Though Divya Anand has been a traveller almost all her life, food didn’t really play a big part. “I wasn’t a foodie. I had to eat but what I ate didn’t matter, as long as it was vegetarian,” she says over a phone call. So it seems a bit ironic that she is the author of a book titled Dare Eat That: A Guide to Bizarre Foods from Around the World (Penguin Random House).
Her attitude to food, she says, changed after she met her husband Vivek. “Getting excited about food and spending hours searching for that one special dish... I understood that this could be part of travel only after meeting him.” While the book charts Vivek’s course in tracking down new species to eat — horse, camel, squab, crocodile, insects, snakes, ant eggs and much more — she also describes places of interest, markets and her own fascination — sometimes slightly horrified — with the hunt. Like the time Vivek brought a balut home. For the uninitiated, balut is an 18-day-old fertilised duck egg. On watching him eat a puffer fish, she says, “This was supposed to be a new milestone in Vivek’s quest to eat his way through the world, not the end of it!”
Divya Anand
So when they plan a trip, apart from the sightseeing, they also check out the cuisine. “Once we get there, Vivek talks to the locals like the people at the hotels and the cabbies to find out where they eat and the best places for local food. That’s one way.”
Wandering around a book
The other option is to look for food streets or local markets, thanks to which the reader gets vivid word pictures of the Pike Place Market in Seattle, Borough Market in London, the Chatuchak Market, Khlong Toei and the floating markets of Thailand, the fish market at Sydney among others. “There’s lots to wander through. Watching people bargaining reminds me of markets at home, but the stuff available is different. The meat section can get a bit overwhelming; so I walk around for a bit and, when things get a little too much, I wander away, read my book and wait for Vivek to finish his exploring in more detail and come back.”
Their search for local food in Tanzania was a bit of an anti-climax, however. “It was a very planned trip with packaged food, but our driver said we could ask the chef at the hotel we were going to. So when we got there, Vivek asked if he could meet the chef. He turned out to be B Singh from Rishikesh. He was so happy to meet us and graciously offered to make us dal chawal .”
Since the book is primarily about Vivek’s food experiences, I ask Divya for her most exciting food story. “It’s not really exciting,” she says self-deprecatingly, “but I was very curious about the durian.” So in Singapore, they went hunting for a fruit shop that sold only durian. “The smell was very strong and people were cutting their own fruit open. I didn’t go that far; just ate the cut fruit. I am not a big fan of the taste either, but it was the one time I went pretty far out for a food experience.”
It’s been a blessing, she says, that the worst that’s happened to them is just a tummy upset, “especially given Vivek’s penchant for street food. Nothing stops him. For me, the only difference is that I now religiously buy travel insurance, since I don’t know if he’s going to eat something potentially poisonous”.
Divya describes herself as primarily vegetarian. “I became open to trying non-veg in the US. If my only option is a sad-looking salad, then I may look for something with fish or chicken. And I don’t worry if the noodles has been cooked in a non-veg broth. That’s about the extent of my transition. I am happy to go along and see Vivek try new things.”
Finally, I ask about the use of the word ‘bizarre’ in the sub-title. “I agree that what’s bizarre to us may be normal to someone else. What happened was that Vivek was maintaining a chart with all the species he’d managed to consume. And it became a topic of conversations. The terms that almost everyone used was ‘bizarre’ or ‘weird’. That’s where it came from.”
