Some Thoughts On "A Cook's Tour"

I truly enjoyed reading A Cook’s Tour.  Bourdain’s description of places and people immediately caught my interest and his obvious love and appreciation of food sparked my curiosity.   There were some inconstancies in his writing though, for instance his obvious judgment of tourists in Mexico.  Does he not consider himself a tourist?  Another was Bourdain’s uncharacteristic sympathy towards the animals kept at the My Kanh Restaurant in Can Tho.  The reader gets a look at Bourdain’s more humane side when he expressed his guilt towards the pig raised and killed just for him in Portugal.  However, his disgust of the restaurant in the Mekong Delta, his use of the word “cruel” to describe it, seemed off to me.  Perhaps the setting was more gruesome than he cared to describe in his book.  The fact that they were kept in cages may suggest that the lives of these animals were cramped and unpleasant in comparison with the pig, which was raised in relative comfort.  But his description of his waiter on page 123, when he says, “If I should suddenly decide to order some monkey, he’ll happily slit the little fella’s throat with the same friendly expression on his face” didn’t seem any more off putting than the children in Portugal after the pig was killed and, “the look on their little faces could barely be described as interest.  A passing bus or an ice cream truck would probably have evoked more reaction.”  He goes on to say, “We eat no animals with cute bunny eyes.  I just can’t take that today.”  It was weird to see this sudden compassion towards what he eats.  Bourdain is out in search of his perfect meal, he has eaten some strange and off putting things, and so I was surprised by this moment where he separates the cute from the less cute as reasonable judgment for what he puts in his mouth.

Especially considering the comment he made when eating with the vegans, when he said, "Our basic design features as humans, from the beginning of our evolution, developed around the very real need to hunt down slower, stupider animals, kill them, and eat them" and that he went on to kill a turkey with his own hands later, when he traveled to Oaxaca Mexico.  A scene, I admit, was hilarious to me.  I respect the seriousness of death, and the deep feeling that must have come from killing something for the first time, but the way he told the story, his desperate hacking and the turkey’s wild flailing, was just hysterical I thought.  The humor in his writing is a big part of why I enjoyed this book so much.  Though I am a bit surprised by how desensitized I am now to many of the stories Bourdain writes about, such as the turkey and the pig slaughter.  At the age of fourteen, I decided I wanted to be a vegetarian after watching a video in school about the Industrial Revolution, which showed a pig being slaughtered.  Being young and energetic and needing a cause, I decided that the meat industry was the devil and anyone who ate meat was a terrible human being.  I spent a year refusing to eat another living thing and harassing my friends before I eventually grew out of the phase and realized I was doing nothing to save the world in refusing to eat meat.  The next day I had a taco.  (Please Note:  I have nothing against vegetarians.  I was just a really obnoxious one.  Sorry for giving you a bad name.) 

After a long period of refusing meat, I began to take an interest in it.  When we watched the video of Bourdain eating genie pig in Ecuador, my first reaction was, “there’s something new I’d like to try.”  I think what may have freaked a lot of people out by that clip was that the animal still had a face (and little feet and ears at all that) when they were frying it up.  I spent a year watching PETA videos.  I know now that all the meat I eat had a face on it once.  Reading Bourdain’s work makes me more curious than cautious.  It’s why I got a strange look from someone in the library, when they looked at my notebook and saw that the first thing under the title, “Dishes I Want to Try” I had written down “Sheep Testicles” after finishing the chapter on Morocco.  His love of food and his brilliant descriptions of his experiences encourage me to explore food.