A lesson in culture, genuine emotion

After his gruesome account of the Portuguese pig slaughter, Tony Bourdain says he starts to notice the things missing from the average American dining experience: large groups eating together, the family element, living close to your food, and the resistance to change at the expense of maintaining food traditions. Although I often lost focus during his breathtaking and incredibly detailed descriptions due to the constant reminder that no matter how intimate a moment might have been, the camera crew was nagging at him to extract more information from his subjects, I was always brought back to this idea.

In my opinion, eating with a group of people makes for a better experience than eating solo. But in the U.S., the family and group element of dining is generally absent from the culture (the living close to your food and food tradition arguments will be put on hold for the sake of length). We settle for fast food instead of slow food, and sacrifice dinner with the family because it’s convenient with our long workdays. Of course everything is relative, and it’s easy to criticize our culture when juxtaposed with foreign ones that seem refreshing at first glance. This isn’t always fair if the comparison at hand is based on a snapshot of that culture taken from a chapter in a book like Bourdain's. I don’t know much about cultures outside of the U.S. and Mexico, so I feel guilty for condemning our values and priorities in the U.S. when all I have for comparison is an author’s words that I have no reason not to believe.

As somebody who places a high value on family (which is due in part to the Mexican cultural values I’ve grown up around) and has grown up in a neighborhood with similar values, I’m hesitant to generalize that we fail to appreciate the beauty of family, of large groups eating together, in the American dining experience. Part of this is because I believe we’re social people in the U.S.—we like to go out, to spend time in large groups.

On a different note: Bourdain's book on extreme cuisine reads like a travel book just as much as one all about food. He knows it's impossible to understand and appreciate a country without knowledge of its history and the events that have shaped its present-day culture--a culture and identity that he shows us can be reflected as much in the food as in the surroundings. I've always been one to pass up a history lesson for the fun stuff like a pig slaughter, a tapas marathon, or a desert lamb feast. Knowing about a country's customs and cultural values, however, made the experience of reading about these events much more rewarding. I was blown away by the amount of detailed information he provided about the people and their history, even if he did it while smoking himself into a state of enlightenment that he proudly, and often, describes.

I didn’t know much about Anthony Bourdain before I started this book, so after the first several pages, I assumed he was the insensitive and intrusive Giant American Savage that radiated from the introduction. I still don’t know him very well, but what struck me in these first several chapters was his ability to take a real emotion like guilt and translate that so honestly onto the page with an intensity that made me feel like I was present in real life.

(Side note: I found an interesting interview with Bourdain from Time magazine. Check it out!)