The morning of June 8, 2018 started off as weekday mornings usually do for me. I was awakened well before I needed to be up by one of my kids, who had grown cold overnight and needed to warm up next to me, or had been disturbed by the dolt across the street who has custom-tuned his Mustang’s muffler to make the car sound sort of like a jet engine, if airplanes didn’t require sharp wits and good sense to pilot.
I gave my phone a glance, its lock screen offering the usual banal updates, an Instagram like here, a podcast advisory there. I glimpsed the name Bourdain through bleary eyes and put my phone down to make my preparations for the day. Halfway through packing my lunch a nagging wonder about why that name had appeared in my advisories got the better of me. With wariness and bated breath I searched the morning’s top headlines and found a dozen trending stories titled with some variation of: Celebrity Chef and CNN Television Host Dies, aged 61, of Apparent Suicide.
Anthony Bourdain was gone.
In my roughly five years of developing this column, that last combination of words has been my absolute least favourite to write. In fact, I hate those words and bringing them forth right now, with unavoidably fierce keystrokes and a lump in my throat, just proves how raw this loss still is for me, a week on.
And yet, I have no special claim to the mourning of Anthony Bourdain. With or without my two cents, he was a revered cultural icon, an anti-hero for the ages with a rare symmetry of character, at once, in equal parts, an acerbic wit and a profound empathy, whose insights gleaned through travel and insider access form a legacy that many of us would envy, if it didn’t come with such a heavy cost.
So no, adding my sadness at his passing to the shared global grief is like throwing a tissue on a bonfire, a trifling contribution absorbed by a consuming force.
Nevertheless, I owe a debt to Anthony Bourdain, as I figure all of us who discuss food for a living do to one extent or another. And so it is that this week’s column is a personal reflection on Mr. Bourdain’s enduring influence.
For me, the single biggest takeaway from Bourdain’s oeuvre is the seemingly simple, but surprisingly profound insight that it was never, ever just about the food.
Eating is a primal drive; we need to do it or we die, eventually. That’s not a terribly interesting fact after the initial terror of its inevitability is understood. So what is it that makes food such a passionate subject for so many? Sure, learning how to cook, understanding the fundamentals of how to impart, blend and extract flavours, is a beneficial life skill and one likely to improve the quality of the subjective human experience, but it still doesn’t account for the unending, global fascination with what we eat.
How many actual cooking shows remain on the various food networks that generate high ratings and garner throngs of viewers? Very few. As Bourdain transitioned from an early career as a chef into the broader role of unearthing shared human experiences through fearless exploration, so too did hungry audiences worldwide begin to recognize that within their beloved native cuisines existed the keys to decode the cultural cyphers that have divided us through convention or misapprehension.
Food is the platform upon which we engage in a frank but respectful dialogue that can safely transgress borders, transcend ideology, and defy insularity. The dishes we prepare are imbued with a weight far beyond their ingredients. We cook at a specific point in our collective history, informed by the billions who cooked before us, and whether we explicitly acknowledge it or not, we contribute with every meal to a profound canon of shared wisdom, skill, and understanding. Those who we have been taught to see as “other” become just like us around the dinner table, where the foods of deep relevance to their identity are made accessible to us. Time and time again, Bourdain led by example, breaking bread in the humblest of kitchens with people whose only motivation was to feed him, to relate to him through the proudly realized dishes that define their heritage.
Sharing a meal is an extremely intimate, honest, and personal experience, and requires a vulnerability on the part of both the host and the guest; through the meal they are mutually encouraged to engage over a common thing to which they can both relate irrespective of the societal machinations that otherwise divide them, away from the table.
I have come to believe through my own experiences in this same vein, that there is no such thing as a bad meal if it has been made in the spirit of authentic communion. I did not arrive at this conclusion independently, but was validated consistently in my emerging suspicions by Anthony Bourdain’s relentless pursuit of authenticity.
I distinctly remember an episode of Bourdain’s brilliant CNN travelogue Parts Unknown in which he heads out with a local chef in a scenic bay of Sicily to catch fresh seafood for dinner. Once in the water, Bourdain notes that it appears the passengers in the boat ahead are dropping dead, previously caught sea creatures into the water for the local chef to wrangle in a faux act of bare-hand fishing. I have never seen another instance of such raw disdain exhibited by Bourdain and I can relate to his reaction fully. This sort of cynical artifice is anathema to the genuine, unifying experiences he sought to reveal to his audience.
Bourdain’s great gift was to create the space for others to share what defined them. His work was not about receiving the things that people wanted to give him, but rather giving the opportunity for those things to be revealed, in an open, welcoming and informed environment. This level of receptiveness, this spirit of honouring the traditions of others and showing the rest of us a path towards better mutual understanding, takes tremendous strength and must surely have been exhausting.
I am grateful to you, Chef.
Thank you.
Rest easy.
