In Bad Taste?: The Adventures and Science Behind Food Delicacies.

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

How far would you go to enjoy a cup of coffee made with beans that have been freshly pooped by a weasel-like creature called a civet? Well, if you are scientist/broadcaster Massimo Francesco Marcone, the answer is all the way from Canada to Ethiopia and Indonesia. Dr. Marcone is a professor of Food Science at the University of Guelph. He also appears regularly on CBC Radio to report on very exotic foods. As a slightly-more-curious-than-most human, he wants to know how civet-pooped coffee (called kopi luwak) tastes. Does scat coffee live up to its 600–dollars-a-pound price tag? As a scientist, Marcone wants to know the science behind the marketing spin. Can passing through the digestive track of an animal actually improve the taste of a coffee bean?

To get his answer, Marcone is willing to endure hardships that would make Indiana Jones scream and run. He confronts government red tape, corrupt police, crocodiles, trigger-happy warlords, ants, rats, leeches, stampeding zebras, hungry Abyssinian lions, and hotel rooms made of cow dung. A true scientist, Marcone is emotionally overwhelmed when he realizes that he is the first person to conclusively prove that the Ethiopian civet excretes the same kind of coffee bean scat its smaller Indonesian cousin does. Marcone’s prose is peppered with references to God’s greatness and it sometimes resembles the travel writings of 19th-century Western explorers. While searching for edible birds’ nests in Malaysia, Marcone realizes that he is in a region known for headhunters, but he is relieved to learn they are now Baptists. Other delicacies discussed in this book include goat-dung oil, Italian maggot cheese and edible insects. Just under two dozen colour photographs accompany the text. Besides explaining the traditions and science behind these foods, Marcone challenges Western readers to examine their own contradicting food prejudices. Why does kopi luwak make us cringe but not honey, which is produced from the digestive tracts of bees? This is a fun and informative read for armchair travellers and fans of weird facts.