Notes on Culinary Loves and Anthony Bourdain
by Oli Najt
Illustrations by Milagros Brasco
My first culinary love was and will always be Anthony Bourdain. I discovered him when I was twelve years old on the Travel and Living channel that I watched on the old television set in my parents’ room. It began as an after-school ritual: return from school, make a snack and watch him have adventures all around the world. He was often nursing a hangover, always sharp and dressed in a leather jacket, sunglasses, gel in his hair and a cigarette in his hand, eating and telling stories that I could only dream about.
The following year at the start of middle school, I was diagnosed with a chronic autoimmune illness that forced me to spend months in bed in front of the tv and quit nearly all the foods that I was not only used to but that I craved. My lonely periods of different diets, which sometimes meant long months of fasting and only drinking a protein smoothie that was supposed to be sweet but tasted salty and aggressive, were tolerable because I felt accompanied by Tony, the name I started calling him around this time. He had adventures and ate the things that I couldn’t and held my hand through the darkness and uncertainty. A tv crush is like any other crush, a crutch and obsession.
I started eating normal again — at least what I would consider normal — after I ended up hospitalized for being underweight. I was dehydrated and passed out after lifting my arms. After a month they gave me a free card to feed myself again, which opened up a new door and changed my life. At the hospital, my friends brought me food and books by Tony. As the years passed, I learned more about myself, gathered new tools and had more autonomy (and intuition) about my life, my body and what I consumed.
Travel and experimenting with drugs and the body, mine and others, were the qualities I wanted to embody. The potential that I had and desired at all costs. It feels strange to think about every single phase that brought me to where I am. Some that were filled with pain, trauma and exposure and others full of joy, fun and pleasure. The eternal duality of the search for meaning. I can’t unsee the parallel between that first love and the rest. Although not all of the boys that I liked had a problem with substances, they all were sharp and mostly were of the same physical type, the malnourished or sleep-deprived boy. Those boys are a part of who I was.
In the book I Love Dick, Chris Kraus recounts a crush on her husband’s colleague. Love letters are mixed with personal anecdotes - particularly her battle with Crohn’s disease - regrettable and enlightening encounters with former lovers, and her thoughts and reflections on the world, politics and art. It is a book that I read and have reread over the last five years. It is like reading a personal diary of my adolescence, she feels like me, and I feel like her. Reading Chris recount her life, and that when she falls in love she fills up with a catharsis that stirs something awake in her, and her awareness that she is projecting onto the person that she desires, helped me understand that sometimes we need someone that takes up space in our imagination to fill us with life.
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I remember a summer afternoon eating acorn-fed Ibérico ham, a gift from a friend with money who traveled, that I was sharing with a boy that I liked. The sensation of the kitchen counter’s cold marble on my thighs. The taste of chestnuts that the animal had eaten for most of its life and had crept into the profoundness of its body, together with the stories of car accidents that this boy had lived through, of coming close to death in an infinite search for constant adrenaline, always just barely saving himself, or always saved by some divine action, depending on who tells the story.
The relationship with death and sex is a part of every human being, consciously or unconsciously. We are always riding the risk, what Freud called the death drive, Eros and Thanatos, self-care and self-destruction. It is in that mixture, and that balancing act where we find the transgression of the erotic. George Bataille said, "The kiss is the beginning of cannibalism." The feeling of really living, that joy, and being connected with everything, includes being connected with the certainty of death. The little death as a fortuitous result.
It makes me think of The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover by Peter Greenaway, a film where food is both an expression of sensuality and revenge, and especially in The Big Feast, a film by Marco Ferreri with Marcelo Mastroianni, the story of four bourgeois friends who make a suicide pact to kill themselves by overeating, in other words, giving in to the pleasure of excess. Where pleasure becomes pain, and there is no return.
I was in Florence the day that Tony died. It ultimately felt serendipitous to be relatively close to him. The climate was the same. It was hot and we had been in the same country a few days before. I went to Trattoria L’Brindellone and ate the taglierini al tartufo, a dish that I will never forget, and two — or three or four — glasses of white wine. I ate and drank for him and myself and cried all week. His death came in the midst of mourning my father, and caught me alone, as I carried out an Odyssean journey, both external and internal, trying to reconnect with a life force. Trying to feel things and find beauty.
Today, after spending almost two years with an invisible enemy, a virus that is always on the prowl that disabled the possibility of meeting another, I can feel the desire for connection and adventure spring up like flowers from the earth, not only in me but in the people around me. Getting drunk on the sidewalk of a bar to remove a couple of filters from our own impulses and see who is with us and what can be unleashed.
With the fear of desire itself, of vulnerability, and other people still being a possible risk, I can say that I see the opening towards the unknown getting closer and closer. The hunger for connection that I have needed so badly has returned.
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This text was translated from its original Spanish with the guidance of the author.
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Oli Najt. Writer and creative director. She is a part of Shokupan, a new sandwich shop dedicated to Japanese bread.
Milagros Brascó. Illustrator and graphic designer. Her work generally gravitates to gastronomy. She was raised and has worked in many restaurants and studied to be a sommelier. You can find her on Instagram.