Anything That Moves: Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a New American Food Culture

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, November 2013: In Anything That Moves, Dana Goodyear draws readers into the tentacled extremities of the new culinary vanguard. Bringing her omnivorosity to hundreds of tables, she infiltrates easily a dozen subcultures of the renegades who are procuring, cooking, and devouring their way to a new American cuisine, a “convergence of the disgusting and sublime.” The most inspired characters she introduces are chefs insatiably drawn to experiment with the new: ingredients, methods, and technologies that create never-before-tasted dishes. Goodyear writes with a precise poetry. Her accounts of 12-course (and occasionally 40-course) meals surprise, sometimes to the point of transcendence, occasionally nausea. She’s also unafraid to break her own spell and acknowledge the fog hovering over this hedonistic feast: anxiety over our industrial food chain’s sustainability when the population tops 9 billion, just as we wade into the age of Earth’s sixth major extinction. But even as Goodyear asserts that the bulk of our future protein will have to come from bugs (yes—from bugs), we see her own hunger most clearly when she experiences a meal that evokes vivid memories, “like feasting on my past”: her first hunt with her late father, who dipped a finger in the blood of her kill and marked her forehead. –Mari Malcolm