National Post (National Edition)
Bourdain’s magnetism had little to do with food.
MORE AN ANTIQUE ROMAN, HIS MAGNETISM HAD LITTLE TO DO WITH FOOD
The outpouring of love and grief that followed Anthony Bourdain’s suicide has revealed him to have been something much more than a “celebrity chef.” Or maybe it just reveals how complicated and significant that category is in our time. On a simple level, Bourdain occupied more or less the cultural role that Julia Child once occupied. He was, like Mme. Child, an interesting, educated person of undisguisable American stamp who had been trained in the high French culinary tradition, and had thus become privy to the secrets of an intimidating professional elite.
Bourdain and Child (whom he venerated) preached a closely related gospel on American television: western Europeans don’t have exclusive access to an inherited secret grimoire of culinary magic, or to some sense organ that has withered away in the New World. Most of what matters, what is worthy of imitation in them, is their attitude to food.
But the crux of Julia Child, as a personality, is that she was a reassuringly friendly technical educator. You can go look her up on Youtube and she is still there to show you the objectively correct (French) way to make an omelette or a bouillabaisse. Her ability as a teacher of technique accounts for her continuing, even increasing cultural stature.
What is noticeable about Bourdain is the degree to which he was not this. Unlike Julia Child he had actually run French-style professional kitchens. But can you learn much about how to cook, per se, from watching his TV documentaries? Of course not. Bourdain is being mourned by hundreds of thousands of people who don’t own a frying pan.
Even to say that his pertinent lessons were about how to eat, rather than how to cook, does not quite get to the heart of the matter. Most celebrity chefs reach a point at which they are no longer doing much cooking on camera, but Bourdain crossed over almost completely into being a pure travel documentarian.
His shows always featured him chatting with other chefs, and eating local cuisine, because food was his back door to foreign communities, and because it was central to his existence, and because, well, the “celebrity chef ” label is hard to elude. But if he had started to leave the food out of his shows altogether, it would take you at least a little while to notice. And if he had explicitly announced a foodless travel show, the fans might not know how to take it, but we would watch just as eagerly, and the show would probably be just as interesting.
There is a sense in which I disapprove of this in retrospect. Anthony Bourdain was a heck of a writer, and I would have liked him to leave behind more writing — to have subjected himself to a regular print deadline somewhere for a few years. Maybe that is too much rigour to expect from one man in one lifetime, but documentary-making is no picnic either. My guess would be that prose was almost as important to him as food: he had near-unimpeachable literary taste, and it was a book — a book that poured out of him, uncommanded — that made him famous.
But there was something about Bourdain that people wanted to hear and see. His personal demeanour — a historian might mention his “table talk”, and that is no coincidence — had a curious power that made it impractical for him to remain behind a byline. I had always thought there was something vaguely Roman about Bourdain, and when I got the news of his death — its Roman aspect is difficult to ignore — I consciously found the conceptual key. He was, in both the colloquial and the philosophical sense, an epicure.
How, after all, did Bourdain acquire such a following? His thoughts on and his way of talking about food were shamelessly materialistic. We are made of meat and we eat things that are made of meat and we like it and there is no sense in pretending otherwise. He decreed no animal out of bounds, making jokes about cannibalism and about eating dog (which made people a lot angrier). He honoured no taboos concerning the devouring of organs of sex, perception or excretion. He fought food police of all descriptions, taking a Nietzschean carving knife to vegans and advocating aggressively for foie gras. Although he paid respect to the religious vegetarianism of Hindus, he made it fairly clear that this was because it would be otiose, impolite and stupid to wonder where the meat was in a good Indian meal.
A “celebrity chef” might engage in all of this performatively, as a question of attention-getting stuntwork. Eating a seal eyeball? Wow, Tony, that’s great television! But we knew instinctively that Bourdain was as serious as a razor about all of it. His emphatic insistence that social customs are important, and that superstitions and prejudices are not, was not just a lesson in eating: it was a lesson in being. His real subject matter was pleasure and fear and courage and wisdom. Food was only the occasion.
HE FOUGHT FOOD POLICE OF ALL DESCRIPTIONS.