From popular culture, it seems as if you could eat a shoe but I’m wondering if that’s really true. I remember old movies when people trapped in a cabin or else poorer than dirt boiled up their boots and ate them, and I’m sure there was also something about rawhide and Inuit, but I’m wondering if you could cook up and eat a pair of fancy Italian loafers? If so, how would you prepare them?
WAG, but doesn’t much of the shoe leather get treated with a whole lot of chemicals you wouldn’t want to ingest? If there was a way to be sure you wouldn’t be swallowing any of those lovely things, I suppose it would be a lot like eating jerky.
I would just throw 'em on the grill, light the fire, smother 'em with steak sauce, and have some really good filet of sole.
Of course, I’d cut the inside out first and stick it in a casserole dish, there’s nothing like baked tongue.
My dog tried to eat some leather recently, and he ate it raw, but puppies can stand different things than humans. On the whole, it probably does taste like jerky, I’d imgine, but I don’t know, since I rarely put my foot in my mouth. 
I'm sorry.;)I’d worry more about cracking off a tooth trying to take a bite.
Most shoes these days seem to be made of more synthetic stuff than leather and while leather may be reasonably harmless, I don’t know about the plastic and rubber stuff.
I guess I’m thinking you take the leather off (or you have a pair of fine shoes that are all leather) and soak it, boil it, whatever. But I wonder if it would ever be chewable?
I don’t think leather is digestable so you probably wouldn’t get anything out of it, except a huge dose of fiber.
FYI, the movie you’re remembering is Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 classic The Gold Rush. While that movie certainly imprinted in popular culture the scene in which the lonely prospector is so hungry that he eats his shoe, it was strictly for comic effect, and never intended to imply that it was possible to eat shoes.
FYI, the prop shoe that Chaplin ate in shooting that scene was made of licorice.
Thanks for the movei reference - Chaplin comes back to me now that you mention it. Ah but I’m sure I read a book where the main character, an Inuit stuck on an ice floe, ate some of his hide clothing. Is hide clothing different than skin that’s been leatherized (leatherated? Leatherapalooza’d?)?
rubberdemon: if it was walrus hide/skin, maybe:
http://www.tapirisat.ca/english_text/itk/departments/enviro/wildlife/walrus.htm
Speaking of those licorice shoes that Chaplin eats at gusto, it was reported on the American Masters documentary of Unknown Chaplin, that Charlie was so much of a perfectionist that he made dozen of takes for every scene. The shoe eating one scene was no exception and both Chaplin and Mack Swain got really ill of eating so many shoes!
The film Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe is a documentary that shows someone actually eating a shoe. Filmmaker Error Morris had approached Werner Herzog with an idea for a documentary about a pet cemetary. Herzog told Morris that if anyone made a successful documentary on this subject, he would eat his shoe.
The documentary, Gates of Heaven, was highly successful and critically acclaimed. Herzog paid off on the bet by having Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley cook his shoe. He ate the shoe in front of a live audience at the U.C. Theater. The documentarian Les Blank filmed the event.