Andrew Zimmern, the host of The Travel Channel’s strike series Bizarre Foods, has an extraordinarily well-earned status for traveling all over to search out and sample everything that’s consumed as food globally, from cow vein stew in Bolivia and large flying ants in Uganda to organic camel kidneys in Ethiopia, putrefied shark in blood pudding in Iceland and Wolfgang Puck’s Hunan design rooster balls in LA. For Zimmern, local food – bizarre, gross or downright tummy about The Bizarre Truth: THE WAY I Walked Out the Door Mouth First . and Came Back Shaking My Head turning as it may become to us — is not simply what’s offered at mealtime. It is a primary avenue to finding what is most authentic – the bizarre truth – about ethnicities everywhere. Having consumed his way all over the world during the period of four months of Bizarre Foods, Zimmern has released Bizarre Worlds, a fresh series within the Travel Route, which, his first book, a chronicle of his journeys mainly because he not merely tastes the “taboo treats” from the world, but delves deep into the ethnicities and life-style of far-flung locales and seeks one of the most valued of the modern traveler’s goals: The Authentic Experience. Written in the sensible, often hilarious tone of voice he uses to narrate his TV shows, Zimmern uses his activities in “culinary anthropology” to illustrate such designs as: why visiting local markets can reveal more about destinations than museums; the importance of going to “the final stop in the subway” – probably the most remote area of a location where its essence is frequently revealed; the necessity to look for and catalog “the final bottle of coca-cola in the desert,” i.e. disappearing foods and civilizations; the profound variations between dining and eating; as well as the pleasures of snout to tail, regional, new and organic meals. Zimmern takes readers into the back of the souk in Morocco where locals are eating a complete roasted lamb; along with a conch fisherman in Tobago, who may be the final of his kind; to Mississippi, where he dines on raccoon and possum. There, he writes, “People stated, ‘That’s roadkill!’ ‘Zero it’s not,’ I said. ‘It’s a social story.’”

Whether it’s a session with an Incan witch doctor in Ecuador who blows fire on him, spits on him, thrashes him with poisonous branches and beats him with a live guinea pig or taking in bloodstream in Uganda and cow urine tonic in India or feeding on roasted bats on an uninhabited isle in Samoa, Zimmern cheerfully celebrates the undiscovered locations and weird wonders still remaining in our increasingly globalized globe.