CNN
In the days and weeks to come, there will be words upon words poured out to remember Anthony Bourdain. He’ll be eulogized with phrases like “bad boy chef,” “travel guru,” and “raconteur,” all meant to sum up the work of a man who lived an incredibly colorful life. Writers, TV hosts, and friends will do their best to distill his essence, a difficult task that’s only made more impossible when attempted by those overwhelmed with grief. All the words will wind their way to the same conclusion, the largest conclusion possible: The man lived.
That is, perhaps, the best compliment that can be given to Anthony Bourdain. He roared through life like a wildfire raging through a forest. He crackled with wit. He burnt with passion — hot and loud and untameable — for food, for travel, for culture, for… all of it. Across the various incarnations of his TV shows, in his books, and in scores of interviews and public appearances, the message always was: “There is so much living to do; so much world to see!” And that overarching theme, which can easily slip into the realm of pop-psych platitudes, had teeth thanks to the man delivering it.
Bourdain was always achingly real with us, blatantly imperfect, and terribly clear-sighted about his successes and his failures. As a result, we trusted his message deeply. Yes, we loved him as our adventurous avatar — eating pig anuses one day and sharing soup with the president of the United States the next — but we also loved him as our life coach. His voice sliced through to the news cycle to remind us not to let our biases keep us from experiencing beauty. We loved him not in spite of his flaws, but because of them. They were all part of a big-hearted man — one who’d overcome all sorts of well-documented hardships — who was leading an even bigger life.
We knew him, we felt, and the greatest gift we could give back was never trying to tame him.
CNN
As a travel writer, it’s impossible to ignore the impact and influence of Anthony Bourdain. Early in my career, when I created an interview series called “How I Travel” for BootsNAll, he granted us a conversation between shoots — instantly legitimizing a column which had struggled to score premier names. When I arrived at Uproxx, he gave us an interview before the season six premiere of Parts Unknown, jumpstarting our ability to enter the food and travel conversations. In airports, hostels, and restaurants, almost every time I spoke about being a travel and food writer I’d invariably hear, “Like Anthony Bourdain?” — to which the only reasonable response was, “Well, sort of… but less successful.”
“I just love him,” people always seemed eager to tell me. “Isn’t he the best?”
They said this — and I have literally hundreds of memories to pull from here — with their eyes sparkling. As if speaking about a mutual friend, someone we alone shared the special joy of knowing, not an internationally renowned celebrity. In the travel community, Bourdain was ours. A man famous for living everyone’s dream, vagabonding around the world eating and drinking, and doing it all better than we ever could.
Still, I never fully fathomed the “Bourdain effect” until I met my partner, who had come to the United States as an Iranian refugee. We connected over a love of travel and, on our first date, she brought up Parts Unknown. She was eager to talk about the show, sure that a rabid fandom was something we shared. My response burst her bubble.
“The truth is,” I said, “I get so jealous of him, I want so badly what he has, that his shows are hard for me to watch.”
She paused to consider this, then replied, “Okay, I get that, but you have to watch the episode about Iran with me, promise?” I agreed, eager for a second date. When I met her parents, they also asked about Bourdain and highlighted that episode. So did her cousins, in-laws, and best friend.
As I grew more involved with her family, and our discussions finally turned to world affairs, I finally got what Bourdain had given them. They were from a country that was quickly written off by most Americans as war-torn and intolerant, part of the infamous “Axis of Evil.” There was violence in Iran, of course — they’d literally come to the country to escape it — but it was also their home, and people are ferociously proud of their homes. My partner had grown up in the United States having to convince people that the place she came from was more than just war, more than terrorism, more than dictators. It was also long afternoon teas. It was ghormeh sabzi and tahdig. It was song and dance and laughter.
For Iranians, living in America, Bourdain had been a bridge, helping people gain a more nuanced understanding of the country they loved deeply. Now, when they met people, it was common to hear, “Oh, Iran! I’ve wanted to go there since seeing that episode of Parts Unknown.”
That’s what Bourdain gave to so many cultures that had been marginalized, and finally realizing it turned me into a fan despite the petty jealousy I held inside for him. He widened the lens of the all-too-often myopic American people. He challenged us to see nations as more than the actions of their governments (something we in the United States always ask for but rarely offer in return). With easy charm and cutting wit, he highlighted beauty in the world. He was the enemy to casual stereotyping; always at war with lazily drawn conclusions.
In telling stories — and choosing which stories to tell at which moment with the precision of a surgeon — Bourdain made us think differently about food and culture. More importantly, he made us think differently about one another and what it means to share a world. That’s an enormous feat.
CNN
It has long been said that travel is the enemy of prejudice, and prejudice is born out of fear. Anthony Bourdain knew this and his mission always underscored this fact. Whether he was eating foods that sounded strange to the Western palate or stepping into war zones, he urged us not to be afraid of the unknown. Instead, he wanted us to rejoice in it.
“We liked movies with subtitles in my house,” he told Vogue of his childhood in 2016. “That meant something. The ‘other’ wasn’t bad or frightening. It was interesting.”
That doesn’t mean that the man was willing to stick his head in the sand for the sake of optimism. Before he was a TV host, he was a writer — of both fiction and non-fiction — and always approached his subjects with a journalist’s rigor. In a world where stars have to be able to pitch their brand in a sentence, he refused to be anything but complex.
“Life is complicated,” he said in the same Vogue profile. “It’s filled with nuance. It’s unsatisfying… If I believe in anything, it is doubt. The root cause of all life’s problems is looking for a simple fucking answer.”
This quote seems to speak to both the public and private lives of a man who clearly had so much and yet took his own life. It’s very human yet perfectly impossible to speculate on the demons Bourdain struggled with when he was alone, but anyone who’s seen any of his shows knows that the refusal to look for simple answers is what made him so very good. He understood the world because he never tried to be reductive about it. His conclusions, journaled in hotel rooms and shared in voiceover narration, were open-ended. They rarely overreached but they were always, always brimming with hope.
That’s Anthony Bourdain as best I know: He was an enemy to fear and a lighthouse keeper of hope. Perhaps, not for humanity at large (he famously said that he was “not optimistic about the human race”), but certainly hope for individuals who come together to build communities and who, in doing so, go on to build a world. Hope that by eating with each other, trading stories, and sharing culture we could begin to understand each other better.
Bourdain’s message — to fight fear and find joy in “the other” — might very well be the most important pursuit of our divisive era. Today, the world has lost one of its greatest flag-bearers for that mission. It’s why his death feels so deeply painful for so many, and why this world will miss him so very much.
CNN
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