Wanting it All, According to Bourdain

“Your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.”

Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential

I’ve been spending most of my summer reading rather than writing, which is why you haven’t heard from me in almost two months. I decided to not buy new books (the horror!) and instead read books that have been sitting in the “someday” pile for a while. I’ve read Maria’s Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, and Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. I’ve pretty much been talking in circles about Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat lately (you can watch the tl;dr version on Netflix), but nothing has made me feel more gutted than Bourdain. Over a year after his death, I still lie awake thinking about his life and his words and his travels. 

I’ve actually been, like, pretty into cooking the last ten months or so. Who ever thought that day would come? After about twenty-one years of disinterest, last fall I decided that I needed to satisfy my food-critic-meets-college-athlete-worthy appetite somehow and start cooking for myself. Because, ya know, both my parents and the university dining hall weren’t feeding me anymore. 

I’ve always been a voracious eater–my uncle said he knew I could give him a run for his money when I was five and spying his plate across the table…eyes narrowed, like, you gonna eat that? However, I was also a pretty picky eater until probably mid-middle school, when I sat myself down to talk some sense into my chicken-fingers-only mentality. If I wanted to travel as much as I thought I did, then I had to suck it up. Since then, instead of punishing myself with foods I don’t actually want to eat but feel like I have to, I’ve come to enjoy eating anything and loving everything because I want to. 

I’ve spent the last year in my tiny Columbus kitchen reading cookbooks, pinning recipes on my Pinterest page, and roasting whole chickens for myself on a random Tuesday night. I’m not saying I’m any good, but I’m at least invested. 

I came to Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat with the ambition of being a better cook, and found a delightfully optimistic friend in author Samin Nosrat along the way. I came to Kitchen Confidential, on the other hand, for the Bourdain travel persona that I grew up with. He was more of an eater-of-weird-things to me than a chef-chef. But I came away with a wholly shocking, wonderful, and mesmerizing picture of a realist who really loved food, and really loved life. Bourdain writes, “Food has power. It could inspire, astonish, shock, excite, delight and impress.” I feel that way about food, too, but I also feel that way about him.  

The book is almost twenty years old, and the New Yorker article that incited it even older. But his words still manage to inspire, astonish, shock, excite, delight, and impress. Like Bourdain’s shows, primarily the ones I grew up on (No Reservations and Parts Unknown), his meditations are about much more than food. Here’s a quote from Kitchen Confidential I keep coming back to:  

We are, after all, citizens of the world — a world filled with bacteria, some friendly, some not so friendly. Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonald’s? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria’s mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all.

I want it all, I repeat to myself. 

I used to watch The Travel Channel religiously as a kid. My favorite show was Samantha Brown’s Passport to Europe, which was, as much as I enjoyed it then, not incredibly realistic. That shit was always perfectly planned out. She was all smiles and all energy. That hasn’t entirely been my experience since. 

Recently, when cleaning out the garage, my dad found a personal essay I wrote to myself after visiting Italy (my first trip abroad) in 2010. I was thirteen. After assessing and coming to terms with some culture shock, I wrote (among other cringey things), “Traveling is not always a Samantha Brown show.” I was right, though. Bourdain, conversely, was the badass who told it as it was, who I actually wanted to be like. Who could revel in the discomfort of food and traveling. Returning to Kitchen Confidential reminded me of that voice. 

I’ve been thinking about travel and life and moving and the future and etcetera, I suppose, because of my impending Big Move and the constant media onslaught of populist insurgency and border-ism. I’m banging my head against a wall every day, it seems. See the world and get over yourself, I want to yell. As if I know any better. What would Bourdain say? Maybe he thought he was shouting in the void at that point in his life, I don’t know. That a conversation between strangers over a bowl of noodles wouldn’t change anything. But it really has. At least for me.   

Bourdain has captured the hearts of millions around the world for decades, down to his colleagues in cramped New York kitchens. I’m definitely not the first to have written something like this about him, and I won’t be the last. I’m glad I finally got to read his words for myself. I’m also happy that my amateurish cooking skills and travel bug live on, and I owe a small part of that to him. When the world feels like it’s crumbling, I can now pull out some ingredients and have everything fall back into place. Right now, that’s enough.