Extreme Cuisine premieres Saturday, February 21st on the Food Network.
Interview with Jeff Corwin
Your television career so far has focused on nature and animals. What was the inspiration to do a food show?JEFF: I have a great fascination and passion for food. I really consider myself a foodie in regard to my spirit. I, typically, can be on the road ten months out of the year. So much of our lives is bent around trying to get a great meal wherever we are at the moment. It really becomes a mission above and beyond, say, filming silverback gorillas. We hear of this local place where they make this incredible regional dish. So, it's been a passion of mine growing up in the restaurant business. I've explored a lot of things from winemaking to cheesemaking. My wife and I, for example, were filming in Europe that will take us on a side trip to France for a few days and we'll explore the local markets. Or Italy. It's really a passion of mine and I've always wanted to apply my adventure model, my exploration model with TV shows to food. And that's what we really do with this show.
The show is called Extreme Cuisine. What's your definition of "extreme"?
JEFF: This special we filmed in Thailand, we spent nearly two weeks traveling from east to west, north to south. Many rural, remote regions in little villages, tribal communities to remote markets to sprawling urban food markets. When you think of Thai food, you think of Pad Thai and chicken satay and tom yum soup. Here, we're off the menu, off the grid when it comes to food. The people in Thailand often use extraordinary flavor combinations. Their sort of Eastern sense of balance, of incorporating equality of sweet, sour, savory, spicy...often used to mask very simple proteins. They're often eating the lowest of the food chain and out of that experience making an incredible epicurean experience. And that's what we look at. So we eat everything from this regional dish called 'jumping shrimp' (it's alive when you eat it!) to seeing how they sustainably harvest silkworms from bamboo, which is renewable, and use that to make an incredible snack. The food we look at is often outside the comfort zone of Western culture but for these people, the communities in Thailand, this is everyday food. It may be extreme to us but to them this is what they're eating. We try to look at that and see how the food becomes the glue that keeps a community together and builds and sustains a culture...sort of moves the history of a people forward to the next generation. Just as we would with Thanksgiving dinner or a special dinner with friends. If I was in New England, it would be a lobster bake. There, it would be the whole Trang pork cooked in the Trang province.
The other thing we look at, which I'm really fascinated about,(and for me the mission is not to force this down the audience's throat but to have it naturally bubble up through the adventure) is to look at how many people around the world survive by using local ingredients. And many dishes and many of the ingredients used to make that fabulous food were harvested within yards from where we were. When we ate the Trang pork, that pork grew up in the backyard of the people who make it. And the people who eat it live down the street. And it's that sort of idea of local, really cool, unique slow foods, often simple foods but wonderful foods. This is what it's really about. It's about adventure...taking my passion as a wildlife biologist, my passion as an anthropologist, my interest in food and sort of braiding them together.
