Anthony Bourdain

By The Manolith Team on January 1st, 2009

I like Anthony Bourdain, pleasant guy and at the same time opinionated. That’s not an easy combination to maintain show after show as he does on the Travel and Living channel. I envy him and often wish I could swap places with him, traveling the world for free and checking out the babes and hotspots. But it’s not exactly free, he has to subject his taste buds to sensations and his expose his sensibilities to experiences that would make perhaps make even Bear Gryll’s belly churn.

Like when he had to push warthog anus down his throat on a visit to Namibia, by his own admission that was the hardest thing he ever had to gulp down. Anthony Bourdain places fermented shark and drinking cobra blood up there as well. I guess that means raw seal eyeballs and fetal duck eggs were a comparative cakewalk for him.

So the point is what kind of a person does one have to be to come out smiling after taking punches from a boxing champ in Puerto Rico and consuming hot chillies and meat floating in scalding hot oil in a Japanese eatery. My guess is that it takes an intelligent and humble man who sees himself as a part of a universal whole and one who is aware of his own finiteness, his smallness. Or maybe it takes a guy who’s been numbed by some LSD tablets before the camera starts rolling and when on that trip the taste doesn’t matter and all that part smart / part witty / part psycho-babble philosophical stuff rolls easily.

Check out Bourdain eating a snake’s heart – the kind of stunt that qualifies him for sobriquets like badass and the man amongst men!