Free The Turk Who Loved Apples by Matt Gross

to me. Usually, it was instant—this was long before the Starbucks revolution—but I gulped it down anyway. With enough time and repetition, I thought, I would grow to like the taste.
    In my sophomore year, however, I had a revelation that has since come to govern my entire approach to food. It was late at night, and I was drinking bad coffee in a friend’s dorm suite when it hit me: If I didn’t like a particular food, it wasn’t necessarily the food’s fault—it was my own failing . Coffee is what coffee is, and I would have to learn to appreciate that, as I would have to learn not to wish that yogurt was stiffer or that Carolina barbecue were more rib-centric. Those things would never change, but my palate, and how I consciously processed the sensations coming from my mouth, could. And would. And did.
    N early raw beef at a Japanese backpacker restaurant in Phnom Penh. Horsemeat sashimi in Kyoto and donkey stew in Venice. Tennessee cicadas in butter and garlic, Oaxacan grasshoppers with chili and lime, Cambodian deep-fried spiders. Half a roasted lamb’s head in Tunis, curried goat brains in Rangoon. Spaghetti in an ice-cream cone in Seoul. Still-writhing octopus tentacles that suckered to my face in Seoul. Rocky Mountain oysters in Oshkosh, Nebraska. Pickled crabs in Koreatown. Stinky tofu in Taipei. Pig-blood “pop-sicles” in Taipei. Pig intestines, of varying levels of funk, in Taipei. (Goose intestines, too.) Grilled kangaroo. Grilled porcupine. Stir-fried mango leaves in the Golden Triangle. Chili-drowned rabbit heads—which I tore apart with plastic-gloved hands—in Chengdu. Tofu with pig brains in Chengdu. Fish pastes and shrimp pasteseverywhere. Hearts, stomach linings, kidneys, esophagi, everywhere. Chicken feet, duck tongues, pig ears, everywhere and often. Congealed blood—everywhere.
    Yeah, that’s about it. Those are the strange things—the bizarre foods, as I guess we have to call them, thanks to Andrew Zimmern—that I’ve eaten since 1996. (None of them, as far as I know, has made me ill.) Some people, perhaps, will read the list with horror. Others, I’m sure, with smirking superiority: What, no grubs, no dog, no poop? But for me, as I sit here at my desk trying to recall all the odd bits I’ve put in my mouth over the years, I feel quite neutral. Certainly, I’ve enjoyed these dishes, and would eat most of them again without hesitation. (I would, however, seek fresher spiders, less gristly porcupine, more gently fried Rocky Mountain oysters.) But eating strange things was never my explicit goal. Rather, it was a logical consequence of my approach to food.
    That is, on a very basic level, I liked eating, and my capacity for delight in the presence of new flavors and textures grew with each adventuresome bite, from the multilayered richness of a truffle-studded cow-sheep-goat cheese in Washington, D.C., to the sweet acid tang of a yellow passion fruit I scooped from the fecund forest floor of Kauai. Even in our food-mad culture, it’s hard to explain the deep appeal of eating well, since pleasure itself is so hard-wired and individual. Why do we like things? Because we like them!
    For whatever reason, food worked for me, and on me, and that sophomore-year epiphany—that not liking a food was my failing, not the food’s—launched an instant shift that broadened my palate beyond what I’d expected. Now I knew I could and would eat and enjoy anything.
    Or almost anything. A few days into my Vietnam sojourn, Le Thi Thanh, the only person I knew in this country of seventy-five million people, invited me to lunch at her home, around the corner from the Open University where I hoped to soon begin teaching. Ms. Thanh’s apartment was neither tiny nor spacious, maybe fourcool, blue-painted rooms on the ground floor of a not especially dilapidated concrete building, and the tables and shelves were piled high with