The new season of Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern on the Travel Channel started recently with a trip to Minnesota. I don’t usually watch this show, as it is often not bizarre food, but simply disgusting and gross food. Like Dirty Jobs, the point seems not to entertain but to gross out. So he goes to places you wouldn’t want to go to and eats food you wouldn’t want to eat.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
So I have been seeing the commercials for the season premier with Lutefisk and Meat Raffles as a couple of the featured items. Now here is a show that is more my speed. With the exception of Deer Heart and Sucker Head Soup, which was given to him by some Native Americas and not in a restaurant, he ate pretty much normal food.
Of course, Andrew can’t even go to a fine restaurant without finding something odd to eat, such as wild boar liver, wild boar brains, and wild boar testicles. He made his usual oh-that’s-so-good sounds as he ate these bizarre foods and talked three friends into eating them as well. They seemed a bit less impressed with the offal meal than he was.
There was a good section of the show that dealt with the Minnesota State Fair and all the bizarre foods to be found on a stick-such as a Reuben on Stick, and Meatball Dinner on a Stick and many other odd things. He also had some kind of wild game hot dog and a bit of Watermelon Jelly.
My own memories of Minnesota are a bit vague now, outside of getting a Sundae at Dairy Queen made with Spanish Peanuts instead of toasted Pecans, I don’t recall the food much at all. We went to Fort Snelling and had a bit of roasted pig, which was very good. Andrew Zimmern stopped at Split Rock Lighthouse, which one of my favorite Lighthouses. But I seem to have missed all the stuff that make Minnesota-Minnesota. So if I ever make it there again, I will have to try a few more things.
He ends up eating a burger with Peanut Butter and Mayonnaise called a Goober Burger. For Bizarre Food these all pretty mild things. Maybe they decided that there should be at least one show a year that people like me will watch. So if he heads to London, or Texas, or Ireland, or well, anywhere I might want to go-I’ll likely watch the show again. As long he is in Bolivia and every other Third World country he can find, well, I’ll find something else to watch.
