Wild What?

Wild Foods. You name it and you can probably get it at this festival. I mean it, go ahead, give it a shot. Brain? Got it. Lambs tail? Got it. Sheep's balls? Got it. Chances are that if you have a hankering to eat something that is/was at one point part of a living animal found in New Zealand, you could do it at this festival. They even had a few nice "live" dishes as well but before I get into the nitty gritty, let me rewind.

The festival itself is held in the Pounamu (Jade) capital of New Zealand; a little beach town by the name of Hokitika. It is an artsy place seemingly guided by the jade carving industry. There are such beautiful pieces in sizes that I didn't even know jade could be found in! What added to the artsy feel was that in addition to the "wild foods" part of the festival they set up the town square with booths of artists and crafts makers from all over New Zealand. Trinkets galore. My mom would have been in heaven. Our first day there was spent wandering the booths, getting our tickets for the next day's shenanigans, and trying to surf. I say trying because that's exactly what we did. I have never before been in a rip current that strong. No matter how hard I paddled I couldn't beat it. I was in its clutches. The funny thing about it was that the rip current wasn't going out to sea, it was going straight toward and adjacent to shore! Tim and I were both paddling for about 5 minutes before we realized we weren't going anywhere but down the beach. The current was so bad when we finally made it to the next sandbar where we could stand (maybe waist deep), we put our feet down and dug in but were still getting dragged! In the end Tim never made it out and it took me every ounce of effort to get through the rip. When I finally did I caught two waves and came in out of shear exhaustion. Can you say beat down?

Now it's time for Wild Foods. Maybe. The first thing I noticed at the festival was just how insanely big it was. If I remember correctly I think they were limiting tickets this year to 15,000 people. Apparently there was no cap in past years and it was just getting out of control. Imagine it. 15,000+ people descending on a town of 3,000. One massive party... Apparently the taboo food isn't so taboo anymore. I saw everyone from little kids to an elderly lady in her Sunday's best cruising around in a rascal. There were costumes, games, sing-alongs, lots of food, and lots of drinking. That was by far the largest group of truly inebriated people I have ever seen. The great part was that there was lots of green space (central park in town) which facilitated the "inebriated sprawl." You could almost tell the time by the increasing amount of people falling out on the surrounding lawn. Alright Matt, the goods please? By FAR, the most disgusting food I saw was sheep's balls. Hands down. I didn't get to see anyone eat them but apparently earlier in the day someone did order and eat one. Check the pictures...they're full on disgusting. They were mincing the huevos and making sandwiches out of them which seemed quite popular but still, not my kind of edible organ. That seemed to be the overriding king of disgustingness. You had to be somewhat careful because wild foods seemed to mean two things. There were the wild foods that might be a delicacy in another country and were prepared with scrutiny and then there were the "Fear Factor" wild foods that just tried to be as grotesquely extreme as possible. One tent might have a wild meat stew that was wild venison, wild boar, wild goat, wild mushroom, etc., and one might have a stew by the same name that had brain, testicles, eyes, etc. If you come, read the fine print. I feel bad for the guy who gets extremely drunk and indiscriminately hungry in a place like that. "I ate what?!?!" As far as what Tim and I had: chocolate covered grubs, grasshopper, worms sushi, ostrich, kangaroo, and wild venison and mushroom sausage. I have to agree with my brother, the crunchy bugs are my least favorite. Worms tasted too much like dirt. Grubs probably were the least attractive initially but the best tasting of the three. Kangaroo and ostrich were delicious as was the venison. We also had some ham and cheese crapes as filler in between. We figured it wasn't a good idea to walk around hungry as we did have a beer or three. Thankfully not all the food was on the side of extreme. Another cool thing we got to try was kava from Fiji. It was a very interesting drink and not nearly as bad tasting as I'd thought. I've heard over and over that it tastes like dirty water and that some people have a hard time drinking it. To me it just tasted like an earth tea or something. Not repulsive just not epic either. I'll definitely need to try it again though because outside of a numb tongue (hell yeah it was fun) I really didn't get too much of an effect. Could have been all the food and beer interfering.

So that was it. That was Wild Foods for us. Lots of walking around, lots of eating and drinking, lots of bouncing to the live music, etc. It was a beautiful day with beautiful weather and if I remember correctly we hung around outside that evening watching the sunset and thinking just how bad of an idea it would be to try and go for a surf...