Bourdain and Parts Unknown of Street Food: On the phenomenology of experiencing life through food

I recently rewatched Jûzô Itami’s 1985 movie Tampopo, a classic movie about the mediation of food and human existence. Tampopo’s noodle shop becomes a ‘community project’, where eating ramen is not just about flavour — but posture, timing, and ritual. The ramen master teaches how to approach the bowl, caress the pork, apologise to the noodles, and savour slowly. This encapsulates the bodily intentionality of eating and its sensuality through gestures, attention, and comportment and more importantly, intentionality. If food is sine qua non necessary for living our future, in fact, smells and tastes are associated with certain past memories of us at a precise time. 

Since coming back to St Andrews from my study abroad, I have been feeling post-exchange

nostalgia for my moments of solitary bliss roaming street food markets. Hong Kong beef brisket noodles, pineapple buns and kaya toast, stinky tofu, chicken feet, shrimp, roasted duck, shitake mushrooms, salted quail and cabbage, Taiwanese scallion pancakes — a strong combination of smells from my everyday walk around the city. In Japan, the taste of miso rolls and folds under the tongue of algae and yuzu. In Thailand, fresh coconut, roasted peanuts, lime and chilli. In Korea, fermented and pickled condiments, the pungent smell of Durian in Singapore and Vietnam, with softer scents of coriander and chutneys in comforting broths.  A year ago, I used to be content and grateful for being able to consume food, but I realised I never fully grasped the extent to which it could shape my life, thoughts, and memories as in these precise moments of travel. In Hong Kong and in my travels, I  was overwhelmed by an array of new senses and emotions, and with that, my olfactory system expanded, and so did my focus on noticing the smaller, more benign and mundane movements. The details of streets and night markets appeared to be more ephemeral, with the stalls haloing around the neon of Kowloon lights and the sounds of voices and cars reverberating around the city. Stalls of food were stretching out diametrically under the skyscrapers, sounds muffled from under there, which almost created an optical illusion amongst the dense crowds. 

With my tasting, my hunger grew, and with it, novel taste combinations to my palate. I started snacking, slowing down when munching, tasting new and surprising combinations, and noting them down. Smelling the kitchens and the broths around me rather than focusing only on my dish, the burning oil crackling, the Sichuan sauces and spices. Observing families sharing different plates, nodding in content, sipping tea, and moving noodles into their child’s plate. How food was handed to you on paper, still steaming, pressed into your palm with a nod. Eating became more than the experience of sitting at a table and responding to my hunger…to move beyond maps and monuments into the lived texture of a place. It felt to me like an avant-gout taste of centuries of wisely crafted meals, historically charged, and ways of knowing and transmitting information to an external and foreign eye. In Hanoi, I sat at Anthony Bourdain’s famous bun cha hotspot while conversing with Obama and was thinking about how many people have sat at that exact same spot over the past decades, all hoping to experience life for a fraction of hours like him. It reminded me of my childhood, where I would watch Parts Unknown on the TV as a child and dream of achieving that curated level of exploration. “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. Sleep on floors if you have to.”

Bourdain had it right — Existence or being is finite and temporary, but we rarely appreciate how it is and even less allow ourselves to eat our ‘Madeleine de Proust’and build onto old memories. I think in many ways that is Bourdain's legacy and why his words resonate posthumously through a young audience. As our world's array of opportunities is expanding, with it, so is our conception of time. How many people in the world have time to actually intentionally enjoy their meals through their bodies’ natural hunger, and not through a clock, an agenda, or a schedule?

Precisely because Bourdain recognised the interconnections between different meals, and how they provided an escape in the warm folds of daily lives and society, enjoying a meal is the only concession that we get in the daily chaos of our lives. It enables us to be more capricious and self-indulgent and to avoid limiting our eating habits to the realm of ‘dinner’ or ‘lunch’” time because it provides a haven of peace and self-indulgence in a world that associates performance and productivity with existence.

Illustration by Layla Ritzler