Skip to footer

What kind of an eater are you?

From locavores to femivores, to fast food junkies and punk domestics, here are 11 labels for every kind of person at the dinner table.

11. Culinary tourist / Extreme eater

Khin Maung Win/AP

  • By Stir It Up! editors

There is some debate on whether Venetian explorer Marco Polo actually introduced pasta to Italy after sampling it in China. In any case, he paved the way for  culinary adventurers who jump in feet first and try exotic ethnic cuisine, whether it is pickled sour mango in Cambodia, guinea pigs in Peru, chicken feet in China, or grasshoppers in Africa. The weirder sounding the dish, the better.

Culinary tourists delight in the tastes, textures, smells, and sights of other nations, and sometimes plan their vacation travel around culinary pursuits. Extreme eaters are willing to try something no matter how much it grosses out their friends. They helped make "nose to tail" eating trendy, and will seek out haggis just for the fun of it.

They pride themselves in being clean plate eaters, and making sure no part of any animal goes to waste. Sometimes culinary tourists/extreme eaters are well-traveled, other times they just live in a city that has a large immigrant population, either way, food for them is more about the journey than the destination.

11 of 12
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.