'Everything' Missing Somethin'

You name it, I’ve probably eaten it—or at least thought about eating it. I’ve gobbled my share of pigs’ trotters, chicken feet, and cow stomach, only to reach for seconds. I’ve nibbled pickled jellyfish and chomped on wild boar. Squeamishness, clearly, is not something I’ve been accused of. But John Barlow’s latest food travelogue, “Everything But the Squeal,” rarely fails to turn my stomach—and I suspect he’d take this as a compliment.

“Squeal,” Barlow’s third food-writing venture, catalogues his quest to eat the whole hog in a yearlong journey through Galicia—a rain-battered, idiosyncratic area in Northern Spain. His challenge is to “eat every part of the pig, in as many places as possible,” but with a Dionysian disregard for order, Barlow leaves the rules of the game frustratingly vague. How will he know if he eats every part? How much of each part does he have to eat? Do eyeballs count? His headfirst dives into platefuls of snouts, curly tails, and the rare strip of tasty bacon leave no time for strategy.

The unplanned, dizzying journey that results takes him from chorizo festivals to “ant-throwing bacchanals” and from the hills of ancient towns to the kitchen table of Fidel Castro’s favorite cousin. Along the way he’s stuffed with roasted pig hearts, drenched in molten pig fat, and transported to heaven by porcine pancreas at a Michelin-rated restaurant. Barlow spares no juicy detail recounting his porco-graphical journey.

His adventure through Galicia is full of stomach-churning chunks—for example, the intestinal sac of bony leftovers that he devours, twice. But it isn’t just the food that’s disturbing; his immature metaphors are purposefully off-putting. Barlow compares pigtail fat to nose mucus: “Underneath [the skin of the pig tail] is a layer of blubber...The fatty skin disintegrates as it comes away, gooking up my fingers like boogers that I can’t get rid of no matter where I wipe.” And his juxtapositions are equally nauseating. Passages about homemade chorizo are interrupted with descriptions of bovine flatulence and sloughed foot calluses. And because his journey is so ill-defined, we can’t even breathe a sigh of relief as he crunches on pig ear. He might very well eat it all again, arbitrarily deciding that it “doesn’t count.” There’s no sense of satisfaction and no end in sight.

His dedication to the grotesque would have been commendable if it were the driving force of the book, but Barlow fancies himself a nostalgic explorer and culinary storyteller in addition to a would-be “Fear Factor” scenarist. And in his revelry he often loses sight of his quest. Though he’s mastered the art of revulsion, his approach to the romantic food-writing genre is muddled. Yes, food and culture are intimately linked, but Barlow forgets that in such an explicitly culinary journey, cultural stories should spring from the food and not the other way around. For instance, it is only once Barlow arrives at the house of Castro’s cousin that he searches for a connection to food. Finding none, other than a modest meal she serves, he rambles instead about Galician migration to Cuba. Barlow doesn’t even attempt to find a porcine connection in his visit with Don Manuel Fraga Iribarne, an eminent Spanish politician. I understand that Fraga is the most famous Galician alive, but if he has nothing to do with the Celtic pig, he should have been left on this work’s cutting block.

That said, his pork-free adventures could have worked if he were an enchanting tour guide, but Barlow himself is hard to stomach. His attempts at replicating the misanthropic humor that works so well for fellow food writer Bill Buford (“Heat”) completely miss the mark. His overzealous defense of the pig as an animal worthy of plate space, for example, is not witty and charming, but absurd and disturbing: “You’d roll around in the first effluent you came across [too] if I ripped out your sweat glands and you had no other means of cooling down.” The mockery of his vegetarian wife, Susana, is also largely devoid of the playfulness he needs to pull it off.

There is something instinctively appealing about Barlow’s determination to eat the whole pig. It speaks to the primal desire to triumph over the plate: “There comes a point...when the pleasure of tasting food gives way to a more visceral, almost delirious delight in the physical act of eating.” Just as Barlow feels compelled to finish the steaming bag of bones, the reader feels compelled to finish the book for the sheer pleasure of conquering it.

Still, “Squeal” is not an entirely unappetizing adventure. Like Barlow’s twice-consumed intestinal entrée, the book is also full of meaty gems. His evident mastery of language—if not the aims to which he puts it—makes the quest more palatable than it otherwise would be. His description of Anton, the sainted pig, is endearing, and his passage on “luxury ribs” is tantalizing enough to make any carnivore salivate. But these savory moments only serve to make the looming waves of revulsion hit even harder.

The ultimate justification of the reader’s journey is the (false) assumption that Barlow will succeed. But he gets too lost in the woods and the “maybes” of Galicia to remember the objectives of his quest: “Over the course of a year, the challenge of eating every bit of the pig seemed to take a backseat to the sheer pleasure of seeing so much of Galicia...Only now can I reflect on just how much has been eaten. Everything but the squeal? Perhaps not.” Even more of an affront to the reader, it seems that Barlow never intended on finishing his plate in the first place. “I’m not done. Will I ever be? No. There’ll be no genitals,” he proclaims, as if subjecting readers to pig snout that tastes of “the stuff that periodically clogs the dishwasher” doesn’t require a no-reservations policy. Barlow’s distraction and squeamishness leave his book short of redemption and the plates of his readers tauntingly full. If you’re going to make me lose my appetite, at least have some balls.