Once upon a time, travel shows were stodgy
as fuck.
Television tourism of yonder was populated
with pleasant, proper people
who strolled the Champs de Lise or the beaches
of Rio
in order to show you how to do pleasant, proper
and usually prepackaged things.
But it's too easy to be snooty about a place
like this.
Early travel shows regarded the locals as
curiosities,
interaction with the host was either staged
or kept at a respectable distance
while finding the ideal yacht and shopping
for bargains was paramount.
Up until the 1990s travel shows were mostly
about watching a trusted host
sniffing his way through fine wineries, pacing
through baroque era museums,
lounging around 4 star hotels-
When do I get my bailout?
and indulging in the sensual pleasures of
eating familiar fare
with the right fork at the right restaurant
and always with the right kind of people.
About the time that global capitalism put
distant travel within the range of the ambitious backpacker
all that began to change.
Travel TV went from advertising the lifestyles
of the rich and famous
to adventure tourism for the young and penniless.
Shows like Globe Trekker showed hosts pounding
vodka inside private homes
of the newly opened nations of the erstwhile
Iron Curtain.
The wild eyed 20 something host happily ditched
the salad forks in France
and gave you a glimpse of the back-alleys
of Bangkok.
The hosts were real people and so were the
people they met.
Their travels were rough and risky.
They gave the distinct impression that for
a few weeks
a person of ordinary means could live like
Indiana Jones.
The catch was that you had to want it so badly,
you were willing to live in a rat infested
slum to do it.
which, for a certain kind of traveler, was
half the fun.
But the best by far of this new breed of adventure
travel television shows
belonged to Anthony Bourdain.
Bourdain who began every show with a parental
advisory warning
was ten times snarkier than all the other
hosts put together.
His punk nonchalance stuck out like a middle finger
to every travel show that had ever gone before him.
He savaged over-hyped celebrity chefs by name
and held in righteous contempt every culinary
fad and prophesied ideology
that stood in the way of the pure enjoyment
of food.
I liked him immediately.
I'm frequently asked by vegans are the enemy
of everything that is good and decent
and must be hunted down and destroyed so their
genes don't pass on to future generations.
Bourdain got away with being such an arrogant
weasel
because underneath the swagger was an empathetic
guy with a big idea
that's been so widely copied it's hard to
remember how novel it once was.
Any culture no matter how foreign can be understood
through its food.
And so Bourdain was equally at home to whirling
spaghetti in the swankiest restaurants of Rome
and scarfing down warthog anus with the tribes
of Namibia.
He traveled for all the right reasons,
to understand the world and to understand
himself.
I remember sitting on my couch in Los Angeles
alone and unemployed
watching the first few episodes of the cook's
tour.
The feasts he ate, the flavors he described
and the people he met.
He made the whole world seem alive, no doubt
even as he was contemplating his own death.
Hour after hour I watched as he traveled to
Morocco and Japan
places I'd only dreamed about visiting.
And I started thinking 'maybe I could do that.'
'Maybe I should do that.'
And so I did.
Within a month I was on a plane to India.
No sooner did my feet hit the tarmac in Mumbai,
I immediately and very self consciously began
living la vida Bourdain.
I saved Rupees by living in dumps and drug
dens
and I spent what I could on the best eats
that the city had to offer.
Legendary food stalls like Bademiya Kebab,
and swanky eateries like Trishna
blew my taste buds away with flavors that
were too strong or too strange or too spiced
for the American palate.
Over Hyderabadi biryanis and the manifold
pleasures of the thali plate,
I broke naan bread with imams in the mosques
of Ajmer,
ate dal bhat with feudal Rajasthani landlords,
and dined with countless others whose lives
were unquantifiably different from my own.
Two weeks later, I'd move on to another city
and do it all over again.
I had no real plan; I just kept moving.
At this point I'd just seen my first missile
strike
and it was on the airport that we'd flown
into in Beirut.
No Reservations began as a show about food
and culture.
But with the outbreak of the 2006 Lebanon
War.
Bourdain and his crew were forced by circumstance
to become war correspondents.
-is Tony Bourdain.
You were in Beirut shooting an episode of
your show, what happened?
I was with a Sunni, a Shiite and a Christian
at the time when we started to hear gunfire
and see cars filled with Hezbollah supporters.
The Beirut episode of No Reservations permanently
changed the course of the show
as politics became as important as food.
You sleep through.
But you wake up to bombing, you watch bombing
from the pool during the afternoon
you go to sleep to bombing.
Around the time that No Reservations began
its slow pivot into politics,
I found myself doing the same.
Our top story in Nepal,
government forces fired on thousands of pro-democracy
demonstrators today.
For weeks Nepalese have protested the country's
non party political system.
I took an internship as a photojournalist
with The Kathmandu Post.
Nepal's toxic brew of ruling monarchists,
insurgent Maoists,
and ethnically based political alliances
set the stage for the culmination of a 15-year
civil war.
What began as my adventure in food and travel
was fast becoming a life in news photography.
When the dust settled, the world's last Hindu
king was forced from his throne,
replaced by the violent birth of a troubled
democracy.
I can't wait to get out there and really understand
what Cambodi cuisine is all about.
The main reason I'm here is to understand
the food-
I returned to Los Angeles to find the television
completely Bourdainified.
Television had spawned a dozen Anthony Bourdain
clones,
each one wandering the world in a weekly quest
for that white whale of serious travel hosts,
cultural authenticity—and clicks.
While the snarky host who got my ass off the
couch in the first place
was now a legit celebrity.
The first time I came here, it was a transformative
experience.
But Bourdain's knockoffs and clones never
understood
that the journey outward was always something
of a ruse.
Even while reporting on far-flung conflicts,
Bourdain used travel and food as vehicles
for introspection.
Show after show, he dropped hints about his
state of mind,
concealed inside gallows humor, and easily
forgotten in the pleasures of an exquisite meal.
A lovely spice, I want to die here already,
and I might yet.
The perfect seaweed, the perfect uni is just
woah man I am ready to die now.
If you can't enjoy even a nice stinky, runny,
bright cheese like this
you may as well kill yourself now.
So Tony, what brought you here?
Bourdain's dark inner life was never more
on display than on his visit to Argentina,
where he saw a local therapist.
I will find myself in an airport for instance
and I'll order an airport hamburger
it's an insignificant thing, it's a small
thing, it's a hamburger.
But it's not a good one.
Suddenly I look at the hamburger and I find
myself in a spiral of depression
that can last for days.
In the end Anthony Bourdain couldn't be contained
by this world
not by its political or its existential borders.
The meal of my life.
He passed through some of the world's most
dangerous places unharmed,
only to turn the belt of his hotel robe into
a hangman's noose.
For all the books he wrote and the shows he
narrated,
Bourdain left without a word of explanation.
So I'm left with a sense of loss.
And an a enduring gratitude for the recorded
memory of a life lived spectacularly.
