parts unknown

Anthony Bourdain, Homeric similes, and the ethics of making the strange familiar

In late April, I made an exciting discovery. The food travel documentaries of the late great Anthony Bourdain are available for free with my Prime Video subscription! These are series that I have been meaning to watch since I finished The Bear in December and became fascinated by its references to a network and culture of famous New York chefs. I approached them chronologically, starting with the 2002 ‘A Cook’s Tour’.

Within a few minutes I was in love: with Bourdain, predictably, but more so with how he was utterly enamoured of the places and people he encountered. I even fell in love with the food - regardless of the fact that most of it was meat which would normally make me avert my pescetarian eyes and feel sick. It was something in Bourdain’s unflinching and unwavering quest for each locality’s specialties. He treated everything he ate, no matter how simple and homely it might be, as others might treat precious gems or ancient artefacts. Food was to him something with a meaning and import beyond (but not diminishing) its sensory pleasure and nourishing properties. The spiritual fervour of Bourdain’s culinary pilgrimage almost made me want to try a blood sausage or cockroach too.

At around twenty minutes each, the episodes are ideal for punctuating a daily routine without becoming cumbersome. ‘A Cook’s Tour’ loyally documents disparate regions’ foods and cultures of eating – that more fundamental feature of real human life - while avoiding political judgement or commentary. Thus, I was able to consume (forgive the pun) the 22-episode first series in the course of a week, while in the depths of revision for a Classical Legacy exam. I needed the cool and bland palate cleanser after the tough gristle of reception theory, classicism and classism, translation. A series without plot or narrative seemed to offer just that.

However, I struggled to relieve my mind from its state of frenzied revision. One might say that the aftertaste of the theories which I was reading lingered. Or better, like a peppercorn stuck between teeth and being dislodged at dessert, their flavours were tasted afresh in this new environment: afterwards, neither pepper nor ice cream can exist independent of the taste-memory of this fusion.

I initially found Bourdain’s constant references to American cuisine to be jarring. In the third episode of ‘A Cook’s Tour’, he comments that Vietnamese fried cobra chips are ‘kind of like potato chips, only sharper.’ Of cobra blood, he notes that ‘it kind of tastes like a Bull Shot, a Bloody Mary made with beef broth.’ With a head full of centre-periphery postcolonial theory that I had just been revising, I was irritated that the unique food of Vietnam had to be qualified through comparisons to the West. To me, Bourdain’s comparisons were equivalent to the ‘domesticating translation’ which translation theorist Lawrence Venuti condemns.

According to Venuti, by ‘suppressing the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text, assimilating it to dominant values in the target-language culture’, the domesticating translation into a colonial target language (generally English) perpetuates cultural complacency.¹ In short, domesticating translators accommodate and assimilate the foreign to their audience’s cultural practices and norms. The fundamental ‘otherness’ of foreign culture is made comprehensible by a process of diminishment and even elision. Consequently, the reader need not confront the cultural specificity of their own notions, because they are encouraged to believe that these are mirrored and affirmed by other cultures.

In the same vein, Bourdain seemed to allow his audience to accept their own world of potato chips and chicken wings without appreciating the unique particularity of foreign food. I felt, with a sniffing disdain and superiority, that I had successfully identified an all-too-familiar ideology of American cultural hegemony (which, when related to other countries, verged on cultural imperialism) lurking beneath the surface of the innocuous TV series.

Yet in this verdict was I not also comparing, translating and domesticating Bourdain? To comprehend his style of documentary narration, I assimilated it to the familiar academic theories within which I so often seek refuge and explanations for the world. I tried to understand a Bourdain who, tragically, cannot answer back, and who is now as incomprehensible and distant as the Homeric world. In reaching back and trying to know him, I judged him by the narrow criteria of what I do know.

Another approach was necessary. If Venuti’s theory of translation could be applied to Bourdain’s comparisons, then it could be applied to all comparisons. And so, I was compelled to think of Homer when I watched ‘A Cook’s Tour’ (what a statement). My comparison stemmed not from the Odyssey of eating that Bourdain embarks upon, but from how he makes use of comparison itself.

The Homeric ‘epic simile’ will be familiar to (and perhaps loathed by) anybody who has read or studied the Iliad and Odyssey. It is the literary comparison par excellence; its legacy is our own tendency to ransack the realm of the figurative to describe the actual. Translating an unfamiliar scene into a register familiar to his audience, the Homeric simile negotiates the fraught relationship between foreignising fidelity and domesticating accessibility. He lands more on the side of the latter, as he fits the source culture of a warlike past to the target culture of an agricultural present. This task seemed roughly equivalent to that of Bourdain, whose comparisons similarly use familiar tastes to help his audience imagine the alien ones he encounters.

I include an example from Book 2, ll.144-150 of the Iliad for those who have not read Homer, and some context: this simile describes the response of the Greek troops to their leader Agamemnon. To sound their morale, courage and resilience, he pretends to order a return from stalemate in Troy to home in Greece. They are eager to follow this command, believing it to be genuine - and proving their exhaustion and lack of commitment to the war.

And the gathering was stirred like the long sea-waves of the Icarian main, which the East Wind or the South Wind has raised, rushing upon them from the clouds of father Zeus. And even as when the West Wind at its coming stirreth a deep cornfield with its violent blast, and the ears bow thereunder, even so was all their gathering stirred, and they with loud shouting rushed towards the ships; and from beneath their feet the dust arose on high.²

Homer is saying that the men were ‘stirred’ in a similar way to waves being stirred by wind and to a cornfield being stirred by wind. These two ‘vehicles’, the waves and the field, are used to describe a singular ‘tenor’, the men. That both vehicles describe the effects of wind on nature gives the simile a further satisfying varnish of coherence.

Other epic similes tend to delineate one vehicle at greater length, but they share a general trend of comparing and thus relating an unfamiliar scene of mythical battle to a more familiar scene of nature and agriculture. They spur an act of imagination, in order that the audience may relate that which cannot be easily visualised to that with which they are accustomed. Homer renders comprehensible the conspicuous strangeness of the scene by explaining them in the terms of his audience. Indeed, the above ‘double-simile’ (my term), combining two vehicles, can perhaps be explained through this aim. By using images from the agricultural and the nautical, Homer can reach audience members familiar with either or both - and can further stimulate an understanding of the interconnection of these images. The simile, as conceived by Homer, is a tool for accessibility.

Returning to the Iliad after some time, I note how my attention is lost while reading this simile. I feel irritated by the repetitions (‘the gathering was stirred….even so was all their gathering stirred’). Necessitated by oral composition and narration, certain features become superfluous and even tedious when Homeric epic is transcribed. More pressingly, the function of the simile is somewhat impeded: I am not a 7th century BCE aristocrat on a Greek island, but a 21st century city-dweller. The images of fields and oceans in the vehicle are as familiar as the image of an army in the tenor, thanks to film and TV and photographs.³ Though the simile remains beautiful, it does not not ‘work’ for me as it might have for Homer’s original audience. Indeed, it is an act of imagination and comparison even to reconstruct its original context and function. Reading the Homeric simile now, it seems less an instrument for facilitating immediacy and accessibility than an interesting formula to be appreciated for its literary merit.

But this is not just an essay on Homer. This is about Anthony Bourdain (stay with me here). If the purpose of the Homeric simile is to enable comprehension of something unfamiliar, it must be carefully attuned to its audience and must adapt to suit new audiences. The content, but also the form, must change. In the world of mass media rather than epic poetry recitals, I would argue that Bourdain’s travel series are a modern reincarnation of the Homeric simile. Bourdain, like Homer facilitates his audience’s comprehension of disparate cultures, foods and places which they may have never even heard of. And, like Homer, Bourdain compares the alien with points of reference familiar to the American audience (hot dogs, ice cream, football, films).

However, similes are bilateral; they operate bidirectionally. If we return to the Homeric simile above, we may notice how it compels us not only to relate an army to a field or ocean, but to relate a field or ocean to an army. In the case of this simile with its double-vehicle, there is further a tri-directional relationship between all three images (an ocean is like a field and like an army, and vice versa). Even while appearing to familiarise the foreign, this act of juxtaposition also foreignises the familiar.

What the simile performs is therefore a simultaneous foreignisation and domestication. The strange is fitted into a frame within which we can better understand it, but the frame of the familiar is brought into proximity with the strange and can be viewed and evaluated afresh. My metaliterary gesture here, using a metaphor to describe a simile, strives to dramatise the process of comparison. Consider how a simile is like a painting in a frame; consider how a painting in a frame is like a simile.

And, returning to the postcolonial basis of the foreignisation/domestication paradigm, the simile possess an ethical dimension. Its multidirectionality can be transformative, and comparison can challenge a centre-periphery complacency in the normality of the target culture. This binary can be deconstructed through the reversal that the simile encourages: the centre which seemed so familiar and certain now becomes less so as it is brought into contact with the periphery. Any distinction between them is destabilised. When applied to similes, what Venuti figures as the choice between domesticating or foreignising translation is therefore less a dichotomy than a dialectic, as is evidenced by Bourdain use of comparison.

In the first season of ‘A Cook’s Tour’, Bourdain shuttles his audience from Japan to Vietnam to Cambodia to Portugal to Spain to France to Morocco to Russia to Mexico to the USA. This structure takes us from the foreign and ‘exotic’ to the familiar, and enables Bourdain to do something more progressive than was allowed for by my initial valuation. Though the American audience may commence the series complacent in their ‘civilised’ tastes compared to strange and distant lands, this position is increasingly undermined.

Bourdain’s initial narration of the preparation of a cobra to be eaten in Vietnam is delivered with the same wry humour as his later description of the preparation of a pig in Portugal. Western cuisine is interrogated and exposed for all its strangeness as fully as the Japanese or Moroccan, and Bourdain displays the same mixture of aversion and fascination in every country he visits. There is no room for the double standard of Western ‘delicacies’ (snails, oysters, foie gras) contrasted with non-Western ‘cruelties’ (chicken feet, shark). He points this out more explicitly in episode three:

‘Eating [cobra or tree grub] is a lot like some Western foods that the sophisticated eat without thinking. They'll want oysters, caviar, foie gras. Maybe eating snakes and worms only seems more outrageous because it's a different culture.’

This sentiment is likely familiar and thoroughly accepted by you, dear reader, because you are (I assume) a liberal-minded student in 2025. But for a post-9/11 American audience, on a mainstream network, Bourdain’s constant insistence on cultural relativity must have been rather revolutionary.

Here we may return to the theme of exploration and journey in both Homer and Bourdain, which dramatises the widening of horizons which their similes and comparisons aim towards. According to Friedrich Scheiermacher, a good translation ‘moves the reader towards [the author]’, or, as Venuti suggests, ‘mak[es] the target-language reader travel abroad’.⁴ Rather than symbolically colonising the foreign culture through domestication, the reader should be displaced and dislocated from their culture.

For Homer, the fantastical lands and events demand escapist feats of imagination. In the strange places he narrates, cyclopes and nymphs and monsters roam; they are different to the here and now of his audience, or of any audience. Reading Homer forces our minds to ‘travel abroad’ in space and time to a world of gods, heroes and myth. His similes make this possible by providing us with a ‘vehicle’, a vessel to transport our imagination.

So too in Bourdain, for whom flavours and textures are always ‘a bit like’ something American but never replicated in them. His are similes of comparison, not equivalence. We understand the obvious sarcasm of his repeated, ironic ‘tastes just like chicken’: comparisons, paradoxically, draw attention to incomparability. Though we may travel vicariously through the series, we can never fully appreciate his sensory experiences without experiencing them ourselves. To quote Bourdain, ‘If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel—as far and as widely as possible.’ Bourdain’s ethos encapsulates the foreignising project: he encourages his audience to literally ‘travel abroad’. Indeed, it is impossible to watch an episode without the urge to go to wherever he is and try whatever he is trying - in situ, not a watered-down and domesticated Deliveroo version.

Earlier in this essay I used a simile of aftertaste ruining the next dish to describe the way in which the mind makes strange comparisons. Perhaps this can be revised. Perhaps my comparison of Homer and Bourdain was like a ‘wine-dark’ wine pairing for a twenty-two-course (twenty-two-episode) tasting menu. The thoughts and observations which a comparison generates are always greater than a sum of it parts (they can even give rise to an entire essay). And more comparisons and connections beyond the orbit of my knowledge and reading will appear to you as you read this - points of intersection and divergence which, I hope, will enrich the both essay and your outlook.

By watching Bourdain we learn that one cannot consume (food, television, writing) without being connected to culture and meaning. We must think through these connections rather than mindlessly ingesting information. For it is through comparison that we can challenge our narrow horizons, and it is by way of connection that we may seek to exceed them.

1. Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation : Towards an Ethics of Difference (Routledge, 1998), 43.

2. Homer, The Iliad, trans. A.T. Murray (Harvard University Press, 1924).

3. I am currently working on more detailed exploration of simulacra replacing nature, so stay tuned!

4. Lawrence Venuti, Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (Routledge, 1994), 84.