Bourdain travels to Singapore, known to some as “Disneyland with the death penalty.” He keeps coming back for the food, he says—only here does one find the singular, exquisite mix of Chinese, Indian, and Malay dubbed “indigenous fusion” by local chefs. Over several meals in homes and at hawker stalls, the conversation turns to Singapore’s government; here residents seem to have traded civil liberties for a booming economy. Bourdain asks an unavoidable question: “Is free speech overrated?”

“One could be forgiven for thinking it’s a giant, ultramodern shopping mall. An interconnected, fully wired, air-conditioned nanny state. Where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts. And those things are … kind of true, especially if you read the papers or the carefully monitored internet. You look around the litterless streets, where everything seems to work just fine, and you think—or you could be forgiven for thinking—‘Gee, maybe a one-party system is just what we need.’ You look at all the social problems and ethnic strife, street crime, drugs that Singapore has managed to avoid and you could think, ‘Is this the life we want?’ It ain’t my system, it’s not the world I want, but damn—it has its appeal.”