Food, Fuckery and the Wisdom in a Realised Smallness
It all begins with an idea.
“Have a cold pint at 4 o’clock in a mostly empty bar. Go somewhere you’ve never been. Listen to someone you think may have nothing in common with you. Be open to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person sitting next to you but have a drink with them anyway. Eat slowly. Tip your server. Check in on your friends. Check in on yourself. Enjoy the ride.” – Anthony Bourdain
It's probably the Bourdain quote you’ll see first on a Pinterest board, or some half-assed lifestyle account run by a “travel vlogger” (or indeed, a lousy art discussion blog), but that’s because it’s the best. Amidst the endlessly deep well of Anthony Bourdain quotes this is a standout because these words reflect a man that reflected and exhibited all that was, and is, beautiful, horrific and splendorous about humanity. Bourdain is a fascinatingly magnetic character that I regretfully admit only being drawn to after his tragically premature death. A man of the world in the truest sense, a cult following of adoring fans has long venerated Tony since his rise to overnight stardom after the publishing of his bestselling debut book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. This is where I came to love him also, after stumbling across more than a few of those Pinterest quotes, I decided to pick up Kitchen Confidential and before long I was hooked. Hooked with the man, his philosophies and most importantly his innate ability to inspire within me a more worldly view and a conceivably more profound understanding of what’s important within it.
Across his publishing’s and TV program appearances, Tony has consistently advocated for nothing more than the human experience and perhaps more importantly, our shared human experiences. It’s one of his most endearing qualities, married with an authenticity seldom found in television personalities and a deeply rooted respect and consideration for our world and its offerings. Evidenced in his TV series’, Bourdain’s ability to give voice to the previously unheard and his unabashed pursuit of providing nuanced perspectives from every tiny corner of the globe truly made him one-of-one. Despite his culinary experience, Tony famously avoided working for cooking channels for the simple reason that he believed food was merely the fabric tying the world together and if ever given an audience, he would make sure his expertise in food would at most be in service of an infinitely more important subject, the world and its inhabitants. To that end, Tony began producing travel programs that encompassed culture, history and of course food, all in efforts to show us the world in front of us and waiting for us. As inspiring as all of that is, the real impact made by Anthony Bourdain is unquantifiable and one that will long continue.
Bourdain’s legacy is one of connection and inspiring curiosity and his wishes for us, people of the world, can be summarised as follows:
He implored his audiences to reject certainty, to explore what you don’t already know and even more so what you think you do. To find reverence in the seemingly insignificant, for it is here that life’s significance is most abundant. Ignore itineraries, pursue what interests you no matter how valuable or invaluable the world tells you it is. Find yourself to lose yourself to find yourself again. Acknowledge the marks you leave on a place or person, the tangible and intangible, but equally acknowledge the marks they leave on you and take each day as an opportunity to be better.
If I have taken one thing from Anthony Bourdain it is this; “It is inherently human to seek, to find universalities, common ground and unifying theories of behaviour and experience. This is often the goal of the traveller, but it would be remiss not to consider going home and looking inward to find the meaning of all you know and see in the world around you. What you will find, you have seen elsewhere and everywhere. Maybe the differences between places are no less- and no more- pronounced than the distance between human hearts.”
It isn’t often that people come along and change the way you think about the world and redefine how you want to approach it. Anthony Bourdain had this effect on me. We live in a dark, ugly times that is true. But there lays a romance in knowing we have all seen the sun together. Tony has inspired me to seek that romance whenever and wherever I can, and to know that very pursuit is enough.