"In a perfect world, individuals would be free to take all the heroin they wanted – and stuff their faces with trans fats as much as they like – until it becomes a problem for their neighbors. Which it clearly has."Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw (via fortuneandglory)
"I have long believed that it is only right and appropriate that before one sleeps with someone, one should be able – if called upon to do so – to make them a proper omelet in the morning. Surely that kind of civility and selflessness would be both good manners and good for the world."Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw (via fortuneandglory)
(Source: amazon.com)
"It’s a cultural thing. And that intersection of what makes food possible to me is the most central part of why we do what we do - to examine that question and be able to tell stories about a culture through the food to me is what it’s all about. I am obsessed with food and with eating. … So to have the opportunity to sit on, you know, in a street corner in a suburb of Louisiana and have a Vietnamese grandpa make me duck blood pizza the same way his grandparents made it for him when he was a kid in Dien Bien Phu is to me what a food life is all about."Andrew Zimmern on the importance of food in understanding different cultures. (via fortuneandglory)
(Source: blogcritics.org)
"Sweating through your shirt, resisting the urge to double over in pain, you begin to understand. Pain - followed by relief. Burn, followed by a pleasing, anesthetizing numbess. It’s like being spanked and licked at the same time. … At no point in your youthful misadventures would the offer of even playful discomfort have appealed … Pain, you were pretty sure, was always bad. Pleasure was good. Until now, that is. When everything started to get confused."
I have never really been able to explain why it is I subject myself to foods that cause physical pain. I’m talking burn-my-nostrils, make-me-cry pain. Why?
When I was eleven years old, I had my first extra sloppy, extra spicy chicken wing from a local pizza joint - mild by my current standards, but excruciatingly painful to a child who grew up in a salt and pepper only household. A friend of my older brother - Steven was his name, five years older yet never treating me like an inferior or annoyance as so many of my brother’s other friends did as I tried so desperately to butt my way into the teenage world - brought them over on a Friday night after a football game and asked if I was interested in having some. “They’re damn hot,” he warned me, and I did not hesitate to prove my worth, to show him that I was just as much of a hardass as the rest of them, scrawniness be damned. Those wings burnt - and I panted my way through eating a half dozen, sauce dripping from my fingers, my chin - but they burnt so good. I was hooked.
Soon, my teenage love affair with jalapeno, serrano, and habanero peppers took off. Exploring atomic and suicide sauces with mandatory waivers became a priority. Middle school lunch competitions to see who could bring in and eat the spiciest sauce without blinking or taking a drink became a weekly occurrence.
Nowadays, my more subdued adult self still has an addiction to adding ingredients which cause burning sensations and when asked, I have never really been able to explain it to friends and family. Reading Bourdain’s Medium Raw tonight, I think he did a damn fine job of explaining why it is those of us who love spicy foods enjoy it so much.
(via fortuneandglory)
Anthony Bourdain’s Worst Meals
- A Snickers bar at the airport. It was slightly past its expiration date and had the flavor and texture of peanuts preserved in wax. It nearly strangled me as it descended my gullet and it just sort of sat there, choking off my digestive process with its corporate nougat.
- A Big Mac eaten between shoots at a Cardiff McDonald’s. It was a greasy, fatty, and grayish-brown lump of wet meat slathered in mustard-colored sauce I’m guessing was produced from industrial solvents by a machine that has to be water-cooled. You truly get the sense of America’s reach when you’re gulping down poorly-cooked American beef covered in American processed cheese substance while a doughy man with rat eyes yells at you in Cymraeg.
- Skittles? I don’t know what a Skittle is, but it tastes like iodine and corn syrup. They are the sort of miserable pellets that sink to the bottom of an Easter basket when you’re a kid and you don’t even care enough to untangle them from the grass. Handed to me by my guide, Zyrikikov, during a truck stall on a particularly treacherous mountain road.
- There was a Taco Bell at the bus terminal in Trblej. I had something called a “Mexi-Melt” that I assume is a rough approximation of what you would get if you used a heat ray to melt a Mexican. With cheese. It did not mix well with the homemade vodka I drank from a surplus military boot.
- A so-called “BK Broiler” at a Rangoon Burger King. I think “BK” is an element forgotten on the periodic table, something mined very close to hell, that they then “broil” in a microwave until all of the juices have been replaced with gristle nodules. The sandwich was so appallingly bad it made me homesick for an Arby’s pile of wet sheets of beef paper on a soggy bun.
(Source: somethingawful.com)
(Source: fonzyd)
"Everything was different now. Everything. I’d not only survived - I’d enjoyed. This, I knew, was the magic I had until now been only dimly and spitefully aware of. I was hooked. My parents’ shudders, my little brother’s expression of unrestrained revulsion and amazement only reinforced the sense that I had, somehow, become a man. I had had an adventure, tasted forbidden fruit, and everything that followed in my life - the food, the long and often stupid and self-destructive chase for the next thing, whether it was drugs or sex or some other new sensation - would all stem from this moment."Anthony Bourdain on eating his first oyster as a child - from his memoir Kitchen Confidential. (via fortuneandglory)
