Do we like Andrew Zimmern?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Consistently on the right side on immigrants, Pride and hunger, with one badly worded 2018 insult he apologised for.
Zimmern is the bloke who made eating weird things on telly a career, first with Bizarre Foods and since with shows like Pitmasters and Wild Game Kitchen. These days he's as much a food-policy campaigner as a cook, and in 2021 the UN World Food Programme named him a Goodwill Ambassador.
The big stain is 2018. Promoting his Minnesota Chinese restaurant Lucky Cricket, he told Fast Company he was “saving the souls” of diners from Midwest Chinese restaurants, with a swear word attached. Eater's Hillary Dixler Canavan called the comments “outrageously offensive”, and plenty of Chinese American voices agreed.
He apologised on Facebook, writing that the upset was “reasonable, legitimate and understandable”. He also said some remarks were taken out of context, which some critics thought hedged it. It was a clumsy, arrogant jab at a community, not a campaign, and nothing like it has turned up since in the sources we checked.
On the harm test he's mostly on the right side. In 2022 he answered an anti-LGBTQ+ preacher's video with a Pride Month post saying he's “the son of gay parents” and that “Hate can't win”. In 2018 he said US restaurants couldn't run without immigrants, and he challenged the Trump Tower restaurant over who picks its tomatoes.
The planet side is solid too. In Aspen he argued that eating a meal or two more a week from the “blue world” would be better for the planet and our health. His recent work, including the Blue Food Cookbook, runs along the same line. We found no sign of the grievance-and-conspiracy slide, or of him working with people who push it.
The good stuff is real, not just trophies: the UN hunger ambassadorship, aimed at hunger and food waste, plus years of speaking up for immigrant restaurant workers. He's never run for office, though he said back in 2012 that he might one day.