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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Anthony Bourdain’s Moveable Feast

Goodbye to a chef, a traveler, and connoisseur, and a friend
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I just woke up to the news that Anthony Bourdain has killed himself. I’m sitting here in tears. How can this be? He seemed to love life without any limit. But there was a darkness in him that gave him allure. It seemed, though, that the worst of that — the part that led him to heroin addiction as a young man — was over. In fact, his entire body of television work — traveling, discovering the world through its food, and making great TV about it — conveyed to me a joy in being alive.

According to the New York Post, he was found dead in his Strasbourg hotel room by his friend, the great chef Eric Ripert.

I have no words just yet. I loved his work so much. His episode on Lyon I watched almost liturgically. It’s the only television show I’ve ever watched that made me travel somewhere just to be part of the world it revealed to me, if only for a couple of days.

That poor man. God, he had everything good, or so it seemed, and now this. It is almost unbearable for me to watch this glimpse of the moveable feast — in both senses of the term — that he made of his life. But this is how I choose to remember him:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiKUni751uI&w=525&h=300]

UPDATE: This. It was easy to believe that he could be a smart-ass about it all because it was in his past.

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