Anthony Bourdain_The Last Interview by Anthony Bourdain

Author:Anthony Bourdain [Bourdain, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2019-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

ANTHONY BOURDAIN DISHES ON FOOD

INTERVIEW WITH NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON

STARTALK WITH NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON

APRIL 7, 2013

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: People always say “Oh, I’ve been to this country, and this food is a delicacy there.” That’s a cue to me that the food tastes nasty, or it’s some bug that they pulled out of the ground and sautéed. So, what’s with people saying something is a delicacy?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: Well, it’s rare or expensive, you know? It’s valued more than the way we look at shrimp or lobster or truffles as the good stuff, a lot of people in this world look at ingredients that many of us would probably have some difficulty with. That’s an attitude that changes really quickly…the more you travel. You know, that’s something I got over very quickly. Particularly, you know, you talk about, wow, their food in Thailand is really repulsive to me. I mean, they eat bugs! But the Thais, who are largely a non-dairy culture, you know, try to put yourself in their shoes. They’re looking at us—you know, eating, like, cottage cheese or Roquefort would be truly horrifying, if you think about it for a second, what that must look like.

DEGRASSE TYSON: What I do find interesting though, is you go from one country to the next, and one of the simplest measures of this is what is the assortment of flavors they infuse in their potato chips that they’re selling. So like in Japan, they have fish-flavored potato chips. I mean, we eat fish here, but I don’t know that that would sell.

BOURDAIN: There are whole spectrums of flavors that other countries, other cultures, take for granted and require in their diet. In the Philippines there’s a whole bitter component that we are almost instinctively not happy with. They will introduce bile into dishes to give it that welcome bitter note. There’s a tradition of rotting things, like fermenting fish, getting it really, offensively funky by our standards, just ‘cause, I think, out of boredom.

DEGRASSE TYSON: It introduces another flavor.

BOURDAIN: And it’s worth noting also that we—Western societies, anyway—used to do that. For the Roman times, the condiment of choice was essentially something called garam, which was essentially rotten fish guts and rotten fish sauce. This was the salt, the principal seasoning ingredient, all across Europe. So even our own tastes have changed.

I think the last, for a lot of people, the last frontier is the textural thing. Particularly in Asia, they like squishy, or even rubbery, chewy, or a lot of traditional European cultures, you know, cartilage texture—that’s something we really have a problem with. We tend to like crispy. Once you cross that border, you’re really someplace special.

To get back to your question about delicacies, you’ve got to ask always, is there an assumed medical component to what we’re talking about also? I think a lot of what we consider the really freakiest foods, the eye-popping, what the, why would you eat that—a lot of that has either folk medicine, or

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