Bizarre Foods America - Blues Trail

Mr. Y and I were watching Bizarre Foods America last night.  Andrew Zimmern was traveling down the Delta Blues Trail from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi.  A lot of the foods did not look appetizing - full of fat and random meat parts.

One of the most interesting parts of the show was when Andrew visited a pork rind factory in Clarksdale, Mississippi.  The owner is a Chinese-American named Kim Wong, and he came to the United States when he was pretty young.  A lot of the Chinese immigrants came to work in the fields after the Civil War, and eventually worked their way up to owning grocery stores.  Kim Wong's family owned one of these stores, and he got the idea of improving on the pork rind recipe by using the Chinese recipe to make roast pork.  Now his factory makes pork and chicken rinds, and they look really delicious.  It was so weird listening to Kim's son, a first-generation American, speaking in very thick Southern accent.

Andrew also visited the Chow family, who had been living in Mississippi for four generations.  Again it was very odd to see Chinese people in our parents' generation speaking with very thick Southern accent.  They had invited Andrew over for a big family meal, and had four wok stations set up in a car port.  The food was a mix of Southern and Chinese food - Crawfish Cantonese, Venison Pepper Steak, Fried Rice, Chinese-style spareribs with Mississippi honey, Pig's Feet, etc.  The food looks absolutely delicious.  From a historical perspective, we usually assume that the Chinese are the more recent immigrants to the United States, and it was fun to learn about the Chinese who came to Mississippi in the 1800s.