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

by Anthony Bourdain

While there is a certain stigma attached to sucking the cocks of strangers—because, perhaps, of particularly Western concepts of intimacy and religion—how different, how much worse, or more “wrong,” is it than plunging toilets, hosing down a slaughterhouse floor, burning off polyps, or endorsing Diet Coke?

Like a lot of things in my life, there’s no making it prettier just ‘cause time’s passed. It happened. It was bad. There it is.

luck is not a business model.

Perhaps omelet skills should be learned at the same time you learn to fuck.

writing about sights and sounds and flavors that might otherwise be described as orgiastic—and doing it in a way that is calculated to inspire prurient interest, lust, and envy in others … that raises more questions in my mind as to… I don’t know … the moral dimension.

Sitting here, choosing words, letter by letter, on the keyboard with the explicit intention of telling you about something I did or something I ate and making you as hungry and miserable as I can—surely that’s wrong. But fuck it. Who doesn’t like a good wank now and then?

I believe the words “meat” and “treated with ammonia” should never occur in the same paragraph—much less the same sentence. Unless you’re talking about surreptitiously disposing of a corpse.

while animals of the future might be cruelty-free, which would allow those who can afford to eat them to do so with a clean conscience, what about life for those who will have to shovel the shit from their stalls?

What kind of dreams can a well-fed boy have if he doesn’t even have the tools to articulate them?

It’s very rarely a good career move to have a conscience.

A dining room is a stage set, an elaborate illusion, a magician’s trick contained between four walls.

If cooking professionally is about control, eating successfully should be about submission, about easily and without thinking giving yourself over to whatever dream they’d like you to share.

tasted like something you’d only be lucky enough to discover if you were getting stoned late at night with Ferran Adrià—and you both found yourselves with the munchies.

Customers should understand that what they are paying for, in any restaurant situation, is not just what’s on the plate—but everything that’s not on the plate: all the bone, skin, fat, and waste product which the chef did pay for, by the pound.

The famous French mantra of “Use Everything,” by which most chefs live, is not the operative phrase of a three-starred Michelin restaurant. Here, it’s “Use Only the Very Best.” The rest? You do what you can.

It’s a central irony of fine dining that, unlike the waiters who serve their food, the cooks are very rarely able to afford to eat what they have spent years learning to make.

I’m just a cranky old fuck with what, I guess, could charitably be called “issues.”