I wasn’t supposed to like Anthony Bourdain

I never watched or read anything by Anthony Bourdain until he was gone. We had many mutual friends and I heard nothing but wonderful things about him. But I was told, according to my political tribe, that I was supposed to hate him. So I did. Not even knowing why.

I was vegan and Anthony apparently flew from island to island murdering tiny animals with his bare hands laughing like a maniac and eating them whole in front of children….or something like that. So screw that guy.

This happened to me a lot on the left. Jocko Willink has helped me with discipline, and teaches us to say “good” when something bad happens. This helped me learn from my mistakes instead of freak out and take several panic naps. But he’s a navy seal and probably a war criminal so screw him too. I discovered Jocko on the Tim Ferris show, who I also should have ignored for being a tech bro investor or something involving capitalism. Oddly enough he’s the guy that taught me about meditation and mindfulness. But alas, we are not in the same clique, so we shouldn’t listen to them. Plus they probably all murder baby animals. (I mean, Jocko probably does.)

Here is Anthony gently describing people who don’t eat animals:

“Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter-faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.”

I mean goddamn Anthony! (That Hezbollah line was pretty good.) That’s harsh. I mean shit, vegans just like animals. At least that’s how I look at it, cause they are my tribe. Anthony’s tribe is different. Anthony traveled the world befriending the unseen. The poor, downtrodden, men, women, and children of the world. The people who no matter how hard their life was, could still smile and laugh over a home cooked meal. And sometimes, most of the time, that meal involved dead animals. So maybe, when he saw vegans calling anyone who ate meat a monster, he thought of the children in Cambodia, or street vendors in Thailand, his friends, and thought, “Fuck you vegans.” As many people do.

Vegans on the other hand, spend all day trying to scroll through Instagram without seeing some poor cow on a conveyer belt scared to death and desperately trying to back peddle to save his life. COME ON MAN I JUST CAME TO INSTAGRAM TO SEE SOME GOD DAMN MOTIVATIONAL QUOTES AND A CAT OR TWO! But we see it. All the time. We live in the world of animal suffering. No fun.

Vegans are called preachy everyday. But think about it from their perspective. They are taunted by meat on billboards, commercials, most places to eat, and drunk uncles waving bacon in front of our faces saying “baaaacon.” We don’t torture the dinner table waving our food and saying “toffffffuuuu.”

I mean maybe because it’s cause no one likes tofu.

So here is where shit gets tricky.

I saw a lot of vegans posting after Anthony’s death that they, in short, didn’t give a damn. I saw a lot of people who were touched by Anthony’s life, get furious at those vegans. And the great war continues.

In this online day and age of “tweet your outrage as fast as humanly possible consequences be dammed”, we never get a chance to look each other in the eyes and talk out our disagreements. We rarely get to see the humanity in someone we thought we had nothing in common with. A message which Anthony Bourdain lived his life trying to spread. A message that I only got to hear this last week.

Tweets trashing each other get thousands of likes, while me a liberal, tweeting how a navy seal, or meat eater, or tech bro inspired me, will be met with indifference at best, and unleash the attack dogs at worst.

This leads to a world, online and off, where we are looking for what to hate in people, and not what to love.

Anthony Bourdain and most vegans lead with the same beautiful quality; empathy. I legit thought Bourdain was a monster, but as I pile drive through his work I saw a love for humans, for outcasts, for the little guy, the unknown. I’ve seen Vegans crying while feeding baby pigs who nuzzle up to their hands before slaughter. Both of these take compassion and it’s a shame that those two worlds rarely meet because of ideological differences.

In my three day quest to learn as much about this man, that I could have met anytime on the jiujitsu mats (including my own gym), or through my comedian friends, but chose not too, here is one of my favorite things I heard him say in one of his last interviews for Fast Company:

“If I walk into a room where everyone agrees with me, I find that frighting and dismaying, and boring… as fuck.”

We need more of this. We need to be around people who challenge us and teach us new things and not just people who clap for everything we say.

I wish you were still here man so I could buy you a burger and you could give me your fries, but I hope you find peace discovering the great unknown.