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Already it’s been a year. So much has changed. Not enough has changed. New endeavors, new friends, new possibilities and yet, everyday is the same. I wash dishes. I cook food. I write. I keep myself distracted. A year has passed since Anthony Bourdain hung himself in a hotel room in France and I still have not recovered.
How is it that the death of a man I did not know or ever meet has so severely impacted my life? In the last few years, we’ve all dealt with the sudden or tragic death of someone we love or admire. The rise of mass shootings, terrorist attacks, and suicides has made feelings of loss and shock near daily occurrences. The deaths of Dolores O’Riorden, Chris Cornell and Johann Johannsson, in my case, were devastating and unexpected blows, to say the least, but left nothing more than a dent. Why then can I not shake the death of Anthony Bourdain?
For most of my adult life, Bourdain was my role model. Not for the messy, unrestrained kitchen culture he documented in Kitchen Confidential, which many young cooks glorified. Nor was I under the misapprehension that he lived the “perfect” life as he’d hear repeatedly on morning talk shows and interviews. He even said it a few times himself. Moving constantly as a kid, this always rang as somewhat hollow, ignorant of the pitfalls of a transient lifestyle.
How is it that the death of a man I did not know or ever meet has so severely impacted my life? In the last few years, we’ve all dealt with the sudden or tragic death of someone we love or admire. The rise of mass shootings, terrorist attacks, and suicides has made feelings of loss and shock near daily occurrences. The deaths of Dolores O’Riorden, Chris Cornell and Johann Johannsson, in my case, were devastating and unexpected blows, to say the least, but left nothing more than a dent. Why then can I not shake the death of Anthony Bourdain?
For most of my adult life, Bourdain was my role model. Not for the messy, unrestrained kitchen culture he documented in Kitchen Confidential, which many young cooks glorified. Nor was I under the misapprehension that he lived the “perfect” life as he’d hear repeatedly on morning talk shows and interviews. He even said it a few times himself. Moving constantly as a kid, this always rang as somewhat hollow, ignorant of the pitfalls of a transient lifestyle.
I was drawn to the balance of discipline and debauchery — a balance that, as far as I knew, was unique to professional kitchens. Cooks had to play hard and work harder. But, even that wasn’t the reason I wanted to model my life after his. He hadn’t live by a road map of careful decisions. He’d made a lot of mistakes. He’d changed, lived multiple lives. He was never just one thing. Life, I had been lead to think, was college, then career, then marriage, then a house, then kids, and here was Bourdain, ex-heroin addict, chef turned writer turned TV-show host, doing everything his own way. I was an angry middle-class kid eager for self-destruction and aching to run from anything clean and wholesome and Bourdain offered the answer.
At 23, lost and freshly out of college, untrained and unskilled, I somehow landed a kitchen job. I learned fast what it meant to be a cook. My fingers became numb. I reeked of grease. I swapped fiction for cookbooks and I fucked up — a lot.
Soon, that debauchery I was looking for became the daily goal instead of the prize for all my hard work. My discipline soon twisted into a knot of anxieties and a focus on my shortcomings rather than a regimen to help me improve. By that point drinking was less recreation and more self-medication.
Then, when my anxieties swelled to debilitating heights, I turned inward, shutting out any ambition I had for cooking to prioritize writing. If I wanted to be a writer, I told myself, I at least had to try. It felt like a risky and stupid decision but a necessary one. Looking back, though, that decision was based partly on dread. Locking myself away in a room with my thoughts was safer than dealing with the struggles and pressures of a kitchen and my own inadequacies. I thought my problems might be solved by writing, but writing is lonely, arduous work. So, I stagnated in those fears as my addictions and ambitions isolated me further. My peers and friends started business and families, lived healthy, fulfilling lives while I stacked up rejection letters and failures.
After a day mired in dissatisfaction, regrets, self-hate, and shame, smelling of a fryer and too tired to think, much less write, watching Bourdain and hearing what he had to say was often the thing that got me through to the next day. His voice, his perspective, shit, just knowing he was out there restored my hope and determination. The man was the personification of change. Life didn’t have to be static. Evolution was possible, even moment to moment, and he was the evidence. His life became a great comfort to me.
On the morning of June 8th, 2018, when I heard the news that Bourdain had given up, I thought I should too. Not because I saw myself as some sort of disciple wanting to follow in his footsteps. I just couldn’t see a path forward. I was utterly empty. In that moment, I had no friends, no family, nothing was good, nothing was bad. My hopes, my ambitions, my diligence and appetite, the drive that kept my countless worries at bay, it all suddenly evaporated. Living made no sense. Stupidly, I thought, if Anthony Fucking Bourdain was calling it quits, what chance did I have?
I spent the day on the floor, my thoughts circling around the trees in my yard, wondering which could hold my weight and what might substitute for a rope.
Those feelings and thoughts carried over into the following days, weeks, months, even to this day, morphing into a substantial depression which forced me to consider and reconsider to a neurotic degree staying alive. What did I care about? How do I keep living? Why should I keep living?
When you’re numb in that way for any considerable amount of time, when everything you cared about before has lost its meaning, anything that sparks even the tiniest inkling of excitement comes like a scream out of the darkness.
The answer, again, came from Bourdain.
He often said that he pointed the camera away from himself and onto whatever or whomever he was focused on. He went into a situation informed and aware of his bias, but he was always open to them being proven wrong. He allowed himself to be changed and, in watching him change, we might be as well. If things didn’t turn out as he imagined, he’d let you know. Nothing was hidden, not even himself. He valued the dirty and the profane, the simple and the humble, just the same as he valued the exquisite and the sacred. His anger was precise and targeted. He could’ve easily spiraled into nihilism. Instead, he funneled his negative impulses into discovery, using skepticism and cynicism as his weapons to cut through the bullshit.
What if I did the same? What if I let go of my expectations? Let go of my hopes, my worries? What if, like Bourdain going into a new environment, I aim my obsessive examinations at something other than myself? What if I sharpen my negative behaviors into a tool? What if I ask more questions, talk to more people, get out from behind my desk?
Peon developed from there – a merging of my two favorite things: writing and cooking. The project began as an answer to those questions, a reason to live, a reason to get out of my head, discover, talk more, learn and develop as a cook and a writer. On one level, that is still the case, however, the original format was going to be nothing more than a blog. It was going to be a platform that just offered my perspective and that seemed boring. It lacked depth. As Bourdain had done with his shows, I wanted to create a platform that could present countless perspectives.
I’m a cook and I’ll always think of myself as a cook. That’s how I see the world. And the cooking world is not all Michelin stars, celebrity chefs and geniuses. It runs the gamut from haute cuisine to backstreet peddlers. There are cooks performing miracles with broken equipment. Farmers resurrecting long-forgotten varietals. Dishwashers elbow deep in orange thunder. Bartenders charming drunks into paying their tabs. There are burnouts, wasters, people who can’t wait to get out of the industry and people incapable of doing anything else. There are lifers who shouldn’t be in the game anymore and lifers who don’t see being a cook as a work at all.
The people creating and serving your food and cleaning up after you is massive and diverse group of ethnicities, backgrounds, motives, tastes, and goals. Sadly, most of those voices are unheard. Most of their experiences are unheard. Most of their perspectives, their humor, and their opinions are polished and purified for mass consumption. This magazine is about peeling that bullshit back and seeing the world through the lens of the service industry. This magazine is about and for the peons.
We won’t ever talk down to you, tell you what to do, how to do it or where to go. No city guides, how-to’s, news, lists, clickbait or food porn. Don’t expect any of that from us…unless we’re making fun of it.
Peon is a magazine, except it’s online. It will function essentially the same as a print magazine. Some issues will be themed and each new release will completely transform the site displaying a new logo, new art and a sweep of new content. Each individual piece inside the mag will have its own unique design. We’ll have art, photo essays, comics, travelogues, interviews, and whatever you can imagine. All from chefs, farmers, bartenders, writers, dishwashers and any service industry person with some shit to say. If you notice some similarities to, say, the seminal food-quarterly Lucky Peach, then you are exactly right. Lucky Peach is our number one visual influence and we might be following in their footsteps, but we’re forging our own path with the groundbreaking example they left behind.
~ June 8th, 2019
