A Tale of Two (Food) Americas – What I Learned from Celebrity Chef, Andrew Zimmern

• November 24, 2020

Food, we all eat it. We all need it and we all have our favorites. (Mine is bacon, of course.)

While many of us take it for granted, we forget about the cultural and social impact having food on the table creates.

Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to have Andrew Zimmern, the James Beard award-winning personality, chef, and activist, on my podcast, All Business with Jeffrey Hayzlett on C-Suite Radio. Many of you know Andrew from TV shows like Bizarre Foods and his most recent MSNBC show What’s Eating America, an in-depth look at some of our country’s biggest issues seen through the lens of food.

“If you take away bread and rice, that’s the stuff revolutions are made of,” Andrew said. “We swim in food culturally. As Americans we inhale other cultures first through our mouths, way before we appreciate the dance or music. Sadly, very sadly, in America (we appreciate the food) before we appreciate the people.”

Andrew says we’ve seen this attitude come to the forefront during the COVID-19 pandemic. You may remember that my hometown of Sioux Falls, South Dakota made national headlines for an outbreak at a pork processing plant. While the pandemic continued to spread, his hometown of Minneapolis, MN made the news after the murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed. Andrew says both these events, in their own ways, shone a bright light on what he called the different “Food Americas.”

“The rawness of the systemic racism that’s been revealed by the horrific shootings that have gone on over the last three or four weeks here in this country layered on top of the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed a really ugly truth about our food systems in America that are also not immune to the inequalities; in fact, they’ve been built on them,” Andrew said. “But we actually have two or three different food systems going on in America, one that you and I get to participate in, and then a very clear other food America where people are not participating in it.”

He continued saying, “The COVID-19 crisis has revealed the ugly truth, though, about our relationship with food. We don’t produce it fairly, we take advantage still of the people who make it. We promote its unhealthiness much to our regret, both economically and in terms of the morbidity that it creates. There’s two or three food Americas that exists right now, which is horrific.”

Andrew says that Americans have a unique relationship with food, one he hasn’t seen elsewhere around the world.

“We have an extremely profound relationship with food. At no time in human history has a culture ever had as romantic a relationship with food as Americans do in 2020,” Andrew says. “Over the last couple of decades, it has just grown more and more intense, to the point that it’s how we measure status.”

While we might consider many of Andrew’s TV shows something to watch after a long day, he says there’s more to it than just a show about food.  His shows are a form of activism which Andrew said it’s something he learned from his parents and continues to speak up to this day.

“The show on one hand for some people is an entertainment show about a fat, white guy that goes around the world eating bugs,” Andrew said. “The real show is about preaching patience, tolerance, and understanding to people that otherwise we’re only describing us by our differences and not by our commonalities. And I really felt that it was important to make.”

“Every TV show that I made — from The Zimmern List to Family Dinner, I need to be able to stand behind something that’s going to change the world and make it better because of its existence. If it’s not going to make the world a better place because of its existence, simply beyond entertainment, I simply don’t do it,” Andrew added.

He also offered up ‘Easter Eggs’ of sorts in every episode of Bizarre Foods. I’ll make sure to look for it next time I watch the show.

“For 12 years in Bizarre Foods, we always put a family meal and every single episode of every show that I ever did, Andrew said. “I wanted to show people what a family looks like eating in another part of the world, because we all look the same. When families gathered together and eat, we all look the same, and I saw tremendous value in that.”

Over the run of Bizarre Foods, we’ve all seen Andrew eat some stuff that most of us wouldn’t normally eat, so I had to ask what he won’t eat, and you might be as shocked as I was to learn his answer.

“I’m not big on walnuts. I’m really against raw cookie dough, which some people just love. I just hate the taste of raw flour.”

That’s not all we talked about, we both had an idea for a new show he could do, blue lobsters and a shocking exchange he had with a man over apricot juice. You even get a small sneak peek at an upcoming project.

Listen to the full interview on this episode of All Business with Jeffrey Hayzlett.