{"id":166668,"date":"2018-06-09T06:43:20","date_gmt":"2018-06-09T10:43:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=166668"},"modified":"2018-06-09T06:43:20","modified_gmt":"2018-06-09T10:43:20","slug":"for-bourdain-food-was-a-storytelling-tool-and-a-passport","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2018\/06\/09\/for-bourdain-food-was-a-storytelling-tool-and-a-passport\/","title":{"rendered":"For Bourdain, food was a storytelling tool and a passport"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\u201cI<\/a>
\u201cI have the best job in the world,\u201d the globe-trotting food-taster and culinary storyteller once told the New Yorker magazine, stating the rather obvious. \u201cIf I’m unhappy, it’s a failure of imagination.\u201d (Photo By Peabody Awards – Anthony Bourdain and Charlie Rose, CC BY 2.0<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Many people thought Anthony Bourdain had the most enviable career in existence. He didn’t deny it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have the best job in the world,\u201d the globe-trotting food-taster and culinary storyteller once told the New Yorker magazine, stating the rather obvious. \u201cIf I’m unhappy, it’s a failure of imagination.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bourdain’s stunned fans were mourning the loss of that singular imagination on Friday following his death from an apparent suicide, recalling everything from his fearless consumption of a beating cobra’s heart or a sheep testicle — \u201clike any other testicle,\u201d he remarked — to his outspoken support of the #MeToo movement, to his blissful paean to syrup-soaked pecan waffles at Waffle House.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want it all,\u201d he wrote in his breakthrough 2000 memoir, \u201cKitchen Confidential.\u201d \u201cI want to try everything once.\u201d And it seemed that he pretty much accomplished that, travelling the globe some 200 days a year for his TV shows, reveling not in fancy tasting menus — which he scorned — but in simple pleasures like a cold beer and spicy noodles in Hanoi, which he once shared with former President Barack Obama. For him, food, though a huge pleasure, was more importantly a storytelling tool, and a passport to the world at large.<\/p>\n

It was a lifestyle that, while undeniably glamorous, took a toll, he suggested in a 2017 New Yorker profile. \u201cI change location every two weeks,\u201d he said. \u201cI’m not going to remember your birthday. I’m not going to be there for the important moments in your life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, it was on the road, in eastern France, that Bourdain, 61, was found unresponsive Friday morning by good friend and chef Eric Ripert. He’d been working on an episode for the 12th season of his CNN show, \u201cParts Unknown.\u201d A prosecutor said he had apparently killed himself in a luxury hotel in the ancient village of Kaysersberg. He left behind an 11-year-old daughter, Ariane, from his second marriage. In a 2008 interview with The Associated Press, Bourdain had said his daughter’s birth had changed his outlook on life: \u201cI feel obliged to at least do the best I can and not do anything really stupidly self-destructive if I can avoid it.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the time of his death, his girlfriend was Asia Argento, the Italian actress who has accused Harvey Weinstein of rape. In an essay written after fellow chef Mario Batali was accused of sexual assault, Bourdain wrote that \u201cone must pick a side … I stand unhesitatingly and unwaveringly with the women.\u201d Argento wrote on Twitter Friday that Bourdain \u201cwas my love, my rock, my protector.\u201d<\/p>\n

Traversing the globe meant visiting areas of conflict and also intense poverty, and Bourdain didn’t shy away from either. In \u201cNo Reservations\u201d on the Travel Channel, he went to Haiti after the devastating earthquake in 2011, and reflected on his ambivalence at being there. \u201cI’m there talking about local cuisine, and that means I’m shovelling food into my face … that a lot of those people can’t afford,\u201d he said. And he described how his well-meaning efforts to feed locals around him led to chaos and \u201chungry kids being beaten with a stick.\u201d<\/p>\n

There was, of course, a more lighthearted side to his travels, including some wild and bizarre eating experiences. In Morocco, it was that roasted sheep’s testicle. In Canada, it was a raw seal’s eyeball. In Namibia, it was the wrong end of a warthog (he wound up with a parasite.) In Vietnam, it was the still-beating heart of a cobra that had just been sliced open.<\/p>\n

Much closer to home — Bourdain lived in New York, when he wasn’t travelling — was a late-night visit to Waffle House in Charleston, South Carolina, described in poetic terms by Bourdain as \u201can irony-free zone where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts; where everybody regardless of race, creed, colour or degree of inebriation is welcomed.\u201d Sampling the pecan waffle drowning in butter and maple syrup, he exclaimed, \u201cThis is BETTER than French Laundry, man,\u201d referring to the Napa Valley temple of high cuisine.<\/p>\n

That clip was being widely shared on Friday, and fans were also flocking to Amazon, where at mid-afternoon, four of the six top-selling books were by Bourdain. \u201cKitchen Confidential\u201d was No. 1.<\/p>\n

In that acclaimed book, Bourdain, who born in New York City and raised in Leonia, New Jersey, candidly described his personal struggles, including drug use that led to his dropping out of Vassar College.<\/p>\n

But he thrived in restaurant kitchens, and that work led him to the Culinary Institute of America, where he graduated in 1978. He eventually became executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles in 1998. In the preface to the latest edition of \u201cKitchen Confidential,\u201d Bourdain wrote of his shock at the success of his book, which he managed to write by getting up at 5 a.m. before his kitchen shifts.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe new celebrity chef culture is a remarkable and admittedly annoying phenomenon,\u201d he wrote. \u201cWhile it’s been nothing but good for business … few people are less suited to be suddenly thrown into the public eye than chefs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fellow celebrity chefs didn’t always gain Bourdain’s respect or praise. Many earned his unfettered scorn. Among them: Alice Waters, whose insistence on organic food he once described as \u201cvery Khmer Rouge.\u201d He called Sandra Lee \u201cpure evil,\u201d and worse. He called New Orleans chef Emeril Lagasse \u201cEwok-like,\u201d and Guy Fieri’s Times Square eatery, Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar, a \u201cterror-dome.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Lagasse became his friend, and he tweeted Friday: \u201cTony was a great soul, a mentor, a friend, a father, and an incredible chef.\u201d His friend Ripert, the famed chef of Le Bernardin, called him \u201can exceptional human being, so inspiring and generous, one of the great storytellers of our time who connected with so many.\u201d Saul Montiel, executive chef at the Mexican restaurant Cantina Roof Top in Manhattan, called Bourdain \u201cone of the few chefs that valued the work of Latinos in the kitchen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Countless more wrote of their shock and sadness. Some noted that Bourdain’s death came just days after the suicide of fashion designer Kate Spade, also a great shock to those who knew her. Bourdain’s own mother, Gladys Bourdain, a longtime editor at The New York Times, said she had no indication that her son might have been thinking of suicide.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe is absolutely the last person in the world I would have ever dreamed would do something like this,\u201d she told the Times. \u201cHe had everything. Success beyond his wildest dreams. Money beyond his wildest dreams.\u201d<\/p>\n

——<\/p>\n

AP Writers Sylvie Corbet and Elaine Ganley in Paris, Hillel Italie and David Bauder in New York contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many people thought Anthony Bourdain had the most enviable career in existence. He didn’t deny it. \u201cI have the best …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":166669,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,106],"tags":[51801],"class_list":["post-166668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","category-hollywood","tag-anthony-bourdain","mauthors-jocelyn-noveck","mauthors-the-associated-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166668\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/166669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}