Skip to main contentWhy do Americans care so much about food these days? Or, to be more precise, why do we care so much about the people making food? Perhaps the only way this salivating adulation could chew up even more space in the national psyche would be if cooking karaoke were invented: Regular people could make meals in front of a crowd of peers in the style of their favorite chef. But to answer the rhetorical question in the first paragraph, let's turn to someone who garners more than his fair share of food-related lust.
The author of Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain (the foie gras set's Kenneth Anger), positions himself as the ultimate insider-outsider in the food world. He tells not-so-appetizing secrets of the trade, pans competing chefs and flings cuss words like spice. In his latest book, A Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal, Bourdain attempts to lift the lid on food craziness by submitting himself to a globetrotting quest for said meal. Most readers will know from the start that this is an impossible grail hunt, so we're not too surprised at the end when Bourdain writes, "The whole concept of the perfect meal is ludicrous."
The confession isn't disappointing--all along we've known this food fever was about something more. But what? Bourdain, the lanky, aging, self-deprecating, self-styled bad boy, posits gingerly that "food is the new porn--a less dangerous alternative to the anonymous and unprotected shag of decades past." But this analogy, brought in during the last third of the book, is clearly not at all what he has proven as he's thrown himself into a series of unfamiliar situations with strangers eating a whole host of alien foods. Yes, eating is primal, just as sex is, but food is about creating emotional bonds.
If this reviewer can be so bold as to suggest it, the reason people are so obsessed with food these days is that now, more than ever, we are a nation of kids from broken homes and dysfunctional families. We've adopted the likes of Emeril (the goofy dad), Martha Stewart (the perfect mom), and yes, Anthony Bourdain (the fucked-up, hipster uncle) to indoctrinate us in the rituals of cooking and eating that are usually a family affair.
Whether Bourdain nails the causes of today's food obsession or not won't determine whether this book succeeds. What makes A Cook's Tour work is that Bourdain is an adventurous thinker who doesn't miss an opportunity to write his way out of any situation. He perfects a style that is both spare ("I just had the closest near-death experience I've ever had") and extravagant ("A terrifying mob of blood- and sauce-spattered culinarians lurched in the doors, many still reeking of sweat and fish, made straight for the bar, and began baiting and bullying the vastly outnumbered civilians."). It's a style that reflects his own persona, which is one part Hell's Kitchen braggart, one part self-belittling neurotic. Passages in which Bourdain is traveling into unfamiliar territory, such as Vietnam, show a vulnerable side that is endearing, putting the reader on an equal footing. When he is marching on home turf, however, the bravura that marked his bestseller pops out.
The shift from chapter to chapter can sometimes be jarring. It's hard to say whether he chose to arrange the passages by theme or not, but you go into a travelogue like this and you expect to be reading about the journeys in the order in which he took them. Maybe he did hop-scotch across the map with a disconcerting itinerary that seems only to make sense if one is competing for the most frequent-flier miles, but it seems unlikely. Chapters about experiences in Vietnam are buffered with passages about California and Scotland that threw this reader off his trail.
One theme that worms its way through the book is a Food Network television crew that tagged along on Boudain's entire tour to film a 22-part series as a cross-promotion with the release of A Cook's Tour. In typical Bourdainian fashion (or Franzenian fashion, if you will) he treats this intrusion as an albatross around his belly, even though he's the one who bagged the damn bird.
As he bitches and groans about the silly things the television producers make him do, the book takes on a subplot of cultural critique worthy of a Robert Altman film. This gift for playing both sides of the blackjack table is part of Bourdain's genius and the reason it seems likely that once the lost children flutter to another source of nourishment and the national obsession with food fades, he will still be bringing something to dinner.
Anthony Bourdain
(Bloomsbury, 308 Pages, $25.95)
Watch the new Food Network series called, surprisingly,
starting Tuesday, Jan. 8, at 10:30 pm.
Mr. Bourdain will be your reader at Powell's on West Burnside at 7:30 pm Thursday, Jan. 18. This reading will be served with a side order of a daytime event at Wildwood restaurant, 12:30 pm Friday, Jan. 19
WWeek 2015