Travel Is Transformative: Spilled Milk #76

A refresher course on the right and wrong ways to travel.

Jaya Saxena got me thinking. She wrote a column a few weeks back about the dearth of great food/travel TV these days and what viewers want from it.

Eugene Levy in “The Reluctant Traveler With Eugene Levy.” Photograph courtesy Apple TV+.

Her POV is that in Episode 1 of Anthony Bourdain’s “A Cook’s Tour,” he set the tone for travel TV, a new zeitgeist focused on food experiences.

She couldn’t be more right.

At the time Tony was first heading out to make that show for Food Network I was pitching Travel Channel on a different idea that became “Bizarre Foods.” I remember in the pitch making the point that all the current travel shows were light on food and heavy on a lone human walking, usually Rick Steves, with voiceover carrying the vast amount of the storytelling.

One episode I mentioned was in Ireland, where finally, at the end of the show, the host was in a pub and I heard a few references to lamb pies and a ploughman’s lunch and then the credits rolled. Steves is a legend and one of my idols, but in those days food was not his focus — far from it. That’s why Bourdain’s first show was such a marvel. (Interestingly, Martin Yan was making food-focused travel TV a decade before anyone was and doesn’t get the credit he deserves.)