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Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Chapter 8 - Lust

I like my life. My job, my apartment, my area. While many consider Scranton to be boring, I find that “it is what you make it.” As I hope it is apparent by this blog, I get out. I meet people, see new places, and have a taste for the peculiar. That is why, as I say in my profile, I would drop everything to replace Andrew Zimmern (host of Bizarre Foods) or Anthony Bourdain (host of No Reservations). The travel, the odd food, weird places, and potential danger do not deter me, rather, entice me to that kind of life. So, it comes as no surprise that I’m reading Anthony Bourdain’s Medium Raw.
            Chapter 8 opens with a description of Bourdain’s experience in Hanoi, and how one should never travel by car because their size and closed cabin area prevents one from truly experiencing the bustling metropolitan center of Vietnam. After a few pages, he describes the endless places where one can find pho, a rice noodle soup made with a broth that has been simmering with bones and other stock for hours. From here, he launches into a litany of descriptions of his international food experiences, each remembrance more succulent than the last. My favorite example:

There is a roast goose in Hong Kong – Mongkok, neat the outskirts of the city. The place looks like any other. But you sink your teeth into the quickly hacked pieces and you know your experiencing something special. Layers of what can only be described as enlightenment, one extraordinary sensation after another as the popils of the tongue encounter first the crispy, caramelized skin, then air, then fat – the juicy, sweet yet savory, ever so slightly gamey meat, the fat just barely managing to retain its corporeal form before quickly dematerializing into liquid […] Your pretty goddamn sure this is the best roast goose on the whole planet. Nobody is eating goose better than you at this precise moment. Maybe in the whole history of the world there had never been a better goose. Ordinarily, you don’t know if you’d go that far describing a dish, but now, with that ethereal goose fat dribbling down your chin, the sound of perfectly crackling skin playing inside your head to an audience of one, hyperbole seems entirely appropriate.

This kind of description is reminiscent of adult novels, which is why it is appropriately referred to as “food porn.” As a food blogger, I am fully aware that much of what I write could easily fall into this category. As infatuated with food as I am, I would wear the title of “food pornographer” proudly. Why? Because in the same way that I watch Adam Richman of Man vs. Food plow into pounds of burgers, pizza, and all sorts of heart-stopping food challenges, people live vicariously through these descriptions. When a writer is as talented as Bourdain, one is able to picture and almost taste where he has been and what he ate. While, ideally, writing like that would inspire us to travel to these places and sample these delectables (I know it does for me), that isn’t an option for everyone. So, until I get paid to circle the globe in search of foreign fare, I can satiate my “lust” with chapter 8.

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