Anthony Bourdain has always meant a lot to me. We share a similar demeanor, despite the fact I’m a 32 year old female who has never been a professional cook. But still. I’m certain he is my uncle or much older brother from a marriage twice removed; or my dad if he had me when he was 20 or so…
I don’t need to introduce Kitchen Confidential, or Medium Raw that followed as a follow up to the mis-adventures of the first book, and everything that came between both on paper and in his life. He writes as well as I could ever hope to, and characterizes his industry as honestly and soulfully as anyone could. He feels all of it. His insatiable urges for food and travel come with an open mind and palette that gets its point across with an I-don’t-care-if-you-agree-with-me-or-not-but-go-fuck-yourself-anyway candor.
He keeps his ire for Food Network and Top Chef celebs at a slow raging boil, and I feel the same way about all of it. Millions of zombie fans watching Rachel Ray, toting her shite cookbooks is far beyond my realm of comprehension. If you disagree with the mass-market, you’re always on a road paved to hell where friends and colleagues are concerned, and I can’t understand it, and Anthony Bourdain doesn’t care. In my critical thinking exercises in grad school, separation from mass market anything would prove that just maybe you were an independent thinker, unassailed by what the conglomerates would prefer you to believe. You might seek out your naturally desired pleasures, instead of having them smack you in the face across all networks, magazine covers and headlines. But alas. If you bash Wal-Mart and the fat slugs who shop there, or a chain restaurant for being shitty, you’re a terrible person with standards too high for the mere commoner. It’s balls. I never said it out loud before, but THANK YOU Anthony Bourdain for being the exemplar of saying NO to the Olive Garden because it truly is disgusting food, horrible atmosphere and ridiculous that anyone would willingly go there, unless they were wandering the Sahara for weeks. Why do we even have to say it?
It’s like the people who use Campbell’s cream soups in casseroles and pat themselves on the back. Don’t even.
There are two (among the thousand) statements in Medium Raw that I find brilliant, and indicative of how I, too, feel about the world. The first is:
I was angry, too, that all my little-boy dreams of travel and adventure would for absolutely sure never come true—that I’d never see Paris as a grown-up or Vietnam, or the South Pacific, or India, or even Rome. From my vantage point, standing behind the stove at Les Halles, that much was perfectly clear. And, to tell the truth, I only became angrier when my boss, Philippe, sent me to Tokyo for a week to consult, because now I knew what I was missing. Which was—as anyone who’s been lucky enough to see those places knows—everything. It was as if someone had opened a happy, trippy, groovy, and exotic version of Pandora’s box, allowed me to peek inside, into another dimension, an alternate life, and then slammed the thing shut. (p. 256)
I, too, have been lucky enough to travel. Not to Asia or Africa (yet) but to about 35 countries. I traveled in college when I studied abroad, I lived in NYC for a few years, I moved out west, been all over Canada, parts of South America, up and down the east and west coasts, and to every country in Europe, plus parts of the Middle East, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, etc. I don’t discuss it with most people, and I don’t buy the t-shirt, but its part of who I am.
I’m planning a trip through Africa as we speak, and I couldn’t imagine what my life would be like, or who I would be, had I not had these experiences, or the burning desire to see the world, document the landscape and meet the people. I feel this Bourdain’s rage at the people who don’t care about or pay attention to other cultures, and who think everyone else is sub-par if they’re not the same. The ones who discount the customs of another because they aren’t their own. And that goes for a more general version of his next quip (albeit on food):
It is, of course, ludicrous for me to be insulted on behalf of strangers who would probably find my outrage completely misplaced, embarrassing, and probably even deranged. I don’t claim to speak for them and am unworthy, in any case, of doing so. I’m just saying that some of the shit I see some people doing to food on television causes a physical reaction in some deeply buried reptile part of my brain—and that makes me angry. It makes me want to say mean things. It probably shortens my life every time it happens. (p. 266-267) (with the exception of the fabulous Emily Henderson, this is also how I feel about HGTV)
I think Alice Waters is the shit. She’s got an awesome restaurant, amazingly solid cookbooks and a legion of fanbots and proteges up and down the west coast and in France. Anthony is not a fan of Alice, and I doubt she’s a fan of him. While he uncovers all the dirty little secrets and dark derisions of the food industry and its proprietors, she is hailing the praises of the slow food movement, and trying to get poor people to grow organic heirloom gardens and cook from scratch. She lobbies for the White House to swap chefs and thinks everyone else in America is on her same page. In other words, she’s a preacher boy and Anthony’s not having it. And again, I’m with him. Let the people who want heirloom tomatoes find their ilk. And let those of us who think Sandra Lee is a fruitbat in white cashmere have our own opinions on the subject.
He’s “Saint Francis of Fucking Assisi one minute” and wanting to vomit blood over TV food people the next, but really, he’s both of those things all the time.
