Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

by Anthony Bourdain

Whatever riches they may have acquired or may yet acquire, there is and always will be the lingering and deeply felt suspicion that come tomorrow, it will all be gone. No amount is enough or will ever be enough, because deep in the bone they know that the bastards could come knocking at any minute and take it all away.

The boy’s schoolmates are a feral, opportunistic bunch who instinctively seek to destroy what they don’t understand and can’t possess. In fact, nearly every other child in the film is depicted as part of an unthinking mob, fighting viciously among themselves even as they pursue the boy and his balloon through the streets, like a pack of wolves.

The message? Life is cruel, lonely, and filled with pain and random acts of violence. Everybody hates you and seeks to destroy you.

Better to opt out altogether, to leap—literally—into the void, escape by any means necessary. However uncertain or suicidal the way out.

Life was clearly a cruel joke. A place with no guarantees, built on a foundation of false assumptions if not outright untruths. You think everything’s going okay… Then they shoot your fucking dog.

I am not a fan of people who abuse service staff. In fact, I find it intolerable. It’s an unpardonable sin as far as I’m concerned, taking out personal business or some other kind of dissatisfaction on a waiter or busboy.

Perhaps it’s that they’re so ugly, these “beautiful” people.

I’ve been at this bar before, of course. We all have.

strangely, indefensibly happy here.

I’ll never be a regular at this bar. Or any bar. Not even a “writers’ bar.” If you’ve ever even spent ten minutes in one of those—a bunch of bitter, snowy-haired, bilious fucks with gin-blossomed noses and ballooning guts talking too loud and laughing too hard and secretly hating each other—you’ll

reconsider ever putting another word to paper. As much as I admire the work of good writers, I’ve found that hanging out with more than one of them at a time is about as much fun as being thrown into a cage full of hungry but toothless civet cats.

There is no debating that it’s “better” to cook at home whenever—and as often as—possible. It’s cheaper, for sure. It’s almost always healthier than what you might otherwise be ordering as takeout—or eating at a restaurant. And it is provably better for society. We know, for instance, that there is a direct, inverse relationship between frequency of family meals and social problems.

I’m interested in whether we should cook as a moral imperative—as something that every boy and girl should be taught to do in school and woe to him or her who can’t. I’m talking about pounding home a new value, a national attitude, the way, during the JFK era, the President’s Council on Physical Fitness created the expectation that you should be healthy

if you were a kid. That you should, no, you must be reasonably athletic. That at the very least you must aspire to those goals, try your best—that your teachers, your schoolmates, and society as a whole would help you and urge you on. There would be rigorous standards. Your progress would be monitored with the idea that you would, over time, improve—and become, somehow, better as a person.

But I do think the idea that basic cooking skills are a virtue, that the ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency should be taught to every young man and woman as a fundamental skill, should become as vital to growing up as learning to wipe one’s own ass, cross the street by oneself, or be trusted with money.

Through a combination of early training and gentle but insistent peer pressure, every boy and girl would leave high school at least prepared to cook for themselves and a few others.

At college, where money is usually tight and good meals are rare, the ability to throw together a decent meal for your friends would probably be much admired. One might even be reasonably expected to have a small but serviceable list of specialties that you could cook for your roommates. Cooking has already become “cool.” So, maybe, it is now time to make the idea of not cooking “un-cool”—and, in the harshest possible ways short of physical brutality, drive that message home. Let us then codify the essentials for this new virtue: What specific tasks should every young man and woman know how to perform in order to feel complete? What simple preparations, done well, should be particularly admired, skills seen as setting one apart as an unusually well-rounded, deceptively deep, and interesting individual? In a shiny, happy, perfect world of the future, what should every man, woman, and teenager know how to do? They should know how to chop an onion. Basic knife skills should be a must. Without that, we are nothing, castaways with a can—but no can-opener. Useless. Everything begins with some baseline ability with a sharp-bladed object, enough familiarity with such a thing to get the job done without injury. So, basic knife handling, sharpening, and maintenance, along with rudimentary but effective dicing, mincing, and slicing. Nothing too serious. Just enough facility with a knife to be on a par with any Sicilian grandmother. Everyone should be able to make an omelet. Egg cooke...

Everyone should be able to roast a chicken. And they should be...

Cooking vegetables to a desired doneness is easy enough and reasonable to expect of any citizen of voting age. A standard vinaigrette is something anyone can and should be able to do.

The ability to shop for fresh produce and have at least some sense of what’s in season, to tell whether or not something is ripe or rotten might be acquired at the same time as one’s

driving license. How to recognize a fish that’s fresh and how to clean and filet it would seem a no-brainer as a basic survival skill in an ever more uncertain world. Steaming a lobster or a crab—or a pot of mussels or clams—is something a fairly bright chimp could do without difficulty, so there’s no reason we all can’t. Every citizen should know how to throw a piece of meat in the oven with the expectation that they might roast it to somewhere in the neighborhood of desired doneness—and without a thermometer. One should be able to roast and mash potatoes. And make rice—both steamed and the only slightly more difficult pilaf method. The fundamentals of braising would serve all who learn them well—as simply learning how to make a beef bourguignon opens the door to countless other preparations. What to do with bones (namely, make stock) and how to make a few soups—as a means of making efficient use of leftovers—is a lesson in frugality many will very possibly have to learn at some point in their lives. It would seem wise to learn earlier rather than later. Everyone should be encouraged at every turn to develop their own modest yet unique repertoire—to find a few dishes they love ...

People will continue to pay for quality. They will be less and less inclined, however, to pay for bullshit.

Hard times, he seemed to be saying, might actually help push us in a direction we were already coming to think we wanted to go—or that we should be going but hadn’t yet actually gotten around to.

Belt-tightening implies a bad thing. But it also means you’re getting thinner.

I’m on my second gin and tonic and planning on having a third, settled back in a heavy rattan chair and feeling the kind of sorry for myself that most people would be very content with. There’s incense in the air, buffeted about by the slowly moving overhead fans: a sickly-sweet odor that mirrors perfectly my mixed feelings of dull heartache and exquisite pleasure. I often feel this way when alone in Southeast Asian hotel bars—an enhanced sense of bathos, an ironic dry-smile sorrow, a sharpened sense of distance and loss.

Turning thirty came as a cruel surprise for me. I hadn’t really planned on making it that far. I’d taken seriously the maxims of my time—“Never trust anyone over thirty” and “Live fast, die young”—and been frankly shocked when I found that I’d lived that long.

John F. Kennedy said something truly terrifying—guaranteed to make every parent’s blood run cold: “To have a child is to give fate a hostage.”

It says something about a person when you put chicken Caesar on the menu. You’ve crossed a line and you know it. It’s the chef version of sucking Ron Jeremy’s cock.

“Basically? A night of no problems and where everybody is busting their ass and doing their jobs. I don’t have to yell.”

Chang’s answer has almost everything to do with work and little with play,

“I’ll die before I’m fifty,” he says, matter-of-factly.

It reminds me of the opening passages of Zola’s Belly of Paris

I loved them for their craziness, their excesses, their foolishness—their shrewdness or guile, their wastefulness, even their criminality.

Okay. I am genuinely angry—still—at vegetarians. That’s not shtick. Not angry at them personally, mind you—but in principle. A shocking number of vegetarians and even vegans have come to my readings, surprised me with an occasional sense of humor, refrained from hurling animal blood at me—even befriended me. I have even knowingly had sex with one, truth be told. But what I’ve seen of the world in the past nine years has, if anything, made me angrier at anyone not a Hindu who insists on turning their nose up at a friendly offer of meat.

I realize that one thing led directly to the other. Had I not taken a dead-end dishwashing job while on summer vacation, I would not have become a cook. Had I not become a cook, I would never and could never have become a chef. Had I not become a chef, I never would have been able to fuck up so spectacularly. Had I not known what it was like to fuck up—really fuck up—and spend years cooking brunches in bullshit no-star joints around town, that obnoxious but wildly successful memoir I wrote wouldn’t have been half as interesting.

We bask in the warm glow of bonhomie, of our shared appreciation for this remarkable meal.

You’re not getting any faster—or smarter—as a cook after age thirty-seven. The knees and back go first, of course. That you’d expect. But the hand-eye coordination starts to break up a little as well. And the vision thing. But it’s the brain that sends you the most worrying indications of decay. After all those years of intense focus, multitasking, high stress, late nights, and alcohol, the brain stops responding the way you like. You miss things. You aren’t as quick reading the board, prioritizing the dupes, grasping at a glance what food goes where, adding up totals of steaks on hold and steaks on the fire—and cumulative donenesses. Your hangovers are more crippling and last longer. Your temper becomes shorter—and you become more easily frustrated with yourself for fucking up little things (though less so with others). Despair—always a sometime thing in the bipolar world of the kitchen—becomes more frequent and longer-lasting as one grows more philosophical with age and has more to despair about. You’re basically done—or on your way to being done. Your brain knows it. Your body knows it—and tells you every day. But pride persists.

What I do miss, I tell them, and will always miss, is that first pull on a cold beer after work. That is irreplaceable.

That single moment after a long and very busy night, sitting down at the bar with your colleagues, wiping the sweat off your neck, taking a deep breath, with unspoken congratulations all around—and then that first sip of cold, cold beer. It tastes like victory.

You look at each other with the intense camaraderie of people who’ve suffered together and think, “We did well tonight. We will go home proud.” There are nods and half-smiles. A sigh. Maybe even a groan of relief. Once again. We survived. We did well. We’re still here.