Tony Bourdain, open your mind

My wife read Kitchen Confidential by Tony Bourdain a few years back, and I vaguely remembered that she mentioned he had some snarky comment about vegetarians in it. When a friend was talking about the TV show with the same title, I decided to search the book on Amazon to see exactly what the quote was. It was much worse than I expected.

On the dust jacket, Tony straightforwardly mentions his "naked contempt for vegetarians, sauce-on-siders, the 'lactose-intolerant'...", and he isn't kidding. (By the way, I love how he puts lactose-intolerant' in quotes, as if it were some alleged condition with no scientific evidence to back it up.) Here's the paragraph from the book that is the real stand-out (bold is mine):

Vegetarians — and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans — are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body — these waterheads imagine — is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It's healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I've worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold. Oh, I'll accommodate them, I'll rummage around for something to feed them — for a "vegetarians plate" — if called on to do so. Fourteen dollars for a few slices of grilled eggplant and zucchini suits my food cost fine.

Wow, really? "The enemy of everything good and decent"? That's pretty damn extreme. And as for his "accommodation"... I've had chefs at wedding banquets from Colorado to Michigan do a better job creating a vegetarian entree than him. It speaks volumes of his attitude towards his profession if the best vegetarian entree he can summon is to grill a few vegetable slices.

Tony, if you're truly interested in growing yourself as a chef — or even if you're simply interested in seeing how good vegan cooking can be — then you owe it to yourself to try a meal made by a top chef who considers the lack of animal products not a constraint, but a freedom. Have a meal at Candle 79 in New York. Try the black bean torte at Millennium in San Francisco. Have one of the fine chefs from VegAdvantage cater a meal for you. Or maybe try one of your own recipes that the have been veganized by the people you so despise

But you shouldn't pass judgement on vegetarians without at least trying the experience yourself. And if you're worried about the cost, then worry not. Dinner's on me.

Comments

[David Creemer]

This guy sounds to me like the Fox News / talk-radio of chefs -- spouting off outrageous bullshit to get people angry and attract attention. Remember the opposite of love is indifference, not hate.