A Cook's Tour_ In Search of the Perfect Meal - Anthony Bourdain [7]
But you want to know what it’s like making television? Even a completely nonscripted, cinema verité, make-it-up-as-you-go-along travel and food show, where you do whatever the hell you want and hope the cameras can keep up? It’s being poked in the head with shotgun mikes so often, you feel like the leading lady in a late 1970s Ron Jeremy flick. There is no halfway. You don’t, it turns out, sell out a little bit. Maybe you thought you were just going to show a little ankle – okay, maybe a little calf, too – but in the end, you’re taking on the whole front line of the Pittsburgh Steelers on a dirty shag carpet.
There’s a punch line to a joke – ‘We’ve already established you’re a whore. Now we’re just haggling over price’ – that fairly describes my predicament. I sold my ass. When I signed on the dotted line, any pretense of virginity or reluctance – of integrity (I don’t even remember what that is) – vanished. It means when the shooter says, ‘Wait a minute,’ you wait to enter the restaurant, jump in the river, or light a cigarette, so he can get the shot. When they want you to enter the restaurant again, shake hands with the owner, tell him how delighted you are to be eating fish head at his establishment – even though you just did that five minutes ago, when you meant it – you do it.
I’ve had a lot of fun trashing Emeril and Bobby and the Food Network’s stable of stars over the last few years. God, I hated their shows. Now I’ve gone over to the dark side, too. Watching Emeril bellowing catchphrases at his wildly barking seal-like studio audience, I find myself feeling empathy for the guy. Because I know, I think, how it happened. One sells one’s soul in increments, slowly, over time. First, it’s a simple travel show (‘Good for the book!’). Next thing you know, you’re getting dry-humped by an ex-wrestler on the Spice Channel.
I don’t want you to think I don’t like the camera crews that followed me around the world. As TV people go, they were pretty damn cool. Most of them had been shooting documentaries in hospital emergency rooms and trauma units before coming aboard my project, so they knew how to stay out of the way in crowded kitchens and how to behave around people with knives. They ate the same terrifying food. They stayed in the same at-times-septic hotels I did. They braved minefields and roadblocks to get their shots. They stood close, cameras running while, drunk off my ass, I wildly and irresponsibly discharged automatic weapons and high explosives. They froze when I froze, suffered the antimalarial drugs, the food poisoning, the bugs, the vegetarians that I had to. When challenged by locals to contests involving tequila, they did not let the side down. As I, from time to time, crawled, vomiting into some drainage culvert, so did they. They, too, were showered with blood, watched pig-fisting, throat-slitting, force-feeding – and filmed every second. They managed to shoot all day in Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen without causing injury to themselves or others. And they did it with considerable good humor. But when you hear me carping about how lonely and sick and frightened I am, holed up in some Cambodian backwater, know that there’s a television crew a few doors down the hall. That changes things.
All told, however, the writing of this book has been the greatest adventure of my life. Cooking professionally is hard. Traveling around the world, writing, eating, and making a television show is relatively easy. It beats brunch.
Where Food Comes From
‘The pig is getting fat. Even as we speak,’ said José months later. From the very moment I informed my boss of my plans to eat my way around the world, another living creature’s fate was sealed on the other side of the Atlantic. True to his word, José had called his mother in Portugal and told her to start fattening a pig.
I’d heard about this pig business