‘It Bugs Me’: Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern

One of the first UN Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations, 2015) is ‘Zero Hunger’, which seems to be apt for a chapter on food television. Yet it, along with Goals One (‘No Poverty’), Three ‘(Good Health and Well-Being’), Five (‘Gender Equality’) and Ten (‘Reduced Inequalities’) are all relevant to the American series Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern and its attempted promotion of foods and cultures outside the Western experience. The unintended subversion of this promotion by the series is the subject of this chapter, particularly as it relates to wider issues relating to food/travel television, tourism and sustainability. More specifically, this chapter addresses the series’ problematic representation of insects as food, despite insects being a sustainable and viable source of protein, and the problematic representation of cultures/cuisines which include insects. This is accomplished through the analysis of insect-eating scenes, tying their construction to Othering the food and associated cultures as well as the gendered, colonial and moral connotations of disgust which serve to recentre the white/Western neocolonial palate as arbiter of what is ‘good’.