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

by Dana Goodyear (Riverhead Books 262 pgs., $27.95)

Dana Goodyear’s new book, about being a wallflower at the American food orgy, won me over on its second page. That’s where she admits that, as a kid in the back of the family station wagon, she used to nibble on Milk-Bone dog biscuits. I’m not sure why this image lit up my pleasure sensors. These Scooby snacks were, she writes, “tastier than you might expect.”

Beginnings and endings are important. The last page of Goodyear’s book is hard to forget, too. It’s an upchuck scene in slow motion, the start of a wet heave. It’s as if her psyche and stomach were rebelling, finally, after the onslaught of harrowing foods (bugs, guts, blood, ox penis) to which she has subjected them.

Goodyear is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and a poet, and the possessor of a gentle, almost demure prose style. Today’s best-known food writers tend to be noisy boys; her soothing sentences are a balm. Like the shy girl in the back of class whose occasional whispered utterances are masterpieces of marinated snark, she gets off a lot of vivid observations.

Being presented with a plate of food from one carnivorous outlaw chef feels to Goodyear, as if she were Little Red Riding Hood in a bib, “like stumbling upon a crime scene while running through the woods.” Espresso brewed with pig’s blood leaves behind “a metallic flavor familiar to anyone who’s ever been punched in the nose.” Now that’s a tasting note.

“Anything that Moves” is an eyes-wide-open exploration of the foodie avant-garde; Goodyear sets out to meet the people who are stretching our notions of what is edible. There’s a “Caligula”-like decadence to the proceedings. “To look at the food for sale in our best restaurants, you’d think that our civilization had peaked and collapsed; what we see on our plates is a post-apocalyptic free-for-all of crudity and refinement.”

The phrase that comprises this book’s title — anything that moves — used to be an insult when applied to another culture’s ostensibly filthy eating habits. “Now it is a foodie-to-foodie brag,” Goodyear notes, “used to celebrate unchecked appetite.”

At heart this book is a series of profiles, some of which originally appeared in The New Yorker. She hangs out with the scruffy Los Angeles food god Jonathan Gold, the first food critic to win a Pulitzer Prize, a Falstaffian biker type who almost single-handedly upended our notions of what tasty means. “He has a lot to do with people eating at restaurants with a C from the health department,” one avid eater tells her.

She meets raw-dairy dealers, who risk jail time for peddling their stuff. To their plight, she is sympathetic: “Appetites are hard to legislate, and people usually end up doing what they want to do.”

She attends a “Weed Dinner,” in which cannabis is employed in nearly all the dishes. “In 10 years,” she is told, “marijuana will be the new oregano.”

Goodyear is a good-natured tour guide, and she possesses a (mostly) strong stomach. “My relationship to food is that of an acrophobe to a bridge,” she says. “Unease masks a desire to jump.”

I wish the author had a bit more to say about food and class, and about food and gender; gnarly food, like gnarly guitar solos, is an arena for macho posturing, a staging ground for omnivore bromance.