Eat Weird

Who are you?

My name is Chris Fehnel, and I’m a 25 year old web developer from Pennsylvania. I’m just a guy with a cat, who loves food.

I work at Next Step Design and Development, am a contributor to TheUbergeeks.net, and have a personal website mostly tracking fitness progress (or lack thereof) at ChrisFehnel.com.

Who cares about you? Why are you doing this?

I always tell people that I would love to eat anything. Everyone that knows me knows that I live with a food mantra of “Try anything once.”

I was sitting around watching Andrew Zimmern the other day and saw him eating scorpion, and it got me really, really hungry. I decided then and there that I was going to try scorpion one day before I die.

Then I thought, why not try it sooner rather than later? Why not make it happen. Why not try all the weird food you want to? Not too long after that, this idea was born, which leads to…

What is your goal?

I’ll start with what my goal is not. I’m not shooting for shock value, even though some may consider what I eat shocking. I’m not going for a gross out effect. I’m simply aiming to try weird (read: different) things, and to bring my experience with the weirdness to you. Maybe what I eat one week won’t even be considered gross by some people. Maybe one day I’ll eat something I’ve never even heard of, from meats to fruits to foreign delicacies. Another day I might try an odd combination of food in a concoction never experienced before.

Put simply, my goal is to encourage people to try things they’ve never had before. Maybe it’ll be gross, maybe it’ll be your favorite food. Though it’s been repeated into cliché status, it still stands true: You’ll never know if you never try.

I see so many people go to their local restaurant and get the same thing over and over again. “I’ll have the chicken fingers. I’ll have the pizza. I’ll have the burger.” You ask them if they’ve ever tried shrimp before, and they give you a crazy look. Granted, shrimp’s not weird cuisine to 95% of the world, but when you have someone who has never tasted it before experience it for the first time, it’s an event. What if they love it? What if it adds joy to their life? What if they never have that experience?

What if I never have that experience?

That’s not a question I want to have. That’s a question I’m determined not to have. There are too many good things on this planet to enjoy, that I’ve never enjoyed before. I want to ty them, enjoy them or hate them. I want the proverbial “spice of life.”

However, I can’t do what Andrew Zimmern does. I can’t travel everywhere to try these weird things. So….. not only am I going to hunt down foods I think I want to try and ask for your suggestions in the process, I’m going to do simple stuff too - whether I’m down at your standard restaurant, a local diner, a sushi joint, or finding something from the local market and cooking it up at home, my goal is to find the weirdest thing they’ve got and try it, just for the sake of the experience.

Stay tuned. Live well. Eat weird.