Review

Chef and sustainable agriculture pundit Dan Barber is fond of starting his talks by boasting that “the future belongs to the foodies.” Barber means that big agribusiness is destroying the very natural resources upon which it depends. It will fail soon, he promises, leaving “the foodies” in charge. Anthony Bourdain’s graphic novel Get Jiro! turns Barber’s statement of hope into a forecast of imminent doom, mocking the idea that “the foodies” will be better shepherds of the planet they inherit. Bourdain, along with coauthor Joel Rose and artists Langdon Foss and Jose Villarrubia, presents a vision of a post-apocalyptic, near-future Los Angeles, a walled megacity on a planet with soil and oceans that are nearly depleted and with traditional foodways that are undermined—but where the chefs, by some inexplicable twist of history, stand at the top of every social...