Response to Bourdain’s essay "Don’t eat before reading this"

Anthony Bourdain’s essay Don’t eat before reading this shocked me greatly because it honestly reports ugliness of the U.S. restaurant industry. Bourdain, a prominent chef of his French restaurant also reports life of cooks with his frank, witty and amusing tone. Since I’m not a huge food ethics person, vegetarian, or an epicure, I naturally had trust and fantasy of restaurant foods and didn’t doubt about the process of cooking these behind restaurants’ kitchen door and ingredients of them. When I was young, my parents forced me to eat every dish that was given to me including restaurant food, so I became a total omnivore who is oblivious to discern the dishes that use poor-quality ingredients.

His essay starts with: “Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay … Your first 207 Wellfleet oysters may transport you to a state of rapture, but your 208^th may send you to bed with the sweats, chills, and vomits” (83). This shows that food has two sides – ingredient of food and its negative and positive impacts from eating. You might guess that your dish is delicious and amazing from looking at its good appearance; however, this dish can lead you to having illness by its hidden and poor-quality ingredients that are used. And he goes on reporting the scary reality of restaurants dealing with ingredients horribly.

“When a kitchen is in full swing, proper refrigeration is almost nonexistent, what with the many openings of the refrigerator door as the cooks rummage frantically during the rush, mingling your tuna with the chicken, the lamb, or the beef” (84). It was frightening to think about tuna sandwich that I had in numerous restaurants in U.S. Tuna mingling with other poultries made me not want to eat it in a restaurant ever again. I realized I was an innocent or maybe stupid customer thoughtlessly consuming food I paid. “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” (85). This part struck me too by thinking of innocent customers like me ordering well-done steak with expectation of good food but actually ending up eating nerves and connective tissues of beef that substitutes the real meat part. These revelations made me think of unavoidable choice of restaurant cooks to let these things happen because they need to get decent paychecks. Restaurants are influenced largely from profits they make so cooks have to use almost all the parts of ingredients and can’t waste them. I believe that cooking is art, and it is sad to see how cooks have to use ingredients improperly and rush to make dishes to sell. Cooks are driven by money too like commercial artists who have to draw massive amounts of painting without putting his or her best efforts to pay off his bills. If restaurant business goes down, then there is not much chance for a cook to create new dishes earnestly and carefully. Simply they can’t afford to do it.

Furthermore, I like Bourdain’s description about beauty of a restaurant’s kitchen community. It is fascinating that the restaurant kitchen accepts people from different backgrounds, education, and pasts yet each cook equally starts from being a dishwasher to be a chef. Restaurant cooks give up the regular lifestyle as they have to be in the kitchen on the weekends. They also have to get stress under busy, pressured, strict and confusing environment (if the restaurant is famous) while surviving through chef’s harsh demands. I think that they follow this career because they are so passionate about cooking so they bear these hardships.

This piece is different from “A Cook’s Tour” in a way that Bourdain describes his own territory, his New York City’s restaurant, rather than describing food in different restaurants in different countries. It is interesting that he blatantly reveals dirty secrets of restaurant’s kitchen although he is a chef, and many cooks don’t want to expose their malicious cooking process. Now I know behind scenes of kitchen that no one taught me!