“Guess what I’m eating for dinner,” I wrote in an e-mail to my mother the other day. “JELLYFISH. Jellyous?”
Six minutes later, she responded, “Really??? Where??? Are you going to become one of those crazy ‘anything that moves’ people??????” My mother is a corporate lawyer, so her reply was ominously followed by “The information contained in this e-mail message and any attachments is legally privileged and confidential.”
Nonconfidentially, I was eating jellyfish because I’d heard that Calvin Trillin recommended the dish at the Full House Cafe, a dim-sum joint on Bowery. And my mother was alluding to a new book by Dana Goodyear, “Anything That Moves: Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a New American Food Culture,” which we’d both just finished.
The book, we agreed, with its survey of the nation’s food fanatics, from friends of Michelin to foes of the F.D.A., made us hungry and grossed us out in almost equal measure. “Big hunks of white tuna, with the taste and texture of chilled butter”—yum. “From an herbaceous, pond-like bullion thick with sticks and ruffles of black fungus, she spooned a piece of penis”—yuck. In the introduction, Goodyear writes, “To look at the food for sale in our best restaurants, you’d think that our civilization had peaked and collapsed; what we see on our plates is a post apocalyptic free-for-all of crudity and refinement, technology and artlessness, an unimaginable future and a forgotten past.”
If there were a post-apocalyptic gastronomic free-for-all, my mother and I would likely show up to feed. Left to be governed by the beast from the sea, why not spring for the tasting menu? How much for a bite of the beast? Together, we’ve consumed mare’s milk, camel’s milk, yak milk, reindeer milk, and horse meat (Mongolia); snake jerky (Cambodia); kudu, impala, and buffalo (southern Africa); and kangaroo, live ants, and crocodile (Australia), among many other things. But my path to jellyfish is not just strewn with leftovers from increasingly wild things eaten over the years. My dance with food adventurism has involved plenty of ill-advised leaps in every direction.
When my first goldfish, Spacey, died of a disease called ich (and pronounced “ick”), my mother ditched an important meeting and hurried home. She put the fish in a little box, and got ready to explain death to a three-year-old. The lid was removed. I peered in: Spacey lay, inert, already a little dried out.
“Can we eat it?” I asked.
“We don’t eat our pets,” my mother replied. (Goodyear: “Most people hold back some species or another from consideration as food, and the reasons can seem arbitrary. Usually it seems to come down to relatability.”)
In middle school, I would only eat animals that were “not cute.” This category was conveniently permeable; the first time I traveled to Paris, when I was ten, and realized that my meal options came down to cute animals or cheese, I caved and removed duck from the cute list. I had a stint as a very bad vegetarian in high school. In secret, I would eat a barbecue-chicken pizza once a month, and when I finally dropped the ruse altogether, it was for a heaping plate of tripe in Florence.
Then came a period of unchecked hedonism. I read, and believed, A. J. Liebling: “No sane man can afford to dispense with debilitating pleasures; no ascetic can be considered reliably sane. Hitler was the archetype of the abstemious man. When the other krauts saw him drink water in the Beer Hall they should have known he was not to be trusted.” I have a photograph of Liebling and Joe Mitchell above my desk. They are seated beneath a shady tree somewhere pastoral and have three bottles of wine and what appears to be a pitcher of cocktails laid out between them.
My literary education in indulgence picked up speed. M. F. K. Fisher and Julia Child made me blush, then grin, with sapphic oyster experiences and graphic eel-skinnings, and I began to derive an almost indecent pleasure from reading the most grotesque passages of new cookbooks.
“When Salvador put the knife to that goat’s neck that day in Borrego, the goat’s eyes opened big and wide. Those eyes will forever be tattooed in my soul, and I will forever be linked to birria,” Roy Choi writes in “L.A. Son.” In “Food DIY,” Tim Hayward defines a sheep’s “pluck,” in a recipe for haggis, as “the windpipe, lungs, heart and liver,” adding that “in traditional recipes, the windpipe was merely hung over the edge of the pot to remove ‘impurities’ (read sheepsnot).”
But, inevitably, in my marathon of reading and eating, and eating and reading, I came across Michael Pollan and his ilk, who convinced me to eat fewer of all those weird and wonderful and sometimes cute things that move. Eating less meat makes a lot of sense to me, in terms of both my health and the planet’s, although defending this idea is rarely very sexy. I’ve become a lunchtime vegetarian and I consume red meat only when I really crave it. (The perk is that, instead of having to seek out nether-organ meat for my dose of the illicit, a very rare cheeseburger has started to thrill.)
I still can’t imagine becoming a full-time vegetarian, because I refuse to forsake certain pleasures. My go-to comfort meal involves crosscut marrow bones with toast; Christmas is not Christmas without a standing rib roast; and I would not give up the opportunity to try crocodile when it’s the house specialty. But who knows? I’ll admit that I’ve been wrong before—I wanted to eat Spacey.
At Full House Cafe, I was glad to be able to sample the jellyfish. It arrived on a small plate: a mound of what looked like sautéed onions, golden brown, sprinkled with chopped scallions and sitting in a pool of clear, yellowish broth. It was cut into long slivers, gelatinous noodles, some of which had disconcerting freckles. My dining companion (who, as a round-the-clock vegetarian, was abstaining) watched the dish warily—it seemed to never stop jiggling, like it belonged in an old Jell-O commercial. I bit into it, and found it had the consistency of raw squid—salty, and tasty, with a satisfying snap.
“Is jellyfish a popular dish?” my companion asked the waiter as he cleared about two-thirds of the quaking heap.
“You’re asking because you don’t like it,” the waiter replied, with a frown. “Lots of Americans don’t like it as a main dish because it’s cold.”
“No, no!” I said. “It was great, just so much.”
Was it great? I don’t have much to compare to it, but I’d be happy to taste competitors. My mother, meanwhile, sent a follow-up e-mail: “I have no interest in jellyfish.”
Photograph: The Canadian Press/Nathan Denette/AP.
