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

by Anthony Bourdain

I took it as an article of faith that chefs were unlovable. That’s why we were chefs. We were basically … bad people—which is why we lived the way we did, this half-life of work followed by hanging out with others who lived the same life, followed by whatever slivers of emulated normal life we had left to us. Nobody loved us. Not really. How could they, after all? As chefs, we were proudly dysfunctional. We were misfits. We knew we were misfits, we sensed the empty parts of our souls, the missing parts of our personalities, and this was what had brought us to our profession, had made us what we were.

My parents loved me. Neither of them drank to excess. Nobody beat me. God was never mentioned—so I was annoyed by neither religion nor church nor any notions of sin or damnation. Mine was a house filled with books and music—and, frequently, films.

I was miserable. And angry. I bridled bitterly at the smothering chokehold of love and normalcy in my house—compared to the freedom enjoyed by my less-welllooked-after friends. I envied them their dysfunctional and usually empty houses, their near-total lack of supervision.

Call it a character flaw—of which drugs were simply a manifestation, a petulant “fuck you” to my bourgeois parents, who’d committed the unpardonable sin of loving me.

I was holed up in the Caribbean about midway through a really bad time. My first marriage had just ended and I was, to say the least, at loose ends. By “loose ends” I mean aimless and regularly suicidal.