Anthony Bourdain Has Had It With Restaurant ‘Bro Culture’


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Anthony Bourdain stands up for a lot of causes. Since moving his TV empire to CNN, he’s become more political and more outspoken on hot-button issues facing society and the world. And, really, how couldn’t he be? Traveling the world as much as Bourdain does opens eyes and allows any person a more reflective demeanor. Bourdain has been doing a lot of press lately for his long list of projects and lighting up his Twitter handle with truth bombs about Trump, politics, travel, and the mounting sexual misconduct and harassment charges being leveled against powerful men across multiple industries.

Right now he’s hitting hard at the ‘bro culture’ in the restaurant industry — a scene he feels partially complicit in fomenting, through his book Kitchen Confidential. Bourdain has been rectifying this by using his pulpit to amplify women’s voices and offer a sort of ‘stop-being-assholes’ guidance to those who will listen.

While promoting a new series in his Parts Unknown empire, Bourdain laid down how his relationship with Asia Argento has guided him, “First of all, I want to be really clear, I’m not central to anything,” Bourdain said. “I’m not an advocate of anything. I’m someone who met an extraordinary woman with a very painful story, who introduced me to other extraordinary women with very painful stories.”

Bourdain continued the conversation and touched on what’s next for a world finally catching on to the vile use of sex through power.”I think that a lot of good-hearted people are asking themselves, ‘What is my part in this world that we find ourselves in?'” Bourdain wondered. “What have I been complicit in? What have I seen? What have I missed?'” Bourdain’s saying being blind or willfully ignorant is no longer a way forward. These are questions we all need to be asking ourselves right now and, hopefully, many of us are.

For Bourdain, in the end, it came back to taking action and embracing the positive change that’s taking place in our society by calling out and (finally) taking seriously the systemic sexual misconduct that runs rampant. “Generally speaking, people are thinking about the consequences of their actions and what they’ve seen, times they should have stepped up, they should have spoken up, times they stayed silent… Change is good.”

He’s right. This change in particular.

(Via Eater)

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