![]() ![]() Bourdain had lots of those (as is reasonable for someone with such a large body of work) in all different shades - a cringy exchange involving a kiss with a ladyboy in Thailand, for instance, or a passing remark about whether remnants of colonization in Myanmar could be a “vestige of a golden time.” Regardless of the city or country, any traveler is by definition a low-information character, prone to embarrassing gaffes and misguided choices. “He was constantly evolving and constantly trying to right his own wrongs.” She’s referring to a No Reservations episode in Vietnam where Bourdain ate a beating heart cut moments before from a live cobra - an experience Bourdain enthusiastically hyped, at the time, as a great cocktail story. “He hated that beating cobra-heart scene,” says Louisa Chu, a reporter with the Chicago Tribune and Bourdain’s fixer in Chicago and Paris. He did this with humility, and integrity, and showed us we could do the same. But more often we have to pause and manually remind ourselves to factor them in, and many of us have spent the last couple of years learning as we go.īourdain was no different. It’d be nice if we all had an innate, automatic social conscience wherein it occurred to us, organically, to consider the needs and perspectives of people whose identities we don’t share. You saw them with their kids, you saw them cooking someone you know, maybe me, dinner.” That they’re not just stacks of brown bodies, that they’re people. “So that when news happens, you have some clue of who we’re talking about. “I think it’s useful for Americans who don’t have passports and who haven’t traveled much to see, to at least get a picture of what people are like in these countries that we read bad news about all the time,” Bourdain said in a 2016 Eater Upsell interview. ![]() Yet since his death by suicide at age 61, Bourdain is being rightfully remembered as an advocate - for women for immigrants for the Mexican restaurant workers who carry the entire industry for addicts for the humanity of Iran and Palestine and West Virginia. In the golden age of Outrage Twitter, someone in a similar position could have been dragged weekly from one end of the internet to the other. Bourdain showed us how to own them.Ĭonsider the frequency with which Bourdain willfully engineered interactions around the world that he could have disastrously botched in matters of race, class, politics, and religion. Making mistakes when you travel is inevitable. He also did a lot of drinking and made a lot of dick jokes and dispensed such career advice as, “Do a lot of cocaine and heroin.” He complained about the diarrhea-inducing properties of Western breakfasts at non-Western hotels (“I don’t like to roll around in my own shit in a moving bathroom - that’s elitist?” he shot at his friend Éric Ripert, a nice man whom Bourdain delighted in making uncomfortable). He complained about temperatures, smells, Nashville hot chicken, vegetarians, and rickety train rides. Anthony Bourdain also loved to offend people. Anthony Bourdain complained a lot when he traveled. So it’s good to remember that Anthony Bourdain was not cowed by political correctness - even as a straight white man who was enormously privileged, wealthy, and famous. And this makes the world smaller, more stagnant. ![]() “Political correctness” often just means being conscientious around people who are not you, yet some Americans feel it discourages them from traveling and exploring other cultures, lest they say the wrong thing. Who believe political correctness has gotten so overwrought, so complicated, that there’s simply no way to engage with other cultures thoughtfully. People who feel nervous to interact with those who act, look, and live differently than they do. There are large contingents of Americans who are afraid they can’t open their mouths without offending someone. ![]()
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