The Fast Food and the Furious

Foodie-philosopher Anthony Bourdain spares no barbs in mortifying all enemies of good food.

Foodie-philosopher Anthony Bourdain spares no barbs in mortifying all enemies of good food.

With his chops and riffs about restauranteering, Anthony Bourdain was the first chef who rocked the gastro-firmament with Kitchen Confidential, a bloody gut-spilling account of coupling in the alleys, coke-snorting and all the never-heard-of-before shit that happens in this trade before your food gets slapped on the table. The book got Bourdain as many screaming groupies as Floyd and the Stones. Then, from being a print-cult figure, he towered over TV, bumming about the globe with a fork and suitcase, tasting wart-rectums and goober, eating with Maharajas and profitably turning the series into books. Getting by with ‘No Reservations’ and pulling ‘Nasty Bits’ out from his teeth. 

Finally, like Freddy, Bourdain’s back with a sequel to Kitchen Confidential. Though much of his bad-ass self is euthanised, those dark shadows still fall upon the pages. He’s no longer a working chef in foul-mouthed full, but a mellower, metamorphosed being. At 50, he’s a father for the first time. He has a fixed address. From his apartment in New York, standing tall over the culinary universe as Gastro-totle or Epi-crates, he’s now a foodie-philosopher. Spouting profundities and profanities, he takes on Big Food Corp: Cargill, McDonald’s, agri-business and even TV networks. Ignited by conscience, he slays all the enemies of good food, and then raves and rants about the reigning gods of gastronomy. 

Unlike Kitchen Confidential, which was written with his chef knife stuck into his chest, Medium Raw seems like it’s been tapped out between bouncing his baby on his lap and wiping her drool with a bib. Even then, when you hear his scared-daddy voice, you’re stunned. Bourdain confesses that he’s used CIA propaganda to prevent her from eating a burger. He wants to soak a sponge in vinegar, stuff it in a McDonald’s wrapper and leave it for his little girl to find, unwrap and bite into… so she gets Big Mac-o-Phobia. As Big Daddy, he throws his punches hard at ‘the Clown, the King and the Colonel’ of the fast-food empire so they can’t get their greasy hands on his baby. So he can protect her from diabetes and stop her from becoming a white-bellied, morbidly obese adult.       

Why burgers? Because to Bourdain’s mind, every patriotic American’s fundamental right is to bite into this meaty bun without ingesting ammonia or fearing death due to the killer pathogen E-coli; cheap contaminated meat has resulted in E-coli death tolls. Cargill coats its burger meat with ammonia to kill bacteria. Why? Because it’s more profitable to pack burgers with toilet cleaners than to clean up the cheap meat factories. And that’s where Bourdain’s beef is at. For him, the good fight is for a burger that can be pink in the centre and safe, safe enough to put in your kid’s mouth. 

Biblical in his allusions, he writes chapters on Greed, Lust, Virtue and Meat. With an authorial voice as compelling, erudite and as wicked as Bourdain’s, Medium Raw is almost a Food Bible, except it’s written by the anti-Christ himself. Read.

About The Author

Pramila N. Phatarphekar