Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre World of Food

by Andrew Zimmern

  But let’s start from the beginning. The moment Travel Channel picked up Bizarre Foods, I wanted to live for a time with an African tribe. It seemed to me to be the ultimate family of Bizarre Foods experiences: Getting in with real indigenous people, many of whom live the same way their ancestors did thousands of years ago, would allow me the best opportunities to experience food and share cultures. And that’s exactly what we found in Uganda.

  Uganda is located in East Africa, and it is landlocked by Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Zaire, and Sudan. Much like its neighbors’, Uganda’s past has been turbulent at times. Despite the fact that Uganda achieved independence from Britain in 1962, the establishment of a working political community has been a Herculean task, due to the ethnic diversity of the population.

  You’re probably wondering if this is a safe place to be traveling to begin with. I had plenty of those thoughts myself, and it seemed anytime I researched this trip, I stumbled upon words like “insurgent activity,” “armed banditry,” and “roadside ambushes.” We were staying in the city of Kampala, located on the northern edge of Africa’s largest body of water, Lake Victoria, for the first few days and last night of our stay, but for the greater part of our trip we lived in an isolated village well outside the city.

  Lake Victoria is the main reservoir of the Nile River and is the largest lake in Africa. Lake Victoria occupies an area of approximately 26,800 square miles and is the second-largest freshwater lake in the world, after Lake Superior in North America.

  I always felt very safe in Uganda, but that’s a relative term. Flying in to Entebbe International Airport, you can see the decades-old hull of the famous Air France jet hijacked in 1976, now left as a “training tool” on the runway where it finally came to rest. Not the most charming of welcome mats. Armed guards, hired to keep us safe, watched over us in Lwanika. Frankly, I wondered how one old guy with a rusty AK-47 would fare against a jeep- or truckload of rebels intending to do us harm or steal our equipment. I bet my producer a hundred bucks that the rifle couldn’t fire if he pulled the trigger a dozen times, which was a bet he wouldn’t take.

  VISITING THE VILLAGERS

  We headed out by Range Rover to Lwanika, where we would stay with the Embegge tribe for four days. We started off on a main, paved highway heading out from the city of Kampala, snagged up for a good half hour in the early-morning traffic of the congested city. Eventually, that road morphs into a simple paved road, then to a dirt road, and finally you’re actually going all-terrain, driving over rutted grass byways to get to the heart of the village. In and around the village itself, we encountered a system of primitive dirt roads that connect the isolated villages of the region to each other. Villagers from one cluster of simple mud and straw homes would walk or bike from one to another to visit family or friends, or to help with work.

  Native Africans have been found to dig up lungfish, burrow and all, and store them for later use when they want fresh fish to eat. Now, that’s a serious doggie bag!

  While it’s extremely rare for most villagers to venture into the big city, modern civilization has touched their lives just enough that they have the occasional need to go into another village or a bigger town. The most traveled members of the tribes always seemed to be those involved with dance or music, and most of these villagers spent a lot of time traveling throughout eastern Africa performing in regional festivals and contests.

  This explains why the Embegge in Lwanika greeted us with an impressive amount of fanfare. All the women turned out, dancing and singing us into the main town square—just a dirt area surrounded by a cluster of four or five homes. It seemed everyone was curious about the arrival of these “bazungu” and their cameras.

  The term for white Westerners is muzungu (plural bazungu). Caucasian visitors should get used to hearing it shouted out by children in every corner of the country. It is not a derogatory term, so smile and wave.

  Muzungu basically means “whitey” in Ugandan culture, but it never felt derogatory—people use it more as a term of endearment mixed with a healthy dose of good humor. In fact, this nickname put me at ease and made me feel so welcome that I went so far as to join the village’s all-female cooking co-op for an adventurous lesson in cooking matooke—a common dish made from boiled and mashed green bananas. To the Embegge, this was probably the most bizarre thing they’d ever seen from any man, as the responsibility of preparing food—except for lungfish—belongs solely to females. In fact, once a male hits age twelve, he isn’t expected to even sit in the kitchen.

  In Uganda, females do not eat the lungfish because they consider it a “sister fish.” Men assume the task of preparing (and eating) the lungfish.

  Taking an active role in the people’s everyday lives, instead of simply staring and gawking from the safety of my Land Rover as most visitors do, afforded me a singular experience that meant we bonded in a way that would have been impossible had I only hung out for a few hours a day, then bussed back to a cushy hotel room somewhere.

  A DAY IN THE LIFE

  Life for the Embegge is very rustic compared to life in the city of Kampala. For the most part, they do not wear Western clothes in the American sense. Women wear a traditional native shift, the same sacklike dress they’ve been wearing for years. Men wear pants and T-shirts in the village, or just shorts and flip-flops. Young men in Lwanika dress like beach bums in Hawaii. But because national charitable organizations in the States organize fund-raising drives on a grassroots level, you will often see whole families or villages decked out in prom shirts from 1997 in Cleveland, or see three boys walking together across a jungle field all wearing “Kimmelman Bar Mitzvah 2006, WE LOVE YOU KENNY!” tees. The families live in small, circular mud and straw huts, which they share with their goats, cows, or other animals, depending on which predators live in the jungles nearby. Some families are situated in homes made of brick with penned enclosures for their animals. This is becoming more and more the norm. They cook over small fires, and they farm and hunt off the surrounding land, sharing what they can with their community. It’s the pinnacle of sustainable living, except that buzzword doesn’t exist here. It’s just the only way of life they know.

  Intertribal marriage is still rare in Uganda, and although many Kampala residents have been born and bred in the city, they still define themselves by their tribal roots.

  The Embegge people were gracious, kind, and generous hosts, more welcoming than I could ever have imagined. However, I’d be lying if I said the few days I spent with them weren’t one of the most physically, mentally, and emotionally stressful experiences of my life. You’re constantly fighting the oppressive dampness and moisture, the heat, the hunger, the overwhelming stench of rotting plant matter, and the constant threat of disease. It’s how I’d imagine August in the Everglades, except with more animals that can eat you and insects that can kill you, plus the fact that the nearest person who can understand you is thousands of miles away.

  From dusk until dawn, all bazungu must cover themselves from head to toe in clothing that has been treated with permethrin, a powerful insecticide that you must soak your clothing in, and wear heavy-duty DEET repellant. Despite the fact that you’ve essentially bathed in these chemicals, the biting flies, some literally the size of cigar butts, continue to seek whatever purchase on you they can. At night, from the safety of our fire and wrapped tighter than Tutankhamen in fine cheesecloth, we could see the mosquitoes flying in cloudlike waves around our heads.

  I was quickly forced to face my fears on day two as I accompanied some of the tribesmen on a lungfish hunt. To be perfectly honest, I was really nervous about going lungfishing from the first days of preproduction because of the horrific swamps in which they live. I was petrified of disappearing in a mud suck-hole or being devoured by snakes.

  CATCHING MY FIRST LUNGFISH

  Early that morning, eight of us marched from our tents through the jungle to the swampy rice paddies where the tribe farmed their grain. There were dozens of paddies, each
a couple of acres in size, all bordered by mud berms made of swamp detritus. Reeds, branches, and grasses are cut by hand and piled like dikes between the ponds to regulate the flow. These organic items decompose very rapidly, creating a mud topped by spongy, grassy compost, which serves as pathways between ponds after years of being cut and piled and shaped. The waters here are filled with poisonous snakes—several of the most deadly varieties in the world, in fact—as well as some of the most infamous disease-carrying insects. The mud berms were so brutish to walk on, they actually sucked my Keens right off my feet. I went barefoot for most of the day after that, encouraged by local pals who reminded me that the only thing in the water was mud and plant life. A lot could happen to me out there, but stubbed toes and cut feet were essentially physical impossibilities. I had envisioned my body helplessly succumbing to the mud after accidentally stepping in a sinkhole, however, so I insisted on tying a rope around my waist—just in case.

  Catching a lungfish is nothing like any sort of fishing I’ve ever done. First, you take a giant stick outfitted with four or five metal barbs, which are typically just pieces of stiff wire lashed to the end of the poles. It resembles a supersize fondue fork, maybe six feet long. Next, you jab the pole into these grassy, muddy walls, trying to find hollow spots where the fish nest. Occasionally, you’ll spot a fish as it surfaces, breaking the thick brown water for a breath of fresh air.

  The lungfish we found were about four feet long, weighed twenty-five to forty pounds, and had ferociously large teeth sprouting from their powerful jaws. They are extremely ugly and angry animals, and, as it turns out, they don’t like to have their nests poked by bazungu. They like it even less when, upon finding their nest, you start hacking away at the mud walls with a machete. Here’s the best part: Once these crazed, prehistoric creatures start to slither in, around, or out of their nest, you must blindly reach down into the mud and muck and retrieve them by hand. And considering their giant, sharp teeth, you better hope you find them before they find you. As you’re trying to get your hands on the fish, your fishing mates attempt to jab the fondue forks into the fish to immobilize them. Trust plays an important role in lungfishing.

  All the lungfish that we caught were found by hand, then speared once they were found. Holding on to a wiggling, thirty-odd-pound, ferocious half-fish, half-lizard animal, all while standing chest deep in filthy stagnant water in the middle of the Ugandan jungle surrounded by biting flies, leeches, ticks, snakes, and God knows what else, was one of the more intimidating experiences of my life. I couldn’t have been happier that catching them actually happened a lot faster than I’d anticipated. Within an hour, we had five or six lungfish sprinkled throughout our eight-man fishing party. Surprisingly, I’d landed one on my second try. The guides were cheering and screaming “Muzungu! Muzungu!” the entire time. Apparently, they had never seen a white person even try to catch lungfish, let alone actually score one. I am proud of many achievements in my life, but having dubbed myself the first muzungu lungfisherman in Lwanika is one of my all-time faves.

  COOKING WITH NATURE

  By this time in the morning, it had to be ninety-five degrees, with 80 percent humidity. We were all a dirty, muddy, sweaty mess, and I was just so thankful that the ordeal of collecting food was over. We carried the fish, impaled on our spears, over our shoulders and back to camp. Interestingly, lungfish is one of the few foods the women will not prepare, and therefore the men take a turn in the kitchen. Whereas in larger African cities a salt and sun-dried method is commonly used in preparing the fish, the tribesmen usually hot-smoke them. This fancy-food term brings to mind images of these wonderful, touristy salmon shops in the Pacific Northwest, which couldn’t be further from reality.

  The Embegge build a huge fire of brushwood, then place the fish fillets on a cooking grate, drying and charring them in the fire’s smoke. Once the process is completed, you end up with an overcooked, rock-hard, brown and blackened slab of fish. In that state, it continues to dry out and can later be rehydrated in boiling water and braised in a stew with g-nuts, which are what we would call peanuts here at home. Peanuts are incorporated into a lot of Ugandan and East African cuisine, commonly mixed into a paste with sesame seeds and used as a condiment for meat, or crushed and served sautéed with greens, steamed with beans and rice, or boiled in a soup that’s used to rehydrate the lungfish, which is exactly what we did.

  This was one-pot cooking in its purest form. The fish reminded me of carp, an oversize whitefish I’ve eaten plenty of in my time: kind of fatty, a bit fibrous, but definitely mild. This ferocious, prehistoric animal was more benign on the palate than I ever imagined. In fact, I’ve discovered that most of the time, the more ferocious and horrific-looking something is in real life, the more mild the flavor and the duller the eating experience.

  As we prepared our meal, I couldn’t help but think about how many times this scene is repeated over and over again in every African village. Whether the villagers are lungfishing or collecting wild vegetables, seeking out ingredients is such hard work that they collect the bare minimum of food, gathering only what is needed that day. They really don’t have a place to store food effectively before it starts to go bad, bananas and grains being the two large exceptions. We caught five or six lungfish, well over the normal daily quota, because the entire village was turning out that night for the big dinner celebration.

  In addition to the lungfish, the Embegge killed a goat for stewing, something typically reserved for special occasions. That night we ate the fish, the goat, roast squirrel, flying ants, crickets, millet porridge, rice and beans, g-nuts, matooke, yucca, cassava, and sweet potatoes and other root vegetables that are commonly served in tribal Uganda. You see more unseasoned, nasty root vegetables in tribal East Africa than anywhere else in the world. I’d be just fine if I never saw another steamed potato—or steamed banana—again after my three-week visit there.

  Not a day goes by that I don’t think of the Embegge. The journey was difficult, the stress was insane, and the unknown was all around you every second of every day, but the simple fact of the matter was that for four days I never once thought of a bill I had to pay or a call I had to make.

  It might not seem like it at first glance, but Mexico is one of the world’s most diverse countries, ethnically, geographically, politically, and culturally. Every time I visit, I marvel at the abundance of things to do and how amazingly different one day can be from another. Americans love heading to Cabo, Mazatlán, or Cozumel, but my favorite destination has to be the country’s southernmost state, Oaxaca.

  How do you say the x in Oaxaca? The x in Spanish is pronounced like an h. Therefore, Oaxaca sounds like “wah-HAH-kah.”

  I’m sure you’ve heard of Acapulco, the region’s most bustling beach town, but beyond that, Oaxaca offers the best of everything: gorgeous sand beaches, a phenomenally complex and varied food scene, and (in most towns) that easygoing vibe that nobody I know can ever seem to get enough of.

  If you’re headed to Oaxaca, bring your sunscreen. The area experiences about 330 sunny days a year with an average temperature of 82°F.

  The Pacific coast of the state of Oaxaca is lined from top to bottom with fishing villages, both large and small, some thriving, some dying, and some struggling to survive the onslaught of the developers’ bulldozers. Take the city of Huatulco, which seemed to spring up almost overnight, but really has grown over the past three or four decades from a lonely little beach, with some fun rock outcroppings surrounding a nice deep-water harbor, into a numbingly throbbing hotel zone. Back in the day, this little beach town was wallowing in huge puddles of financial success because of the fishing. The sheer abundance of seafood that is available here is staggering: Mollusks, abalone, conch and clams, urchins, squid, fin fish, lobsters—you can find all manner of crustaceans in the cool, deep waters off Huatulco. These days, tourism drives the economy. Projections are that the once-tiny fishing town will support some twenty thousand hotel rooms by 2020. In 2008,
nearly 300,000 visitors traveled to Huatulco. Within twenty years, that number is expected to swell to 2 million.

  I spent some time in Huatulco a few years back, staying overnight in one of those all-inclusive resorts on the beachfront. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The best experiences you will ever have as a traveler require getting off your bottom and spending quality time with real people in real towns, cities, and villages. I prefer to do it by experiencing food and sharing culture.

  While I love the Pacific shellfish, Huatulco is actually best known for a different sort of sea creature. The area surrounding the town’s hotel zone, technically called Las Bahías de Huatulco, is made up of about nine bays that stretch for twenty miles along southern Mexico’s Pacific shore. Much of the coastline is extremely rocky, with good currents and clean waters, and thus provides the perfect breeding grounds for octopus. I love hunting and gathering food, so naturally I wanted to fish for octopus the old-fashioned way.

  Octopuses are rarely kept in captivity, in part because of their well-known problem-solving skills and high intelligence, which has been compared to that of the average house cat. They’ve been known to escape tanks and aquariums with great ease.

  OCTOPUS DIVING WITH FRANCISCO

  Enter Francisco Rios Ramirez, an octopus diver with thirty years’ experience under his belt. Francisco has a trim waistline, maybe thirty-four inches, but the guy weighs more than I do. He’s solid muscle, with a huge chest and the widest shoulders I have seen on anyone his size. If I hadn’t known better, I would have pegged him as an NFL linebacker, albeit a very short one. My crew and I met up with him at the docks in the sleepy port of Santa Cruz. We shared a coffee and a roll, got our gear together, and, under a cloudless sky, boarded his little boat, a skiff with an ancient outboard motor, and headed out toward our first stop, Tagolunda Bay—the name, incidentally, means “beautiful woman” in Zapotec, one of the area’s indigenous languages.