If you are what you eat, Benjamin Epstein is squid guts, John Acosta is a prickly cactus and Tanya Norvidas is a platter of pokeweed.
Blechhh! Do people actually eat those things?
There is in Southern California a scattered and little-known group of rugged individuals who haunt specialty restaurants and shops seeking out the raw, the stinky, the slimy and the piquant.
They are devotees of delicacies. Gastronomic exotica. Weird food.
This is not cheap juvenile bravado of the greasy-grimy-gopher-guts variety. These are no showoffs who eat a chocolate-covered ant and run to tell their little brothers.
For some gourmands, eating exotic food is a trip back to their childhood or homeland. Or a grand adventure. Some even claim their favorite foods have healed illnesses or improved their sex lives.
But hard-core delicacies are not for the squeamish. Most folks who try exotic foods don`t go back for a second taste, according to a 1989 Roper survey.
Of 21 percent of Americans who have eaten tripe (ox intestines), only 8 percent said they ”really liked” it.
Down to it, we are a nation of bland eaters.
President Bush crumbles Butterfingers candy bars on his bran, and it makes national headlines.
The truth about caviar and sushi? Glamorous they may be, but these pricey comestibles do not tempt the average American palate.
Of the 30 percent of Americans who have eaten caviar, only 8 percent liked it. Of 19 percent who have tried sushi, only 7 percent were crazy about the once-trendy raw fish.
Benjamin Epstein, 38, Newport Beach, Calif., belongs to the upper reaches of that 7 percent. Cozying up to a bowl of salted squid guts at the Kappo bar (authentic Japanese delicacies) at Koto, a Newport Beach restaurant, Epstein chewed. And he chewed. And he chewed.
”Very chewy,” he reported, his face puckering like a Cabbage Patch doll that went through the wash. ”With a quasi-slime exterior. And a very subtle flavor.”
Epstein`s favorite fare is not limited by culture.
He has scooped the brains out of a quail head, slurped lamb eyeball soup, shared a bowl of baby skates on a first date, and carefully balanced a spoonful of octopus in its own ink (spill it and your clothes are permanently stained).
He`s sawed through reindeer fillet, and his ”single favorite food” is the hypothalamus gland of a young cow.
”Most people screw up their noses to exquisite things” on introduction, he said. ”Some of these tastes have to grow on you.”
Too busy with his own business to travel as much as he`d like, he finds ethnic food to be a good substitute. ”It`s like traveling from the inside out,” he said.
Some delicacy lovers restrict their habit to the road. At home, they eat hamburgers and fries like their neighbors. But send them away with a Samsonite, and let the experiment begin.
”I`ve always been a finicky eater,” said Orman Day, 43, director of public relations at Saddleback Memorial Medical Center in Laguna Hills, Calif. ”For years, I wouldn`t eat pizza because of the look and smell of it. I still won`t eat potato salad. I once gagged when my friend`s mother forced me to eat lima beans.”
But when Day befriended some Masai warriors in Africa by introducing them to the Frisbee, he had no choice but to accept the hospitality drink they offered him from within the kitchen of their cow-dung hut: Blood mixed with milk.
After that, the guinea pig in Colombia went down easy.
”They said the head was the best part,” he said, ”but I couldn`t bring myself to eat the sad expression off its face.”
Why some people love offbeat tastes and others gag remains a mystery to scientists.
”The taste receptors are very simple,” said Dr. Daniel Hollander, chief of gastroenterology at University of California, Irvine. ”We can only taste very simple differences. Acid-based and salty. . . . But people think there are differences. So it must have to do with how the brain synthesizes the simple information given to it by the taste receptors.”
Research at the Yale University School of Medicine shows that the majority of the U.S. population (about two-thirds) has a genetic sensitivity to bitter chemical compounds.
Broccoli, buttermilk, rutabaga and sharp cheese are but a few of the foods these folks wrinkle their noses at.
Ottomar Vetter, 55, Laguna Beach, thinks different tastes are bred into a person, depending on culture.
”I sucked the taste up with mother`s milk,” he said, explaining his love for organs.
He developed his taste for aged, raw pork in his native Germany.
He buys it in Mexico because he knows a company with strict standards to avoid trichinosis, a disease caused by a worm in insufficiently cooked pork.
”How can you eat that?” asked a Los Angeles International Airport customs official recently as he confiscated all $44 worth of Vetter`s 2-pound bag of raw pork.
To which Vetter responds: ”The most boring food on Earth is American food. Americans have developed an art of ruining food.”
Vetter, owner of a geothermal research company, speaks from the wisdom of a frequent flier. He has traveled around the world many times.
He developed a taste for rice paddy rat in Java. The trouble is, he has a heck of a time finding his favorite foods here in Southern California.
”I challenge you to walk into a supermarket and ask for a pig uterus,”
he said.
Santa Ana, Calif., Vice-Mayor John Acosta, 55, loves organ meats. ”I know the thought of eating a cow`s stomach lining sounds yucky to some people,” he said. But as a child he was poor. No part of an animal raised on the family farm went to waste. His grandfather would wring out the intestines of a cow, run water through them, braid, chop and saute them.
Acosta also enjoys stripping fresh cactus, which are available in several supermarkets, boiling and straining them (”to get the slime out”) and sitting down to a bowl of them.
”I know an Anglo lady, her doctor told her to keep a jar of cooked, cold cactus, and every time she had an ulcer to grab a handful of that cactus,” he said. ”She swore by them.”
Menudo, a Mexican delicacy made from tripe, also is said to have healing powers.
”Many believe oysters to be an aphrodisiac,” Acosta said-and their Western brothers, Rocky Mountain oysters, are the subject of much legend.
Judy Lloyd, 27, Corona del Mar, Calif., grew up in Colorado, where Rocky Mountain oysters are part of the regular hors d`oeuvre fare. ”But you have to eat them in the right frame of mind,” she said. ”You have to block out what you`re actually eating.”
What are you actually eating? Bull testicles.
Many food cravings are regional. Tanya Norvidas, 44, Laguna Hills, grew up in the South and her husband is of Russian descent. She regularly makes blood soup, a Russian specialty, for her husband, while she scarfs down pig feet she pickled, fried green tomato sandwiches and cow brains.
She deeply misses fresh pokeweed, a toxic plant that grows in the hills of Tennessee where she grew up.
Poke must be boiled twice, drained and sauteed, she said, to purge the poison. Poke doesn`t grow in Orange County, so Norvidas drives to Tustin, Calif., to buy canned poke at the only grocery store she could find that carries it.
”The foods are so delicious,” she said, ”you actually crave them.”
Back at Koto, Epstein had finally chewed the last of the squid guts and moved to a bowl containing a large, gray, sea slug in vinaigrette. ”I`m always pushing the envelope,” said Epstein, forking down the slug. He downed a bowl of gelatinous water shield (lotus roots), swallowed some salted jerry
(jelly) fish with sea urchins and capped it all off with the sharp-tasting and ooey-gooey fermented soy beans.
