Loved his series until he visited my hometown and completely misrepresented it. I get his style was anti establishment and mainstream, but he ended up hanging out with the wrong crowd in town, one of them known for being a fraudster, a spoiled child running bad restaurant after bad restaurant. Somehow these guys managed to be featured in the show as the progressive minds of local cuisine. It made me question everything else I have watched from Bourdain.
I had the same sense. I can see why people like the shows, but to me there's a subtle arrogance to the rich, white American guy just holding court everywhere he goes and explaining local matters as if he's an expert. The food aspect of his shows was often secondary.
> I had the same sense. I can see why people like the shows, but to me there's a subtle arrogance to the rich, white American guy just holding court everywhere he goes and explaining local matters as if he's an expert. The food aspect of his shows was often secondary.
My most memorable moment from the show was when Bourdain visited some poor farmer to see how they were harvesting yuca (or maybe yams, I forgot) and he went into the typical (I am paraphrasing) "oh look, this is the life, so perfect being one with nature, etc...". And the farmer shut him up pretty quickly with something like "How about a trade: you stay here and farm yams in the rain, in the perfect unity with the nature, and I go to live in your apartment in New York?"
Jon Krakauer pointed something similar out in relation to the native people around Everest attaining a higher quality of life (and thus more Western lifestyle) as more and more commercial Everest expeditions started happening.
Climbing tourists would be complaining that the local culture was being destroyed and that the huts they would visit would have the local kids be wearing, say, a fashion shirt and the huts themselves had amenities like a heater instead of burning dung for heat.
Basically, wealthy climber tourists wanted these people to live in stasis in a lifestyle of poverty just so the atmosphere of quaint mountain life was maintained for them. Almost like an open-air museum.
I think there's a more charitable way to interpret their perspective, as well as that of Bourdain. Climbing Everest is pain, suffering, and a fairly significant chance at death. And practically speaking, to even try to do it in modern times you generally need to be wealthy. So why are these people doing it? Because wealth doesn't provide contentment or satisfaction in life in and of itself. It's people searching for a meaning and purpose in life.
And so when you see people who live lives that are indeed much harder, but for whom there seems to be true meaning and purpose, there's going to be some major internal conflicts in seeing them striving to push that away to pursue something that one knows leads to just vapidness and emptiness in the end. Obviously you might argue that wealth need not trend towards the end of culture, but scarce is the society with a rich culture and a rich economy. Does it even exist?
Like don't you see a paradox in effectively equating a higher quality of life and a more Western lifestyle, when in the West a vast (and rising) percent of people are drugged out on various psychotropic pharmaceuticals just to make it through day to day. Yet look at poorer cultures and it's not like 1 in 6 people are walking around with untreated mental conditions - they simply seem to be far healthier from a mental, to say nothing of physical, perspective.
So I think wealth and quality of life have a far more nuanced relationship than most appreciate. And the ostensible subset relationship (a rich man can easily become poor if he so chooses, but the other way around is much more difficult) is not so simple. Many people are endlessly addicted to things that they genuinely believe make their life worse, and that they could easily cast away, yet find it difficult to do so. See: social media. And obviously casting away wealth is going to be many orders of magnitude more difficult than something like social media.
It's always funny when I watch stuff about some foreigner visiting my home country and they either focus on something not all that important, or get something completely wrong.
The funniest part is trying to present some dish as "traditional" that everyone here eats, while it's some super niche thing only one region does, occasionally, if you have grandma that remembers how to make it
If you only eat it when you have a grandma that remembers how to make it, I would consider that the very definition of "traditional". And also interesting to hear about!
(But yea, perhaps not "everyone here eats" in that case. And yet, if everyone knew what it was -- even if it's "what grandma used to eat" -- I'd even let that slide. I don't eat what my grandparents ate, but I know more about it than a foreigner.)
He probably didn’t personally vet the politics behind each person, the production team would’ve organised it in advance and he just turns up and goes along with it. That being said it’s still grounds to be skeptical of his shows. Also, please tell us your town
The production crew would have used "fixers" to get insight into good locations for filming and other things of interest. Whatever fixer they used was probably just friends of and/or part of this "wrong" crowd. Bourdain and his producers made a lot of shows over the years, some are going to be better produced while others are flawed. How it goes. Bourdain and his team weren't perfect — doesn't make them inauthentic at a wider perspective.
Not only this, but depending on which season of which show of his, there may have been other reasons for why spots were chosen. For instance there was at least one season of No Reservations where episodes were themed with the location as a backdrop. The episode he had in my hometown caused a lot of locals to complain that he wasn't choosing the best spots, but the point was the whole episode was a narrative and the spots chosen fit the narrative.
I wish he sticked to food, his only expertise. His Newfoundland episode in Parts Unknown is the best and most tasty piece of television I have ever watched. Why is that good? Guess what, he brought on his pals that are great chefs from that place.
I appreciate that must have been difficult. If you could set the record straight, where would you have taken him? Love to hear your reccos and thoughts!
Maybe it's just the similarity in appearance and cause of death to Carradign and Epstein making me see patterns that aren't there, but I cannot watch a Bourdain clip without getting the sense something is deeply wrong.
