It was 7am. I was reclined at a 45-degree angle. Their hands were in my mouth. And I was a 28-year old adult woman crying for my “mommy.” But at least Anthony Bourdain was there.

Every few months either for a cleaning, a filling, or an anxiety-induced spiral caused by a nightmare where all my teeth spontaneously fell out of my head and I have this weird jaw pain, you see, I find myself watching No Reservations on the ceiling screen of the dentist office.

At this point the dental assistant knows to put it on (and give me one of those foamy stress balls they save for children) before I even ask. I’d rather be literally anywhere else but hearing his gravelly, unfiltered voice spew endless curiosity and wisdom through the not-so-noise-cancelling headphones makes the experience just that little bit more bearable.

He was sitting on the floor with the cameraman’s grandmother’s childhood friend making papusas, so for a second (between the scraping and the drilling) so was I.

He was reporting live from some faraway street market and, for a moment, there was no whirring or buffing or muffled “mmphs.”

When your ability to speak is stripped away, that makes you actually listen, and that’s when I picked the topic for this week’s newsletter—travel, the world, the many many different people who share it, and the way that we all come to understand it through the lens of food because hey…we all gotta eat.

* then I returned to contemplating the unique intimacy of having another human being's hands in your mouth at sunrise*

Let Food Be Your Diplomatic Passport

"You learn a lot about someone when you share a meal together." - Anthony Bourdain

One thing that Anthony Bourdain understood implicitly and imparted in all that he did and created is that food is the great equalizer.

No matter who you are, where you come from, or what hand you were dealt, we all get hungry, we all have to eat, and there's something primal about breaking bread with another person.

It’s a human need and a universal language.

For some reason, this truth that we seem to understand when imparted from a podium or when spelled out in front of us on the page, sparks a sort of dissonance when traveling.

Experiencing newness triggers the gut instinct to other. “That smells weird.” “Wow, so…exotic.” “That’s…unique.”

In the western world (primarily) we have come to view travel as either a cosmic scavenger hunt with boxes to tick and pictures to post or as a cultural zoo where everything that might be perceived as different from your own day to day is seen as a departure from the norm or the changing variable at play when statistically the “majority world” is the majority for a reason.

So, there I was, mouth pried open in a dental chair, drool pooling inelegantly down my chin, watching Anthony Bourdain navigate a bustling market in Vietnam, as the dentist did unspeakable things to my molars. I found myself wondering why it’s so easy to label the Vietnamese food on the screen as "exotic," when to millions of people, it's just... Tuesday dinner. Who let the western world set that standard?

How To Travel…The Bourdain Way

Anthropologically speaking, our impulse to label unfamiliar foods as "different," "exotic," or "weird" reveals more about us than whatever we're pointing at. When we call food "authentic" or "ethnic" or "exotic," we're really saying, "this doesn't fit neatly into my limited frame of reference, so I must create linguistic distance between it and me." This linguistic othering stems from what anthropologists call ethnocentrism—our brain's annoying tendency to position our own cultural practices as the default setting for humanity. Everything else gets categorized as a deviation from our norm, rather than simply another norm that exists parallel to ours.

It's the culinary equivalent of standing in someone else's living room and declaring their furniture "ethnic" or "quirky"—as if your IKEA SÖDERHAMNMEATBALLALLENKEY is somehow the universal standard against which all seating arrangements should be measured. Your beige sofa isn't the control group in humanity's grand experiment, Sharon. It's just your sofa.

Bourdain understood what many travelers miss: places aren't attractions to be conquered—they're contexts to be absorbed. The difference between seeing a place and experiencing a place isn't how many museums you visit; it's whether you allow yourself to adapt to its rhythms rather than imposing your own.

This means embracing the uncomfortable reality that meaningful travel requires temporary discomfort. It means accepting that you will get lost. You will misunderstand cultural cues. You will feel stupid. You will point at menu items and receive surprising things. You will spend too much on something underwhelming and too little on something extraordinary.

The True Cost of Authenticity in “Food Tourism”

On one hand, you have the Anthony Bourdains of the world—respectful, curious, aware of their outsider status but genuinely interested in connection. On the other, you have the “checklisters” desperate to “do” places, frantically photographing dishes and ingredients. The good side of this is that food tourism can revitalize struggling economies, preserve traditional cooking methods, and create meaningful cultural exchange. The downside is that the same forces that "discover" can destroy and result in pricing locals out of their own staples or creating unsustainable fandoms and queues.

The transformation from tourist to temporary local begins when you stop asking, "What should I see here?" and start asking, "How do people live here?"

Here's how to shift from seeing to being:

1. Pick one neighborhood and get unreasonably familiar with it. Find your coffee shop. Become a regular somewhere. Let the routine become your anchor.

2. Shop where locals shop. Markets are community centers. Watch how people select produce, how they negotiate, how they greet each other.

3. Adjust to local meal timing. If dinner happens at 10pm, eat at 10pm. Your digestive schedule is not universal law.

4. Take public transportation. Nothing will teach you more about a place's social hierarchies, economic realities, and interpersonal norms than how people navigate shared spaces.

5. Learn enough language to be corrected. The moment someone stops saying "your accent is so good!" and starts gently fixing your grammar is when you've crossed into meaningful cultural exchange.

The richest travel experiences happen when you stop being a spectator and become a participant—even if that participation is clumsy, imperfect, and occasionally embarrassing.

Beyond Bourdain & What's Inspiring Me This Week

While Bourdain set the gold standard for thoughtful culinary exploration, there are other voices worth following who bring different perspectives:

Yasmin Khan explores how food tells stories of migration and displacement, particularly in the Middle East. Her approach is less about "discovering" and more about understanding how food preserves identity during upheaval.

Soleil Ho interrogates the power dynamics in food tourism and who gets to determine what's "authentic," challenging the narrative that Western appreciation somehow validates other cultures' food traditions.

Michael Twitty traces the painful histories of enslaved people through recipes, showing how food can be both a form of oppression and resistance—a complexity often missing from the "delicious discovery" narrative.

My Top 15 Cities To Explore if You Really Really Love Food (& there are hundreds more that I have yet to explore!)

• Bangkok, Thailand

• Cape Town, South Africa

• Madrid, Spain

• Paris, France

• Istanbul, Turkey

• Marrakech, Morocco

• Rome, Italy

• New York City, USA

• Buenos Aires, Argentina

• Mumbai, India

• Copenhagen, Denmark

• Austin, USA

• Porto, Portugal

• Amman, Jordan

• Bogota, Colombia