01c. 1987 ADYou have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money, and your time in cheese.Anthony Bourdain / quote ↗
02c. 1987 ADI wanted to write in Kitchenese, the secret language of cooks, instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever dunked french fries for a summer job or suffered under the despotic rule of a tyrannical chef or boobish owner.Anthony Bourdain / quote ↗
03c. 1987 ADEarly moralists who believed that taking too much pleasure at the table led inexorably to bad character-or worse, to sex-were (in the best-case scenario, anyway) absolutely right.Anthony Bourdain / quote ↗
04c. 1987 ADDo we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonalds? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria's mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.Anthony Bourdain / quote ↗
05c. 1987 ADIf you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go.Anthony Bourdain / quote ↗
06c. 1987 ADThe journey is part of the experience - an expression of the seriousness of one's intent. One doesn't take the A train to Mecca.Anthony Bourdain / quote ↗
07c. 1987 ADO enchanted land of my childhood, a cultural petri dish from which regularly issues forth greatness. New Jersey, in case you didn't know it, has got beaches. And they're not all crawling with roid-raging trolls with reality shows. I grew up summering on those beaches and they are awesome. Jersey's got farmland, beautiful bedroom communities where that woman from "Real Housewives" who looks like Dr. Zaius does not live nor anyone like her. Even the refineries, the endless cloverleaves of turnpikes and expressway twisting and unknowable patterns over the wetlands that are to me somehow beautiful. To know Jersey is to love her.Anthony Bourdain / quote ↗
08c. 1987 ADLooking at these photographs, I know that I will never understand the world I live in or fully know the places I've been. I've learned for sure only what I don't know - and how much I have to learn.Anthony Bourdain / quote ↗
09c. 1987 ADI’m a big believer in winging it. I’m a big believer that you’re never going to find perfect city travel experience or the perfect meal without a constant willingness to experience a bad one. Letting the happy accident happen is what a lot of vacation itineraries miss, I think, and I’m always trying to push people to allow those things to happen rather than stick to some rigid itinerary.Anthony Bourdain / quote ↗
10c. 1987 ADIt’s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after,you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you’ve been and whats happened. In the end, you’re just happy you were there- with your eyes open- and lived to see it.Anthony Bourdain / quote ↗
11c. 1987 ADIf I'm an advocate for anything, it's to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else's shoes or at least eat their food, it's a plus for everybody.Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.Anthony Bourdain / quote ↗
12c. 1987 ADFood is everything we are. It's an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It's inseparable from those from the get-go.Anthony Bourdain / quote ↗
13c. 1987 ADyour body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.Anthony Bourdain / quote ↗
14c. 1987 ADVegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans ... are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit.Anthony Bourdain / quote ↗
15c. 1987 ADI've long believed that good food, good eating, is all about risk. Whether we're talking about unpasteurized Stilton, raw oysters or working for organized crime 'associates,' food, for me, has always been an adventureAnthony Bourdain / quote ↗
16c. 1987 ADVegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter-faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It's healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I've worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold. Oh, I'll accomodate them, I'll rummage around for something to feed them, for a 'vegetarian plate', if called on to do so. Fourteen dollars for a few slices of grilled eggplant and zucchini suits my food cost fine.Anthony Bourdain / quote ↗
17c. 1987 ADWe know, for instance, that there is a direct, inverse relationship between frequency of family meals and social problems. Bluntly stated, members of families who eat together regularly are statistically less likely to stick up liquor stores, blow up meth labs, give birth to crack babies, commit suicide, or make donkey porn. If Little Timmy had just had more meatloaf, he might not have grown up to fill chest freezers with Cub Scout parts.Anthony Bourdain / quote ↗
19c. 1987 ADI lurched away from the table after a few hours feeling like Elvis in Vegas - fat, drugged, and completely out of it.Anthony Bourdain / quote ↗
20c. 1987 ADTo me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living.Anthony Bourdain / quote ↗
21c. 1987 ADThat without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things, we shall surely become static, repetitive, moribund.Anthony Bourdain / quote ↗
22c. 1987 ADIn another telling anomaly of the meat-grinding business, many of the larger slaughterhouses will sell their product only to grinders who agree to not test their product for E. coli contamination--until after it's run through a grinder with a whole bunch of other meat from other sources...It's like demanding of a date that she have unprotected sex with four or five other guys immediately before sleeping with you--just so she can't point the finger directly at you should she later test positive for clap.Anthony Bourdain / quote ↗
23c. 1987 ADFor a moment, or a second, the pinched expressions of the cynical, world-weary, throat-cutting, miserable bastards we've all had to become disappears, when we're confronted with something as simple as a plate of food.Anthony Bourdain / quote ↗
24c. 1987 ADA sampler of England's hottest 'chefs' would include a mostly hairless young blond lad named Jamie Oliver, who is referred to as the Naked Chef. As best as I can comprehend, he's a really rich guy who pretends he scoots around on a Vespa, hangs out in some East End cold-water flat, and cooks green curry for his 'mates'. He's a TV chef, so few actually eat his food. I've never seen him naked. I believe the 'Naked' refers to his 'simple, straightforward, unadorned' food; though I gather that a great number of matronly housewives would like to believe otherwise. Every time I watch his show, I want to go back in time and bully him at school.Anthony Bourdain / quote ↗
