“What Anthony Bourdain did when he told everyone about his struggles with addiction and other mental health issues is make them feel that they could too.”

By Krystie Lee YandoliOriginal Source: buzzfeed.com“In America, the professional kitchen is the last refuge of the misfit,” Anthony Bourdain once wrote.“Admittedly, it’s a life that grinds you down,” he added. “Most of us who live and operate in the culinary underworld are in some fundamental way dysfunctional.”That declaration served as an in-your-face summation of Bourdain’s 1999 New Yorker piecethat did much more than launch his celebrity career. It dragged the stresses and mental health rigors of working in the restaurant industry into the open, both for those people seated at the front of the house and, more importantly, for those unseen, toiling in the back.Bourdain kept that conversation up as he traveled the world digging in to whatever food the locals would put in front of him. Baked into his conversations with top chefs and street cooks was his ownership of his former experiences with drug addiction and...click here to continue reading