By NPR

Author Dana Goodyear has spent a lot of time dining with foodies who champion bugs as a meal. And horses. And brains. Whales. Leaves. Weeds. Ash. Hay. Even plain dirt.

Goodyear, a staff writer for the New Yorker, set out to document the outer bounds of the extreme food culture that has taken hold among American foodies. Their quest for ever more exotic, challenging ingredients, she says, is raising fundamental questions about the nature of food itself and the assumptions that underlie what we view as acceptable to eat.

“The food movement is starting to challenge those [assumptions] in a pretty serious way,” Goodyear tells NPR’s Rachel Martin. “I wanted to see what the basis of the taboos is, and what it looks like when people start to question them.”

Her new book, “Anything That Moves: Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters and the Making of a New American Food Culture”, documents this transformation of modern food culture.

Read the whole story