A while back, a strange thing happened in tv land. Food Network and the Travel Channel took advantage of a holiday by showing marathons of their popular shows. No, that’s not strange by itself. What was strange to me was the juxtaposition of the networks’ choices. Food Network showed viewers’ favorite episodes of media maven Rachael Ray’s travel shows, “$40 a Day” and “Rachael Ray’s Tasty Travels.” The Travel Channel, on the other hand, showed episodes of chef Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations.”
Ray and Bourdain couldn’t be more different if they tried.
Ray, as just about anyone with a television knows, made her name with her “30 Minute Meals,” wherein she whips up “delicious and healthy meals from start to finish” at a sometimes frenzied pace and always with a heaping helping of shortcuts. She is incessantly chipper and calls herself a cook, not a chef.
Bourdain’s show, on the other hand, is a travelogue. He embraces cultures as different as Iceland and India and the Texas/Mesico border and Las Vegas. He doesn’t just taste food; he experiences it and the people who make it. Bourdain is gruff (and a little sexy), and I honestly don’t think there’s anything the man won’t put in his mouth. But he’ll let you know if he doesn’t like something, as he did when he ate rotten, aged shark in Iceland.
Ray’s approach to travel is that of a typical American. She looks for bargains, spends a lot of time shopping, and doesn’t steer too far off the beaten food path. But I find it disturbing that she always enjoys every single thing she tries! How can someone travel that much and be happy with everything she eats? Is she really lucky, or does she not have discerning tastes? I can’t figure it out. But I do watch her, and she is the woman I credit with inspiring me to cook more and be more adventurous in the kitchen. Because of Rachael, I now know that I don’t have to measure everything exactly.
Bourdain, perhaps best known as the author of Kitchen Confidential, is an excellent writer, one any of us would do well to learn from. His story of how he got caught up in the Beirut war last summer was compelling and depressing.
He has a deep respect for the cultures he visits and he lets us soak it up with him. He’s as comfortable getting high in the desert in India as he is playing cards with some strange and shady characters in Vegas. He’s a hoot, and he’s refreshingly honest. A man who’s been seemingly everywhere, he has no problem expressing his hatred for vegans, as he did in an interview with Salon:
“How can you travel? Before you’ve even left home, you’ve already decided, ‘I reject most of the world’s bounty and the expression of their hopes and dreams and culture.’ Some nice, possibly impoverished Vietnamese rice farmer is nice enough to offer you the one chicken he can kill a month, or a week, and you say, ‘Sorry, I can’t'? It just seems antihuman. It’s antisocial.”
But Bourdain doesn’t just hate vegetarians (and fat people). He hates Ray, too (along with countless other celebrity chefs and Food Network stars). And I have to disagree with him there. If she inspired me to cook, Rachael can’t be all that bad, Tony. In the kitchen, I’m Rachael, not Bourdain, the former New York City chef.
That said, while I watch and enjoy them both, when I had to choose between marathons, I picked Bourdain. With no reservations.
Austen
