Book #87: Medium Raw

Title: Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook
Author: Anthony Bourdain

I like Anthony Bourdain. I enjoyed his first memoir, Kitchen Confidential, when I picked it up a few years ago, and No Reservations has been my laundry-folding Netflix show of choice lately. I like watching him stroll the streets of the world's cities, eating weird things, and looking like he doesn't have a care in the world. Here's a guy who will eat things like raw seal meat and the intestines and genitalia of just about anything, but in Medium Raw, he talks about his biggest food fear-- the Chicken McNugget.

I'll admit to feeling a little bit defensive when I read Bourdain's passages in which he gleefully brainwashes his preschool-age daughter into believing that Ronald McDonald abducts children and smells bad. For someone who gained his cred eating anything and everything, who didn't even have health insurance until a decade or so ago, he certainly seems to have adjusted to life on the Upper East Side pretty quickly. Seriously-- he can poison his body with all kinds of drugs and alcohol and consume multitudes of weird stuff, but the very thought of his precious baby eating a chicken nugget has him quaking in his boots? Gag me.

Other than that, I found the book fairly typical (which means good) Bourdain fare. I enjoyed the stories about people he's met and worked with in the food world, even those I don't know much about. I also loved hearing about his family. My favorite chapter was the food porn chapter-- it made me want to travel the world, or at least stray a little further than the familiar Wendy's (or McDonalds-- the horror!) the next time I take a road trip.