Eat it.

Quite a few years ago my wife and I were honored to be invited to a colleague's wedding in Chinatown. We were very touched to be included, along with some other people I knew, and were looking forward to it. It was a beautiful ceremony, a gorgeous blend of Chinese tradition, Christian church, and no fewer than three outstanding dresses for the bride at different parts of the evening.

We were also promised an amazing feast of many courses. I was a little wary, knowing that this was not going to be the takeout that Americans normally think of as Chinese food. But we had recently started to frequent a wonderful Indian restaurant and were all in on that cuisine, so we figured this might be a similar situation.

As you might guess, it was not.

To my uncultured Ugly American palette, what we faced was just dish after dish of weird things from the sea, stuff you would throw back, stuff that might make you give up fishing forever if it landed in your net. Everything seemed runny, gummy, wobbly, gushy, weird. We and the other white folks at the table were fighting over the rice as the meal progressed. Also, we of some Irish extraction drank all the beer before the reception was half over. (Meanwhile, the groom, who did not like to drink, was borne by tradition to toast every table of the large extended family with Chivas Regal.)

I bring this up as an example of why I think it's perfectly natural to resist unfamiliar food, and the more unfamiliar the stronger the resistance. My wife has lately taken to watching the show Monsters Inside Me, and if you are trying to lose weight this new year, I advise putting it on during dinner. 

Monsters Inside Me details the real-life horrors of people who at some point contracted a terrifying disease, most often caused by parasites. Doctors are unhelpful, because early symptoms and signs are confused with more common complaints -- but eventually the effects turn hellacious, and usually life-threatening. If that's not enough, the show provides gruesome magnified animations of the "monsters" at play in the body, munching, bursting, oozing, and multiplying. My wife turned it on once and the narrator was saying something like "When the fungus finishes eating the natural bacteria on the eyeball, it can adapt to eat the tissue of the eye itself." I called out from the kitchen, "That is the most typical piece of dialogue you can imagine from the show." Every episode I've seen includes little talks from Dr. Daniel Riskin, explaining why these creatures are so deadly and how many people they kill. He's lots of fun at parties. 

No offense to our wedding hosts, and I can promise you no one got sick there, unless it was from too much Chivas Regal. The only reason I bring it up is that there are consequences to eating unknown foods in strange places, especially things that have not had the hell cooked out of them, and we seem to have a natural urge to avoid foreign things if we can. Evolutionary biologists might say it comes from millennia of watching Og or Thunk so hungry that him eat weird thing raw and then him turn green and devoured from inside out. Our natural reaction to new food, thus, ranges from caution to spurning to horror. 

Heck, what's more anodyne than American peanut butter to those without food allergies? And yet I'm told many people from foreign lands think it's weird and won't touch it. 

It's not a bad idea to be cautious when sojourning outside the country. As the CDC says, "International travelers can be at risk for a variety of infectious and non-infectious diseases. Travelers may acquire parasitic illnesses: through ingestion of contaminated food or water, by vector-borne transmission, or through person-to-person contact. Contaminated food and drink are common sources for the introduction of infection into the body." I think Monsters Inside Me has turned my wife off sushi permanently.

It's not bad enough that eating raw crabs or something can infect you with a parasite that will kill you. It's that the parasite may also make you want to kill yourself. You may have heard that the common cat-related Toxoplasma gondii parasite is linked with depression, but so too is Ascaris lumbricoides, which may be ingested if good hygiene is not observed.

Which got me to think of chef and author Anthony Bourdain, largely remembered for traveling around the world and eating weird foods on shows like No Reservations. Well, now I have reservations -- I wonder if his mental state had been wrecked by some ingested parasite. If the autopsy did not look for it, we'll never know; Bourdain was cremated. 

I'll add a note too to Andrew Zimmern, host of various Bizarre Foods shows: Bring a microscope with you when you dine out. Or Dr. Daniel Riskin.