There Are Others. The 7th Annual Weird Food Fest. Van Nuys, CA.

Vis-à-vis with dinner. Literally.

Back in the very lean ramen days of college, one of the most anticipated weeks in the new school term was the “Hello Lunch” week. This was the blessed week when free food was bountiful and flowing like the famous Thanksgiving cornucopia with its horn spilling forth fruit. Almost every club or organization with a semblance of a budget would at minimum offer a free cheese pizza slice and a cup of caffeinated drink. The more lavish Hello Lunch spreads rolled out gherkin garnished meat and cheese platters where you could build a custom sandwich, an exotic Greek salad (usually at Fraternity luncheons), a box of glazed donuts and Doritos. But, of course, as we all know well, there is no such thing as a free Hello Lunch. No way. You will pay. And the price is steep. Even before you get to cozy up to your plate of free calories, you’ll be accosted by one of the lunch’s hosts who will be your uninvited meal companion and very own club membership marketing assault machine.

The club’s objective at the Hello Lunch is to recruit and recoup; that is, to recruit lots of new members and to recoup the Hello Lunch expenses with new membership fees.

My objective was, however, exactly opposite: to eat, leave and not join. The old “dine and dash” routine without the law breaking. After all, there’s no contract between the club and the eater that states if the eater ingests any of the chow, then the eater must join the club. Don’t underestimate the Hello Lunch though. Its organizers are prepared for the likes of me. Whenever I went into a Hello Lunch I’d be greeted by many of the current members who, with fanged grins, encouraged me to partake in their bounty. At the same time they are assigning themselves a target to recruit. It’s a classic parasite and host relationship: They feed you and you help them to survive.

Now, a little strategy.

One way to discourage Hello Lunch harassment is to simply chew with your mouth open and speak with your mouth full. This technique works 90 per cent of the time. For the other ten percent I quote Groucho Marx who famously said “I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.” I say this as clearly as possible with my mouth full. I then get up from my seat, grab a slice of pizza to go and look for the next free lunch to say “hello” to.

Since those years, I’ve not been interested in any clubs other than the kind that makes me wait in a long line out in the freezing cold while a clipboard wielding jerk clad in the latest D&G handpicks those worthy to enter. Oddly, I want in on a club that probably doesn’t want me.

But then there’s this other group. It’s a sort of kinky culinary collective who call themselves the “Weird Food Fest.” Once a year, a relatively intimate group of about seven get together to eat. Their gathering may be small but their passion for food is big. To be specific, this group is really into food that is exotic, weird, uncommon, an acquired taste, extremely foreign or highly indigenous. Whatever label you want to place on it, it’s food that you won’t soon forget.

On the buffet, silkworm pupae...

...laver bread...

...thousand year-old egg...

...fermented papaya.

Scott Levi Ahlberg, one of the principals of this gathering, explains, “We loosely define weird food as anything that the typical American would likely find odd or disgusting, but that someone somewhere on this planet would eat and consider normal. So of course it's subjective. Personally I think some of the processed food found at the average supermarket is pretty weird and disgusting but that's just my subjective bias.”

Again, this gathering may be small but its ambitions are not; to wit this annual get-together calls itself the “Weird Food Fest”. A true festival it is far from but the bones are there. This accidental freaky feast began in December 1999 at the house of one of Ahlberg’s friends. The first ever Weird Food Fest was a humble affair which had its participants sample ketchup flavored chips, Limburger cheese and Indian pickled mango.

If you attended the most recent 7th Annual Weird Food Fest, you would’ve found yourself at a typical San Fernando Valley condominium in one of the many impersonal, stuccoed citadels on the Valley floor. There is perhaps nothing less exotic. But inside this non-descript domicile you may be transported by your palate to distant locales like Wales, Seoul, Stockholm, Shanghai and even Yerevan, Armenia - as delectably far from Van Nuys as possible.

The Breakfast Club this isn’t. Here you’d avail your appetite to foods such as fermented papaya, surströmming, silkworm pupae, lamb’s testicles, pork bung and many others. Some of the choices are more daunting than delicious. All of them are not typical of your standard American potluck. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, this event is a potluck. Everyone is expected to bring edible exotica. That’s what makes this gathering unpredictable and fun, maybe frightening. If you’ll indulge me, it also reveals each participants degree of Deep End Dining. For example, the attorney might bring shark’s fin soup. The soccer coach dishes up pig’s trotters. The grad student offers durian ice-cream for dessert. There is no pre-fixed anything here. Just show up, bring something interesting and taste everything.

What’s this?

Beef pizzle.

Fo’ shizzle?

Yep. Take a bite.

Mm-mmm, what exactly is pizzle?

Bull penis. My bad.

Beef pizzle aka bull penis.

Relax. It’s not going to kill you. Nothing at the Weird Food Fest will kill you. And, as everyone knows, what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger. Especially if you eat lamb’s testicles. Make you strong. Make you love long time.

Lots of heart.

There’s nothing deadly at the Fest only because nobody has introduced live octopus or fugu to this funky bunch yet. But I have a feeling that it’s only a matter of time before somebody does. Maybe I will.

GQ’s restaurant critic Alan Richman has been trying desperately to find a place that serves assholes. The “Weird Food Fest” might be just what he’s looking for. And I mean that in a good way. Even a delicious way.

"Do you serve assholes here?" Pork bung.

It looks like I may have actually found the perfect group for me. They’re local. They’re interesting people. They enjoy exploring the edge of the gastronomic world. Now if only they’d refuse to have me as a member, I may just find them irresistible.