Anthony Bourdain dead at 61: reflections on his legacy

When horrible news — like the deaths by suicide of chef, author, and TV star Anthony Bourdain and fashion designer Kate Spade, or the 2015 Paris attacks — breaks, crisis counseling services often get deluged with calls from people in despair. Deciding whom to help first can be a life-or-death decision.

At the Crisis Text Line, a text messaging-based crisis counseling hotline, these deluges have the potential to overwhelm the human staff.

Anthony Bourdain, the legendary chef and tv personality, died on Friday morning — and people around the world are mourning.

Bourdain was a best-selling author and was known for various TV shows, like Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, and the CNN series Parts Unknown. But he’ll be remembered for more than introducing Americans to regional cuisines in far-flung places.

The recent deaths of chef, TV host, and author Anthony Bourdain, 61, and the fashion designer Kate Spade, 55, by suicide raise some of the same issues as the coverage of DJ Avicii’s death in April of this year.

“Avicii reportedly committed suicide with broken glass bottle” was Page Six’s headline. “Avicii’s suicide caused by self-inflicted cuts from glass,” reported TMZ. “In Avicii’s death, suicide details emerge,” the Los Angeles Times said.

As much as the era of #MeToo has been an explosive display in courage, one in which women are speaking out en masse, it’s also a story of silence — and cowardice.

Very few men, by comparison, have stood up to take responsibility for their own actions or for their active or tacit contributions to a system that’s allowed harassment and abuse to flourish.

Anthony Bourdain, the writer, chef, television host, and outspoken food and media personality, died early Friday morning. He was 61. CNN, the network that airs Bourdain’s show Parts Unknown, confirms the cause of death was suicide.

Bourdain rose to fame in 2000 with his best-selling book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, a memoir of his time as a chef that established his reputation as the bad-boy rock star of the food world. From there, he moved on to host the Food Network’s A Cook’s Tour, then the Travel Channel’s Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, and finally CNN’s Parts Unknown, for which he won five Emmys and a Peabody Award.

The suicide deaths of chef, author, and TV host Anthony Bourdain and fashion designer Kate Spade this week are stories of lives cut short for reasons we’ll never fully understand. But these anecdotes are also a reminder of a serious public health issue in America that needs far more attention.

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, released on June 7, suicide rates have increased significantly across the US. Between 1999 and 2016, suicide rates rose in nearly every state in the union, with 25 states showing increases of more than 30 percent.

Before Anthony Bourdain was a TV host, he was a memoirist. And before he was a memoirist — before Kitchen Confidential, before Medium Raw — he was an essayist.

Actually, technically, Bourdain was first a novelist and a short-story writer. “My lust for print knows no bounds,” he wrote on a submission to the downtown literary journal Between C & D in 1985. In 1995, he published Bone in the Throat, a crime novel set in the restaurant world, and in 1997 a follow-up, Gone Bamboo. Both novels disappeared quickly and quietly.