The Unorthodox Eater

By Ken McCulloch

Shrimp! Worms! Embryonic Sharks! His own buttocks!

Phileas McNeil has eaten it all and more; practically one of everything – but there is one meal that will be his match. Phileas’ semi-farcical journey through exotic alien cuisine brings him face to face with inevitable doom, endings, beginnings and the reason why anything is worth eating anyway.

This eBook collects three short strangitudes of Phileas McNeil, along with a detailed annotation of the stories’ curious basis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ken McCulloch
• Release date: Feb 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9780991679317

Ken McCulloch

Ken is a 21st-Century Renaissance man who gives his imagination flight through writing, artwork and model making. He is a twenty year veteran of the video-game development industry, with several original high-profile titles to his name, including Blood Omen: The Legacy of Kain, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem and Too Human.

Book preview

The Unorthodox Eater

A Phileas McNeil Compilation

By

Ken McCulloch

A GRNDL’s Grub and Grog Publication

Copyright Notice

The Unorthodox Eater

A Phileas McNeill Compilation

Copyright 2012 Ken McCulloch

Smashwords Edition

Cover Image: Ken McCulloch

1st Edition: Aug 2012

2nd Edition: Feb 2013

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

e-ISBN: 9780991679317

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Foreword

The Incredible Last Meal of Phileas McNeil

The Even More Incredible Afterlife of Mr. Phileas McNeil

The Curious Ingestion and Even more fascinating Regurgitation of Phileas McNeil

The Weird and Mostly Accurate Annotations of Phileas McNeil

Foreword

Phileas McNeil has been with me since 2006 and making me hungry ever since. He grew out of an idea spawned by weird news reports of hunters and fishermen in exotic, almost unheard of places, discovering wild and exciting species of animals, either new, rare or previously thought extinct, then killing and eating them.

Coelacanth, probably one of the most well known living fossil fish has been repeatedly caught and eaten, despite its rarity, for possibly hundreds of years. It has a rank smell and oily flavor and is generally thought of as a worthless animal on the food market. Still, food is food and it can be found occasionally for sale.

In 2010, a rare Snub Nosed monkey was discovered in the deep jungles of Myanmar, then promptly killed and eaten. Locals take to hunting them during the rainy season because they are easier to locate as the rain makes them sneeze on account of their extremely short noses, akin to thin holes in their faces.

Even the apex predators like sharks are prone to this human behavior. In 2009, a 13ft long, 1100lb megamouth Shark was caught in the seas about the Philippines. Only forty members of the species had ever been sighted. Even after being told by a World Wildlife Fund representative it was a rare animal and shouldn’t be eaten, it was promptly butchered and made into kinuout, simmered in coconut milk.

Another account in the Philippines is of a Worcester’s Buttonquail, an animal thought to be extinct, but found to live only on the island of Luzon. It was sold on the market shortly after being photographed causing people to ask the question: What if it was the last one on the planet?

But I think that the real question people would be asking, probably inwardly, is what does it taste like? After all, if these examples prove only one thing it is that humans love finding new things to eat.

And that brings us to Phileas McNeil. I consider him to be the ultimate foodie. He has made his life into a quest to find and eat everything there is to eat, travelling from culture to culture, country to country, sampling everything he can, both good and bad, becoming a celebrity in the process.

Phileas is the primordial human in each of us that enjoys food. His desire transcends all human boundaries and ethics. In one instance, he desires human flesh and its procurement probably involved murder at some point, possibly the most literal case of meat is murder. Even