“Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” by Anthony Bourdain

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Anthony Bourdain’s 1999 essay about working in Manhattan restaurants: “Gastronomy is the science of pain,” he writes. “It was the unsavory side of professional cooking that attracted me to it in the first place.”

Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals. It’s about danger—risking the dark, bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese, and shellfish. Your first two hundred and seven Wellfleet oysters may transport you to a state of rapture, but your two hundred and eighth may send you to bed with the sweats, chills, and vomits.

A good deal has changed since Orwell’s memoir of the months he spent as a dishwasher in “Down and Out in Paris and London.” Gas ranges and exhaust fans have gone a long way toward increasing the life span of the working culinarian. Nowadays, most aspiring cooks come into the business because they want to: they have chosen this life, studied for it. Today’s top chefs are like star athletes. They bounce from kitchen to kitchen—free agents in search of more money, more acclaim.

A year ago, my latest, doomed mission—a high-profile restaurant in the Times Square area—went out of business. The meat, fish, and produce purveyors got the news that they were going to take it in the neck for yet another ill-conceived enterprise. When customers called for reservations, they were informed by a prerecorded announcement that our doors had closed. Fresh from that experience, I began thinking about becoming a traitor to my profession.

People who order their meat well-done perform a valuable service for those of us in the business who are cost-conscious: they pay for the privilege of eating our garbage. In many kitchens, there’s a time-honored practice called “save for well-done.

 

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First world suffering.

This is seriously one of the best things ever

😔 Anthony

Gone too soon.

dukacavalcanti_ te dedico

I must have read this 5 or 6 times and it just does not get old. What a wild talent he was.

Damn, just damn. 😥

Miss him a lot.

dlipo77 ☺️

Not interested in the views of a man who did not stick around to say them in the here and now.

Awesome article

Wow - seems like a lot of 'chefs' just hate cooking ...and people in general. LOL.

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