The bear & The Beautiful
I thought I had an iron-clad stomach. Evidently, I was mistaken. For years, I took immense pride in the fact that I could pretty much eat anything — from haggis to a hundred chicken wings — and keep my gut intact. Recently, however, my once-unflappable digestive system met its match. The culprit? Dodgy tuna tartare from a neighborhood Japanese restaurant. Maybe I was hallucinating from the intermittent projectile vomiting — my apologies to those in the middle of a meal or considering one — but all I could think was: Bear Grylls will not approve.
Born Edward Michael Grylls, the 35-year-old British daredevil is the host of the Discovery Channel’s Man vs Wild. In the series, Grylls — he has mentioned that his sister started calling him “Bear” when he was a week old — puts his Special Air Service training to good use. As his official bio states, he parachutes on to “some of the most inhospitable deserts, jungles and mountains on earth” to show “what you need to do to survive.”
The Grossest Eats
A little more than a decade ago, at 23, he entered The Guinness Book of Records as one of the youngest Brits to successfully climb Mount Everest. Bear draws upon these experiences for his worldwide speaking engagements. But clearly, the posh adventurer — his accent suggests an Eton education — has become legendary for his somewhat unusual choice of eats.
Doubled up in bed and drowning in a sea of lemon-lime Gatorade, I couldn’t help but look back on the grossest sh-t Bear Grylls has chowed on in the name of survival. Since debuting on air three years ago, he has most famously turned a zebra corpse into a tasty treat, peeling back the skin with a knife to chomp on the meat Fear Factor-style. (“If the carcass smells rotten, move on — but this meat is fresh,” he raved.)
There’s more, of course: raw goat testicles, sheep’s eyeballs, camel stomach fluids, elephant dung juice, live tree frogs. The stuff on Bear’s wilderness menu would be enough to incapacitate both Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern; but persist he does. I suddenly felt a bit lame that a small plate of dubious raw seafood — and, quite possibly, dubious tap water — made me violently ill. Compared to him, I was Jake Gyllenhaal in Bubble Boy.
Man Vs Fakery
But then I came across something: It turns out Bear had some help. “It has been claimed that he spends some nights in motels and hotels instead of facing the wild in his shelters. As well, a member of the production crew said that during the Deserted Island episode, the crew made the raft and disassembled it for Grylls to make sure that it worked before Grylls assembled it. He also frequently talks and directs the production crew, which he claims never interferes in the survival part of his show,” the BBC reported.
My faith in cable television was totally shattered. See, up until that point, Bear Grylls was The Man, a part-Bond, part-Rambo millennial swashbuckler. He was as real as Chuck Bass was fake. Or so I thought.
To address the debacle, the show’s producers eventually issued a disclaimer. They basically said that Man vs. Wild was more of an instructional show and that Bear demonstrates what a man in peak physical condition — with excellent outdoor survival skills — can accomplish. Different from Survivorman, which is more or less a documentary about surviving alone in a hostile environment, Man vs. Wild does not portray what your average person could ever hope to do in such a dire situation.
Still Badass But A Little Less So
No doubt Bear Grylls remains an inspiration to countless couch potatoes everywhere; the show, after all, is quite entertaining. On the other hand, finding out that your idol only looked extra tough because of clever editing is also sobering.
It will probably take months before I could set foot inside another sushi place again; I miss it — it used to be my favorite — but since I puked my guts out, I’ve been reflexively averse to anything raw. Baby steps.
To me, Bear Grylls is still badass but a little less so.
Fortunately, there’s an upside to all this: I’ve learned to lighten up and not measure manliness based on a crazy TV show because, chances are, parts of it are contrived. I may have been knocked out by an unexotic type of food but — and I hope this makes sense — at least it wasn’t staged.
