Entering the unknown: Education through travel
What Anthony Bourdain taught us about humanity
"Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life―and travel―leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks―on your body or on your heart―are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt." - Anthony Bourdain
To truly understand a place, you have to go there. Not to the tourist spots, but to where the locals dine and spend their leisure. Books and YouTube videos can tell you much about a place, but they only provide a snapshot. To get a fuller picture, you need to spend time with and talk to the locals in the midst of their day-to-day lives. Anthony Bourdain understood this. He used the preparation and enjoyment of food, a daily ritual and necessity enjoyed by all humans, as a gateway to learn about people and cultures. As Bourdain puts it, "when someone is offering you food, they are telling you a story: what they like, who they are. Presumably it's a proud reflection of their culture, their history, often a very tough history." Bourdain, through a myriad of outlets, most recently the television show Parts Unknown, provided the masses with an education on food and culture, but more specifically, on humanity by simply asking the questions: What do you like to eat? What is your life like? What makes you happy? He opened the door to the joys and struggles of every-day people—people who may experience the world differently, but otherwise are just like you and me.
Bourdain's education began in the kitchen.
He became enamored by the restaurant business during his first kitchen job as a dishwasher. There, he learned to show up on time, show respect for colleagues, and make good on his word. The kitchen brigade was the first organization and the first people whose respect he wanted, and after a hard days work as a dishwasher, it was the first time the self-admittedly lazy and disenfranchised Bourdain went home feeling respect for himself. Restaurant life prized hard work, produced immediate rewards and punishment, engendered respect, and gave him a sense of camaraderie. It was a subculture that he wanted to be a part of. Because of that first kitchen job, he dropped out of college, attended culinary school, and launched a career in the restaurant business. His education on humanity came later, when he left the kitchen to eat his way around the world.
Bourdain sought to understand the essence of a place. Not by visiting establishments ordinarily showcased on typical travel and food network shows, rather by trying to uncover what life is like for residents and what drives them. He patronized a 50-year-old dive bar in Chicago, the Ale House,—not the Chicago blues scene, Italian beef joints, or abusive hot dog stands, and "sure as shit" not deep dish pizza establishments—to get a feel for the notoriously hard-working city of big shoulders. He visited the Philippines to illuminate where the fun-loving caregivers of the world come from. He showcased where many of the cooks of America's restaurant kitchens come from in Puebla, Mexico. And he found locals in Hawaii who would disabuse him of the notion that everyone is living in paradise. Instead, he learned that Hawaii is simultaneously the most and least American state in America: "It’s Main Street America in so many ways—socially conservative, family oriented, fairly straight laced in its appetites, suspicious of outsiders, and shot through with all the usual suspects of American business you’d want and need and expect from Wasilla to Waco to St. Paul. And it’s also, deliriously, deliciously, not American at all: its spine, its DNA, its soul, the descendants of warrior watermen."
The people who work, often tirelessly, to propel cities and states forward often go unheard, therefore we, the outsiders looking in, rarely hear from them or understand their struggles. Our understanding of their world is filtered through journalists, those who drop in, ask a few pointed questions about a specific issue, and then helicopter out with a story filtered through their lens in hand. Bourdain was not a journalist. He achieved access to the lives of real, every-day people and got them to open up by accepting their food without judgement. By dining with an open mind and heart, he showed that he was "visibly grateful and appreciative of what is offered [...], even if very poor or by our standards, very unusual." Letting his guard down in this way and stepping out of his comfort zone allowed him to gain a sense of perspective and offered an opportunity to walk in someone else's shoes. The virtues of mercy, humility, curiosity, and empathy guided his education on humanity, as did his understanding that you can never be too certain about anything. In fact, Bourdain abhorred certainty. Instead, he recognized that when you leave the familiar and enter the unknown, "you’re almost always the stupidest person in the room."
This attitude set him apart from other observers of humanity, and it permitted him—mentally and physically—to visit places that far too many people dismiss, such as coal and gun country America. Much of his life traveling was spent abroad and Bourdain wondered: Why do we cut people in other countries slack but we don't do that in our own country? Why do we acknowledge "that's just how it is here" in other places, but don't extend the same grace to our neighbors? Even as a self-described "cynical, born and bred, citified lefty," he knew there was something to respect, and perhaps love, about people who live life differently, and he wanted his audience to recognize this as well. The West Virginia episode of Parts Unknown in particular was "a plea for understanding of the people whose personal histories, sense of pride, independence, and daunting challenges deserve respect." When talking about places like West Virginia, there is a sense on the part of urbanites and political liberals that the working class, when they elect Republicans, are voting against their interests. Bourdain flipped the narrative, or at least sought to, by showing that the residents of coal country are not naïve, and that their identities, aspirations, and situations are far more complex, and their needs more immediate—"like the difference between dinner on the table tomorrow and no dinner." They are proud of where they come from and often struggle to survive just like many others, from the political Left and Right, across the U.S.
He did the same for people living in Libya, New Mexico, and Senegal. He chose many locations precisely because he wanted his audience to get a sense of who pundits and politicians are talking about when they talk about those people—those hunters who fight for their right to own guns, or those Muslims who are banned from travel to the U.S.—because it is "useful to see them with their kids, to see how their everyday lives are, doing seemingly ordinary things, or trying to do ordinary things." He thought that by seeing their humanity, his audience would have a little more empathy, be a little bit more humble about what they know, and be a little bit more open minded about different ways of living, even if they ultimately disagree.
And Bourdain wanted his audience to understand that the people of a country are not the same as the government. That the decision made by political leaders do not always reflect the aspirations of the people. And that one can be simultaneously fiercely patriotic and critical of their government. What newscasters say, and the footage they show, do not necessarily represent local conditions or the hopes and dreams of the people living there. Bourdain found that you can stand in front of a giant, snarling mural that reads “DEATH TO AMERICA!” in Iran and "be treated better by strangers—meaning smiles, offers of assistance, curious attempts to engage in limited English, greetings and expressions of general good will—than anywhere in Western Europe." You can read about the horrors of communism and the necessary fight to curtail it in Southeast Asia and be angry about the destruction of the cities and lives of people in Cambodia in the name of that effort. You can visit poisoned and denuded Montana to witness the excesses of capitalism and view Butte as "a testament to generations of hard work, innovation and the aspirations of generations of people from all over the world who traveled to Montana to tunnel deep into the earth in search of gold and then copper, a better life for themselves and their families." You can hear talk about, and find despicable, the corruption in New Jersey and "watch one lone woman’s struggle in Camden to take back, one block and one child at a time, a city she grew up in, loves fiercely and won't let go of." Essentially, you can walk away from a human story with the understanding that nothing is black and white, life is full of shades of grey.
Mark Twain famously made this case for travelling to foreign lands: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” Bourdain agreed with Twain and heeded his advice. And for those who lack the luxury to travel to distant lands, he brought the world to their living room. He was legendary for this reason. I venture to guess that he changed the way many viewed the world, both those who are content with staying in one place and the globetrotters. Food was the centerpiece of Bourdain's education on humanity because it brings people together, and in many ways, explains who we are—our heritage, our culture, and how we understand the world. He gave deference to those who make the most out of what's available, not the the food of the bourgeois in big-city kitchens. And because those are the people and food he sought to understand, he gifted the world an education about real people, the common man. An education most rarely received.
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