I got a reminder that last Thursday, June 24, was Anthony Bourdain’s birthday. That made me sad. I drummed up the will to pull up No Reservations. Anthony sat on a dog sled in Iceland and learned why some drinks were necessary to combat the cold.

Anthony Bourdain died in 2018. We were in the throes of the first Trump regime, with people protesting the Muslim travel ban (yeah, how did we forget about that). Kate Spade died that same week; the double whammy hit pop culture hard. While I wasn’t as attached to Kate Spade, people in my social circles were. Mainly we couldn’t comprehend death by suicide. I talked with my friends to try and understand; that conversation freaked me out, and I turned to fiction writing. A character in my short story “A Resting Place for Dolls” also processes Anthony’s deaths, though she takes a more ethically dubious approach.

The world loved Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade. Sure, double standards exist against women that exacerbate when they become famous, but still. How do you comprehend losing someone that you realize was one of your tethers of belief that the world is good?

Anthony died eight years ago. No one has brought the same impact to travel television that he did. And maybe that’s a good thing; sometimes, we can’t replace what we lost, especially pre-pandemic.

Falling For An Open-Minded Attitude

You wouldn’t think I admired Anthony. While his show No Reservations was cool and still is, I didn’t watch it fervently. Rather, I saw the show whenever it came on television and the Travel Channel happened to feature it. Anthony also made a cameo in the biopic The BIg Short to liken day-old fish to subprime mortgages and CDO bonds, to explain why they were being repackaged.

No Reservations and Uncharted focused on what we could learn when traveling, if we listen to people. Bourdain traveled to Myanmar to cover the culture that genocide and the war Facebook enabled would destroy. (Read Careless People; there’s a whole chapter about that.) An attempt to feed people in Haiti nearly led to brawls in line. Despite Iran having America, and getting more reasons to by the decade — and the fundamentalists in power– the country allowed Anthony to travel there and film locals. It could have gone horribly wrong, if The Daily Show’s interview with a journalist that got the latter imprisoned was any indication.

Note that Anthony wasn’t a role model, and he would have disavowed the notion of people looking up to him. His memoirs confirm that he had to learn many lessons in humility and recover from substance abuse before it killed him in his twenties. (Being a chef is hard, and you have to shelve your ego when getting into the kitchen.)

Food Doesn’t Fix Everything For Anthony Bourdain…

But it can provide answers and connection. There’s a reason why sacred hospitality is one of the most ancient obligations in Western society, dating as far back to Homer’s The Odyssey and becoming a crucial plot point. Anthony used food as a jumping point to bring the world to American doorsteps, so that we wouldn’t stay trapped in our bubbles.

Anthony was remarkable because he didn’t want to impose his privilege on various hosts, though he was aware of it. He knew he couldn’t solve every problem, so he brought them to the surface instead. But he didn’t bring down his audience. To the end, Anthony believed in his audience.  He expected us to listen to the vulnerable and marginalized.

We need to keep listening.

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