Great takedown of Bourdain. I love how they linked his anti-veganism with the rest of his bog-standard bourgeois lib ideology

Calling vegans “terrorist scum,” Bourdain once fulminated that

“These fucking people are not really all about us not eating duck liver,” snarls Bourdain. “No, no, no. They don’t want us eating any animal product whatsoever.

“When they win this tiny battle, they’ll move to the next one, like freeing the lobsters.

“These people,” says Bourdain, “are the worst kind of terrorists. And they must be stopped.”

Obviously such a histrionic level of bile over something that didn’t actually affect Bourdain at all indicates that the vegan-bashing was motivated by something other than the objective importance of the carnivore cause. The fact that Bourdain was so upset over being divested of foie gras and lobster is surely a clue. Elsewhere, Bourdain complained that “being a vegan is a first-world phenomenon, completely self-indulgent.” If one wants to highlight self-indulgent first-world lifestyles, “travel show host” might seem downright sybaritic compared to “person who chooses to forego animal products,” which is actually a sacrifice and not an indulgence. To most people, Bourdain’s career sounds like a series of Caligulan excesses—look at how quickly the no-fuck-giver threw a frothing tantrum over the idea that someone, somewhere disapproves of his eating habits. In his famous quote on the “Hezbollah-like” vegans, Bourdain called vegans “an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.” If “all he stood for” was “pure enjoyment,” then who exactly is self-indulgent?

Inflating his reputation by strategic projection and disavowals is something Bourdain did a lot. Like so many people held up by the propaganda machinery as progressive luminaries, Bourdain got to masquerade as something he’s not by constant repetition of his outsider mythology. We are told he wasn’t someone with an agenda, we are told he was edgy and iconoclastic, we are told he was unique, et cetera. People are told this despite the fact that his material, when it counts, was totally conformist and utterly conventional. Ultimately, he was a guy who was paid a ton of money to indulge his every whim, and tell us the same things we are supposed to hear everywhere else along the way. And that’s why Bourdain carried on his campaign against people who give up meat: they are the dark other onto which Bourdain could project what he really was: utterly spoiled, wildly privileged, and truly parochial.