https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/anthony-bourdain-parts-unknown-obituary?mc_cid=d8fb33148d&mc_eid=d08d95c9cb
Anthony Bourdain on November 7, 2016 in New York City. Mike Coppola / Getty Images
Anthony Bourdain’s genius was not in the kitchen. His genius was in never mincing words and knowing which side he was on. Asked what he would serve at a summit between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump, Bourdain said, “Hemlock.” He told David Duke, “I’d be happy to rearrange your knee or other extremities.” After visiting Cambodia, Bourdain wrote of Henry Kissinger — “that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag” — “you’ll never stop wanting to beat [him] to death with your bare hands.”
Journalists are not supposed to talk like this, at least ones hoping to retain a coveted network show like Parts Unknown. That CNN series nabbed Bourdain four of his five Emmys, and the sixty-one-year-old chef and author was in France filming an episode for the twelfth season when he hung himself June 7.
The obituaries and reminiscences about Bourdain miss who he was. He was more than a celebrity chef, a Hunter S. Thompson of the kitchen, a roguish culinary adventurer, or part Epicurean, part everyman. Bourdain was simply a journalist. And journalists can’t recognize him because they can’t recognize what real journalism is anymore. Bourdain was a chronicler of societies, of cultures, of people, of stories, of emotions. Food was his reporter’s notepad and pen.
When Bourdain claimed, “I am not a journalist,” he was right. He was not compelled to drown everyday observations in qualifications and important sources. But his approach represented the best of journalism. “There is actually nothing more political than food. Who’s eating, who’s not eating,” he said. He would sit down with people and ask, “‘What makes you happy? What’s your life like? What do you like to eat?’” And, he noted, “More often than not they will tell you extraordinary things many of which have nothing to do with food.”
Some outlets, like Vox, did grasp that Bourdain was a journalist. “He was an ally to marginalized communities and called out powerful leaders for their hypocrisy,” they wrote. But they failed to connect his reporting to his view of food. Bourdain was a stellar materialist. He knew food was meaningless outside the society it existed within. Fast food was neither totally evil nor totally harmless; it was all about the context.
Presented with a “tasting experience” of hash browns, pecan waffles, fried eggs, pork chops, and steak during a bourbon-fueled visit to a Waffle House, Bourdain declared, “This is better than the French Laundry, man.” He ripped the food police like Alice Waters for not realizing that people lined up at Popeye’s not because “it’s particularly healthy chicken, or organic chicken, or conscientiously raised chicken — or even good chicken. They do it because it’s three fucking pieces for a dollar ninety-nine.” He fantasized about smashing up the Chili’s on the Mexican border. “Do we have a shortage of Mexicans in these parts? Is there a shortage of good food?”
Bourdain had a capacity for reinvention and a tongue sharper than knives. He moved from chef and heroin addict to recovery, best-selling author, and television raconteur. At first, Bourdain gave in to the man-versus-food genre — consuming “raw seal in Quebec, eyeballs and all . . . fermented shark in Iceland . . . a still-beating cobra heart in Saigon.” He charmed with curiosity and crankiness, affability and pugilism.
The macho swagger that launched his career would slip out in references to “boner-inspiring” dishes, bong hits, heroin, and jokes that “Umami means, in Japanese . . . I will suck your dick for a bite of that burger.” He did buddy pics with three-star Michelin chef Eric Ripert, who found Bourdain’s body, and indulged in gastronomic excesses from Charleston to Tokyo, but he shunned the sentimentalism of classic travel shows like On the Road with Charles Kuralt and its cast of craftsmen and do-gooders.
Bourdain said of his crowning legacy, Parts Unknown, “Some shows are agenda-driven.” That agenda was at once banal and radical: “Show regular people doing everyday things.” The locations tipped viewers off to his politics. Bourdain visited Gaza, Iran, Cuba, Congo, Vietnam, Namibia, Libya, and Colombia. US locations featured West Virginia, Montana, and Cleveland. It was a roll call of neocon enemies and neoliberal abandonment. Bourdain used food to oppose the Washington consensus.
In Jerusalem, Bourdain remarked that the half-a-million Israeli settlers who’ve moved to the West Bank since 1967 are “all in contravention of international law [though] it seems to make little difference.” In Bethlehem, Bourdain said of Israel’s wall, “It doesn’t feel like anything other than what it is. A prison.” In Gaza, Laila El-Haddad, author of The Gaza Kitchen, explains how Israel shoots at and detains fishermen, before showing the diversity of Gaza through two meals.
First Bourdain joins a family gathering over a chicken, rice, and fried vegetable casserole. Then, apart from El-Haddad, a men’s-only feast of roasted young watermelon, tomatoes, chili, olive oil, and unleavened bread scooped from a collective pot. It’s a sumptuous way to demolish the image of Gazans as a monolithic faceless enemy.
In accepting an award for the Jerusalem episode, Bourdain let loose. “There is a measure I guess of how twisted and shallow our depiction of a people is that these images come as a shock to so many. The world has visited many terrible things on the Palestinian people, none more shameful than robbing them of their basic humanity. People are not statistics. That is all we attempted to show.”
Humanity is the current that runs through Bourdain’s best work. He showed solidarity and genuine affection for people, and disgust with brutal governments; tourist-led development, as in Cuba; colonialism, as in the Congo; and predatory capitalism, as in Puerto Rico.
His politics did not magically spring forth, and it would be a mistake to essentialize Bourdain. He was neither a renowned cook nor a natural writer. “I was a journeyman chef of middling abilities,” he admitted. As a writer he labored over his craft. His first stabs, in the mid-nineties, were two crime capers dismissed as “flabby” and “a sorry, soggy mess of a stew.”
One reviewer commended him for “great descriptions of food” and that seems to have stuck. In Kitchen Confidential, his breakout account of drugs, sex, and insanity in the New York City restaurant industry published in 2000, Bourdain makes running out of tomatoes during service or having to add flour to a sourdough starter seem dramatic, violent, and lurid. Kitchen Confidential belongs to the genre of bro realism that includes Liar’s Poker and Platoon. Meant to be cautionary tales about the dark side of male pursuits like cooking, Wall Street, and war, these works instead glamorized the underbelly to thrill-seekers.