A Love Letter to Anthony Bourdain
& the powers of a celebrity crush
Quick content warning: I will discuss food and eating disorders in this newsletter.
A few weeks ago, my friends and I were discussing our celebrity crushes. Since I can remember, I have always had the same type of celebrity crush. Typically, the dark-haired, sensitive type who appears malnourished and has a lot of very complicated feelings. My earliest memory of a celebrity crush was Paul Dano’s character in Little Miss Sunshine, which is a perfectly normal crush for a perfectly normal child to have and requires no further psychoanalysis.
But my most persistent and long-lasting celebrity crush, the one I’ve stood by for about a decade, is the late Anthony Bourdain. He was tall, funny, and charming, but rough around the edges with an aura of darkness and mystery. He was also one of my all-time favorite writers, capable of capturing the essence of human nature, complex political affairs, or long-held cultural traditions in just a few sentences, or over the course of a meal. He was unpretentious and the picture of open-mindedness, a conversationalist who thrived on human connection. To me, he represented many increasingly rare but important human traits, such as the ability to talk to people with whom we have nothing in common, free of judgment, and with immense cultural sensitivity. He reminded us that the point of being alive is to see and do and learn as many things as possible outside of the tiny worlds we’ve built for ourselves.
Importantly, he did all of this through food. I’m currently re-reading A Cook’s Tour, Bourdain’s 2001 account of his world travels after the success of Kitchen Confidential. And I found the book’s opening quite thought-provoking.
He begins by asking the reader to recall the best meal they’ve ever had. The best meal I’ve ever had stands out in my mind immediately: a double-decker chicken salad sandwich from the Carnegie Deli (RIP) in midtown Manhattan. I don’t remember exactly how old I was, maybe elementary school age, but I remember everything about that meal. A six-inch pile of the most tender and perfectly seasoned chicken with more mayonnaise than I had ever seen, 3 (!) pieces of fluffy white bread, about a half a head of lettuce, an entire tomato, and a hard-boiled egg. My Granddad treated me, my mom, and my cousins. He paid with a $100 bill.
As Bourdain goes on to explain, the best meal we’ve ever had is almost never at a Michelin-star restaurant or somewhere sterile, dimly lit, and exorbitantly expensive. The perfect meal is about much more than that. The people with whom we ate, the conversations we had, the feelings or nostalgia surrounding that meal. It’s the soup your mother made when you were sick as a child. The first bite of steaming-hot, greasy fish and chips on your first trip to England. The imperfect but delicious handmade gnocchi you made with your partner when you first started dating.
In rereading this book, I am reminded of exactly why I continue to harbor such strong feelings for Anthony Bourdain and why his writing is so important to me. It also reminds me of how much of an impact he had on my relationship with food. As a highly anxious person, I am afraid of many, many things. Unfortunately, for a long amount of time in my life, I was afraid of food.
My fear of food came primarily from a fear of gaining weight. From the ages of about 14–22, I struggled on and off with meal-skipping, over-exercising, calorie counting, binging, and MyFitnessPal—a “fitness” app that for many people my age, was their first taste (No pun intended! ha ha!) of disordered eating habits. To this day, I can name the number of calories in most food items from memory.
I was afraid of bread. Horrified of coffee that was anything but black. I shuddered at the thought of cooking with butter, oil, or cream. When I inevitably binged, I would subsequently calculate how far I’d have to run and how much I would have to restrict the next day in order to make up for this appalling transgression. It occupied all of my thoughts, distracting me from classes, social interactions, and daily tasks. Some of this stemmed from untreated mental illness. But, this is one bad habit for which I can rightfully refuse to take full responsibility (yippee!).
In the United States, in particular, we have become entirely alienated from the food we eat. The processing, manufacturing, advertising, freezing, shipping, glorifying, vilifying, and total bastardization of food has completely separated us from the things we consume every day.
We order takeout over our phones to eat in silence in front of the TV—doing everything we can to remove human interaction from the process. We eat pre-portioned, unseasoned chicken for five days per week out of microwaved Tupperware. We eat prepackaged salads in front of our computers at work, blissfully unaware of the individuals and labor that went into bringing that shredded lettuce from a farm hundreds of miles away. When the experience of eating a meal becomes so depersonalized and solitary, it is very easy to fear.
As a sophomore in college, I certainly did not have time to purchase produce every week and create nutritious, home-cooked meals. What I did have, was prepackaged sushi from the dining hall that I knew for a fact was less than 300 calories. Packaged food, particularly “healthy food” labels, make it impossible to see food as anything other than calories.
Food, in its purest form, is a source of life. Food has the ability to tell stories of its surroundings and the people who harvest, learn from, and transform this food into meals. We instead assign our food moral value based on the amount of protein, fat, carbohydrates, and sugar it contains. We don’t have the time or ability to consider the history behind this food, or truly enjoy the feelings it brings us, because what true emotion can Lean Cuisine evoke, aside from total despair?
Whatever the exact opposite of this school of thought is, is what Anthony Bourdain wrote about. He knew his food intimately. He knew its history, he understood its beauty, and he deeply respected it. Even if that meal was just a cup of Ramen, he expressed love and devotion for the comfort it brought. Its novelty and cultural significance. He ate food because even if it isn’t fancy or healthy or even remarkably delicious, it can teach us something or make us feel something. It’s pasta with more butter and garlic than most people eat in a month. It’s a velvety poached egg over asparagus paired with about three bottles of wine in the French countryside. It’s the blood of a pig slaughtered as part of a sacred cultural tradition, enjoyed respectfully and free of judgment.
Reading about food this way: food as a way to know people, food as a sacred vessel, and food as a way of satisfying curiosity about the world around us, was life-giving for me. For as long as I could remember, food was about convenience, fuel, and maybe a mediocre Instagram picture if you decided to go somewhere expensive. In white American culture, we do very few things with intention and gratitude—food preparation being one of them. The relentless pursuit of individualism (!!!) makes it easy to lose touch with any semblance of tradition: recipes shared, rituals passed down for generations, and the physical closeness required to truly share meals. Rather than appreciating food for what it is, we simply see food as a means to an end.
As I went on to read more and more of Bourdain’s work, I came to understand food as more than just a thing. He described his meals with profound respect and almost lustful admiration, an emotion I had not felt in years. Food, for me, had become a numbers game. Grams of carbs vs. grams of protein, number of hours I could last before eating again, number of calories burned per mile ran. I ate with remarkable speed and only when I was absolutely starving. I ate at home to avoid the unknown nutritional information of restaurant food. But in the conversations I imagined us having, Anthony would tell me that I was being stupid and depriving myself of one of life’s greatest pleasures. The last thing I wanted to do was disappoint my handsome king!
I began to confront the number of experiences I had missed out on while living in fear of food. Dinner plans dodged; meals lovingly prepared by my mother (turned away in lieu of whatever truly upsetting combination of lettuce, beans, or rice I could find in the house); baked goods tainted by my inescapable thoughts of guilt, shame, and calorie counting; and the objectively terrible, flavorless food I had spent years eating because I had decided it was safe and “good”.
In a way, the strength of my crush on Anthony Bourdain superseded my own self-hatred. Granted, Bourdain alone did not singlehandedly cure my years of disordered eating. Entering therapy, graduating college, and surrounding myself with brilliant people who loved to cook and never spoke ill of their own bodies or eating habits had a lot to do with it.
I didn’t want to be like the diet-obsessed, food-blogging masses that Bourdain so detested. I wanted to be someone who got it. Someone who could sit down with Tony in Vietnam on a tiny stool while slurping noodles and drinking a cold beer (I genuinely believe I would have been better company than freaking Obama but that is life!). Someone who was fearless and unencumbered by meaningless, self-imposed rules about eating butter. Someone who could really, truly experience life.
In my sophomore year of college, my therapist assigned me homework. She ordered me to leave our session, walk down the street, order a freshly baked cinnamon bun from the bakery, and enjoy it with a friend. Viewing this as an assignment rather than a moral failure of my own made this task a bit easier. And so I did. I walked through the snow and wind into the warmth of the bakery and ate the cinnamon bun. It made me feel genuinely happy; that nostalgic and familiar way that food can. It reminded me of being home for Christmas. I ate it with a dear friend who didn’t think twice about sharing a treat with me while we laughed and drank coffee.
Eating wasn’t always smooth sailing after that, but it got easier. In the years following, I traveled to new countries and tried as many new dishes as possible. I made new friends who cooked me eggs in real butter with a side of crispy bacon. I experienced the joy of whole milk lattes and I devoted my time to cooking new things for myself with the care and intention my mother did for me when I was younger. And yes I still eat bagged salads and microwavable veggie burgers, but only in an absolute pinch, with the knowledge that my next meal will be delicious and hearty and prepared with care. (Also, those Wegman’s bagged salads really can be quite good.)
Looking back on things, I feel that what I experienced was a very predictable side effect of diet culture on my obsessive-compulsive brain. For some, recovery focuses on separating emotion from food and understanding that food is necessary fuel for our bodies. The opposite held true for me. Understanding food as a deeply emotional, powerful, and beautiful thing worth experiencing is what gave me my life back. Realizing that missing out on something so integral to the human experience was, to me, not a life worth living. In a world where weight loss is a multi-billion dollar industry, it is genuinely brave and incredibly cool to eat a delicious bowl of spaghetti and drink a glass of red wine. And if it’s hard, try to imagine you are sitting with Anthony Bourdain. Or me, your friend Julia!
“Eat as much of whatever is around as you can, drink all of the local beverage that’s offered to you, get drunk with strangers, and be grateful for the fact that you’re lucky enough to do it.”
- Anthony Bourdain
This is such a beautiful essay. Food is such a rich part of life and a real, tangible, tasty pleasure. I love the way you wrote about food in this too. It reminded me of the way a camera lovingly lingers on food being prepared in a movie. Thanks for sharing your journey and I'm so glad you've reached a better place and have had such a great therapist and I agree it IS cool to drink wine and eat pasta, just objectively, like riding a Vespa or something.