Anthony Bourdain Believed Americans 'Lost Touch' With These Rich Foods

Anthony Bourdain ate an incredibly wide array of different foods during his life and career as a food lover, professional chef, and world traveler, and that experience heavily influenced his opinions on America's relationship with food in the latter half of his life. This could be seen quite clearly in Bourdain's hatred for many popular American food trends that he deemed to be overrated, but it was also integral to the New York City native developing an affinity for underrated and underutilized ingredients such as oxtail, neck bone, and pigs' feet in American cuisine. This love was paired with immense disappointment for Bourdain that these ingredients aren't mainstays in kitchens and restaurants across the country.

He elaborated on this feeling in a 2017 interview with Business Insider, where he noted his dismay with the lack of attention some remarkable old-school ingredients get in the modern day. "So many traditional foods that we've sort of fallen out of touch with are underrated," Bourdain reminded. "Things like a traditional Italian ragu of, you know, oxtail and a neck bone." The chef even noted that, while ingredients like pigs' feet weren't impossible to find, they were increasingly becoming similar to lobster — an expensive food that was once considered a poor man's seafood. "[For] pigs' feet, you have to go to an expensive hipster restaurant to get [it]," Bourdain admitted.

Bourdain's point about hipster restaurants serving pigs' feet brings to attention another reason why the chef grew frustrated with America's lack of interest in traditional ingredients like pigs' feet and oxtail — their affordability. Bourdain believed America was missing out on some delicious food due to a refusal to eat what many deemed to be cheap, undesirable types of meat, and was using food classism to justify it. This has long been an issue in the world of soul food — a genre of cuisine where ingredients like pigs' feet and oxtail are quite common. 

However, Bourdain was quick to bring up how this unwarranted reputation has contributed to many Americans missing out on great dishes and worsening food waste at the same time. "Across America, people have lost touch with what used to be a staple at a certain lower-income point," Bourdain lamented to Business Insider. "A lot of these ingredients we are talking about — we're urging people to use more of, so as to avoid waste."

In the same way that Bourdain was a fierce defender of the use of MSG in Chinese dishes, the chef found it unjustified to handwave so many pivotal and delicious ingredients. Plus, Bourdain was quick to acknowledge that this wastefulness is not seen across the board in the United States; a handful of regions still regularly use things like oxtail and pigs' feet in their daily cooking. "The techniques we're talking about — slow-cooking, braising, stewing, pickling — these are nothing new to...people today in rural West Virginia, all across the South," Bourdain reminded. "In huge parts of America, particularly in the cities, we have lost touch with them."