Bourdain is also one of the few celebrity chefs who is truly, and I mean truly, respected both outside and in the food service industry.
He was a chef who literally worked up from dishwasher to globally renowned “food personality”. He had worked just about every position in a kitchen. He never turned his nose up at street food and drank beer from a plastic bag because that’s how the locals did it. In an important-to-me move, he insisted his show go to the Azores when he learned while visiting Portugal that the food labeled “Portuguese” in Rhode Island and Massachusetts has its roots in Azorean cuisine rather than mainland Portuguese cuisine.
He gave a shit, not just about the food, but about the people who produced it. We bandy about the term “ethically sourced” like it’s nothing but a marketing buzzword. But Bourdain gave enough of a shit that he, Eric Ripert, and Christopher Curtin teamed up to make a chocolate bar with chocolate sourced from a single farm in Peru. But he, Ripert, and Curtin didn’t stop there. Bourdain cooked for the farmer’s family when he was there with one of his shows. He introduced the farmer’s daughter to some of the most famous chefs in Lima. He, Ripert, and Curtin, also made it a point to get rice stoves (stoves that burn rice hulls instead of wood and are not as toxic as wood) put into the homes of farming families in Peru.
There’s a prayer I’m reminded of, a modified version of a Christian prayer that’s used by my pagan church. “[Deity], we ask you to bless this food we are about to eat. We ask you to bless the hands that made it, both seen and unseen. We ask you to bless the hands that grew it and harvested it, both seen and unseen. We thank you for these gifts. So mote it be.”
Bourdain went looking for the people whose hands were unseen, he saw them, and he did what he could to make life better for them.
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