Anthony Bourdain: The Last Interview

by Anthony Bourdain

  I like grey areas, obviously. I like ambiguity (the Nosenko case being a terrific example) and tend to enjoy the company of people who deal in ambiguity. Victor Cherkashin. Nice guy. Great host, lunch companion. A man who has done–what we would certainly describe as many bad things. I feel the same way about Ted Nugent. I don’t have to agree with a guy to enjoy their company. As a political ideology and as a practical matter, I loathe communism. However, I often find myself getting along very well with communists. I feel the same way about Red State America. Not my world, not always my point of view. But I always have a good time in gun country America and tend to like the people I meet. Palin sticker on your bumper or Che Guevara—if you have a sense of humor and enjoy food made with pride, chances are, we can be pals.

  I assume I share one characteristic with a good case officer: empathy. I’m good at looking at things from the other guy’s point of view. I can put myself in their shoes. I’m willing to reach out. I’m a good listener. The overlap pretty much ends there.

  Convincing some poor slob to betray his country, though—which is pretty much the job of the spook—is something I’d never have the stomach for.

  * Stewed fava beans with a variety of herbs and spices including cumin, garlic, onion, lemon juice and chilies.

  ANTHONY BOURDAIN ON FOOD: THERE IS NOTHING MORE POLITICAL

  INTERVIEW WITH PETER ARMSTRONG

  CBC NEWS ON THE MONEY

  NOVEMBER 7, 2016

  PETER ARMSTRONG: Well thank you so much for coming in. It’s great to see you. To what extent is food the best or maybe least biased glimpse into how a society, a country, an economy works?

  ANTHONY BOURDAIN: Well there’s nothing more political. There’s nothing more revealing of the real situation on the ground, whether a system works or not. I mean, whatever your philosophical, uh, the foundation of your personal belief system, it’s difficult to spend time in Cuba, particularly like ten years ago, eat with ordinary people, and come out of it thinking “Wow, this system is really working out for everybody.” [Armstrong laughs] Who gets to eat, who doesn’t get to eat, what they’re eating—I mean, the food itself on the plate is usually the end result of a very long and often very painful story. I mean, is there a lot of food preservation, is there a lot of pickling? You know, certain countries, their cuisine very much reflects either a siege mentality, or abundance, or intermittent periods of difficulty. Also people just—if you go in not as a journalist but just as someone who’s asking simple questions like, “What do you like to eat? What makes you happy?” people tend to drop their defenses and tell you extraordinary things that are very revealing.

  ARMSTRONG: And where do you get this stuff—I mean, the production chain, and how you get all this food, tells you so much about how an economy functions, doesn’t it?

  BOURDAIN: Well, I think maybe the strongest example that snuck up on us when we were shooting in Egypt before the Arab Spring, we wanted to shoot a scene with fūl, which is the everyday food of working-class Cairo. And our fixers and local translators suddenly were all up in arms. “No no no, you must not shoot this. You can’t shoot fūl.” I said, “Wait, it’s ubiquitous, it’s everywhere. It’s not interesting.” We said, “No, we’d really like to shoot it.” They said “It’s forbidden. We’ll kick you out.”

  We ended up getting the shot anyway through various devious strategies, but I think what they were concerned about was they understood that it’s not just typical, it’s all there is to eat. And the army controlled, I guess, the flour supply, there’d been bread riots. And they were not so much worried about how it would look outside of the country, but the show is aired within the country, and I don’t think they wanted their own people seeing it. Particularly after an episode of the same show shot in France.

  ARMSTRONG: You fly into a country—especially for this show—you’re trying to sort of understand a new place, you’re trying to explain a new place to viewers like us. When you go to a place for the first time, you get off the plane, you go downtown, do you go high-end food? Do you go street meat?

  BOURDAIN: No, it’s what’s most typical. A good starting point is always the market, early morning markets. See what’s seasonal, what’s available, what people are buying. Also there are usually little food stalls that are serving people who work in the market. People talk to you in environments like that, generally in a good mood, open to try out their English if that’s interesting to them. Yeah, I’m not interested in high-end restaurants in general. Unless it’s something really unusual and extraordinary and new that says something in and of itself. That there’s an emerging haut-cuisine in Mexico, for instance, that’s really interesting to me. But generally speaking, no, that’s not what I’m looking at first.

  ARMSTRONG: And again, the markets sort of help you understand—you know, we were talking about Gaza off-air—that it’s the fishing is the primary thing, you know, the fish are coming in, that’s how people are making their living, that’s how people are, sort of, trading and making their way in the world.

  BOURDAIN: But, you know, as soon as you’re at the fish market—well, they’re getting their fish two ways. Within the one mile—I think it’s a mile limit—because if they go beyond a mile they risk getting their boat sunk. Or through the tunnels from Egypt. Already, the subject is fraught with peril. It’s extremely controversial. But it’s the sort of thing that, on my show, I get the comment to “Stick with food, man. We don’t want to hear politics from you. You’re a chef, you know, shut up, we don’t want your political opinion.” Okay, fair enough, but it’s difficult to not notice the elephant in the room. “How come you only have these fish?” “Well, we can’t go any further out to sea.” You know, “How come you’re missing two of your limbs in Laos?” “Well, you know, when I was a little boy, I was walking around in a field and stepped on one of the eight million tons of ordnance you guys left in my country.” Look, those are inescapable facts. How you choose to feel about them or interpret them, is up to you.

  ARMSTRONG: And your audience, certainly on the television show, has come to expect that, and to really sort of appreciate that it’s this guided tour that isn’t a political documentary about a world, but it’s a glimpse into a society. Is the book a similar vein, that you get to learn more about a place by cooking and by experiencing?

  BOURDAIN: This is more of when I’m not out there in the world. This is the little place that I keep for myself. It’s what I cook when I’m cooking for a nine year old and her friends, and when I’m cooking at home and sort of comforting myself and a few friends and family.

  ARMSTRONG: You said in an interview I read a couple days ago that you’ve changed your take on brunch as a result of having a kid.

  BOURDAIN: Well, I hated brunch because for many years of my life, for many low points in my professional career, when I was sort of unemployable by any reputable restaurant for various reasons, I could always get a brunch gig. Because restaurants are always desperate to find somebody to cook three hundred omelettes for drunks on Sunday morning, and that was me. And so the smell of eggs cooking and French toast was always the smell of shame and defeat and humiliation until I became a dad. And now, if I want the fast track to looking cool in front of my daughter’s friends, it’s make a pancake bar for them, you know, “Your choice: chocolate chip, blueberry, banana?”

  ARMSTRONG: [Laughing] What fun you can have, huh?

  BOURDAIN: Yeah.

  ARMSTRONG: I want to talk a bit about the TV industry and where you started and where it’s going now. You’ve been making these kinds of shows for a while and have had great success at them. What has changed over that period of time to where we are now?

  BOURDAIN: Well I can only really tell you what changed for me. I think there are certain hard and fast rules of television. CNN, unlike everyone else I’ve ever worked for, have never called me up and started a conversation with “How about,” or “
Have you thought about,” or “We’ve got an idea.” I have complete and total autonomy. I’m privileged to be able to go out there and make whatever shows I want wherever I want with zero interference.

  But I think my previous experiences with two other networks are that everyone on television who works in the television industry by and large lives in fear. And what they’re afraid of is that someday they won’t be on television. So they’re not gonna try anything new, because, well, they’ll say they want something new, but what they really mean is the same thing that worked last year. Because they don’t want to be the guy who’s stuck out there having proposed something that doesn’t work. Everybody kind of adheres to what worked last year. The engine of television on the creative side was always “Do what worked last week.” Which is exactly the opposite of what interests me, which is to never repeat what I did last week, whether people liked it or not. But I’m kind of a freak in the business, in that a) I’m not interested in doing the same thing, even if it worked, and b) you know, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to not be on television anymore.

  ARMSTRONG: That distance, I think, gives you great power in that relationship. But at the same time, does it give us a glimpse into where the art, the craft, and the business of television are going? There’s a success in this, and that, you know—emulate it people, get out there, follow this.

  BOURDAIN: It’s a shrinking industry. It’s an industry under tremendous pressure from the digital universe. And again, people are “We want something new and proactive and young and crazy and out there”—but not really.

  ARMSTRONG: “We don’t really want that.”

  BOURDAIN: “We want it to be just like what’s working over there, only our own watered-down version.” Or “We’re just gonna step back and stick with what we know always works.” And there are certain rules, particularly in the food travel space. You know, if you did every show of people shoving barbecue into their face, that’s gonna be a hit show.

  ARMSTRONG: My favorite quote about television was the old Hunter Thompson line about it’s the “shallow money trench.”* It is now, “If you’re going to do something as undignified as making television, it should be fun.” Which is a quote you gave to a colleague of mine at the Globe and Mail last week. Is it fun? Can you make television fun? And is that a sort of enduring lesson of making good television?

  BOURDAIN: I don’t know whether it’s a lesson of making good television, but incredibly enough, it’s worked for me. For me, the satisfaction of television is largely a technical one. It’s about how can we do this show differently, how can we push ourselves creatively—not just me, but my camera guys, the post-production, the sound mixers and sound designers, the editors—how can we do something different? How can we outdo ourselves? How can we do something strange and wonderful that will confuse and terrify our network?

  ARMSTRONG: Your show is largely about bridging cultures and learning more about someone else and somewhere else that maybe I’ll never go, or maybe now as a result of watching it I’ll get to go. Do you find yourself coming up on this growing sentiment of anti-immigration and xenophobia, these concerns about trade, the Trumps and Brexits, this rising sentiment in the world?

  BOURDAIN: I bump into it a lot. Look, I think if you travel as long as I have and as much as I have, and you meet as many people and spend time with them in countries that we’re supposed to hate and who are supposed to hate us, when you see how similar—and different, but mostly similar—people are, particularly when sitting around a table. It makes it very, very hard—when you see how the economies of the world are completely interdependent and interlocked, and the flow of money back and forth—it’s hard to come back and not be horrified and dismayed by the willful, I mean willful ignorance of the kind of conversation we’re having now, often by people who know better. You know, Trump has—so much of his interests rest abroad and are completely dependent on other countries. It’s ludicrous for him to on one hand take this very xenophobic, protectionist point of view, that would make it impossible for his businesses to continue.

  ARMSTRONG: Well, I’m afraid we have to leave it there, but thanks a lot for this conversation. It’s been a fascinating conversation.

  BOURDAIN: Thank you.

  * In his book Generation of Swine, Thompson said, “The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.”

  TELLING STORIES THROUGH FOOD ON PARTS UNKNOWN

  INTERVIEW WITH TREVOR NOAH

  THE DAILY SHOW WITH TREVOR NOAH

  JANUARY 17, 2018

  TREVOR NOAH: My guest tonight is a world-renowned chef, best-selling author and publisher, and host of the Emmy-winning CNN original series Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown. Please welcome, Anthony Bourdain!

  [Applause]

  Welcome to the show.

  ANTHONY BOURDAIN: Thank you. Good to be here.

  NOAH: I’ve been a fan of yours for so long, watching you travel around the world, and it was so amazing this week I guess it was, uh, perfect timing—CNN aired a bunch of your shows, Anthony Bourdain, specifically of you in Africa around the same time that the president was commenting on how these are “shithole countries.”

  BOURDAIN: Yeah, what a coincidence! [Laughing]

  NOAH: Right. You tweeted about the president saying “shithole countries.” Why did it affect you so much, why did it offend you so much?

  BOURDAIN: Because apparently I’ve wasted my life going to shitholes. I mean, I’ve spent 17 years travelling around to extraordinary places. I mean, the notion that people don’t work hard—clearly no one on his team has been to Nigeria, where people work like no one I’ve ever seen…It was just deeply, I mean, enraging, enraging to me because it’s a refutation of everything I’ve seen, experienced, all the people I’ve met, and everything I’ve done in the past 17 years.

  NOAH: Would you say that that’s something that has shaped your experiences, and shaped your world-view—travelling to these places? Because, I mean, for many people, in their defense, they see images of Africa and they go “Oh, that place doesn’t look great,” but on your show you have gone to, as you say, parts unknown, some of the most beautiful locations and unlikely destinations. Does it change how you see the people and the places?

  BOURDAIN: Yeah. I think Mark Twain said, that “travel is lethal to prejudice.” You know, the extent to which you can walk in another person’s shoes, to see how hard people work and struggle on a daily basis, even for very little…And the extent to which you see how much people do, how well things are going. I mean I love showing up in places thinking one thing, and having those expectations turned on their heads all the time. But then again, you know, I’m a fool. I think curiosity is a virtue [laughing] and that’s not something, uh…

  [Applause]

  NOAH: Let me ask you this. Just like, on a food-level, as a chef…What do you think America would be like if there were no food, if there were no foods, from any of these other countries?

  BOURDAIN: Well, to start with, good ol’ American Southern food as we know it, you know, classic Americana, wouldn’t exist. I mean, if you spend any time in Ghana, you see exactly where, you know, food that we tend to associate on Food Network with, you know, old white ladies, well, we learn this is African food!

  [Audience laughter]

  So, look, the history of the world is on your plate. Every plate of food is an expression of, often, a long struggle, a long story, and I guess that’s one of the satisfactions, one of the joys of travelling and eating as you find out who’s cooking, and why, and where these things come from. I mean, I grew up in the early sixties. American food then, your options were extremely limited. You know, so the more we have people from somewhere else
bringing their food chain, and ingredients, and traditions—life only gets better.

  NOAH: When you look at that statement, the food telling you a story about people, not just the people who are preparing it, but the people who are eating it, which I think is a beautiful statement, if someone was to eat cheeseburgers every day, all the time, what do you think that would say about them and their culinary tastes, as a person?

  BOURDAIN: 239 pounds, apparently.*

  [Audience laughter and applause]

  You know I think it’s worth noting, it is reported, that President Trump, in his year in Washington D.C, which is a very good restaurant town, has never been to any other restaurant than his steak house at the Trump Hotel—

  NOAH: Where he eats well done steaks, with ketchup.

  BOURDAIN: You’re hurting me.

  NOAH: I know, I know. I’m doing this on purpose

  BOURDAIN: That hurts. I am interested, though. Do you think he can use chopsticks?

  NOAH: That sounds like an insult…but it’s a valid question.

  BOURDAIN: I’d be curious to know.

  NOAH: If that was, like, on the test to determine whether or not you could be president, I think America might be calling him President Pence right now. Let’s move on and talk about the journey life has taken you on so far. Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown has taken you on many journeys. You know, you’ve grown as a person. One of the more painful, and I would think interesting journeys you’ve taken on your life just happened very recently in regards to the #MeTooMovement—