I Miss Anthony Bourdain

    You wouldn’t know Anthony Bourdain died in 2018 by reading the headlines in the culture pages of America’s newspapers and magazines. “Anthony Bourdain’s boeuf bourguignon offers the gift of time and patience,” reads a recent offering. “Why Veggies Always Taste Better At Restaurants, According To Anthony Bourdain,” reads another. And then there’s “Tony,” an upcoming biopic about the chef and media personality.

    Add into the mix the TV tributes, the how-to-dress-like-Bourdain listicles, and the tote bags, hats, buttons, T-shirts and lighters with his face slapped on. (I’m pretty sure Tony would be appalled at the previous sentence!) Nearly eight years after his death, the man is still as omnipresent as ever, and his near cult-like fan base hasn’t let him go. I proudly include myself in that fan base. 

    Why? The most obvious answer is simply the fact of his death, a suicide at age 61. Grief—the gap in the world created by the unexpected absence—sometimes leads people to remember a public figure more fondly than they did in life. Bourdain was flawed. He was a neglectful husband and sometime drug addict. But his rugged contrarianism was, and remains, easy to romanticize.

    Nonetheless, Bourdain really did get something right about how we cook and eat. The gap he left in the food industry hasn’t been filled, although many have tried. He taught everyday people, like me, what food should be and what eating well could mean.

    His insight shows in the first lines of the New Yorker essay that established him as a writer:

    “Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals. It’s about danger—risking the dark, bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese, and shellfish.”

    The perfectly curated feeds that dominate today’s food blogs, posts and reels all try to make everything picture-perfect and appetizing. They’re like the shellac and paint photographers use to create restaurant ads. But Bourdain saw food for what it is—often messy and occasionally disgusting. He knew that eating is a deep part of being human, involving biological processes. He understood the feel of food on the teeth, the excitement of the tastebuds, the reaction of the gag reflex, the scent in the nose. He wanted food to touch on human companionship and shared experience. He wanted it to invoke the soul.

    In some ways, he echoed thinkers as profound as the bioethicist and physician Leon Kass, whose 1994 book The Hungry Soul admits the purely biological: “At bottom we are proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins minerals, and nucleic acids—and so is our food.” And yet, Mr. Kass argues, “our bodily neediness” can “be humanizing.” It points toward community and friendship in hospitality, beauty in manners and table-setting, discernment in lively conversation and even the divine in ritual sanctification of the meal.

    Bourdain loved to try the unlikely and unusual. He ate raw seal with the Inuits and fermented shark with Icelanders. He joined a home-cooked meal of squirrel pie in the Ozarks, while the family explained that cooking is done with whatever ingredients the world around you provides. He loved In-N-Out Burger (explaining how the dual patties maximized beef surface areas), and his visits to other countries would lead him to try Korean street food, a Senegalese family’s stew, and sautéed yak hide in Bhutan.

    Bourdain treated food as lived human experience. Sitting at someone’s table means stepping into his world and recognizing dignity in everyday life. He pushed back hard against elitism, abstraction and sanitized culinary narratives. The family meal, the meaning of appetite, gratitude, the ways eating shapes character and community—he understood something that too much of the contemporary foodie world ignores.

    This is what keeps Bourdain around. He was a man who was as excited to sit at a street stall in Vietnam, or shoot rifles and eat Texas barbecue with Ted Nugent, as he was to visit the French Laundry; a man who understood the deep meaning of eating well. Until someone else comes along who can feel all this—and express it with intelligence, humor, and a sincere love to the world—Anthony Bourdain is still alive.

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com