Director of a niche TV series takes to writing

The Hyper Hardboiled Gourmet Report is a TV documentary series that first aired in Tokyo a few years ago. Since then, it has branched out into a book in 2020 and to a Podcast in 2021. Although I’ll be writing about the book today, I wanted to share the links for their YouTube and Podcast since they are also extremely interesting! (Podcast is in Japanese, but parts of YouTube is in English depending on location.)

So what is the documentary about? I believe it’s best described in the book’s preface:

"What kind of food are people eating in areas of the world with extreme circumstances?"
There is only one slogan for this show: Dive headfirst into areas of the world that cannot be reached under normal circumstances, and document the everyday meals of people who live there. Yes, it's rude, and yes, it's meretricious.
However, as harsh and extreme as their living conditions are, I found that their meals were often also overflowing with extreme levels of beauty.
Food stands as an emblem for people's lives, representing the culture, religion, economy, geography, upbringing, and personality of the eater. Yet the expression you see on someone's face as they take a bite of their meal is nothing but universal: pure bliss, relief, hope, and sometimes despair.
Humans eat. This is beyond the question of right or wrong. [...] This is why food can show us the whole world.

Under this slogan, the author takes a deep dive in several unique regions of the world: Liberia, where the repercussions of a brutal civil war remains heavily; a region near Siberia, where a unique religious community live in the deep mountains without electricity; Taiwan, where the mafia rules the underworld; and Nairobi, where mountains of rotting trash is both a source of extreme pollution and a source of living for some. The author steps into these places, quite literally risking his life, in relentless pursuit of the question: “What are folks eating here?”

Parts that I enjoyed

The author’s eloquence draws you into a different world

I was absolutely blown away by how pointed, expressive, and eloquent the writing was in this book. Even though the book describes what feels to me like a different universe, the book drew me in so deeply that I could almost feel the temperature of the air, smell, the colors of the town, the anxiety, the exhaustion, and the fear of the author as I read on.

A living and breathing human

Everyone instinctively assumes many things about someone that they encountered for the first time, based on their appearance or abstract labels. Many encounters described in the book often begin with such labels: “An ex-child-soldier from the civil war who lives in a ruin”; “A prostitute that lives in a lawless graveyard”; “A young man who scavenges trash in a polluted garbage dump”… The labels are often too unworldly for someone like me that it’s hard to suppress the assumptions that subconsciously pop up in my mind.

However, after reading about the day that the author spent with this person, the hard work that they do all day, and about what they eat at the end of the day, what’s left in my mind is a living, breathing human with depth and warmth. Regardless of whether they have come to terms with their unfair situation, they feel all the same feelings that we feel in our lives: joy, bliss, bitterness, hope, despair, restlessness, jealousy…

What it means to be a journalist

“What are people eating?” - The starting point of this book is a simple question, yet the author tackles much bigger themes through his journey like ethics (e.g. Is it bad to steal if that’s your only shot at eating for the day?) and religion. (e.g. What differentiates a cult from a religion? What is religion anyway??) One such question that echoes throughout the book, in my opinion, was the role of journalism. Let me quote an excerpt from the postscript:

As a journalist, I meet people through my camera. But the camera is nothing but a medium - once I develop a relationship with the interviewee, we are nothing but two humans in the flesh. There's no room in between us for anything like "the obligations of the media" or "the role of TV". All that goes out the window.
Interviewing someone for journalism is violence. We cannot forego this fundamental fact. A camera is like a gun, and a pen is like a knife. If we do not use them carefully, it is extremely easy to hurt someone.
A camera can catch a shoplifter, and a pen can expose wrongdoings of authority. People say that's the mission of journalism, and it's probably true.
However, shoplifters and authority are also humans, just like you and me. No matter how much your interviews are in line with social justice, if it negatively affects the person's life, I still believe it's violence. Social justice can be a pardoner of the act, but the act remains violence.

Interviewing someone for journalism is violence, in a sense that the reporter intrudes into the interviewees life and whips out a recording medium. If so, why continue? What is the meaning, the role, or journalism? In fact, many of the interviewees are suspicious, even vicious, at the author when he first approach them. However, by the end of the day, they often smile at the author and say goodbye with remarks like “I’m glad you came here today” and “Please come visit us again.” (Of course this just shows how sincere and honest the author was with his interviewees.) The author closes the book with the remark: “We have real stories of real people that we want to hear. They have stories that they want to tell. In my opinion, this is what it means to film a documentary.” It goes without saying that there’s no easy answer to the question “what is the role of journalism?” - However, I believe that this book provides us with excellent food-for-thought to continue pondering over this question.

Closing remarks

This book certainly gave me a deepened perspective on food, and more broadly, on life. For some, eating is transactional. For others, who work all day under harsh conditions for their single meal of the day, their food is nothing less than life itself. There’s obviously no right or wrong, but developing a new perspective on food certainly gives us a renewed opportunity to learn about our connections to the world we live in.