From Minnesota to Mexico

‘Bizarre Foods’ goes historical

In a television landscape that’s bursting with culinary programming, it isn’t hard to find something that can satisfy almost any taste. Like cooking competitions? Boy, do you have a lot of choices. Maybe some more traditional instructional programs? Cooking Channel has you covered.

For me, one of the greatest gems is “Bizarre Foods” on Travel Channel, which premiered a new season last week and continues on Tuesday evenings. The long-running series has evolved over the years, but at its core, it’s still all about host Andrew Zimmern visiting exotic and not-so-exotic locales and sampling the local specialties that, to a traditional American palate, may seem a bit, well, bizarre.

This season’s seven episodes are all about culinary history and its impact on culture. In last week’s premiere, Zimmern was in a less-than-exotic locale — Minnesota — where he sampled the foods that lumberjacks would have feasted on when the legend of Paul Bunyan first took hold, including duck stew, bear pastrami and muskrat with gravy.

“This season’s adventures proved to be some of our most epic,” Zimmern said in a statement, and considering some of the places he’s been and the foods that he’s eaten, that’s a bold statement to make. This season, he heads to Europe and follows Napoleon’s footsteps through Poland in one episode, and in another he makes the trip to Mexico City, where he dives into the culinary history of the Aztecs and their contemporaries, checking out how their cuisine has influenced that of modern-day Mexico.

Andrew Zimmern hosts “Bizarre Foods”