Because this is my only reading response about Anthony Bourdain’s A Cook’s Tour, I feel compelled to first address the obvious things about this read, some of which we covered in class on Tuesday. His writing is wonderfully smooth and engaging, and the book flew by as I was reading it. It was easy to get caught up in his descriptions and stories, and my curiosity of what he could possibly be doing next kept be reading. His tone and wit only added to the pleasant experience; I wanted him to tell me his stories.
The thing about the second half of the book that really got me thinking, though, was towards the beginning, when Bourdain was in Tokyo. The main premise of this book, of course, is to search for the “perfect meal.” It wasn’t until I reached the chapter on Tokyo that I realized I had been expecting him to find it. As I read through the first half of the book, I kept making mental notes of each place he visited and each meal he tasted, filing them away as if I would have to later judge and evaluate them for perfection. Reading the Tokyo chapter completely discredited this mindset, a mindset which I hadn’t even been fully aware of.
What was it about the Tokyo chapter that made me come to the conclusion that the perfect meal is truly a myth, unattainable and impossible to pinpoint no mater what anyone else says? Simple. I despise seafood.
My whole life, people have urged me to try seafood, to just eat a little bit, but I just can’t stomach it. I’m not sure what it is about fish and seafood that is so repulsing to me, but something about it makes me want to be sick. I hate fish, I hate shrimp. I hate oysters. I hate clams, I hate mussels. All of it, absolutely all of it, disgusts me. I was more disgusted by the description of the cutting up of the 400-pound tuna fish than anything he said about the pig being gutted. Because, to me, pigs are supposed to be eaten. Fish aren’t. This isn’t a blind hate, either-- I’ve tried just enough seafood dishes to come to my conclusion that it’s just not for me, thank you very much.
So, knowing my abhorrence for seafood, you can probably imagine what it was like to read “Tokyo Redux.” While seafood had been featured in plenty of other dishes throughout the book, the overabundance of catfish and clams in this chapter was too much for me to handle. I was absolutely incapable of comprehending how anything that features seafood to this extent could ever be dubbed “the perfect meal.”
Yet as I was reading this section, I was also struck by how, had the ingredients been anything else, the meal would have seemed wonderful. It was fresh, artfully prepared, and made from the highest quality ingredients available. It should have sounded good! Bourdain said that it was not only the best sushi and seafood he had ever eaten, but also one of the best meals he had ever eaten, period. This left me with mixed feelings; it was something I could understand on the one hand, and something I simply could not comprehend on the other.
So I came to the conclusion that no matter what anyone else has to say about the matter, “the perfect meal” is a myth. Food and taste are much too subjective to try to make a science out of it. There is no one answer to the question of what the perfect meal is. Because, if it came down to the choice between Bourdain’s gourmet sushi meal and a burger or two at the 24-hour diner near my house, I would undoubtedly pick the burgers.
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