The Turk Who Loved Apples (10 page)

Throughout all of this misery, I always had an easy out: I could change how I eat—i.e., eat safely. No more fresh fruits or lettuce rinsed in tap water. No undercooked meats. No eating with my hands. No hole-in-the-wall restaurants. No street food.

No way.

For one, this would be capitulation. See, it wasn't the diarrhea I hated about giardia (though I wouldn't exactly say I enjoyed it), nor the lack of energy, nor the gaseous eruptions above and below. No, what drove me mad was the loss of appetite. During bouts of giardiasis, food disgusted me absolutely, and little would pass my lips but flavored water until the bug gave up or I'd taken a course of antibiotics. For many people, I imagine, not eating is just one more hardship to be endured, but for me it was catastrophic. To take away my appetite was to take away my identity.

Almost since I can remember, I've defined myself by my enjoyment of food. This came about gradually. When I was a kid, my parents ensured we ate well—not just home-cooked dinners with all of us at the table but actual culinary ambition. In the early 1980s, my mother was rolling her own pasta, cutting it on a beautiful Italian steel machine, and hanging it to dry in the pantry. My father, while not our family's most consistent chef, could be relied upon to produce, once a year, a ricotta-rich, sausage-stuffed lasagne (which I'd
eat cold for breakfast the next day). Indian, Chinese, Thai, Mexican—this was what we went out for, and we went out a lot.

My first deeper encounter with food was in seventh grade, when I took Home Ec, learned to chop, boil, and bake, and earned a minor reputation as “Matt the Vac” for my Hoover-like ability to make food disappear. In high school, the massive ham-roast-beef-salami-swiss sandwiches I packed for lunch drew attention from my friends, and my fancy root beer in brown glass bottles drew attention from wary administrators. At the time, this was not the self-conscious showing-off of my tastes, it was just how we Grosses ate, although I was beginning to understand that not everyone shared my culinary passion. One night, friends sleeping over at my place turned their noses up at the dish of curried lamb meatballs I'd dug out of the fridge. It didn't make sense to me. How could they not like this stuff?

Which is not to say I liked everything myself. I still had issues with “gooshy” foods like yogurt; mayonnaise I avoided because a character in Judy Blume's
Superfudge
hated it; and for reasons I can no longer fathom I rejected the South's pulled pork. Apparently, it didn't fit with my New England–bred notions of what barbecue should be (i.e., ribs), and so for the three years I lived in Williamsburg, I ate none—a decision I regret even now, two decades later.

But then I went off to college, where something happened: coffee. It's no revelation that college students fuel their late-night study sessions with the world's second most popular caffeinated beverage, but I was slow to try it. At the Gross household, the smell of morning coffee trickling through a Chemex had been a constant, and yet I couldn't bear to taste it. That roasty warm pleasant aroma—how could it be so bitter and harsh on the palate? But one midnight in my freshman dorm a neighbor offered to make me a cup—instant French vanilla, I think—and I managed to drink the whole thing down.

It wasn't easy. I wasn't sure I liked this stuff, but I knew I wanted to like it. I knew I
needed
to like it. Coffee was part of the adult world, a ritual everyone else seemed engaged in, and I wanted to be a part of that, too. So, over the next six months, I drank coffee whenever it was offered to me. Usually, it was instant—this was long before the Starbucks revolution—but I gulped it down anyway. With enough time and repetition, I thought, I would grow to like the taste.

In my sophomore year, however, I had a revelation that has since come to govern my entire approach to food. It was late at night, and I was drinking bad coffee in a friend's dorm suite when it hit me:
If I didn't like a particular food, it wasn't necessarily the food's fault—it was my own failing
. Coffee is what coffee is, and I would have to learn to appreciate that, as I would have to learn not to wish that yogurt was stiffer or that Carolina barbecue were more rib-centric. Those things would never change, but my palate, and how I consciously processed the sensations coming from my mouth, could. And would. And did.

N
early raw beef at a Japanese backpacker restaurant in Phnom Penh. Horsemeat sashimi in Kyoto and donkey stew in Venice. Tennessee cicadas in butter and garlic, Oaxacan grasshoppers with chili and lime, Cambodian deep-fried spiders. Half a roasted lamb's head in Tunis, curried goat brains in Rangoon. Spaghetti in an ice-cream cone in Seoul. Still-writhing octopus tentacles that suckered to my face in Seoul. Rocky Mountain oysters in Oshkosh, Nebraska. Pickled crabs in Koreatown. Stinky tofu in Taipei. Pig-blood “pop-sicles” in Taipei. Pig intestines, of varying levels of funk, in Taipei. (Goose intestines, too.) Grilled kangaroo. Grilled porcupine. Stir-fried mango leaves in the Golden Triangle. Chili-drowned rabbit heads—which I tore apart with plastic-gloved hands—in Chengdu. Tofu with pig brains in Chengdu. Fish pastes and shrimp pastes
everywhere. Hearts, stomach linings, kidneys, esophagi, everywhere. Chicken feet, duck tongues, pig ears, everywhere and often. Congealed blood—everywhere.

Yeah, that's about it. Those are the strange things—the bizarre foods, as I guess we have to call them, thanks to Andrew Zimmern—that I've eaten since 1996. (None of them, as far as I know, has made me ill.) Some people, perhaps, will read the list with horror. Others, I'm sure, with smirking superiority:
What, no grubs, no dog, no poop?
But for me, as I sit here at my desk trying to recall all the odd bits I've put in my mouth over the years, I feel quite neutral. Certainly, I've enjoyed these dishes, and would eat most of them again without hesitation. (I would, however, seek fresher spiders, less gristly porcupine, more gently fried Rocky Mountain oysters.) But eating strange things was never my explicit goal. Rather, it was a logical consequence of my approach to food.

That is, on a very basic level, I liked eating, and my capacity for delight in the presence of new flavors and textures grew with each adventuresome bite, from the multilayered richness of a truffle-studded cow-sheep-goat cheese in Washington, D.C., to the sweet acid tang of a yellow passion fruit I scooped from the fecund forest floor of Kauai. Even in our food-mad culture, it's hard to explain the deep appeal of eating well, since pleasure itself is so hard-wired and individual. Why do we like things? Because we like them!

For whatever reason, food
worked
for me, and on me, and that sophomore-year epiphany—that not liking a food was my failing, not the food's—launched an instant shift that broadened my palate beyond what I'd expected. Now I knew I could and would eat and enjoy anything.

Or almost anything. A few days into my Vietnam sojourn, Le Thi Thanh, the only person I knew in this country of seventy-five million people, invited me to lunch at her home, around the corner from the Open University where I hoped to soon begin teaching. Ms. Thanh's apartment was neither tiny nor spacious, maybe four
cool, blue-painted rooms on the ground floor of a not especially dilapidated concrete building, and the tables and shelves were piled high with books and papers in English and Vietnamese. In one corner was a small shrine, with bowls of fruit and lit candles clustered around black-and-white photos of her ancestors.

To eat, Ms. Thanh, her husband, her niece, and I sat on the floor, thin rattan mats beneath us and crisp newspapers spread out as a tablecloth. I crossed my legs awkwardly and felt the bulges of my ankles rubbing against the hard tiles below. I was not comfortable, but I tried not to show it.

Many dishes came out of the narrow kitchen, brought by the niece, but only two have stuck in my memory: a small clay pot containing a slab of fish braised gently in peppery caramelized fish sauce; and a half-hatched egg, or
h
t vit l
n
.

Now, I'd heard of half-hatched eggs before and had been curious to try one. The idea is simple, if gruesome. A duck egg is fertilized and its embryo allowed to develop for a few weeks. Then, usually, the egg is hard-boiled, and the mix of egg white and semi-developed duck is scooped out with a spoon. This was, I'd heard, a popular snack for kids on their way to school.

What appeared before me on Ms. Thanh's floor was not what I'd expected. Rather than being hard-boiled, the egg had been fried, so that the duck fetus was splayed out amid a yellow scramble, like a suicide-by-skyscraper in a spreading pool of blood. The duck was distinctly duckish—nearly fully formed, with a bulbous head and thin black feathers now floating free of its shiny, pale skin. As much as I loved eggs, and as much as I loved duck, this was not going to be easy.

I cannot tell you how it tasted. I know that I either received, or scooped myself, some egg with some duck limb, and that I nibbled as best I could at its cartilaginous bits, and I remember being surprised at how easily the feathers went down. But as for flavor and texture? They escaped me, and I concentrated instead on the other parts of the meal—the rice, the fish, the jasmine tea—though I was terrified
that Ms. Thanh would notice and think me a coward or, worse, unsophisticated.

Naturally, she and her family took no notice whatsoever, complimenting me instead on my skilled way with chopsticks, and Ms. Thanh began telling me about her life: troubles during the war years, naturally enough, followed by her college studies first in French (not her favorite), then in English. Literature was her focus, and
Gone with the Wind
in particular, for how it related to the experience of people in Vietnam: North vs. South, the disappearance of an older way of life, and the tricky intersection of love, obligation, and economics. She'd visited America before, on faculty trips, and would eventually go on to get her Ph.D. in English from UMass–Amherst, with Margaret Mitchell's novel the focus of her dissertation.