Remembering Anthony: “A Seat at the Table with Anthony Bourdain Parts 1 & 2”

About This Episode

To celebrate the life of friend of the show, legendary chef, author, and TV host Anthony Bourdain, Neil deGrasse Tyson is revisiting his two-part interview with him from 2013, offered here, commercial free, as a single episode with new thoughts and recollections by Neil. The original episodes also featured comic co-host Eugene Mirman and NYU Professor of Nutrition Marion Nestle.

As an appetizer, Anthony tells Neil about some of the most disgusting things he’s ever eaten on his adventures, from African bush meat to rotten, fermented shark, and how a bowl of noodles changed his life. He and Neil discuss the business of food, including a vivid description of “pink slime.” Anthony, a bestselling author whose book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly changed the course of his life, also gets personal about his self-destructive early years and what saved him. Between courses, comic co-host Eugene Mirman and Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition at NYU, dish out a heaping helping of dietary science, evolution, cultural relativism and physiology. Next, we focus more on cooking and eating, from the experimental techniques of molecular cooking to the “Nose to Tail” movement that incorporates respect for the animal into the culinary process. Anthony explains how to avoid getting food-sick in exotic locales and why he’ll never again drink cobra blood out of a snake’s still-beating heart. Marion Nestle tells us how to avoid food-borne illnesses here at home, while Eugene Mirman shares his advice for curing viruses and the common cold. You’ll learn why we can’t eat wood, why eggs get fluffy when we cook them, what altitude does to the human palate, and what type of food the astronauts on the International Space Station desire most.

NOTE: All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: Remembering Anthony: A Seat at the Table with Anthony Bourdain Parts 1 & 2.