Steve Walker

“one morning he and his family were taken off the coast of La Teste sur Mer on a small wooden boat to inspect some oyster beds; their guide without preamble reached over the side, pulled up a huge, silt-encrusted specimen, popped it open with a rusty knife, and handed it to Tony (in his telling, the only Bourdain who wasn’t rabidly oyster-phobic) to eat. It went down gloriously while his family looked on, aghast, and at first Tony seemed to put the experience in a purely positive light, an “unforgettably sweet” reverse Madeleine moment that “tasted of seawater… of brine and flesh… and somehow… of the future…” a moment “still more alive for me than so many of the other ‘firsts’ that followed—first pussy, first joint, first day in high school, first published book, or any other thing.” The oyster changed everything for him, he wrote, because the “glistening, vaguely sexual object, still dripping and nearly alive” brought the realization that “food had power” and that life might be chock-full of wonderful and nearly indescribable sensations that, for both better and worse, had to be experienced to be believed.”
― Charles Leerhsen, Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain