Anthony Bourdain and the Art of Being Human
Written by: Amani Rizwan
Photo: Mike Persson
The name Anthony Bourdain is one you’ve probably heard in passing. Maybe you have some vague memory of one of his shows playing on your parents’ TV, or maybe you heard of him after his sudden, unexpected death in 2018. To the naked eye, he was a chef, TV host, writer, and celebrity. However, up close, Anthony Bourdain was all of those things and more. He became, for many, an unlikely philosopher for our modern, fractured world.
For those unfamiliar, Bourdain first rose to fame in 1999 with his blisteringly honest essay “Don’t Eat Before Reading This” for The New Yorker, where he spilled the greasy guts of the restaurant industry all over the American consciousness. It was brutal, funny, and above all — honest. That honesty turned a guy who had been scraping together a living into a best-selling author with Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (2000), and soon after, a somewhat reluctant TV star.
Bourdain’s long love affair with food first began on a family trip to France, where he had his first oyster straight from the sea — a small but mighty moment that changed the trajectory of his life forever. Fast forward to 1978, when Bourdain graduated from the Culinary Institute of America, before spending years working his way up in the restaurant world. Along the way, he developed a passion for writing, although he once joked that writing was little more than “a show of narcissism and vanity for the writer”. That was the funny thing about him, despite being a celebrity, Bourdain never carried himself like someone who thought they were above others.
His hit shows—No Reservations, The Layover, Parts Unknown— saw Bourdain eating his way across the world, but food was never the end goal. For Bourdain, food was just the easiest way to get people to sit down and tell their stories. Bourdain wandered into most places that tourists would never dare to go: drinking raw cow’s blood in Kenya, waiting years to be allowed into war-torn Iran, or simply getting drunk with strangers halfway across the world. His shows weren’t just lessons in politics and history, but rather lessons in empathy and understanding. Each meal, each conversation, was a quiet act of rebellion against the ignorance that continues to plague our world.
Photo by: CNN
Even at the height of his fame, Bourdain stayed surprisingly self-aware about the seductions of success. He refused to ‘sell out’ and was famous for turning down million-dollar paychecks for endorsements he didn’t believe in. In his own words, “To be honest, a lot of it wasn’t because I have any integrity, it was because I didn’t want to take a million dollars to represent anti-diarrhoea medicine.” His refusal to pander became just one of the things that kept his audience coming back for more.
However, his story isn’t as polished as it seems. Bourdain’s early years in New York, during the 70s and 80s, were heavy with drugs; everything from LSD and amphetamines to heroin. He once admitted, “we were high all the time, sneaking off to the walk-in refrigerator at every opportunity to ‘conceptualise”. In a toxic city and an even more toxic industry, addiction was almost a given. Nonetheless, Bourdain survived it, and carried thosescars with him without feigning perfection.
And somewhere along the way, in between the drug abuse and commercial success, without asking or even trying, Bourdain became a philosopher. Similar to Albert Camus, if Camus wore plaid button-ups and crushed cigarettes into the dirt with his boot. Much like Camus, Bourdain understood the absurdity of our existence and the tug of war between finding meaning and accepting that the universe won’t hand it to you. Food was the way Bourdain embraced that absurdity. It was in the contact and tenderness of sharing a warm meal with a fellow human, knowing that we exist on this planet for just a mere moment.
It was also in the humility of his character that people found something rare. Bourdain was his own harshest critic, and often boiled himself down to a selfish, privileged man who never deserved the spotlight; yet, the man on TV screens across the world was anything but. He met all kinds of people from all around the world, ate their foreign foods, and attempted to speak their languages free from any prejudice and judgment. This is another message in his philosophy of life—never shy from new experiences, and keep your mind as open as possible.
One of the most iconic moments of his career that captures this perfectly was his meal with former President Barack Obama in a small noodle shop tucked away in the alleys of Hanoi. It was two men sharing beers and bowls of bun cha, talking about life, power, and fatherhood—all for about six dollars.
Photo by: Pete Souza
Yes, it did numbers on television, but more importantly, it was a reminder that no matter how vast the differences between us seem, sometimes all it takes is sharing a meal to see someone clearly.
As Obama said after Bourdain’s death: “Low plastic stool, cheap but delicious noodles, cold Hanoi beer. This is how I’ll remember Tony. He taught us about food — but more importantly, about its ability to bring us together. To make us a little less afraid of the unknown.”
Of course, Bourdain’s life wasn’t without its demons. His restless seeking made him a brilliant storyteller, one who seemed to have come to grips with the mechanics of our strange, absurd world. But it also made him a restless and haunted one.
As filmmaker Morgan Neville, director of the documentary Roadrunner, stated:
In 2018, Anthony Bourdain was found dead in a small hotel room in France, where he was filming an episode for Parts Unknown. There were no signs of struggle, and his untimely passing was declared a suicide. That was the day the world lost one of its most honest voices —a man who loved the world too much to look away from its pain, and taught us that maybe loving it anyway is the only real answer.
If you haven’t watched one of his shows or read his books, I’d highly encourage you to. Not because Bourdain had all the answers, but rather because he didn’t. He moved through the world with open palms, a hungry belly, and an eagerness to live intentionally and savour every meal. And maybe, it’s worth trying to do the same.
“Perhaps wisdom...is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.” — Anthony Bourdain [1956-2018]