'Anything That Moves' Explores America's Extreme Food Culture
She tried many strange foods for the book, but for her, the strangest was a $90 cup of coffee, brewed from beans collected from the droppings of civets — a small wild cat — in Southeast Asia. The coffee, which she bought from gourmet grocer Dean & Deluca, tasted "wonderful," she says. (Indeed, civet poop coffee, or kopi luwak, is so rare and pricey that scientists have developed a chemical test to tell if you've bought the real thing. But, as we've previously reported, the coffee's high price tag has also encouraged some to cage the cats and force feed them coffee beans.)
Ironically, she notes, the elite diners at the vanguard of the food movement — the ones who can afford to eat at restaurants where the tasting menu is $250 a head — more and more often are paying high prices to eat the foods of poverty.
"What does it mean," muses Goodyear, "that the richest people in the world are starting to eat like the survivors of a catastrophe?"