Anything That Moves Read Free

blue eyes scanning the room with the herky-jerky motion of an ink-jet printer. His broad, pale, freckled hands were crossed on the counter; the sleeves of his jacket ended a good two inches above his wrists. By then I’d been reading him in the
LA
Weekly
and hearing his views on food recited like gospel among my friends for a couple of years. When, in 2007, Gold won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, a first for a food writer and for the
Weekly,
I asked him to meet me for lunch. I was curious about the man and the food, but more than that, I was curious about the purchase that his fringy approach to eating seemed to be gaining on American cuisine. He wrote, “Let me know whether you’d rather go squishy or swank.” Squishy, I replied, and so it began, with a bowl of rubbery abalone porridge and the promise of an adventure.
    Gold’s dauntless approach to eating has spread to inform a new generation of American eaters. For twenty-five years, he has been chronicling the city’s carts and stands and dives and holes-in-mini-malls; its Peruvian, Korean, Uzbek, Isaan Thai, and Islamic Chinese restaurants; the places that serve innards, insects, and extremities. He works the bottom of the food chain, telling his readers where to get crickets, boiled silkworm cocoons, and fried grasshoppers, of which he writes that “the mellow, pecan-like flavor isn’t bad.” His readers learn to appreciate the sweet rewards of the repulsive, the dangerous, the emotionally complex. “He got me into
sesos
tacos”—brains—“and
uni
, chicken feet, pig’s ears, and lots of organ meat,” a downtown nightlife entrepreneur told me. The only thing Gold fears is scrambled eggs; his first food memory is of pushing away a plate of them.
    Selling food depends on euphemism—if we really knew what we were eating, the thinking goes, we would reject it—and often critics further empurple the industry’s own florid prose. Gold is a disabuser, a champion of the real. His descriptions repel as much as they beckon; the pleasure of his prose, in the service of ghastly sounding dishes, is itself an argument that something can be awful and delightful at the same time. Sea cucumbers, he writes, “breathe through their anuses, and when attacked, some of them defend themselves by farting out sections of their poisonous, sticky lungs. The particular, ganky texture expressed by the title ingredient in bird’s-nest soup is supposed to come from the fondness of the swallows in question for impaling and sucking the mucus from sea cucumbers.” Writing about a Uighur restaurant in Koreatown—“a nondescript corner dining room where northeastern Chinese cooks prepare the Beijing version of Xinxiang barbecue for a Korean-speaking clientele”—he recommended what he called “the winciest dish in town: a sharp, glistening steel skewer stabbed through thin coins of meat sliced from a bull penis, which bubble and hiss when they encounter the heat of the fire, sizzling from proud quarters to wizened, chewy dimes.” To him, blowfish-eating is “heightened by danger, flavored with death.”
    As the patron saint of foodies, Gold rightly suspects that he has encouraged what he calls the “dining as sport” crowd. “These are the guys who say, ‘I’ll see your live octopus and raise you a chicken foot. Oh, so you’re going to eat small intestine full of undigested cow’s milk?’” he said. “That’s actually a good dish. You can get it at just about any taqueria, but you really have to trust the guy.” One avid reader told me, “He has a lot to do with people eating at restaurants with a C from the health department. He trumpeted that really loudly, like ‘I do not care! This is going to make me sick and I’m interested in endangering myself.’” Another told me that he was once laid up for two weeks after