A Layover of Food: Introduction

“Without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things, we shall surely become static, repetitive, and moribund.” ~Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Bourdain was an adventurer, creative force, writer, and, most importantly, a chef. It is this last role that he was able to explore cultures through the framing of a cook and explain the commonalities between the people and locations he showed on television and those audiences that enjoyed his programming. He granted access to the viewer to the mostly unknown world of professional restaurant kitchens and gave an education of what it took to create meals that people would travel miles to experience. Bourdain’s examination of the role of immigrants in the kitchen as they are preparing those memorable dishes helped provide a humanistic angle to the narratives associated with the issues of class in society, being a foreigner, and being a shadow member of a community. His death in June of 2018 diminished these crucial conversations.

One of the common responses of those who paid tribute to Bourdain’s life was of his willingness to listen to and understand other people’s and different cultures’ stories. Gustavo Arellano, a well-known writer, and media personality noted this willingness by saying “from the fields to the slaughterhouses to the lines to the people who are waiters to the people who wash dishes every night, he spoke again and again about their dignity” (Hampton, 2018, para. 5). Viewers of Bourdain’s shows would recognize that he connected best with people and cultures through the locations that he knew best, mainly kitchens and restaurants.

It would be cliché to say that these minor interactions with a diversity of individuals helped his audience explore the world. The bigger takeaway would be noting how his fans gained a sense of empathy for other cultures that is lost in the traditional media coverage of international news organizations (Golan et al., 2010). Bourdain humanized others through this use of mediated narrative construction that allowed his audience and fans a sense of place that was outside their comfort zones of existence. This acquired empathy was noted by Jacob Henry (2018) in The Conversation when he wrote:

The greatest strength of Parts Unknown was its comfort with unknowns remaining unknown – its resistance to arriving at singular truths about complex places. Bourdain never claimed that the “artifice of making television” – as he called it – allowed more than “one window, his window.”

Yet it was an open window, a critical lens that helped his large audience disentangle the tropes so often served up by popular media. Bourdain was critical of the single story, critical of widely held stereotypes and perhaps most critical of his own position as a masterful storyteller.

Bourdain’s storytelling style throughout his various shows and books floated between a correspondent that knows one or several people everywhere in the world, the bon vivant that enjoys a really good meal and wanted to share that experience with his friends and a scholar of world affairs that understood the impact that he, and by extension Western society, has had on the rest of the world. Fans of Bourdain were the lucky tag-along that was able to see the world from his perspective.

Bourdain’s life, work in food, and food journalism has inspired many celebrity outpourings of mourning and remembrance of the man (Nyren, 2018). However, lost in the platitudes in the year since Bourdain’s death has been a careful reflection of his fan community take on what the chef’s life has meant to those dedicated viewers of his work.