Deep End Decade: The Definition of Crazy is to Eat What I Eat. The Flavor of Crazy. Your Newest Taste Sensation.

El Flavo Loco!!

Yes, absolutely, crazy is a flavor. Since umami has joined the ranks of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter as basic flavors, I'm adding a new one — crazy. Sure, you can use insane, loony, psycho, demented, or even, batty as alternates, but just know that crazy is now a flavor.

All I'm saying is that after 10 whole years of blogging about crazy food, I've developed a taste for crazy flavors. Pedestrian type flavors, like mac n' cheese, spaghetti and meat sauce, orange chicken, hamburgers, hot dogs, salads, pork dumplings, and so on, don't do it for me anymore. I suppose it's normal. Adrenaline junkies diving off skyscrapers with wingsuits probably used to simply hang glide for kicks. Now floating in the air by the power of a hang glider seems like standing still when once upon a time, it was a rush. I'd even include chili heads, those hooked on capsaicin in any and all forms, among the clan of crazy flavor lovers. It's the excitement, the high, the rousing.

You can say that I'm experiencing the same thing. From pigging out on pig brain when I was six to consuming human placenta about seven years ago, my food predilections have only become more extreme. I get bored. But not in the "Oh, yawn, chicken again" kind of way. It's deeper than that. Sometimes insanely deeper.

Once in a while I'll look at something and wonder what it tastes like. But that something isn't what normal, sane people would consider food or even edible. I look at strange bugs crawling in the dirt and wonder. An unidentified sea plant washes up on shore and the question of its flavor bounces around my skull. I ask myself if a car fire would make a good smoker for brisket. Occasionally, I ponder the excruciating sapor of Aboriginal Taiwanese maggot boar — its dangling, rotting wild carcass swelling with frenzied maggots as they cascade into a pot of roiling hot oil just below, concluding their brief existence as a nightmarish "popcorn." And sometimes after I've downed half a bottle of Scotch, I think about crazier things to devour. That's when I'm really beastly.

My gastronomic gamut sweeps wide. I suppose my preferences can span anywhere from Dominique Ansel's Cronut to human placenta tartare (grass fed, of course). I'll let your imagination take you where it will as far as guessing what those crazy things I crave might be. But for now, I really love the taste of crazy.

And the crazier, the tastier.