F**k Anthony Bourdain

Everybody reading this is likely aware of Anthony Bourdain’s first book, Kitchen Confidential, in which he exposed some of the – pardon the pun – less savory aspects of the food prep world. In it, he discussed everything from how old that piece of meat you ordered might be (Monday fish no es bueno) to the lurking personal dangers in a profession that was, until recently, very much behind-the-scenes only.

Bourdain was not really on my radar until his second book, Medium Raw, came out in the summer of 2010. It was a promotional excerpt from that book that gave me a true first impression of the man, and it wasn’t good. (See? I didn’t write he left a bad taste in my mouth. Second obvious food pun successfully avoided.)

Here’s that excerpt:

“Nobody will tell you this, but I will: If you’re thirty-two years old and considering a career in professional kitchens? If you’re wondering if, perhaps, you are too old? Let me answer that question for you: Yes. You are too old.”

My immediate reaction to this was a visceral fuck you! Here was a man in his fifties, who had gone from habitual drug user to kitchen staff to chef to writer to TV star over the course of roughly twenty years, arrogantly telling other people what career paths they should avoid. Fuck you.

As I sit writing this, I am in the middle of a career change at the age of fifty. I’ve long wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t pursue it seriously in my younger years. Now, I have time and energy and focus enough to work hard at it. No other person can know the levels of passion or talent that any person at any age might possess in order to achieve a dream, at any scale.

So it appears that sixty-one is the new thirty-two. The headlines this morning on most major news outlets were of Anthony Bourdain’s suicide (supplanting the news of Kate Spade’s suicide only days ago).

As Diana Morales from “A Chorus Line” sang: I felt nothing.

Well, at first, I felt nothing. Now, I just feel a seething anger. Here’s a man that may have squashed the dreams of an unknowable number of would-be chefs with a flippant paragraph in a second-rate book that likely sold only due to the author’s celebrity status. Some may have attributed such statements to his “acerbic wit”. I say it’s just plain conceit, bordering on bullying. Bourdain muscled others out of his field to make sure they would believe he was exceptional. Then when he was done with it all, he didn’t even have the balls to retire like the rest of us. He killed himself.

I absolutely have compassion for the mentally ill. The idea that someone has a potentially treatable condition – be it viral, bacterial, or psychological in origin – that instead leads to their death is horrifying. If I’m wrong, and we find that, like Robin Williams, Bourdain was suffering from Lewy Body Dementia, or had been recently diagnosed with some other incurable disease, I could cut him some slack. No one, not even a pompous naysayer, deserves that. But I hold out very little hope that there was some kind of disease or chemical imbalance that brought Bourdain to take his own life. I think this was an act of pure arrogance, of control. He was going to prove to everyone that he lived – and ended – life on his own terms. Alive or dead, he disregarded the ripples, waves, and tsunamis his words and actions left in their wake.

I imagine that if he could author a book in the afterlife, it would encourage others to follow his path and just give up on anything once they’ve surpassed Anthony Bourdain’s arbitrarily selected appropriate age.

Here’s a toast to the fact such a book can never be written.