by Matt Gross
Throughout all of this misery, I always had an easy out: I could change how I eat—i.e., eat safely. No more fresh fruits or lettuce rinsed in tap water. No undercooked meats. No eating with my hands. No hole-in-the-wall restaurants. No street food.
No way.
For one, this would be capitulation. See, it wasn’t the diarrhea I hated about giardia (though I wouldn’t exactly say I enjoyed it), nor the lack of energy, nor the gaseous eruptions above and below. No, what drove me mad was the loss of appetite. During bouts of giardiasis, food disgusted me absolutely, and little would pass my lips but flavored water until the bug gave up or I’d taken a course of antibiotics. For many people, I imagine, not eating is just one more hardship to be endured, but for me it was catastrophic. To take away my appetite was to take away my identity.
Almost since I can remember, I’ve defined myself by my enjoyment of food. This came about gradually. When I was a kid, my parents ensured we ate well—not just home-cooked dinners with all of us at the table but actual culinary ambition. In the early 1980s, my mother was rolling her own pasta, cutting it on a beautiful Italian steel machine, and hanging it to dry in the pantry. My father, while not our family’s most consistent chef, could be relied upon to produce, once a year, a ricotta-rich, sausage-stuffed lasagne (which I’d eat cold for breakfast the next day). Indian, Chinese, Thai, Mexican—this was what we went out for, and we went out a lot.
My first deeper encounter with food was in seventh grade, when I took Home Ec, learned to chop, boil, and bake, and earned a minor reputation as “Matt the Vac” for my Hoover-like ability to make food disappear. In high school, the massive ham-roast-beef-salami-swiss sandwiches I packed for lunch drew attention from my friends, and my fancy root beer in brown glass bottles drew attention from wary administrators. At the time, this was not the self-conscious showing-off of my tastes, it was just how we Grosses ate, although I was beginning to understand that not everyone shared my culinary passion. One night, friends sleeping over at my place turned their noses up at the dish of curried lamb meatballs I’d dug out of the fridge. It didn’t make sense to me. How could they not like this stuff?
Which is not to say I liked everything myself. I still had issues with “gooshy” foods like yogurt; mayonnaise I avoided because a character in Judy Blume’s Superfudge hated it; and for reasons I can no longer fathom I rejected the South’s pulled pork. Apparently, it didn’t fit with my New England–bred notions of what barbecue should be (i.e., ribs), and so for the three years I lived in Williamsburg, I ate none—a decision I regret even now, two decades later.
But then I went off to college, where something happened: coffee. It’s no revelation that college students fuel their late-night study sessions with the world’s second most popular caffeinated beverage, but I was slow to try it. At the Gross household, the smell of morning coffee trickling through a Chemex had been a constant, and yet I couldn’t bear to taste it. That roasty warm pleasant aroma—how could it be so bitter and harsh on the palate? But one midnight in my freshman dorm a neighbor offered to make me a cup—instant French vanilla, I think—and I managed to drink the whole thing down.
It wasn’t easy. I wasn’t sure I liked this stuff, but I knew I wanted to like it. I knew I needed to like it. Coffee was part of the adult world, a ritual everyone else seemed engaged in, and I wanted to be a part of that, too. So, over the next six months, I drank coffee whenever it was offered to me. Usually, it was instant—this was long before the Starbucks revolution—but I gulped it down anyway. With enough time and repetition, I thought, I would grow to like the taste.
In my sophomore year, however, I had a revelation that has since come to govern my entire approach to food. It was late at night, and I was drinking bad coffee in a friend’s dorm suite when it hit me: If I didn’t like a particular food, it wasn’t necessarily the food’s fault—it was my own failing. Coffee is what coffee is, and I would have to learn to appreciate that, as I would have to learn not to wish that yogurt was stiffer or that Carolina barbecue were more rib-centric. Those things would never change, but my palate, and how I consciously processed the sensations coming from my mouth, could. And would. And did.
Nearly raw beef at a Japanese backpacker restaurant in Phnom Penh. Horsemeat sashimi in Kyoto and donkey stew in Venice. Tennessee cicadas in butter and garlic, Oaxacan grasshoppers with chili and lime, Cambodian deep-fried spiders. Half a roasted lamb’s head in Tunis, curried goat brains in Rangoon. Spaghetti in an ice-cream cone in Seoul. Still-writhing octopus tentacles that suckered to my face in Seoul. Rocky Mountain oysters in Oshkosh, Nebraska. Pickled crabs in Koreatown. Stinky tofu in Taipei. Pig-blood “pop-sicles” in Taipei. Pig intestines, of varying levels of funk, in Taipei. (Goose intestines, too.) Grilled kangaroo. Grilled porcupine. Stir-fried mango leaves in the Golden Triangle. Chili-drowned rabbit heads—which I tore apart with plastic-gloved hands—in Chengdu. Tofu with pig brains in Chengdu. Fish pastes and shrimp pastes everywhere. Hearts, stomach linings, kidneys, esophagi, everywhere. Chicken feet, duck tongues, pig ears, everywhere and often. Congealed blood—everywhere.
Yeah, that’s about it. Those are the strange things—the bizarre foods, as I guess we have to call them, thanks to Andrew Zimmern—that I’ve eaten since 1996. (None of them, as far as I know, has made me ill.) Some people, perhaps, will read the list with horror. Others, I’m sure, with smirking superiority: What, no grubs, no dog, no poop? But for me, as I sit here at my desk trying to recall all the odd bits I’ve put in my mouth over the years, I feel quite neutral. Certainly, I’ve enjoyed these dishes, and would eat most of them again without hesitation. (I would, however, seek fresher spiders, less gristly porcupine, more gently fried Rocky Mountain oysters.) But eating strange things was never my explicit goal. Rather, it was a logical consequence of my approach to food.
That is, on a very basic level, I liked eating, and my capacity for delight in the presence of new flavors and textures grew with each adventuresome bite, from the multilayered richness of a truffle-studded cow-sheep-goat cheese in Washington, D.C., to the sweet acid tang of a yellow passion fruit I scooped from the fecund forest floor of Kauai. Even in our food-mad culture, it’s hard to explain the deep appeal of eating well, since pleasure itself is so hard-wired and individual. Why do we like things? Because we like them!
For whatever reason, food worked for me, and on me, and that sophomore-year epiphany—that not liking a food was my failing, not the food’s—launched an instant shift that broadened my palate beyond what I’d expected. Now I knew I could and would eat and enjoy anything.
Or almost anything. A few days into my Vietnam sojourn, Le Thi Thanh, the only person I knew in this country of seventy-five million people, invited me to lunch at her home, around the corner from the Open University where I hoped to soon begin teaching. Ms. Thanh’s apartment was neither tiny nor spacious, maybe four cool, blue-painted rooms on the ground floor of a not especially dilapidated concrete building, and the tables and shelves were piled high with books and papers in English and Vietnamese. In one corner was a small shrine, with bowls of fruit and lit candles clustered around black-and-white photos of her ancestors.
To eat, Ms. Thanh, her husband, her niece, and I sat on the floor, thin rattan mats beneath us and crisp newspapers spread out as a tablecloth. I crossed my legs awkwardly and felt the bulges of my ankles rubbing against the hard tiles below. I was not comfortable, but I tried not to show it.
Many dishes came out of the narrow kitchen, brought by the niece, but only two have stuck in my memory: a small clay pot containing a slab of fish braised gently in peppery caramelized fish sauce; and a half-hatched egg, or ht vit ln.
Now, I’d heard of half-hatched eggs before and had been curious to try one. The idea is simple, if gruesome. A duck egg is fertilized and its embryo allowed to develop for a few weeks. Then, usually, the egg is hard-boiled, and the mix of egg white and semi-developed duck is scooped out with a spoon. This was, I’d heard, a popular snack for kid
s on their way to school.
What appeared before me on Ms. Thanh’s floor was not what I’d expected. Rather than being hard-boiled, the egg had been fried, so that the duck fetus was splayed out amid a yellow scramble, like a suicide-by-skyscraper in a spreading pool of blood. The duck was distinctly duckish—nearly fully formed, with a bulbous head and thin black feathers now floating free of its shiny, pale skin. As much as I loved eggs, and as much as I loved duck, this was not going to be easy.
I cannot tell you how it tasted. I know that I either received, or scooped myself, some egg with some duck limb, and that I nibbled as best I could at its cartilaginous bits, and I remember being surprised at how easily the feathers went down. But as for flavor and texture? They escaped me, and I concentrated instead on the other parts of the meal—the rice, the fish, the jasmine tea—though I was terrified that Ms. Thanh would notice and think me a coward or, worse, unsophisticated.
Naturally, she and her family took no notice whatsoever, complimenting me instead on my skilled way with chopsticks, and Ms. Thanh began telling me about her life: troubles during the war years, naturally enough, followed by her college studies first in French (not her favorite), then in English. Literature was her focus, and Gone with the Wind in particular, for how it related to the experience of people in Vietnam: North vs. South, the disappearance of an older way of life, and the tricky intersection of love, obligation, and economics. She’d visited America before, on faculty trips, and would eventually go on to get her Ph.D. in English from UMass–Amherst, with Margaret Mitchell’s novel the focus of her dissertation.
So much of what she told me at that lunch I’ve since forgotten, and I feel terrible about it, for Ms. Thanh would show incredible concern for me over the years. It wasn’t just the introduction to the Lucy Hotel or the teaching job that eventually materialized, but the way she asked after me, like a teacher worried about a bright, naïve pupil: Was I healthy? Was I staying away from the dangerous motorbike taxis?
I can’t quite explain why she cared so much, since at that first lunch I’m sure I came off deluded and self-obsessed. Back then, I didn’t really know how to relate to people, to get them to talk, except perhaps by showing them how completely vulnerable and accepting I was. Did Ms. Thanh see this? Or was she simply amazed that this unsavvy American was trying to start a life for himself in Vietnam, to the extent that he’d nibble scrambled duck fetus without showing his distaste?
There’s a lot to be said, I think, for repression. No one at the lunch needed to know how uncomfortable, confused, and lost I felt—least of all me. Instead, I muddled through, willing myself to enjoy, or maybe appreciate, the meal and the company, and I think that counted for something. I may not have been at ease, but by exuding enthusiasm, sometimes honest, sometimes feigned, I put my hosts at ease, enough that they were willing to confide in me. And this is why in the ensuing years giardia would drive me so insane. By killing my appetite entirely, it left me unable even to fake being myself, to connect with the people and places I’d traveled so far to see.
It’s such a tiny thing, isn’t it? Ms. Thanh and her family served something unusual (for me), I calmly ate it (or tried to), and we got on with the process of getting to know one another. Yet eating the unfamiliar challenges people in ways they often aren’t ready for. As Andrew Zimmern often points out on his show, what’s normal to eat in one place is a cultural affront elsewhere. Violating food taboos hits us at deep levels—this is what we mean by disgust, not some innate biological response. By overcoming disgust, I tried to show I was making an effort—perhaps a pitiful, transparent effort, but an effort nonetheless—at fitting in to a new culture.
Still, it took another few months before I really began to fit in to the Vietnamese eating world. That was when I moved from my sixth-floor room at the Lucy Hotel to another on the fifth floor. The new room was larger and air-conditioned, with a weird bas-relief mural of ants climbing on vines across one wall, but I took it for the simple reason that it had a patio, lined with terra-cotta tiles, dotted with plants, and ideal for alfresco lunches.
But what to bring home for lunch? Ham-and-brie sandwiches from the French bakery? Or Thai ground pork with holy basil, served over rice with a fried egg on top? On a stroll around my neighborhood one day, I spotted a man grilling pork chops outside a co’m bình dân, an institution whose name translates as “the people’s food,” a very communist ideal. Co’m bình dân are everywhere in Vietnam. For less than a dollar, you can have a plate of rice and a serving of, say, pork belly braised in fish sauce and sugar, rau mu’ó’ng (water spinach) stir-fried with garlic, or a soup of bitter melon stuffed with pork and mushrooms. Co’m bình dân were pretty much fueling Vietnam’s economic boom.
But they’d never appealed to me. Maybe these little storefronts, with their folding tables, plastic chairs, and worn silverwear, looked too grotty, especially given my ongoing battles with giardiasis. Maybe the premade dishes, sitting in the humid open air, turned me off. Maybe I needed to read a proper menu—to perceive my meals first linguistically, and only then with my palate. Indeed, some of my earliest restaurant memories are of menus, of scanning them with my parents for amusing typos, of matching transliterated phrases to ingredients. The words were essential gateways; without them, my tongue was useless.
Or maybe I was just afraid. My palate could handle a challenge, my psyche—fragile from failure—couldn’t.
When I smelled the su’ò’n nu’ó’ng, or pork chops, however, everything changed. Marinated in garlic, sugar, fish sauce, and shallots, they gave off an intense aroma of fat and caramelization, one I couldn’t turn away from. So I ordered takeout—su’ò’n nu’ó’ng on a mound of rice, with rau mu’ó’ng and sliced cucumbers—and carried the styrofoam box to my fifth-floor oasis. There I ate a perfect, and perfectly simple, meal in utter bliss.
The co’m bình dân around the corner became my standby, a go-to spot for good, unpretentious food to bring home. Usually, I’d get the su’ò’n nu’ó’ng, but sometimes I’d change it up. The shop also had squid, stuffed with pork and braised until soft, as well as crispy-fried fish. And you could get a fried egg on anything.
Eating on my patio was nice, but more and more I began to eat at the co’m bình dân’s flimsy tables, and noticing how other customers ate—with chopsticks, with fork and spoon, or with a combination of the two. I studied the way they prepared dipping sauces, either by filling dishes with blackly pungent fish sauce and a few shreds of red chilies, or by pouring nu’ò’c chm, a mix of fish sauce, water, lime juice, and sugar, from the plastic pitchers placed on each table. (I’d thought it was iced tea—whoops!) People ate without much ceremony. This was good cooking, but just as importantly, it was a refueling stop. As I watched and copied them, day after day, at the corner co’m bình dân and at others around the city, I didn’t even realize that, at last, for the first time, I was eating like a regular person.
Nor did I realize that mastering this one meal would have collateral effects. That is, now that I’d locked down lunch, I could eat however I wanted the rest of the time. No longer did I have to feel guilty about not having ph for breakfast; a few hours after my strong morning coffee and fresh croissants—delicious legacies of French colonialism—I’d be feasting on cheap pork chops.
And with that lunch literally under my belt, I could experiment at dinner, whether that meant testing dosas at the southern Indian restaurant that had just opened downtown, partying in the Siberian Hunting Lodge room of the overwrought Russian restaurant, or eating braised snails and grilled mussels with coconut cream on the oil-slicked floor of a converted auto garage near the Saigon River. Whether these meals turned out delicious or dull, authentic or artificial, I knew that the next day around noon I’d be eating a people’s lunch.
There was, however, one casualty of my newfound cultural adeptness. Now that I better understood lunch, the restaurant that served sugarcane eel no longer fit into my new eating life. In that year I spent in Vie
tnam, I never returned. The lu’o’n nu’ó’ng mía, so fixed in my memory, seems like a heat-induced hallucination, almost as illusory as the man with the Uzi. Except it was real, as real as the charcoal smoke and caramelizing pork vapor that still billow forth from the co’m bình dân on Bui Vien Street, on a thousand other streets throughout Saigon, and wherever regular folks gather to eat.
In late 2011, I was working in my office in Brooklyn when I received some interesting news. Hugo Luján, a fifty-year-old Argentine medical researcher and editor of the book Giardia: A Model Organism, was perfecting a vaccine for giardiasis.
“Yeah, we are close, very close,” Dr. Luján told me from Buenos Aires when I called. “In fact, we have a vaccine that is now—it has been tested not only in laboratory animals but also in dogs, and cats, and bovine, which are the animals more close to humans that can be infected by giardia. And our vaccine is, in fact, the first one that is completely effective against any parasite.”
The problem with developing a giardia vaccine, Dr. Luján explained, is something called antigen variation. Giardia, he said, may look like a primitive creature, but it functions in quite a complex way. When a giardia cell attaches to the lining of your intestine, it does so using a specific protein code on its surface. Taking antibiotics essentially disrupts that code so that the bacteria can’t get a grip and is flushed away. But giardia doesn’t have just one code, Dr. Luján said, it has roughly two hundred of them. His innovation was to puzzle out every single possible code.