A few years ago, on a trip to Tokyo, I ate sperm from the fugu, the blowfish famed for the toxicity of its internal organs. This reads like a boast, doesn't it? What a man I am. I consumed a rare delicacy, waltzed with death, plus I had a warped flirtation with necrophiliac zoophilia. In truth it's nothing of the sort. I really didn't want to eat the stuff, but I found myself in a complex social situation, as many do in Tokyo, which made doing otherwise impossible. It was on a menu created especially for me, in an exclusive Japanese-only restaurant to which I had negotiated special access as part of research for a writing project. Having done so, saying no would have been regarded as appalling bad manners.
I have always been deeply suspicious of culinary adventurism for its own sake. After all, if I'd really wanted to do the whole fugu thing it could have been arranged. But it has always struck me as having far less to do with greediness, and more to do with machismo and a particularly self-regarding form of faux sophistication. I was thinking about all this as the scandal over horsemeat in beef ready-meals broke. Because lurking behind the important questions that it posed – about supermarket economics and our hidden food chain – there was another narrative, dripping with snobbery and disdain: about the "lower orders" being both stupid enough to buy this cheap crap and unsophisticated enough not to recognise that eating horse is fine, as any fool who has holidayed in the Dordogne knows.
Of course, this scandal wasn't actually about the identity of the animals, but the fact that we knew nothing of its life or death. No matter. What was really in play here was the cult of gastro-adventurism, which puts experience for its own sake far beyond whether things are nice to eat. Of course I've eaten horse, they bellow. Hasn't everyone? It even has its own genre of food writing, produced by self-styled foodie Indiana Joneses who boast of scarfing deep fried insects, sashimi of a fish that is still alive and twitching as the slices are taken, or the still-beating heart of the just-slaughtered cobra. And we are supposed to swoon. So brave. So clever. So what?
It is the worst kind of showing off, and has absolutely nothing to do with greed. Occasionally, I have been invited to try exotic meats, ostrich say, or kangaroo or alligator. And I always make the same discovery: they are eaten less often than sheep, cow or pig because, while fine, they aren't quite as nice. Which is why that triumvirate dominates. A few years ago, a restaurant serving insects opened in London. It lasted just a few months. While some people were interested in trying their menu once, few wanted to go twice. They'd eaten locusts. Now they wanted a bacon sandwich.
At which point someone bawls j'accuse and points out that I'm forever bigging up offal: wobbly trotters, calves brains in frothing puddles of butter, kidneys and liver and tripe. And yes I do. But these are fundamentally different. First, they are a part of our culinary heritage that has been forgotten. Second, if we're going to kill an animal, we should consume as much of it as possible. And third, they are all really nice to eat. Call me a weirdo. But where food is concerned I think that's what matters.
