Truth Telling in A Cook's Tour

Throughout "A Cook's Tour" by Anthony Bourdain, I couldn't help but laugh at how Bourdain directly addresses the reader. I truly appreciated how he broke the fourth wall and told the reader how it is. This is in part thanks to the nature of memoir, and the fact that this is a first-person account of food and travel.

My first interaction with this kind of writing is found under the header "Full Disclosure". Bourdain starts with, "Here's the part where I reluctantly admit to something about which I'm deeply conflicted -- even ashamed. I'd lie about it if I could. But you're probably going to find out about it anyway, so here's a little preemptive truth telling..." (12). He goes on to explain how during his travels he had two people follow him with cameras. Initially this isn't what he wanted, but he went along for it. It would be good for the book, they'd say. Perhaps it was a necessary evil, always being on call. Bourdain says, "I had, you see, sold my soul to the devil" (12). This honesty is repeated heavily in sections titled, "Reasons Why You Don't Want To Be On TV".

Bourdain's voice made me feel welcomed into this text, and as if we were on the same level. Some books like this give off an air of entitlement that I am not a fan of, so I was happily surprised when the speaking voice came off as approachable and imperfect. The direct voice caught my attention early on, and made reading about the festivities described in "Where Food Comes From" a little easier to digest. Bourdain walked into the scene feeling guilty and unnerved, but then accepting that this is the fate of every meat product he orders, and ends on a respectful note. He vowed to use as much of the animal as he could to honor it's life, something rather beautiful to me. If it has to die, why not go on to become gorgeous dishes for many more to enjoy?

  

Food & Memory in The Reporter’s Kitchen

As a writer myself, I related to a lot of what Jane Kramer explored in her short essay. She thought of the process of preparing a meal and eating food as a means of remembering, and it seemed that for our author, food and life experience whirled together into one muddy sense-memory. While Kramer is a journalist and a cook, at this point in my life I define myself mostly as a poet and a student. I am excited to be able to find a medium that compliments and questions my writing as Kramer has found in cooking.

Something that surprised me was reading about how food is prepared outside of the US. In fact, I am surprised that I didn’t realize in this reading that of course food is prepared differently outside of America. Sometimes I catch myself in this train of thought, where I assume out of ignorance or entitlement that the “American” way is supposedly the way the world makes and enjoys meals. I always try to snap out of those thoughts because I know they are exclusionary, and I have yet to taste some of the world’s more incredible foods.

Going along with this thread, I appreciated the fact that Kramer was not judgmental about eating things that may be outside of her comfort zone, out of respect for the culture and the people she is among. It must have been a growing experience for her, to be able to not impose her western habits surrounding meals to the various communities she visited in her work.

She beings page 168 with the thought, “Some dishes just don’t travel”. She goes on to say how you’ll never being able to exactly recreate the same meal you had, especially with differences in resources and cultural practices. This got me thinking about our cafeteria at K and how so many students hail from countries and cultures outside of Americanized pallets. My mom is from India, and so that has been my experience. I crave meals that remind me of home, and when our cafeteria has attempted to create meals from different cultures around the world, they unfortunately miss the mark. I hope that our school can find ways to move towards creating meals that are closer to home for me and my peers who enjoy other types of food.

I was also intrigued by the points when the author noted how she cooks something specific to the story she is about to cover, whether it relates to her mood or experience being in another environment. On page 170, she described how when beginning a piece, she is generally a bit panicked, and how her loved-ones “are able to gauge this panic by the food I feed them”. In this section she described how she cooked a “small Thanksgiving turkey, two Christmas rib roasts, and an Easter lamb” when panicked about how to tell the story of an Afghan Refugee.

Seeing this made me want to examine what I do when stressed in regards to my writing. I discovered that for my poetry or journaling, if I am severely overwhelmed I do one of two things: I either don’t write about it at all (my thinking is, if I don’t write it it’s not hurting me, right?) or I free-write in my journal for pages and pages, in an attempt to let it all out before sorting through my feelings. My journals then can be most associated with Kramer’s huge meals, I think. Both are indulgent. Both can be healing.