Anything That Moves: Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a New American Food Culture

Summary

A new American cuisine is forming. Animals never before considered or long since forgotten are emerging as delicacies. Parts that used to be for scrap are centerpieces. Ash and hay are fashionable ingredients, and you pay handsomely to breathe flavored air. Going out to a nice dinner now often precipitates a confrontation with a fundamental question: Is that food?

Anything That Moves, a behind-the-scenes look at foodie culture, is simultaneously a humorous adventure and a serious attempt to understand the implications of the way we eat. This is a universe populated by insect-eaters and blood drinkers, avant-garde chefs who make food out of roadside leaves and wood, and others who serve endangered species, pets, and Schedule I drugs—a cast of characters, in other words, who flirt with danger, taboo, and disgust in pursuit of the sublime. Behind them is an intricate network of scavengers, dealers, and pitchmen responsible for introducing rare and exotic ingredients into the marketplace and, ultimately, bringing them to the family table. Highly entertaining and deeply revelatory, Anything That Moves explores the raucous, strange, fascinatingly complex world of contemporary American food culture, and the places where the extreme is bleeding into the mainstream.