Now I'm hungry

Anthony Bourdain on barbecue. While barbecue is a Platonic ideal and perennial subject for debate, and THE perfect recipe is unknowable, he writes that the Eastern North Carolina variety is as good as it gets. Woo hoo! Bourdain makes an interesting statement, and I bet it's true, that the fall-off-the-bone character of Southern barbecue evolved thanks to a combination of (1) tough critters that had to be cooked and (2) rotten teeth in the mouths of the settlers.

Anthony Bourdain's travel & cuisine TV show "No Reservations" is fun and thought-provoking. It was actually a kind of good luck that Bourdain and his crew happened to be in Beirut when the Israeli rocket attacks began there this past summer; the end product was an impromptu documentary with a humane ground-level perspective on the attack. But all his shows offer an offbeat sensory experience of a foreign locale.