Bourdain in Peru

January 28, 2024

“Imagine you took a lot of acid, and then you ate that whole bowl of ants …” The one where Tony Bourdain treks into the Peruvian Amazon in search of rare cacao beans— and comes back with an idea for a funky chocolate bar he christens Good & Evil.

During a previous trip to Peru, Anthony Bourdain wrote in his program notes for his return visit to Piruw Ripuwlika — Peru’s quechua name — for CNN’s Parts Unknown (season 1, episode 7, originally aired June, 2013) ), he bounced around Lima, explored the ever-changing food scene — ”from the more cutting-edge fine-dining restaurants to the funkiest but most delicious traditional cevicherías” — huffed his way up pre-Columbian Andes mountains, got dizzy from altitude sickness, stuffed his mouth with coca leaves, ate guinea pig in Cuzco, explored the jungle of Amazonia, drank chicha with yucca farmers, took ayahuasca in the darkness of night with a curandero, puttered upriver in a wobbly boat — the kind TV producers like his long-suffering companion Tom Vitale just love — “with imaginary bats screeching in my brain and lights that probably weren’t there dancing in front of my eyes,” and took in the sights of Machu Picchu at dawn — “one of the most extraordinary experiences one can have in this life” — then watched millions of cutter ants strip a forest floor clean, made friends, and “learned something about the world and about myself.”

There was hardly a reason to return, Bourdain readily admitted in his programs notes, save one: His close friend and partner in kitchen crimes Eric Ripert, the chef of the most excellent Le Bernardin in NYC, told him that he (Ripert) had recently tasted the “best chocolate in the world,” and asked if Bourdain would be so kind as to get involved in a likely disastrous cooperative venture into the high-end gourmet chocolate business. Cacao loco!

The resulting chocolate bar, christened Good & Evil, would kick off the most viral discussion of chocolate in recorded history. (To save you the trouble, don’t bother looking; I tried. The most recent mention of Good & Evil chocolate on Reddit dates from two years ago; the high-end kitchenware and home furnishings retailer Williams-Sonoma had exclusive rights to Bourdain-Riperts’ chocolate confections, but any trace of Good & Evil has long since vanished from Williams-Sonoma’s various websites.

Don’t get me wrong: Williams-Sonoma has plenty of gourmet chocolate, but not Bourdain-Ripert.

If you rewatch Parts Unknown, as I did the other night, it might help to sample some gourmet chocolate of your own, to get in the mood.

LA-based Compartés comes highly recommended by connoisseurs, though in my neighbourhood Green & Black’s is more accessible, and less likely to require you to take out a bank loan to cover the cost — to get into the mood.

Peru is less politically driven than earlier 1st-season episodes of Parts Unknown like Libya and Colombia — Peru may have been more politically stable when Bourdain visited than it is today — but the country is full of surprises, none the least its claim to pride-of-place as the world’s premium supplier of gourmet cacao beans.

To reiterate — after all, what are TV reruns for? — Good & Evil was the culinary love child of Bourdain, Ripert and Éclat chocolatier Christopher Curtin; it was fashioned from personally selected, hand-picked pods of Peruvian Pure Nacional, an exceedingly rare and prized all-white strain of cacao bean thought to have been wiped out nearly 100 years ago.

No wonder the Good & Evil bar sparked a chocolate conversation that went viral.

“I don’t know whether you knew this,” Bourdain says at one point, “but I am an aficionado of early erotica of pre-Columbian and post-Columbian eras — you know, like pottery of people doing it.”

Erm, alrighty then.

The Peruvian rainforest was the incubator, too, for many of the early legends of El Dorado, the so-called “City of Gold.”

“Wow, gold necklaces,” Bourdain says, during a museum prowl of pre-Columbian arts and artifacts.

“You see why the Spanish just freaked out when they came here and turned into maniacal greedheads.”

And then there’s the cuisine.

“Whole different flavour spectrum, right? All new. It’s almost like you need a new section of your tongue when you eat this food, It’s not like, well, this is something like. It’s not ‘kind of like’ anything. It’s really awesome.”

Not to mention the chocolate.

After watching Peru, either for the first time or the umpteenth, it’ll be hard to settle for a Snickers or Twix ever again.

Bourdain in Libya

January 21, 2024

Tony Bourdain’s throwback to Libya, post-Colonel: Check out the ‘Uncle Kentucky Fried Chicken’ in a 2013 outing for CNN’s Parts Unknown that still resonates in 2024.

It’s true what they say: The more things change, the more they stay the same. Tangier was always going to be a tough act for Tony Bourdain, but from where I sit, he gave it a genuine shot with Libya, another landmark episode that aired in Parts Unknown’s debut season, on CNN in 2013. Ten years ago today, give or take.

It was one of Parts Uknown’s more tense episodes — one reviewer at the time mentioned that perhaps only Haiti could compare in that department — Libya is both strangely disorienting and oddly familiar today, especially in light of recent events throughout the Middle East.

It’s strange, for example, to hear Bourdain say, as he does in the program’s opening moments: "It's amazing arriving here after all you see on TV these days that Libya is, in fact, functioning at all. But it is.”

Fast-forward 10 years, give or take, and it’s hard to figure out what, if anything, has really changed.

It’s still not on the tourist map — I bought a ticket to Libya once, not so long ago, on British Airways, but the flight, insanely expensive by Mediterranean standards, double what it would have cost to fly to nearby Morocco, for instance, never got off the ground — and at this rate, Libya won’t appear on any tourist maps for some time to come yet.

Two years ago, the Libya episode was singled out in Vanity Fair’s excerpts from Bourdain’s longtime director/producer and creative colleague Tom Vitale’s book In the Weeds, and it’s not hard to see why. Libya was not the kind of program one might see on the Travel Channel or Food Network, or even Parts Unknown at that point.

There is little to no fine dining to speak of, save the occasional nod to the salving effects of street food — the fish market in Libya’s capital, Tripoli, for example, where Bourdain gleefully notes the day’s menu is presented as the actual fish you will be eating for lunch, as opposed to the lame, declassé option of listing the lunch specials on a printed menu.

Anyone for barracuda, with the heads?

And while you’re there, do check out Uncle Kentucky Fried Chicken. It’s like the colonel, but not actually the Colonel.

Libya is replete with those pithy, uniquely oddball and yet uniquely perceptive observations Bourdain-ophiles have grown fond of over the years, from “Every kid over the age of five seems to have been issued a lighter and a fistful of fireworks,” to, “This is Tripoli after 42 years of nightmare … How to build a whole society overnight and make it work in one of the most contentious and difficult areas of the world, is what people are trying to figure out.”

They’re still trying.

Libya today is presided over — “governed” would be too strong a word, metaphorically and literally — by a mishmash of local militias, most of whom hate each other with a passion reserved for, oh, say Gaza or the Occupied Territories in Palestine, and a national government that appears to lurch ever closer to the not entirely exalted status of ‘failed state’ with each passing day.

The shadow of Col. Muammar Gaddafi — Gaddafi, Gadhafi, or Qaddafi (قذافي, Qaḏḏāfī), take your pick — still loomed large over Libya at the time Bourdain visited, even though the erstwhile colonel-in-name-only had been rudely shish-kebabed in his hometown of Misrata two years earlier. Bourdain again: “Outside Tripoli's centre, there's this one-time axis of all power and untold evil, a huge complex of sinister offices, barracks, and residences on top of a rabbit warren of secret tunnels and underground facilities.”

Oh, dear. Secret tunnels and underground facilities — now where have we heard that before?

Everywhere he goes, Bourdain finds himself surrounded by modified weaponry — “You took it off a helicopter, and you put it on a car?" — and homemade firearms — “So, it’s basically a crossbow … that fires Molotov cocktails.”

Bourdain, unshaven and looking at times more shaken than stirred, is constantly being knocked off-balance, it seems, at one point threatened by a local militia that barks at his crew to stop filming, or else, and things get dicey. “I don't know if you noticed but I'm going full-Blitzer on this shoot,” Bourdain says at one point, showing off his scruffy beard for the camera.

The distinct lack of alcohol — it’s a Koranic thing — doesn’t seem to bother him. At first.

"I've been about a week without any alcohol. I'm enjoying my new clean-living lifestyle.”

Well, that wouldn’t last. Either.

As always — and this is what elevates Bourdain’s work above the rote, the usual, then and now — he spared a thought at the very end for those who live there, and he found a grace note on which to close the hour.

“It's Libya,” he says, with weary resignation. “They were supposed to be the bad guys, a bad country filled with bad people, right? I don't think so. … I wish them the very, very best.”

What the hell, it’s all about the end result, right? And Libya makes for fascinating — if occasionally harrowing — viewing, especially today.

And that fried chicken? Not to die for exactly, but I’ll bet it had its compensations. It sure did look that way.

Bourdain in Maroc

January 18, 2024

Remembering Tony Bourdain rock the casbah in Tangier Morocco, the “City of Stories,” for CNN’s Parts Unknown.

At a talk a few years back at a book fair near where I live, the respected world traveller Paul Theroux — who broke bread with Anthony Bourdain over Hawaiian rice flavoured with pineapple, coconut and golden raisins in a Parts Unknown outing for CNN two years later — said that anyone else’s experiences of the South Pacific, as Theroux recounted in his first-person testimonial The Happy Isles of Oceania, would not be the same as his, should they decide to go.

That’s the whole point of writing prestige literature, Theroux said.

It’s not about the place; it’s about the person inside.

I was reminded of that the other night while re-watching Bourdain’s Parts Unknown episode on Tangier, Morocco, in which Bourdain waxes poetic about the experiences of several of his literary heroes, among them William S. Burroughs, in “the City of Stories,” as Tangier is often known.

Tangier was founded in the 5th century BC. It’s a crossroad of cultures, ruled at various intervals over time by Phoenicians, Romans, Carthaginians, Spaniards, the English — oh god, the English! — and Arabs, including a several-year spell as an “international city” in the early 1950s (think Rick’s Cafe Americain from Casablanca, if Casablanca had been governed at the time by the UN).

As described by Bourdain, Tangier is a state of mind, full of cultural enclaves and layers, where a waiter may welcome you in Spanish, a member of the local constabulary may address you in inflected French, and where voices cry out in Arabic over streets that have borne witness to decades of literary hangers-on, from William S. Burroughs and Paul Bowles to Alexandre Dumas and Mark Twain, all cast in the luminous sea light of the Mediterranean and Gibraltar, with Spain and modern Europe just a short ferry ride away.

I’ve been to Tangier myself, years ago, and I can’t still quite wrap my head around the experience, even something as banal as whether I loved it or hated it.

Theroux had a point because my Tangier was most decidedly not Bourdain’s Tangier, or at least the Tangier that Bourdain describes — aptly and well, with the heartfelt conviction that Bourdain brought to virtually every place he experienced throughout Parts Unknown’s 12 seasons. (Looking back on it now, can it really have been 12 seasons?)

I never cared for Burroughs’ writing, for one — Naked Lunch, which Burroughs wrote in 1959, the year I was born, was unreadable. (No, I didn’t try to read it then; that would’ve been some neat trick.

I tackled it years later as a young man).

Bourdain would no doubt dismiss me with one of his signature scoffs and an irritated wave of the hand.

I’m a great admirer of Paul Bowles, though. The Sheltering Sky, for me, is a masterpiece of modern prose. It played a large role — though by no means the only role — in nurturing in me a lifelong fascination with the Sahara.

And therein lies the rub. Tangier is a city of mystery and intangibles, where no two people are likely to experience it the same way.

During his stay for Parts Unknown, Bourdain sampled the British tea at Café Tingis (one teabag per person, and another for the pot, how very English, do they give the teabags pet names?); the tagine (a traditional Moroccan stew of vegetables and meat of fish) at Saveur de Poisson on Escalier Waller; the Moroccan mint tea at Café Baba on Rue Zaitouni and the Moroccan tomato salad at le Restaurant Andalus; and last but not least, the Moroccan goat cheese, or jben, at Grand Socco at Place du 9 Avril 1947, a town square named for the date of a speech given by King Mohamed V.

I, on the other hand, downed a bottle of lukewarm Coke on a hot late afternoon one year in May, while working worked my way through a paper plate of soggy fries.

It did have its compensations, though. I kept the bottle, tiny, made of seemingly inch-thick glass, in the classic old glass style of Coca-Cola bottles, with the Coke logo printed in Arabic. I’ve stored it on a shelf near my workspace all these years. (Fun fact which likely won’t surprise you: Coca-Cola, written in Arabic, is instantly recognizable as saying Coca-Cola, even to someone as unfamiliar with cursive Arabic script as I am.)

Chances are, you will never see Tangier for yourself. If you do, though, remember Theroux’s counsel about all places in all parts of the world: your experience won’t be the same as mine, or anyone else’s. Everyone sees things differently.

I’ll say this, though. What Bourdain had to say, and what he saw and experienced of Tangier in his own words for CNN is an out-of-body experience in its own right. Hadha sahih.

Cat Story

January 10, 2024

Incredible and rare: a sighting of Arizona’s only known wild ocelot. For all the stories of gloom and deprivation that rocked the natural world over the past year, there was the occasional ray of hope. This was one.

Just as P-22, a young mountain lion dubbed the “Hollywood cat” who surprised biologists by establishing a decade-long residency in the Griffith Park area of Los Angeles sparked a conservation movement that has resulted in the construction of a wildlife bridge over California’s 10-lane Highway 101, other animals left their mark in 2023.

Lone animals and groups alike used their innate skills and courage to recover lost territory, expand their range, or simply survive against the odds.

Some were helped by human action like stream restoration, while others, following in the tracks of P-22, deepened scientific knowledge and helped inspire those who work to save them.

An ocelot, a much smaller — and more rare — cat than a mountain lion confounded observations in Arizona’s Huachuca Mountains in early July by, well, showing up. This ocelot, dubbed Lil’ Jefe — a nod to El Jefe, the now-famous jaguar found in the same region — overcame ranchlands, roads, mining activities, poison traps set by the US Dept. of Agriculture, and an increasingly fortified border wall, to find a way to survive.

His presence has since galvanized local conservation efforts in the area, if only by highlighting the threat to wildlife from a border wall that keeps growing, despite the ongoing controversy.

The ever-growing border wall promises to be a divisive issue in the upcoming US presidential elections, where it hasn’t proven to be so already.

Fewer than 100 ocelots remain in the continental United States, mostly in Texas. The US population is the northern reach of a range that extends south through the Americas to Argentina. As reported by the conservation website The Revelator, biologists believe Lil’ Jefe, who was spotted just five miles north of the border, has appeared on trap cameras some 150 times since 2012. He’s the only known ocelot in Arizona and one of just five spotted in the state since 2009. He likely came from northern Mexico, a home he can’t return to — and that others can’t migrate from — because of the border wall.

Camera traps in the region have captured ringtail raccoons, mountain lions and the occasional black bear, an indication of the region’s remarkable biodiversity and the need —some would say responsibility — to protect and preserve it for future generations, for biodiversity’s sake and for the sake of the wild world at large.

Lil’ Jefe’s efforts have not entirely been in vain. A video uploaded to YouTube five months ago by wildlife videographer and self-styled “conservation CATalyst” Jason Miller has captured 20K views. The circle of life goes on.

Glimmer of Hope 2.0

December 31, 2023

2023 was by all accounts — except perhaps those of diehard climate deniers and the more two-faced participants at last month’s CoP28 climate conference — a hell of a year.

Not only did governments fail to reverse the tide of global warming, the rate of heating actually accelerated.

That’s why an obscure, little-reported court ruling in an obscure, out-of-the-way mountain state in the US last August — a month of record-breaking temperatures across the entire northern hemisphere — has the potential to create such a huge ripple effect in the campaign to stem and possibly reverse global heating caused by fossil fuels.

On Aug. 15, a state court in Montana ruled in favour of 16 young people who had sued their local government, arguing that policies that favour fossil fuels violate their constitutional rights to a clean and healthy environment.

In short, youth climate campaigners — inspired in part by Greta Thunberg — were able to prove, using the testimony of climate scientists and constitutional experts, that the climate crisis jeopardizes their generation’s future well-being as guaranteed under the United Nations Charter of Human Rights.

Montana district court judge Kathy Seeley made no bones in her 103-page written ruling.

“Plaintiffs have proven that as children and youth, they are disproportionately harmed by fossil fuel production and climate impacts,” she wrote.

True, the state of Montana is appealing the ruling — an upper court decision is pending — and no one is under any illusion that the Republican/Trumpist-dominated US Supreme Court will toss the ruling the first chance it gets, but a legal precedent has been set.

Recent court rulings across Latin America and South America have shown that court challenges by youth climate campaigners, once ridiculed as the namby-pamby imaginings of a pampered generation of idle kids who don’t have to work for a living yet, may carry more legal weight than many doubters first assumed.

The Montana court judgment has already marked an important turn in the road for climate campaigners who are using the legal system to address the climate crisis.

If nothing else, the ruling is the first trial win for the public interest lawyers who represent the climate advocacy group Our Children’s Trust.

Their voices are growing louder.

By the end of 2022, there were more than 2,100 climate-change-related court cases filed globally, more than double the total from 2017, according to a report from the United Nations Environment Programme. Court cases have been filed in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Colombia, Ecuador, France, and New Zealand, among other countries.

This past month, lawyers representing youth-driven campaigns across the continental United States filed suit against the US Environmental Protection Agency, accusing the agency of failing to meet its obligation to protect the environment for future generations.

The lawsuits are part of a larger movement to use the courts to hold polluters — and the governments that enable them — to account for reckless endangerment and depraved indifference in the name of profit-making.

The impact is global.

In September, a half dozen youthful climate campaigners in Portugal filed suit at the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that governments in Europe aren’t doing enough to protect younger generations from the effects of the climate crisis. That’s instructive because governments across Europe are already far more progressive in combating global heating than in the US and China, the world’s two largest emitters of carbon. We’re talking about Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, France and Germany, not Trumpist America. If continental Europe is shown to be neglecting its moral and fiduciary duty to future generations, what chance have America and Canada?

The kids are all right.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/14/montana-climate-trial-young-activists-judge-order

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/20/what-happened-montana-climate-trial-decision