"Damn it, Tony. Why?"
Those were the words of TV host Adam Richman when he heard of the news of Anthony Bourdain's passing, but they echo the sentiments of countless others who looked up to Bourdain and mourn his loss.
Before entering the travel world, the chef first took the foodie world by storm-perhaps, ironically, helping cultivate the movement he cynically derided as much as anyone-with a New Yorker essay "Don't Eat Before Reading This," that became his best-selling book, "Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly."
From there, Bourdain's career path was infinitely and ultimately uniquely him-from transforming the way millions think about food to eventually tackling much bigger topics. He would have been the first to say he was just a guy doing a TV show, but the beauty of "Parts Unknown" and "No Reservations" before it was that they were always about people and cultures and never just about places and food.
It's not hyperbole to call Bourdain one of the greatest journalists of his generation because-unlike seemingly every single one of his peers-he refused to get caught up in minutia and used his platform to shine bright beautiful lights at some of the scariest corners of the globe. What he found in doing so is that we're all cut from the same cloth and have far more in common than we have to separate us.
What Bourdain was doing wasn't just eating or traveling or even story telling. He was giving all of us a masterclass in the transformative power of love.
Please note: Bourdain himself would've probably torn that sentence to shreds, but give me a moment here.
It is love to remove all edifice, fear and apprehension and just sit across from a person and listen to them. It's love to look at a culture different from your own and seek to understand it and learn from it rather than try to teach everyone else why they're wrong and your culture has it right. It's love to continually try to find the human element in every situation rather than the soapbox.
More and more, one of the biggest movements in travel is the shift toward experiential travel and even past that into what many are calling "transformative travel."
This isn't "Eat, Pray, Love" or "Stella Gets Her Groove Back" nonsense, although it can be. Instead, transformative travel is the shift toward traveling not just for the place or the experience (or the pics for the 'gram) but to connect to the people. To learn from them and to grow into a better person than you've been.
I've spent the last year talking with travel agents and suppliers about this massive trend that cuts across all demographics and price points. It is the idea that travel has the power to make us better people. More that that: It's the hope that more people traveling for the right reasons can make this world a better place.
"If I'm an advocate for anything," Bourdain said, "it's to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else's shoes or at least eat their food, it's a plus for everybody."
Bourdain championed that mission with every trip he took and every show he put onto the airwaves.
The rest of us have a lot of work to do in his absence.
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