| Each day this week, The New Yorker is publishing new articles from the Food Issue, a digital-only collection of dispatches from the world of eating. This month also marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of one of the most famous culinary pieces in the magazine, “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” by the chef, author, and future TV star Anthony Bourdain. At the time of the article’s publication, Bourdain was rebounding from a rough patch. His most recent cooking venture had failed, and the books he’d written had come and gone without success. This time would be different. In his New Yorker essay, Bourdain pronounced himself a “traitor to my profession,” then exposed some of the less appetizing aspects of the restaurant industry: unsanitary conditions in the kitchen, the “powerful strain of criminality” among workers, how much butter is really in your meal. The magazine’s editor, David Remnick, had received the manuscript unsolicited—from Bourdain’s mother—and accepted it for publication on the day he read it. The story turned Bourdain into a star, and the following year an expanded version, “Kitchen Confidential,” became his first best-selling book. Globe-trotting TV shows soon followed, but Bourdain’s celebrity and enduring appeal continued to draw in part on his unabashed honesty—both about the food world and about himself. “It was the unsavory side of professional cooking,” he wrote in The New Yorker, “that attracted me to it in the first place.” | 
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