When I left New York and moved to Beirut, in 2003, I gave my best friend my copy of Anthony Bourdain?s Kitchen Confidential. The writing wasn?t fancy, but he captured a world I knew from working in dirty, drunk-infested diners: late nights, high stress, low pay; sleazy, harassing bosses and paranoid, cokehead co-workers; all of us cursing like sailors in the back of the house, and then acting like butter wouldn?t melt in our mouths in the front; using food, alcohol and other pleasure-inducing substances to get more out of the highs and just to keep going through the lows.
Most of all, Bourdain, who died in June at age 61, captured the exhausting and exhilarating rhythm of pouring all your heart into producing something that is gone the minute your customers consume it. And yet no matter how ephemeral and momentary the rush?whether it?s food or fame, television or celebrity, or the drug we call news?it?s something we can?t live without.
This cycle of ups and downs is not that different, in some ways, from war zone reporting. So it wasn?t entirely a surprise in the summer of 2006, at the height of a brief but bloody war between Israel and Lebanon?s militant Shiite group Hezbollah, to learn that the worlds of the kitchen and the war zone were colliding. ?You know the chef who wrote Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain?? my friend back in New York wrote to me. ?Little piece in the Daily News about his evacuation.?
Bourdain had been in Beirut to do an episode of his TV show, ?No Reservations.? Two days into his shoot, on July 13, Israel bombed the Beirut airport. He spent the next week holed up in a luxury hotel, watching the smoke rise from the city below. ?I was in love for two days and had my heart broken on the third,? he told reporters at the time.
On July 20, a week into the war,
he was evacuatedfrom Lebanon on a Navy transport ship carrying Americans to Cyprus. The war, which lasted 34 days, would eventually kill more than 1,200 people, the vast majority of them in Lebanon, and left that country littered with cluster munitions. The episode Bourdain had planned about Lebanon?s food had suddenly become one about war. ?We never got to show the world how beautiful this country and its people are,? he mourned. ?It is indeed heartbreaking and horrifying what has happened to this lovely country?to spanking new, lovingly restored, resurgent Beirut in particular, in only a few days of sustained and seemingly senseless destruction.?
The trip to Beirut was a turning point for Bourdain. ?I came away from the experience deeply embittered, confused?and determined to make television differently than I?d done before,?
he wrote later. ?Our Beirut experience did not give me delusions of being a journalist. I just saw that there were realities beyond what was on my plate, and those realities almost inevitably informed what was?or was not?for dinner. To ignore them now seemed monstrous.?
If he wasn?t a journalist?and I?m not so sure?he became something more than just a celebrity chef. His shows began to gravitate away from simply showing exotic foods in far-off places to using food to show us a truer picture of the world. Instead of sensationalizing or exoticizing other countries through food, he used it to show Americans the humanity of people we had been taught to hate.
In Laos, Bourdain would use dinner to demonstrate the deadly cost of the millions of unexploded cluster munitions the United States had left behind in its nine-year secret war there. In Gaza, with The Gaza Kitchen cookbook co-author Laila El-Haddad as his guide, he atemaqlubeh, a traditional dish of chicken or meat cooked in rice, with a Palestinian family who worried that they were being rude because the camera crew wasn?t eating. ?They?ll eat later, it?s because of the filming,? El-Haddad told them in Arabic, in one of the many subtle and beautifully human moments that Bourdain captured on his show.
In Iran, Bourdain found a brilliant way to sum up the country?s turbulent 20th century: as a fairytale, told in the voice of a child, of an ancient kingdom with ?magical black stuff under the ground? that other countries wanted. Cue black-and-white newsreel footage of Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt; Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran?s former prime minster; Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who led the country?s 1979 Islamic revolution; and the Americans held hostage in Tehran beginning that same year.
?Let?s assume the worst,? Bourdain said in Iran, to Washington Post correspondent Jason Rezaian. ?Let?s assume that you cannot see any way to reconcile what you think of Iran with your own personal beliefs. That you just generally don?t approve. I think those are exactly the sort of places you should go.?
?I think it?s almost un-American not to go to those places,? Rezaian responded.
A few weeks later, the Iranian government arrested Rezaian and his wife on trumped-up charges of espionage. ?I am, unfortunately, growing used to seeing bad things happening to good people,?
Bourdain wrote in a heartfelt article for the Post. ?But this I can?t get used to, or ever understand.?
How long can you spend watching senseless destruction before it starts to get to you? How many times can you have your heart broken before the rest of you starts to crack? We all have different answers to that. Everybody?s breaking point is different. We may never know why Bourdain took his life. Maybe we don?t need to know.
What made Bourdain great was that he kept reminding us it wasn?t just about him: He used his platform on TV and in print to speak up for people he felt had gotten a raw deal?people who, in a more just world, would have the opportunity to speak up for themselves. ?The world has visited many terrible things on the Palestinian people, none more shameful than robbing them of their basic humanity,? he said in 2014, in his acceptance speech for an award from the Muslim Public Affairs Council.
He came back to Beirut twice: once in 2010, and again in 2015. The Beirut episodes weren?t perfect; they lapsed into
stereotypes and
macho clich?s, as several Lebanese writers noted at the time. But, like his early book Kitchen Confidential, they succeeded in showing us a world we wouldn?t otherwise have seen?even though it?s our own.
I learned of Bourdain?s passing from a Lebanese friend. He did, in the end, get to show the world how beautiful that country and its people were, not to mention so many other countries, and people all over the world loved him for it.
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
