“You wake up in Chicago, pull back the curtain and you KNOW where you are. You could be nowhere else. You are in a big, brash, muscular, broad shouldered motherfuckin’ city. A metropolis, completely non-neurotic, ever-moving, big hearted but cold blooded machine with millions of moving parts — a beast that will, if disrespected or not taken seriously, roll over you without remorse.”
“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully you leave something good behind.” Anthony Bourdain ( June 25th 1956 - June 8th 2018 )
“There is a real danger of taking food too seriously. Food needs to be part of a bigger picture” -Anthony Bourdain
As someone who writes about food, about its ability to offer a window into the daily lives and circumstances of people around the globe, Anthony Bourdain’s passing hit me particularly hard. If you haven’t seen them, his widely-acclaimed shows such as No Reservations and Parts Unknown were a kind of personal narrative meets travelogue meets food TV. They trailed the chef as he immersed himself in the culture of a place, sometimes one heavily touristed, sometimes more removed from the lives of most food media consumers, and showed us what people ate, at home, in the streets and in local restaurants. While much of food TV focuses on high end cuisine, Bourdain’s art was to show the craftsmanship behind the everyday foods of a place. He lovingly described the food’s preparation, the labor involved, and the joy people felt in coming together to consume it in a way that was palpable, even (or especially) when the foods themselves were unusual.
At their best, these shows taught us about the history and culture of particular places, and of the ways places have suffered through the ills of global capitalism and imperialism. His visit to the Congo was particularly memorable; While eating tiger fish wrapped in banana leaves, spear-caught and prepared by local fishermen, he delved into the colonial history and present-day violence that continue to devastate this natural-resource rich country. After visiting Cambodia he railed against Henry Kissinger and the American bombing campaign that killed over 250,000 people and gave rise, in part, to the murderous regime of the Khmer Rouge. In Jerusalem, he showed his lighter side, exploring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through debates over who invented falafel. But in the same episode, he shared maqluba, “upside down” chicken and rice, with a family of Palestinian farmers in Gaza, and showed the basic humanity and dignity of a people living under occupation.
Bourdain’s shows embodies the basic premise of the sociology of food. Food is deeply personal and cultural. Over twenty-five years ago Anthony Winson called it the “intimate commodity” because it provides a link between our bodies, our cultures and the global political economies and ecologies that shape how and by whom food is cultivated, distributed and consumed. Bourdain’s show focuses on what food studies scholars call gastrodiplomacy, the potential for food to bring people together, helping us to understand and sympathize with one another’s circumstances. As a theory, it embodies the old saying that “the best way to our hearts is through our stomachs.” This theory has been embraced by nations like Thailand, which has an official policy promoting the creation of Thai restaurants in order to drive tourism and boost the country’s prestige. And the foods of Mexico have been declared World Heritage Cuisines by UNESCO, the same arm of the United Nations that marks world heritage sites. Less officially, we’ve seen a wave of efforts to promote the cuisines of refugees and migrants through restaurants, supper clubs and incubators like San Francisco’s La Cocina that help immigrant chefs launch food businesses.
But food has often been and continues to be a site of violence as well. Since 1981 750,000 farms have gone out of business, resulting in widespread rural poverty and epidemic levels of suicide. Food system workers, from farms to processing plants to restaurants, are among the most poorly paid members of our society, and often rely on food assistance. The food industry is highly centralized. The few major players in each segment—think Wal-Mart for groceries or Tyson for chicken—exert tremendous power on suppliers, creating dire conditions for producers. Allegations of sexual assault pervade the food industry; there are numerous complaints against well-known chefs and a study from Human Rights Watch revealed that more than 80% of women farmworkers have experienced harassment or assault on the job, a situation so dire that these women refer to it as the “field of panties” because rape is so common. Racism is equally rampant, with people of color often confined to poorly-paid “back of the house” positions while whites make up the majority of high-end servers, sommeliers, and celebrity chefs.
More than any other celebrity chef, Bourdain understood that food is political, and used his platform to address current social issues. His outspoken support for immigrant workers throughout the food system, and for immigrants more generally, colored many of his recent columns. And as the former partner of Italian actress Asia Argento, one of the first women to publicly accuse Harvey Weinstein, Bourdain used his celebrity status to amplify the voice of the #metoo movement, a form of support that was beautifully incongruous with his hyper-masculine image. Here Bourdain embodied another of the fundamental ideas of the sociology of food, that understanding the food system is intricately interwoven with efforts to improve it.
Bourdain’s shows explored food in its social and political contexts, offering viewers a window into worlds that often seemed far removed. He encouraged us to eat one another’s cultural foods, and to understand the lives of those who prepared them. Through food, he urged us to develop our sociological imaginations, putting individual biographies in their social and historical contexts. And while he was never preachy, his legacy urges us to get involved in the confluence of food movements, ensuring that those who feed us are treated with dignity and fairness, and are protected from sexual harassment and assault.
The Black feminist poet Audre Lorde once wrote that “it is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.” Bourdain showed us that by learning the stories of one another’s foods, we can learn the histories and develop the empathy necessary to work for a better world.
I was absolutely devastated to hear about Anthony Bourdain’s passing.
I always saw Bourdain as more than just a celebrity chef or TV host. I saw him as one of us, a sociologist of sorts, someone deeply invested in understanding and teaching about culture and community. He had a gift for teaching us about social worlds beyond our own, and making these worlds accessible. In many ways, his work accomplished what so often we as sociologists strive to do.
Photo Credit: Adam Kuban, Flickr CC
I first read Bourdain’s memoir, Kitchen Confidential,at the age of twenty. The gritty memoir is its own ethnography of sorts, detailing the stories, experiences, and personalities working behind the sweltering heat of the kitchen line. At the time I was struggling as a first-generation, blue-collar student suddenly immersed in one of the wealthiest college campuses in the United States. Between August and May of each academic year, I attended classes with the children of CEOs and world leaders, yet come June I returned to the kitchens of a country club in western New York, quite literally serving alumni of my college. I remember reading the book thinking – though I knew it wasn’t academic sociology – “wait, you can write about these things?” These social worlds? These stories we otherwise overlook and ignore? I walked into my advisor’s office soon after, convinced I too would write such in-depth narratives about food-related subcultures. “Well,” he agreed, “you could research something like food culture or alternative food movements.” Within six months of that conversation, I had successfully secured my first research fellowship and taken on my first sociology project.
Like his writing, Bourdain’s television shows taught his audience something new about our relationships to food. Each episode of A Cook’s Tour,No Reservations, and Parts Unknown, went beyond the scope of a typical celebrity chef show. He never featured the World’s Biggest Hamburger, nor did he ever critique foods as “bizarre” or “strange.” Instead, he focused on what food meant to people across the globe. Food, he taught us, and the pride attached to it, are universal.
Rather than projecting narratives or misappropriating words, he let people speak for themselves. He strived to show the way things really are and to treat people with the utmost dignity, yet was careful never to glamorize or romanticize poverty, struggle, or difference. In one of my favorite episodesofNo Reservations, Bourdain takes us through Peru, openly critiquing celebrities who have glorified the nation as a place to find peace and spiritual enlightenment:
Sting and all his buddies come down here, they’re going on and on and on and on about preserving traditional culture, right? Because that’s what we’re talking about here. But what we’re also talking about here is poverty. [It’s] backbreaking work. Isn’t it kind of patronizing to say ‘oh they’re happier, they live a simpler life closer to the soil.’ Maybe so, but it’s also a pretty hard, scrabbling, unglamorous life when you get down to it.
My parents and I met Anthony Bourdain in 2009 at a bar in Buffalo where he was filming an episode of No Reservations. My father was thrilled to tell Bourdain how much he loved the episode featuring his homeland of Colombia. It was perhaps one of the first times in my father’s 38-years in the United States that he felt like American television portrayed Colombia in a positive light, showing the beauty, resilience, and complex history of the nation rather than the images of drug wars and violence present elsewhere in depictions of the country. That night in that dive bar, Bourdain graciously spoke with my dad about how beautiful he found the country and its people. Both the episode and their conversation filled by father with immense pride, ultimately restoring some of the dignity that had been repeatedly stripped of him through years of indignant stereotypes about his home.
In the end, isn’t that what many of us sociologists are trying to do? Honor people’s stories without misusing, mistreating, or misrepresenting them?
In retrospect, maybe Bourdain influenced my path towards sociology. At the very least, he created a bridge between what I knew – food service – and what I wanted to know – the rest of the world. In our classrooms, we strive to teach our students how to make these connections. Bourdain made them for us with ease, dignity, and humility.
Caty Taborda-Whitt is a Ford fellow and sociology PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include embodiment, health, culture, and inequalities.
lotta new people finding this page today. love to you all.
I’m gonna write a lil something about what Tony meant to me later - if you have a memory or favorite screen cap, quote, dish, restaurant, anything from Tony that you’d like to share with all these people who cared about him (or if you just feel like you need to reach out to someone!), feel free to message me.
surprisingly affected and unspeakably sad today, as I’m sure most of you are, too. Tony taught us all to seek out and enjoy the *life* in everything, to marvel at the wonder in the best of earth’s gifts: our food, the people around us, the grass in our beer. to think of that light extinguished is too much to bear.
I think the best way to honor him today would be by reaching out to a friend (especially a friend who may be struggling) and inviting them to share a meal. and don’t go to the usual place, damnit. and ok, sure, yeah, maybe have a drink or five while you’re there.
love y’all. hope you’re well. and please enjoy this, one of my favorite tony moments. ☀️
Nothing special, just Anthony Bourdain hanging out with The Diaz Brothers and Gilbert Melendez :) Picture taken from Anthony Bourdain’s instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/p/BKfSAORAc4_/
I wrote this up for Twitter, but I thought I’d share it here, as well.
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I think something that people often overlook about suicide, depression, and anxiety, is that it doesn’t always LOOK like anything, and it can come quick.
I’m not sure what Bourdain’s case was, but for someone like me, who deals with depression and anxiety, but is pretty high-functioning, seeing Bourdain go is terrifying.
Someone said to me recently, ‘He didn’t seem sad!’ There’s a lot to unpack here.
The idea of ‘seeming’ is misleading. Many people with depression and anxiety don’t ‘seem’ like anything.
As a culture, we’re taught about depression in entirely the wrong way. It isn’t always staying inside for a week at a time listening to Morrissey. (Although this is totally me most of the time, so maybe that’s not the best example.)
Often, depression is very quiet and small, and working on us in ways we don’t understand, let alone outwardly show.
We’re also taught that anxiety looks like stress. ‘He didn’t seem stressed out.’ Whew, let me tell you, if you’ve EVER seen or spoken to me, I’ve probably been suppressing some anxiety.
For me, my anxiety is always with me. It sits right above my stomach and feels like a slow acid, eating away at me throughout the day. What does that ‘seem’ like to other people? I don’t know. Probably nothing.
For some people, that anxiety and depression build over time. Sometimes ditching plans or staying in the apartment for a week aren’t part of some manic episode, it’s just because we’re physically exhausted.
(Never underestimate how TIRING it is to have depression and anxiety.)
This brings me to the second point: ‘sad’. This has been the dangerous part for me. We’re taught that depression is some kind of more intense sadness. Boyyyy, has that not been the case for me.
My depression is spread pretty thin. Some days, it’s spread so thin that it would hardly ‘seem’ like anything. These days, I’m actually a pretty happy person! I’m a happy person who has serious depression.
My depression feels like a heartbeat. Sometimes, even I barely notice it. But if I look for it, I find a steady dose of worthlessness, self-loathing, and suicidal ideation coursing through…well…everything.
My depression is always there. Sometimes it’s loud. So loud all of you could hear it. Sometimes it’s so quiet I struggle find it. Sometimes, it’s quiet enough that I even think it’s gone. This is the dangerous part.
When I’m not ‘sad’, I can forget I have depression. This is a lot to do with the stigma about depression and what we’re taught to look for. I feel ‘happy’ so I must not actually have it. I must be being overdramatic.
When I said earlier that depression, anxiety, and suicide can happen quickly, THIS is where that comes in.
I don’t think people realize how quickly depression can kill you. In my life, depression does not look like ‘To be or not to be?’ It is quick and hard and vicious. When I’ve nearly died, it’s all happened in less than an hour.
All it takes is one bad night. Out of nowhere. It can be triggered by a thought.
Suddenly, someone who ‘seems’ ‘happy’ (maybe IS happy!) can be in a fight for their life. And if they don’t win EVERY. SINGLE. FIGHT. we lose them.
I’ll say here too that while calls for people to reach out are truly lovely, it isn’t always about that. My depression doesn’t often feel like me ‘wanting to die’. It feels like something trying to kill me.
Because these attacks can happen so quickly and without warning, ‘reaching out’ isn’t always an option.
Because of what we’re taught about these things, Bourdain’s death can seem like a shock. And in many ways it is. But when I heard about his death, I was sad for him and for his family, but also terrified for myself, because I know that sense of ‘shock’ and ‘he didn’t seem sad’ is probably how it would go down for me.
Bourdain’s death is a reminder that my depression is ALWAYS there, no matter how I ‘seem’ to other people and myself. It’s there no matter how ‘happy’ I am. And it always will be.
For some people, depression is something they fight every day. For others, like me, it’s something that comes and goes in a day, or even an hour. And I have to be ready to fight it at every moment. Forever.
If you want to do something to help, all I can say is make your love felt. Reach out to your friends all the time! If you’re thinking about someone, text them. If you love someone, tell them.
I survived a serious episode because I knew I had someone I could call. She had NEVER seen me in that state, didn’t know I could even be in that state, but I knew that that wouldn’t matter, because I knew she loved me.
She came right away, brought me to her home, made me feel loved, and gave me a place to sleep.
There is nothing she could have done to fend off the attack in the first place, but because she had made her love so clear throughout our friendship, I knew I could seek her out when things got bad.
All of this to say, depression is scary. We’re all trying to take care of ourselves and each other and, sometimes, we don’t make it.
BUT, love only helps. Be open and generous with your love. Be persistent. Be effusive. Be ANNOYING with your love. Say it and show it. In any way that works for you. In a big way or a little way. In any way. It can truly, truly save someone’s life.
“Eat at a local restaurant tonight. Get the cream sauce. Have a cold pint at 4 o’clock in a mostly empty bar. Go somewhere you’ve never been. Listen to someone you think may have nothing in common with you. Order the steak rare. Eat an oyster. Have a negroni. Have two. Be open to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person next to you, but have a drink with them anyways. Eat slowly. Tip your server. Check in on your friends. Check in on yourself. Enjoy the ride.”- Anthony Bourdain
