From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast (Alicia Kennedy)

Alicia talks to food scientist Cheryl Mitchell, who developed Rice Dream and the Elmhurst Milked line of nut, grain, and seed milks. They discuss how she came to focus on vegan milks, the HydroRelease process she created, and why we need to diversify protein sources in order to keep feeding the human population.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Alicia Kennedy talks to the host of The Hangover Show, Cara Nicoletti, about her family butcher shop in Boston, what inspired her to cut down on meant, and why people should stop calling female butchers "badass."

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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In the first episode of “Meatless,” Alicia talks to Brooks Headley, chef and owner of Superiority Burger in New York City and the author of the Superiority Burger Cookbook.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Alicia talks to chef Gabriel Hernandez of Verde Mesa in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, about the connotations of “vegetarian,” the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, and the island’s beet resurgence.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Alicia talks to chef Becca Hegarty, one of Zagat’s inaugural 30 Under 30 list of “culinary superstars” and co-founder of the Bitter Ends Garden & Luncheonette, an organic farm, bakery, and restaurant in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They discuss the branding of the farm-to-table concept versus its realities, the economics of buying or renting land to grow food, and the emotional cost of caring for livestock destined to become meat.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Alicia talks with John Currence, a chef based in Oxford, Mississippi who co-hosted a series called the “Big Gay Mississippi Welcome Table Dinners” to protest at the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which sanctioned religiously-motivated discrimination, particularly against queer and trans people. They discuss the political uses of food—both as a tool of protest and in bringing people together — and what makes for a “stunning” vegan breakfast.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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In the first of of Alicia's two dispatches from Chicago, she talks to bartender Alicia Arredondo and chef Pat Sheerin about the city's reputation as a bad place to go meat-free. They discuss some of their plant-focused dishes, how the cultural and social context of Chicago influenced them professionally, and the broader ways in which food and politics intersect.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Alicia talks to Lukas Volger about his 60 percent vegetarian diet, cookbooks, veggie burger lines, and his work on the queer food journal Jarry Mag.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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It’s not easy to make being vegan both funny and incisive, but that’s what writer Gabriella Paiella does both on Twitter and in her writing for The Cut. Alicia and Gabby discuss Tevas, bad jokes about vegans, and the relationship between veganism and body image.

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Alicia talks to culture writer Nadya Agrawal, founder of the South Asian-centered magazine Kajal about what made her become vegan, how veganism can better connect to other social justice movements, and turmeric lattes.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Alicia talks to Chitra Agrawal — maker of the Brooklyn Delhi line of condiments, and author of the cookbook Vibrant India — about her lifelong vegetarianism, the word “curry,” and her punk rock youth in New Jersey.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Alicia talks to food writer and nutrition educator Leah Kirts about her upbringing in rural Indiana, her time in the NYU food studies master’s program, and teaching kids about veganism.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Alicia talks to photographer Theo Samuels, who is a vegan, and writer Shanika Hillocks, who isn’t. They discuss the balance they’ve struck, including staying open to new foods while traveling and navigating a shared kitchen.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Alicia talks to Ysanet Batista, founder of the worker co-operative Woke Foods, which creates plant-based Dominican cuisine. They talk about how vegan food isn’t cruelty-free as long as farm workers lack labor rights, the West African origins of Dominican cuisine, and what a decolonized agriculture might look like.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Alicia talks to Soleil Ho, food writer, host of B***h Media’s Popaganda podcast, and co-host of the Racist Sandwich Podcast. She’s co-authored a graphic novel about the professional and romantic life of a young chef with artist Blue Delliquanti called Meal: Adventures in Entomophagy—that’s eating insects, a field Soleil has become an expert in. They talk about the book, the tech industry’s obsession with cricket flour, and what it all means for vegans and vegetarians.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Alicia talks to Casandra Rosario of Food Before Love, which focuses on education and dining experiences that make "a space for marginalized consumers to create and tell their own stories through food." These events cover everything from how food cultures have been shaped by the African diaspora to classism in the vegan community. Together, they discuss Rosario's panel discussion series Roots & Vines, why wine education is significant to her community, and supporting women-owned small business.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Alicia talks to Olivia Hu, the co-founder and owner of Old Timers, a bar in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The first-generation child of Chinese parents who fled during the Cultural Revolution, Hu talks about the experience of trying reconcile her family's heritage and cuisine with her pescetarianism. She also discusses what she loves (experimenting with cocktails) and hates (racism and sexism) about being a bartender.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Alicia talks to Luz Cruz and Ollie Montes de Oca, members of the Cuir Kitchen Brigade that formed in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Organizing as a collective solidarity group, they flew to Puerto Rico to distribute pickled seasonal produce and run workshops on jarring and preserving foods. They discuss developing connections between activist groups in New York City and San Juan, their work with Tijuana’s chapter of Food Not Bombs, and the broader importance of food to social justice movements

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Host Alicia Kennedy very briefly explains why she wanted to start a podcast about not eating meat, and what to expect from what's to come.

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Alicia talks to Aidan Altman and Andrew McClure, the founders of Fora Foods and makers of Faba Butter — made principally with coconut oil and aquafaba, or chickpea brine. Retail isn’t Fora’s focus: they’re targeting chefs at many non-vegan restaurants, hoping to become a pastry staple. They talk about how working on this project inspired them to go vegan, why corporate agriculture is everyone’s enemy, and why aquafaba has gone mainstream.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Alicia talks with and Danielle Ricciardi and Daniel Strong, a couple who founded the vegan comfort food business Chickpea and Olive. They discuss the process of getting products into Whole Foods, how delivery apps can financially undercut restaurants, and the concept of “making a burger out of all the things that cows eat.”

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Alicia talks to Lee Kalpakis, an editorial producer at Thrillist and the host of A Little Help, a YouTube show in which she helps new cooks learn to create inexpensive and easy meals. They discuss maintaining a (mostly) meat-free diet in a job that requires eating a bit of everything, the ways in which her family’s history in the restaurant business influenced her own understanding of food, and how she tries to teach others not to be scared of learning to cook.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Alicia talks to chef and chocolatier Lagusta Yearwood, owner of the chocolate shop Lagusta's Luscious and its sister café, Commissary, in New Paltz, New York. She also co-owns Confectionary in New York City, and her cookbook, Sweet X Salty: The Art of Vegan Confections by Lagusta's Luscious, will be out in 2019.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Alicia talks to Charlotte Shane, culture writer, publisher of Tigerbee Press, and author of the book Prostitute Laundry. Charlotte’s been vegan for 18 years, but doesn’t often discuss it. They talk about her anti-oatmeal stance, NYU’s recent conference on animals and the left, and whether WeWork’s new reducetarian policy could be good for the vegan movement.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Alicia talks to winemaker Sheri Hood. After spending the 1990s managing bands like Stereolab and working for the record label 4AD, she moved to Portland, Oregon. She now makes wines for The Pressing Plant — all of which are vegan, delicious, and named after songs. They discuss why she became vegetarian, how that inspired her to make vegan wines, and what it was like to not eat meat while on tour in the 1990s.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Alicia talks to vegan activist Amy Quichiz, the founder of Veggie Mijas, a U.S.-wide organization that gives women of color a place to meet and discuss their experiences with food. Topics covered include how to convince your family to stop consuming animal products, how veganism should be inherently intersectional, and how "cruelty-free" must refer to workers as well as animals.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Alicia talks to Ethan Frisch and Ori Zohar of Burlap & Barrel: Single-Origin Spices, who apply models used in coffee and chocolate importation—with fair wages and a transparent supply chain—to spices. Topics covered include roast duck-flavored ice cream, using food to teach people about radical politics, and why it’s so important that we all learn to experiment more in the kitchen.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Alicia talks to cheese writer and community organizer Tia Keenan about dairy production, anti-capitalist food systems, and her backyard chickens. “You can’t solve a systematic problem through individual will,” Keenan says. “If we could, you know, the world would look really different.”

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Alicia talks with Roopa Kalyanaraman Marcello, a public health expert who runs Monsoon Sweets, a South Asian-inspired dessert company. They discuss the systemic power of large food corporations, the ironies of selling desserts while campaigning for healthier diets, and the psychological tricks involved in passing on a vegetarianism to kids.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Alicia talks with Toby Buggiani, the owner of Adelina's in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which serves plant-based Italian cuisine. They discuss his wilder younger years, how his menu was inspired by Roman and Neapolitan cooking, and the latest developments in the search for the perfect cashew mozzarella.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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In the second part of Alicia’s visit to Chicago, she speaks with pastry chef Valeria Taylor, and food writers Tim Mazurek and Natalie Slater. They discuss their frustrations with the way Chicago’s food scene is repeatedly defined by critics based in LA and NYC, their favorite animal-free recipes, and what they think makes for a good vegan city.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Listen now | We discussed intersectionality, performative liberalism, Catholicism, and why baking is naturally suited to political causes, among much more.

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Molly Wizenberg gained food-world fame through her blog, Orangette, as well as two memoir: Delancey: A Man, A Woman, A Restaurant, A Marriage and A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes From My Kitchen Table. Her latest, The Fixed Stars, has no subtitle and no food hook—in fact, it’s a memoir of shedding food, which she noted in her final blog post in 2018. “I am having to learn how to write it as I go along, without the handy crutch that food and recipes had become for me,” she wrote. It’s a book about identity and family, about shedding old skin and finding new comfort. Yet, upon its release, it’s gotten most of its attention from food media. We discussed the genre of memoir, what it’s like to be kept in a box while promoting a book about getting out of them, and the tension in The Fixed Stars around restaurant versus home cooking.

Alicia: Hi, Molly, thank you so much for coming on.

Molly: Oh my gosh, I'm thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Molly: Yeah, so I live in Seattle, now. But I grew up in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. 

And my parents were both from the east coast. My dad was actually Canadian, from Toronto, and my mom was from Baltimore. And they met there, and moved to Oklahoma in the mid ’70s, and very much, I think, did not expect to stay. I think they thought of themselves as coastal people. 

And so, I grew up in this place where my family kind of never planned to be. And in many ways — well, so my father was a doctor. And so I grew up with a lot of privilege, getting to travel and all kinds of things, and see other places, and understand that Oklahoma was just one place. 

But really, we were very much about home cooking. My dad was a very, very avid home cook, and would unwind at the end of the day, after seeing cancer patients all day, would unwind by opening up the fridge and sort of doing off-the-cuff cooking. And he was very much an equal appreciator of Bush's baked beans, but also things that seemed very exotic at the time where we were, like endive. 

And he was very much a — he was a real gourmand. He took such real pleasure in cooking and in sharing food. As a kid, it was actually really embarrassing to me, the pleasure that he took in cooking well for our family. He would always say — or he would frequently lean back from the table and say, ‘We eat better at home than most people do in restaurants.’ 

And it was so insufferable and so braggy, and yet at the same time it was so him and so much about the pride that he took in cooking, and finding food that he had had in other — finding ingredients he had had only in other places and introducing them to me. So, it was very much a very ’80s, food loving scene. 

My mom also did a lot of cooking, and was very much — I think of her as like the baker in the household. But I mean, we had a pretty idyllic, sit-down-to-dinner-together-every-night situation when I was growing up, and I'm really grateful for that. I had no idea how lucky I was to have two parents who put such care and attention into food, whether we were eating hamburgers or roasted chicken my dad had fussed over for a couple hours. 

Alicia: Right.

And your latest book, ‘The Fixed Stars,’ is not a food memoir, but in it there is a lot of tension between restaurant cooking and home cooking, like being at the restaurant versus being at home for dinner. How has this tension changed for you since you stopped working for the restaurants you co-founded? Has the role of food in your life changed since you exited those?

Molly: Yeah. For me, there's tremendous relief. 

Actually, I would love reading your writing about all the chefs that you bring into your interviews, whether you're writing about politics or love or whatever, because you are — you have so much more fluency in your talking about the restaurant world than I feel I ever did. Despite having been very much steeped in it, I was never a restaurant creature. 

And I came to co-found and co-own two, three sort of restaurants because the man I was married to had worked in restaurants off and on since he was a teenager all over the place. Pizza Hut, Balthazar, all over the place. And he was trying to find a way for us to be able to keep living in Seattle, where there were few jobs in the profession that he was trained, is trained in, which is music composition. 

And so he thought, ‘I love cooking.’ He and I both loved cooking, and what is a way that we could take this thing that we love, and that he could use it to sort of build a way for us to make money and live in the city we wanted to live in? And so, he is — Brandon is endlessly energetic, and basically taught himself, with the help of a couple of really generous mentors, how to open a restaurant on a shoestring. 

And we did that in 2009, we opened a restaurant called Delancey. And he was never a chef in the sense of — well, in any sense of being classically trained. Or even having the discipline — I know he wouldn't mind my saying that — that chefs, I think, are so famous for in their approach to work. Brandon has always been a musician, who just happened to be able to make things happen in whatever he did. 

And so we sort of together stumbled into owning, or creating and then owning, a restaurant that really truly was serving food that sort of bordered on what we liked to eat at home. And certainly at the center of it was woodfired pizza, that was the big thing that Brandon wanted to do. He wanted to make really good pizza.

But then everything else when we opened was my territory. And I very much cooked as we had at home. So, really simple, seasonal, but really interesting vegetable dishes and pretty simple desserts. I mean, we opened with a chocolate chip cookie and some homemade popsicles. And, by and large, it has stayed that way.

I only worked in the kitchen there for the first four months, and then spent the next nine years basically doing sort of general admin and ownership tasks. But it was — I think that, to work in a restaurant in any capacity, you have to have a really friendly relationship to adrenaline, and you have to be on friendly terms with chaos. And I am absolutely not that person, and never was. And so, being out of the restaurant is a tremendous relief.

I think that — for me, what was always most meaningful about it is — so, my background is in cultural anthropology. And I have always been most interested in people when I'm thinking about food, like food as a way of understanding how people live, what they care about, what gets them out of bed in the morning. And home cooking has always felt adjacent to that, a way of being with people, being for people, being a person myself. And I feel so — I just, I can't say it enough — relieved to get to scale back my relationship with food to only being that again, and not being beyond what I wanted. 

Alicia: Right.

And, yet, despite the book not being a food memoir, it has been regarded as such in the press, because your two prior memoirs are food memoirs, pretty explicitly. So, being as it is a book about defining yourself on your own terms and breaking out of boxes that the culture provides for you, has that bothered you? How are you defining yourself as a writer now?

Molly: Thank you so much for noticing that and asking about it. The book has been featured in a few articles as a food memoir, and it's really perplexed me because there is nothing about it that is a food memoir. And I haven't known how to engage with that press for that reason. It's sort of more than perplexed me, it pissed me off.

I feel like it's — I was thinking about how I see it — is it ok for me to veer off for just a second?

Alicia: Yeah, of course.

Molly: I was thinking about how — when I see people mention your writing, or recommend subscribing to your newsletter, people often refer to you as a food writer. Do you use that term for yourself?

Alicia: I used to more than I do now. I think of myself more as a culture writer now. I would rather be seen as like a nonfiction writer, a person who writes reported and personal and hopefully kind of immersive nonfiction — and not as a food writer. 

And then I wrestle with myself, because I'm wondering, ‘Do I not like that because I just don't like the way food writing manifests in the world in its most popular forms, because I don't see it as politically and socially engaged?’ But, I do like to write so much about other things. So, it is a difficult box to be put in, which you know, for sure.

Molly: Yeah. 

I mean, the whole time that I did think of myself as a food writer, if I would be in conversation with someone I would just — I had just met. And they were like, ‘What do you do?’ And I said, ‘I'm a writer.’ And then they would ask what I wrote about, I would be like, ‘Oh, I'm a food writer.’ And they would all — I mean 9.9 times out of 10, think it meant that I was a restaurant critic. And so then right away, I would be engaged in trying to define what food writing was and wasn't. 

The word food writing, I think, is — I think that it has always been complicated for me, and has never felt that it quite fit.

I mean, when I was in my — when I started the — my blog, which is how I got started writing as a, an adult, as opposed to just a teenager writing angsty poetry. I mean, when I started it, what I wanted most was to be a food writer in the vein of all the food magazines I saw in my parent’s house. But I look back on that, that wish, and what I was thinking of were like narrative pieces in Gourmet magazine in the ‘90s. I was never going to be a restaurant critic, and I was never going to be a recipe developer. 

And food writing as a term is not nuanced enough to make space for all the different ways that we can engage with food. And in fact, as you were saying, or as you hinted at,  food writing I think is — often, the category of food writing tends to be enforced as a category that is apolitical, that is easy, that is readily digestible, that is approachable. 

And so, I've been really — sorry, I need to clear my throat.

Once I started writing, right away, it was very clear to me that what I had thought I was going to do when this is — on the blog, 14 years ago, was a — I thought that I was going to do food writing. And so often what I was actually doing was writing about everything that orbited food in my own world. So, whether that was like the people, books I was reading, film photography I was interested in. And that food was a way of anchoring a narrative, but only sometimes the actual narrative.

I think that actually one thing that I do want to say: yeah, in the process of trying to — once I had written the proposal for ‘The Fixed Stars,’ and was trying to place it with a publisher, my being known as a food writer was a liability for me in huge ways. For one thing, for literary editors, food writing is a — it is not respected. 

And then the other thing is, of course, people want you to keep doing what they know you can do and what they know will sell. So, I received a lot of feedback from people who wanted to know if there were going to be recipes in this book. And when I said that there weren't going to be, they asked me if I would put recipes in it, if they told me to.

The shoehorning was so overt. But what I think it's really sad is that in talking about this kind of thing, what I think is really some of the most wonderful potential of food writing, I think — I want to be sure to mention that I actually feel writing about food taught me how to write the way that I write today. Which is that food writing is inherently concrete and very specific writing. It insists on the specific over the general. 

Nobody wants to read a general piece about hanger steaks unless we're going to talk about the ways that cows are bred for it, or the right mixture of cream for them, or whether they should be grass fed, or how you should cut a hanger steak, but that's not the food writing that I have ever wanted to do, or to read. 

Food writing, I think, taught me how to drop down into a scene through concrete information and imagery in a way that you have to be able to do to produce most types of creative narratives.

I'm not trained as a novelist. I'm also not trained as a food writer. But food writing really taught me how to do what we think of as writing that feels immersive and that feels real, because food writing is so specific, because food is inherently so concrete and specific. So, I think that, when I — so, go ahead. 

Alicia: No, no, go — you go. [Laughter.]

Molly: Oh, alright. 

I was just going to say that I teach memoir a lot. And even when I'm teaching general craft of memoir, I find it really helpful to use prompts and examples of really good, narrative food writing, because it's so clear the way that food can work as a device to anchor a story or to drop a reader down into a seat. 

Alicia: Right.

No, I was gonna say that food writing really taught me how to write, too, and I think the only reason I can write about things that aren't food now is because I spent so much time deeply, deeply embedded in just writing specifically about food. And just, I think, yeah, once you dive into food and you realize how much it touches everything, you realize that it also provides you the tools to discuss pretty much anything.

Which is why it's bad — I think it's bad — to say that food writing is shallow and etc., etc., just because it so often is in terms of what we most see with food writing. But I do think that if you — when you get deeper into it, you realize that it doesn't have to be as shallow as we think it is. 

I mean, I wish that I felt like, ‘Oh, yes, I'm a food writer,’ really explained what I am because I’m — same thing, I tell that to strangers all the time. It's like, ‘No, I'm a food writer,’ just to explain myself. But I — all that it connotes is so unpleasant to be attached to.

Molly: Yeah, I feel like it has been really — all this writing is shaped by market forces. But I feel like food writing in particular has been — I don't know, I'm probably talking about things I don't really know about. But I just feel like when I think about, ok, the fact that we all consume food, right? Every single one of us human beings. Not all of us read novels, right? I mean, all of us eat food. Not all of us read novels. 

I feel like food has been — sort of, food writing has been more — what am I trying to say? My god, I'm really feeling the fact that I have not finished my first cup of coffee here. 

Food writing, I feel like it has somehow been more sort of buffeted by the winds of the market and has bent to it more than some other types of writing. But maybe that's because food writing also has a useful and prescriptive role to play for so many people. It brushes up against everyone in a way that we don't ask literary fiction to do, or literary nonfiction.

Do you know what I mean? I don't know if I’m making any sense. 

Alicia: No, that does make sense. It does make sense that there's a push to make it general and approachable that we don't demand of other things. We demand nothing of the novel, because a novel can be anything and the way it is written can be anything, but we demand food writing be clear eyed and straightforward. 

I've talked a lot about this to other people, that because there hasn't been — now there is, and you see so much butting up against it, this — that there is cultural criticism in food now. There is criticism of the state of food writing. And so, people are really having strong reactions to that because it's sort of raining on their parade, I guess. 

But, in other art forms and other aspects of culture, there is that long-standing measure of criticism amongst people. And I think that not having that in food has made it be this very kind of boring, or interpreted as boring, genre of writing.

Molly: Mm-hmm. 

Yeah, that's a really good point. I think about it, like I just finished reading ‘Girl, Woman, Other’ by Bernardine Evaristo. Have you read it? 

Alicia: I haven't. 

Molly: It's an amazing novel. It won the Booker Prize early in 2019, I think. 

Anyway, but what I was thinking about is that in her bio, on the back of it, it says like, ‘She has written in tons of different genres.’ I'm paraphrasing here. 

But I think about the people I know who started out as novelists, let's say, and have branched into other things, or occasionally published personal essay, or someone like Kate Christian — sorry, Kate Christensen, who is primarily known as a novelist, but has done a lot of food writing in the last, what, 5 to 10 years. 

There's no question that if you have established yourself in fiction, you can make whatever crossovers you want. And of course, I mean, all of this has to do with, I think, the way that we hold up the novel as the highest form of writing. 

But I would like some day to have had a kind of career where it would say on the back of my book, ‘Molly Wizenberg has written in eight gazillion genres.’ 

Because I've never — I've always wanted to write about what I am trying to understand, like what I am engaged in grappling with. And that's never just one thing.

Alicia: Right. 

No, it's very interesting. I think it's a very U.S. idea, too, that writers have to kind of stay in one lane for their whole careers and never veer out of that. And I don't have any real evidence for that, other than so many European writers that I read, it's like, ‘Oh, this person writes novels, and writes literary criticism, and does a radio show.’ There's just so much more cross-pollination between cultural fields. And I think that we do ourselves a disservice. 

But, I think, it does feel very U.S. to me at this point. The more I try and read up — yeah, it’s — where it's like, ‘You do one thing, and you do it, and you never stray from that. And if you stray from that, we're going to be trying to put you back in a box.’

Which is, I think, what happened with you with ‘Fixed Stars,’ which is that you completely broke out of writing food memoir, but everyone was like, ‘No, food memoir, it's a food memoir.’ And it's really interesting to watch that happen.

Molly: Yeah, and I think it is totally because of our feeling that something cannot succeed unless it makes money. So, yeah, if that is our only — if that's our only measure, yeah, we all have to keep doing whatever we've done that has had any measure of success. 

God, it was really demoralizing for me. Once I had finished writing the proposal, and then shopping it around, and talking to a number of editors before sort of settling on one and moving forward with them, it took a long time for me to un-hear all the things that these editors had said to me, or asked of me when I had phone calls with them. Because, they were — some of them were really openly averse to publishing anything else that I did. No matter what it was or how much they liked the proposal, they wanted me to keep doing what they knew would be a safe bet for them. And of course, they didn't want to lose money on it. 

But, it's so sad. It was so clear to me when I wound up with my current publisher, who — so Abrams is only recently branching into narrative nonfiction. They've done a lot of incredible books that are art books, and books that are heavily illustrated and beautifully designed. But I think that they were actually willing to see the book for what it could be, and to be really interested in it not only as a narrative, but also as an object that they wanted to allow to be beautiful. Whereas other publishers, I got to have no say in what the actual object looked like, or felt like. And it felt quite radical at times.

Alicia: Right. 

And, I mean, I know you want to do other kinds of writing, but memoir has basically been your genre and very fruitful for you. Why do you think that is and do you think you'll step away from it?

Molly: When I started writing this most recent book, I felt really embarrassed by the fact that here I was, about to start writing a third memoir. And I still sort of struggle with that feeling. It feels very different to say, ‘I'm a memoirist,’ like that seems to have sort of a finite end date, as opposed to saying like, ‘I'm a novelist, or I write cultural criticism.’ I feel like at some point, I should probably get over it and move on. 

So, I don't know. Because the truth is, I have always used writing as a mechanism for trying to make sense of my life, and to figure out what I'm gonna do about this life. And I think that people do that in many different genres. And I happen to do it by writing pretty directly about myself. I would like to think that maybe I will find some other ways of doing that. But I don't really have — I’ve never had an impulse toward fiction. I just haven't. 

So I don't know, I think that I am a nonfiction writer. And for as much as I would like there to be a different word for what I'm doing, yeah, I think that I am sort of a serial writer about my own experience and where it kind of rubbed up against the world.

Alicia: Right.

Well, in this book, there's — I was actually like, ‘Oh, wow, it's odd to read a memoir that has so many endnotes.’ And so I do think that this memoir is super-engaged with the world and with other writing in a way that most memoirs are not. I don't know if that was like a thing you had in mind going in, or—

Molly: So, when I was, when I thought that I was going to wind up being in an academic [position], and being in anthropology, I always felt very torn about how to feel that I could be of use somehow. 

Because, in truth, the part that I loved the most about being a graduate student in anthropology was being presented with all of these different writer’s ways of understanding the world, and their theories, and their framework, and their — I just sort of wanted to spend my whole life having someone say, to me, ‘Here are some books that you should read that will make you see the world differently, and let's talk about them.’ And, of course, that is not what it means to be an anthropologist in academia. 

And so, it has taken me a while to figure out how to make that same — how to make that part of me, how to give that part of me a home in my writing. Because yeah, food writing, I didn't feel like — it didn't have space for me to talk about Foucault’s ideas on the history of sexuality, which had been so mind-blowing to me in grad school, and things like that. 

But, I missed getting to steep myself in the world of ideas and theory, however unmarketable they were. I missed getting to steep myself in the world of ideas and thought for the sake of understanding, not for the sake of selling something or changing necessarily policy. 

And so, when I started thinking that I might write the book that became ‘The Fixed Stars,’ I started thinking about it because I was doing so much reading at that point, about queerness, and about historical movements in queerness, and ways of understanding sexuality. And I was trying to understand my own life, kind of doing a personal anthropology on myself. 

And so then to take that and actively make it talk on the page with my own writing. I mean, that was what I wanted to do with this book. And I just, I'm so grateful that I landed with a publisher who let me do that, because, wow, there were a lot who didn't want to let me do that.

Alicia: That's so disappointing, but not surprising at all. Yeah, they don't want anyone outside their boxes.

Well, for you, is cooking a political act?

Molly: Oh, yes. Yes, I mean, at the most basic level, you can't source food, access food in any way without entering into these relationships of power and privilege. 

And for me, beyond that, I mean, beyond my — beyond the thought that I think it's so important to put in where we put our dollars in terms of sourcing food, supporting local restaurants, and local businesses, and things like that. For me, because I am so much of a homebody and a home cook, I, more and more, feel cooking is a way for me of asserting the value of the domestic sphere and care work in a way that is not supported in our broader political climate. I mean, I think about — especially since the pandemic started.

And I have a spouse who does not feel as proficient at cooking as I do. And so, I do pretty much all the cooking. And the number of meals that I have prepared and the amount of care that I — because I have a more flexible job as a writer then my spouse does as a psychotherapist, the time that I put into cooking and doing care work for our child and caring for our home, can you even imagine if those things were compensated?

So, yeah, it feels hugely political to me, the fact that I spent so many — that I care about caring for my family this way, and spending our money on groceries in an thoughtful way, and then that I'm still worrying about where money's gonna come from. It feels so messed up to me that the domestic work that actually fuels the world doesn't, isn't valued in this world. 

So yeah, that's kind of a roundabout way of saying this. But yeah, I feel like when I cook, I am within my family creating a moment and creating a life that I'm choosing to put real care and time into, despite the fact that if the world had its way, no one would care about it. But I care about it. I don't know if that makes any sense.

Alicia: Oh, it makes complete sense. It makes complete sense. 

And I love that, because so many — so few people have given me an answer that recognizes the domestic labor that is uncompensated. And, so I think that that's such a good addition to this conversation around the politics of food. We have to have conversations about how it manifests in the home, for sure.

Molly: Yeah, I mean, I think especially in this period when we're all sort of in and out of lockdown, and I have a child who's in second grade and who is, whose school is online right now. Yeah, I am one of those people you read about in articles, like, ‘Where is my career going to go?’ Because right now my entire world is consumed with shepherding my child through school and cooking 21 meals a week. But there's never been any sort of conversation, at least in U.S. policy, about how we are actively going to value that, the work that underlies keeping us all alive.

Alicia: Yeah. 

Well, thank you so much, Molly, for coming on.

Molly: Oh, my gosh, it was such a pleasure talking with you. I love reading your newsletter every week, and I'm so happy to become a paying subscriber.

Alicia: Well, thank you. Thank you again.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe

The first time I met Vallery Lomas was at the Food Writers’ Workshop in 2018. She had DMed me on Instagram asking if it was ok for her to show up, even though she hadn’t been able to secure a ticket. Venue occupancy limits be damned, I told her to come by, because she was—as I said to her then—“famous.” And she was, because she’d won The Great American Baking Show but it had never aired. One of the hosts had been outed as a sexual harasser before it debuted.

Regardless of that start to her career in the public eye, Lomas has emerged as a baking star, publishing her recipes with The New York Times, appearing on the Today, show, and working on a cookbook for Clarkson Potter. While she had already been famous in the food world, she’s destined to reach far beyond. Listen to our conversation above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi ,Vallery—thanks so much for coming on.

Vallery: Hi, Alicia. Thanks for having me.

Alicia: I was gonna ask my normal first question, but since you said you've had such a crazy week, can you tell me about why you've had a crazy week?

Vallery: [Laughs.] Yeah.

So, I am in the process of preparing for the photoshoot for my book, which will be out in September of next year. The photo shoot — we're starting beginning of next week. 

And I'm also working on manuscript edits and working on a project that's going to be really cool. It's going to have something to do with holiday baking. Just getting ready for that, since we are making some videos and you kind of have to do some — a lot a — just, a lot of work gearing up for that.

Alicia: Oh, wow. Well, that's super exciting, then.

Vallery: Yeah, it is very exciting. [Laughs.]

Alicia: Well, can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Vallery: Yeah. 

So, I grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, born and raised. And I ate just a lot of different things. Obviously, I ate a lot of Louisiana food, like crawfish boils. That's what you do in springtime. like April, May. 

I always loved fresh fruit. And my grandmother, she always had like fig trees, and a grapefruit tree. And we had blackberries growing wild in our backyard. So, I was always just tickled to be able to go and pluck fruit off of the tree and enjoy that. 

And my mom, she's actually from Indiana. So, we also ate rice for breakfast, which is apparently a very Midwestern thing, just rice with butter and sugar.

Alicia: That’s awesome. I mean, it sounds like oatmeal, basically, just with rice.

Vallery: Ok, that's a very interesting way of looking at it. I never thought about it — I just thought, my first cousin, and I was like, ‘This is so weird.’ But we'd go spend summers there. And I'd be like, ‘This is delicious’

Alicia: Well, you didn't start your career in food. So, what inspired you to get into food? What role has food played in your whole life, and what made you make that leap to kind of making it your whole life?

Vallery: So, for me, creating food, and not just creating it but sharing it with other people through media — and for many years, that was through a blog — it was really just an outlet. Because I enjoy doing it, and I had just something inside of me that had this impulse to create things, and take pictures of them, and write about them, and share it with other people. 

And I never really saw, or even really thought about, I guess, how it could potentially be a career. Because I was always very focused on my academics. And it was always you do well in school to go to a good college, and do well in college to go to grad school, and you do well in grad school to pass the bar exam and get a good job. And I had always thought along those lines. I had never really kind of branched out into this concept of the world of being more of an entrepreneurial creative. 

I'm trying to think about when it was that I saw this as an actual career path that I really, I thought I could make something of. And I think I actually had the idea of sharing food in a book before I had the idea of knowing this could be a potential career. I just thought it would be something that I could potentially do while still working as a lawyer full-time. 

But I competed on the Great American Baking Show in winter, or in fall and winter of 2017. And when I got back home from competing on that, I was just sitting at work, feeling like the walls were closing in on me. And I knew that I couldn't devote the best hours of my day to work

that I just was — I really wasn't passionate about it. And that isn't to say that there wasn't a place for me in the legal field where I could have felt that, but I wasn't feeling it. 

I took this leap and was like, ‘Well, I don't know how we're going to make this work.’ And I didn't have anything lined up. And I just said, ‘You know, I want to take that chance to see if I can make an actual career out of this.’

Alicia: Right.

Has that training as a lawyer helped you in your career now, focusing on being a food writer and a kind of a food content creator?

Vallery: Yeah.

I mean, it's interesting, because I think a lot of lawyers, they're self selected for a number of reasons. But, I do enjoy reading, I enjoy writing, I enjoy analyzing, and those are all skills that I really honed in on as a law student, ’cause you don't really have a choice. And also just understanding the concept of sources and primary sources, and knowing — just kind of knowing how to research, and not taking everything at face value, and understanding terms of art. 

And also just knowing how to work hard, because, for the vast most part, being an attorney is — extremely, it's a lot of work. And it's a lot of expectations that people have, just the nature of the job, for some reason is not a good work-life balance, as they say. It's just an expectation of a lot of hours and an expectation of really being committed.

And I think anyone who has written a book, and definitely a cookbook, really understands how much it takes to kind of do it start to finish. So, I think just that work ethic of knowing how to really push myself has probably been the most practical thing.

Alicia: Right. 

It's funny, ’cause as you say that I'm like, ‘All the people I know who are lawyers, and all the people I know who are bakers, are the hardest-working people I know,’ because they're the ones who are like working these long hours. Bakers have to get up at like three in the morning to bake the bread, etc, etc. There is that connection between this very, very focused and intense work ethic, which I hadn't thought about before.

Vallery: It's unavoidable. Any lawyer has studied for the bar exam, which is a crazy thing. And just to kind of put yourself in that zone, and be in that zone for months and months, or people who have worked in the field years, it's a lot of pressure. 

Alicia: [Laughs.] And so, we talked a bit about the pro — where you are in your cookbook process right now? What was the difference between doing a cookbook versus doing your blog or your Instagram? How have those processes differed, or maybe, how have they been the same?

Vallery: Yeah, I mean, I feel like with a book I'm always thinking about this much bigger picture, whereas — and the bigger picture I'm thinking about with a book is, one, it's sharing just my absolute favorite recipes and recipes that are meaningful, but also telling this broader story. 

Whereas with Instagram, I mean, I use social media for a number of different ways these days. But ideally, when I'm thinking about the bigger picture of Instagram, I'm thinking more aesthetically, like, ‘Ok, what photo will look good next to the eight photos I've just posted on my grid? What's the color scheme? What is it so that it fits, so that I don't have a bunch of round pies, one after the next?’ Yeah, I think I think about it a little bit more aesthetically. 

But, I also use social media as a way to — it's a lot of the bread and butter of this whole career in food media. It's how I pay these bills. So, a lot of social content is kind of — I'm not gonna say dictated — but that's a huge part of social content, including blogging content is what different brand partnerships that I have.

Alicia: Does that, I don't know, change your creativity in any way? I don't know, I think people talk about Instagram, and usually they're talking about it in these, laborious ways like, ‘Ugh,’ about these aesthetics, and the grid, and performance, or something like that. For me, and I think for other people, maybe for you, too, it doesn't always feel inauthentic. 

And so, how does Instagram kind of being the bread and butter of your work in food media, change maybe what you want to do? Or does it influence things in a way that you don't like? Or are you still doing kind of what is authentic to you?

Vallery: Yeah, I mean, I think that's an interesting question. Because I feel from when I first got on Instagram to where I am now, it's been a total evolution. 

And when I got on it in 2016, it was really with the idea of one, people are sick of me posting food photos on my personal account. And two, I think the — one of the earlier pictures I posted got reposted by a big account. And I then saw like, ‘Oh, hey, this is a way I can actually build a community of people who are interested in the content I'm creating.’ 

Whereas now, I feel like it — Instagram is a full-time job. When I’m really excelling at Instagram, I am putting in so much thought and time and energy into it. Earlier this year, I got to a point where I was like, ‘This is enjoyable again. I like this. This is fun.’

Just how my account evolved, I think, it has been a struggle to balance it with other creative endeavors that I have. If I'm trying to build connections, where I'm sharing recipes with other media outlets, that's a recipe that I'm not going to share on my blog. And the reach I can get from other media outlets, it — and the credibility is, I think, important for me to kind of take the next step that I want to take in my career in this industry.

So, it's kind of this tough thing to balance of recipes that we've saved for the book, recipes that we're pitching to other media outlets, and then it's like, ‘Ok, so what's left for my blog? What's left for social media?’ 

And that's where those brand partnerships definitely come into play. And some of them are indeed — or I'll say, most of them — are very authentic and genuine. And I actually really enjoy developing recipes for brands, and it also gives me mandatory blog and social media content. 

So, it's a balancing act that I am working on.

Alicia: Right.

No, and I think every freelancer is working on similar balancing acts. I have the newsletter now, and I'm writing a book. And I'm supposed to write, still, for other people. It's like, ‘Where's this well of inspiration that I'm supposed to be drawing from?’ 

Especially now in the pandemic, which — where inspiration used to be pretty easy to come by, because you’d just live in the world. And someone would say something offhand, and you'd be like, ‘Oh, that's a great story idea, actually.’ Or you could observe what is trending, or something like that. But now, it's — everything is coming from the inside, which is an interesting thing. 

And for you, has the pandemic affected your cooking or your work? Where have you been drawing inspiration?

Vallery: Yeah, I mean, I think those are all just really great points. 

And I think I told myself several years ago, when I really kind of went down the rabbit hole of food media and wanting to exist in it. One of my mantras was like, ‘You are an unlimited well of creativity.’ [Laughter.] Whether it's true or not doesn't matter, but you have to at least tell yourself that.

But yeah, I mean, I think with the pandemic — I don't know. I had a really rough start to the whole pandemic, and recovery has been slower than I'd like. And that, just coupled with manuscript edits — that's a really great question. I'm like, ‘Where am I getting inspiration from?’

Oh, actually, my parents. So, my dad — he is, he just has all the great stories about every family member and every ancestor. So, I actually published a recipe for New York Times Cooking a few weeks ago, on succotash with sausage and shrimp, and my dad was 100 percent everything behind that recipe. He was telling me how his dad made it growing up and then how his mom made it, and how his grandmother would make it, and how he makes it now and how his brother makes it now and how his friend makes it now. And I just kind of used all of that to put a recipe together. So, definitely my parents.

Alicia: That's a great place to find inspiration. 

And you talked about how your cookbook is telling a story. What can people expect from that cookbook? And what is the story you're telling?

Vallery: The story is really just about resilience. So, it's about not letting adversity kind of stop you from whatever it is that you want to accomplish. 

Alicia: Got it. Right. 

You are famous for having won a show that didn't air. Do you have a different kind of relationship to that, now that you — you've been seeing such success? How does that feel nowadays, the whole controversy around the — America's Next — what is — America's — [Laughter.]

Vallery: It’s the Great American-

Alicia:  — Great American Bake Show, because I get confused. Because there was America's Next Great Baker, and then it's the Great British Bake Off, and then yes, so. [Laughter.]

Vallery: Exactly! So, a little known fact, and I actually learned this in law school — ’Bake Off’ is a trademarked term by — I believe it's Pillsbury. So, that doesn't extend to Europe. So, that's why they can use the term ‘Bake Off,’ but we can't use the term ‘Bake Off.’

Alicia: Ok. [Laughter.]

Vallery: It still doesn't feel good. And it's not something I think about, because I don't want to give power to it essentially. It's not something I think about often, yeah.

Alicia: There's been so much controversy, since that moment in food media, that there's been so many moments where it seems that things might change in food media, in terms of who is held up and who gets positions of power, and that sort of thing. And your whole career in food media has been in this — these moments. 

And, do you have some hope for changes in the future in terms of who's given power and what kinds of stories we're allowed to tell?

Vallery: Ooh, that's a very — that's a really good question. And I'm just so used to kind of censoring a lot of my actual opinions about these things. 

Do I have hope? I would say optimistically, I have hope. Realistically, I just feel like — the question is just — it's a bigger question than about food, or food media. It's just a question about where we are as a society. And I think we're all kind of seeing exactly that play out, exactly who we really are as a society. And I don't think anything, and our industry in particular, is going to be all that different from everything else that we see in our society. 

So, I would say optimistically, yeah, I have a little bit of hope that there can be some fundamental, foundational changes when it comes to equity, when it comes to equality, when it comes to representation. Real representation. But I think we know what that would actually look like, and that would be across the board representation from every facet. And, we just, we have to ask ourselves if that's where our society actually is right now.

Alicia: Right. No, it's so important. 

Vallery: Probably not. 

Alicia: [Laughs.] Well, for you, is cooking a political act?

Vallery: I think existing as a Black woman in this country is a radical act in and of itself. 

Alicia: Yes, absolutely. 

Vallery: I can't quite separate any particular thing that I do from just existing, let alone having some level of success. Just the fact that I'm here is almost a political statement in and of itself.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much for chatting, Vallery.

Vallery: Yeah, thanks, Alicia!

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe

Klancy Miller is cool as hell. She studied pastry in Paris, wrote a cookbook called Cooking Solo: The Fun of Cooking for Yourself, and is now working on the launch of For the Culture, a food and beverage magazine about and by Black women. She’s also nice as hell, and it’s a joy and a privilege to converse with someone so smart and compelling, who’s doing serious and significant work.

We talked about cannoli, why she went to Paris for culinary school, the political power of pastry (an ongoing theme!), and how this year has expanded her vision for the soon-to-launch magazine. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Klancy, thanks so much for coming on.

Klancy: Thank you for having me. I'm honored.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Klancy: So, I grew up in a few places. My dad is a minister in the Episcopal Church, and we moved around kind of a lot.

I was born in New Haven, Connecticut. Some of my first food memories are pizza like Pepe's pizza. And there is a great bakery called Libby's that had amazing cannoli. And, to this day, those — cannoli are my favorite dessert. I love cannoli.

Alicia: Me too. [Laughs.]

Klancy: Right, like so important. 

Yeah, so we moved from New Haven to Atlanta when I was 4. So, my food memories of New Haven are literally Pepe's pizza, cannoli, and Mississippi mud pie. My parents used to like to go to Chart House restaurant, and I think that was a recurring dessert there. So those are my 4-year-old memories. [Laughs.]  And my mom is an amazing cook. I just don't, from those years, remember what she cooked? 

We moved from New Haven to Atlanta. And I feel like Atlanta is where I spent the bulk of my childhood. And there I remember I was older and grew up there to a certain extent. So, I remember my mom's cooking a lot. She was really into The Silver Palate Cookbook. She also had this cookbook by Eileen Ford that had a really good chicken salad in it. My mom used to like to make some stuff by Julia Child, who was — when my parents got married, she really wanted to become a gourmet cook, and started taking cooking really seriously. But she's also a little bit of a health nut. So I remember a lot of vegetarian things, vegetarian lasagna. Yeah. 

And some Southern foods, too, because both of my parents are from the south. But my mom, growing up, I don't remember her cooking a lot of Southern things. But I remember enjoying it at my grandparents’ house, having greens or fried fish sandwiches or really good barbecue. 

What else? After dance class, we would always go to either Varsity's in Atlanta for my post dance class snack or Wendy’s, where I would get french fries and a chocolate shake. Or, where else would we go? There was this place in Buckhead that made these awesome beignets. And so, yeah, those were all post dance class treats I would get depending upon our moods. [Laughs.]

Alicia: [Laughs.] I'm always interested in how people who grew up with even a touch of that kind of vegetarian cuisine from the health-focused times how you relate to vegetarian food now, or how it manifests in your life.

Klancy: Let's see. So, I feel like I'm heavily influenced by my mom in that, like I said, she's always been a little bit of a health nut and literally at different times in my life has called me to say, ‘Have you eaten a cup of blueberries today? Are you eating enough green vegetables?’ [Laughs.]

She's always had a subscription to Prevention Magazine, and has always been into reading about health. And we're both hypochondriacs, and so I've always kind of been cool with eating heavily vegetarian stuff. And I also, for better or for worse, do kind of, in my head, link it to health sometimes. 

I think because of my mom, I feel very open to eating lots of vegetarian food. And because I'm kind of sometimes lazy in the kitchen I sometimes don't feel like cooking meat, even though I'm not — I don't consider myself a vegetarian. I just kind of prefer eating more vegetarian than not. But yeah, I don't even know if I'm answering the question.

Alicia: No, you are. Yeah. [Laughs.]

How did you decide to go into food and eventually go to Paris to study pastry at Le Cordon Bleu?

Klancy: When I graduated from college, I had no idea what I wanted to do, work-wise. And I decided to kind of make it into a little “choose your own adventure,” or trial-by-error adventure. 

I studied history. I studied French. I studied Arabic. I studied political science. I studied film. I wanted to figure out how to apply aspects of what I learned in some kind of job. I majored in history, so I was thinking — and I really was, and kind of am, still into languages. I was thinking, ‘Oh, ok, maybe international development could pull on things I had learned.’ I ended up working for a non-governmental organization, American Friends Service Committee, in Philadelphia. 

And I started taking classes on anything that interested me on the side. So I was taking film editing classes, I was taking dancing classes and acting classes. And I thought maybe I would become a documentary filmmaker. I hated editing film. 

I also took cooking classes. And the cooking classes were the most fun, because I felt like I saw the fruits of my labor immediately. So, it was like that immediate gratification thing. And I think I realized how much I enjoyed working with my hands. 

I ended up getting an apprenticeship at this restaurant in Philadelphia called Fork. I was actually trying to get a proper job there on the weekends. But the chef was like, ‘You have no restaurant experience at all.’ But she was kind enough to let me come in and do prep work on the weekends. 

And I really loved it. It was the first time I ever showed up on time for work. I felt fully engaged and completely stimulated and very present. And I loved that I was making things, and I loved that I was working with people and I got to see — even though I wasn't the person cooking, I was just chopping up five bins of onions, I kind of got a kick out of the fact that what I was preparing would be put to use to make a beautiful meal. 

And at the time, I also really wanted to go — I thought I wanted to go to grad school. I was all over the place. I was looking at business school. I was really, very materialistic. I wanted to become a millionaire by the age of 25. So I was like, ‘I’m gonna get an MBA, and that's how I'm gonna make millions of dollars!’ Which makes no sense. But I wasn't very logical. 

But I did definitely want to go to some kind of school. So I asked the chef I was reporting to about her opinion on going to culinary school and she was like, ‘You don't actually have to go to culinary school if you want to be a chef, but I would consider it if you want to go into pastry.’ And so that kind of was a lightbulb moment because I do have a major sweet tooth. I had some thoughts maybe of like, Julia Child. I had studied in Paris before when I was in college

for a semester, and frankly, I had a terrible time. And I wanted to go back and have a do over. 

And so basically I was like, ‘Ok, I can go to culinary school for pastries.’ So, I did research on pastry programs in this country, and they were all super expensive. And I already had student loans. So I was like, ‘I'm not trying to go into debt for culinary school.’ I did research on Le Cordon Bleu, and took a quick little — I think I took like — I was living with my parents at the time, so I was able to save money. I took a little research weekend trip to Paris and I was just like, ‘Ok, I could do this.’ And I got a second job, saved up money. This is, meanwhile, still working at the NGO.

And yeah, I was like, ‘Ok, Le Cordon Bleu, weirdly the more budget-friendly school.’ And also because I am a Francophile, it kind of checked that box. And it gave me the opportunity to have a Paris do over. And it all kind of seemed perfect. I was like, ‘Ooh, I'm going to learn how to make croissant in Pair-ee, and that's going to be amazing.’ 

I was there for a total of four years, but the pastry program was nine months. And the first nine months were a genuine fairy tale. It was a good choice for me.

Alicia: That's awesome. 

Were you fluent in French before you went?

Klancy: I was. Which was, I think, the thing that made it even more kind of magical. ‘Cause I was really able to connect in a way that made it feel like an actual home for me.

Alicia: And how did studying pastry in particular shape your approach to savory cooking?

Klancy: I'm not sure it really has, but maybe — I have a visual thing. ’Cause, at least at Le Cordon Bleu and in the pastry kitchens I worked in, you always wanna make it look soigné, you always wanna make it look nice. Especially in the French approach to desserts, there's such a visual emphasis. I care about how food looks. Even before Instagram, I cared about how food looked. 

And I think, I don't know, with pastry, it's kind of laborious. It's really precise. It's a little tedious. So, that is something that I don't really run away from with cooking. But that being said, I actually think because sometimes more difficult pastry is a little tedious, it makes me want to cook like savory food in the simplest way possible.

Alicia: And the political potential of baking has been a big theme this year. Do you view pastry as a tool for political and societal change?

Klancy: Totally. 

I wrote about Georgia Gilmore for the New York Times “Overlooked” section, either last year or the year before last. Time doesn't exist anymore. And I really, really loved researching her story and her work. And the fact that she, from her home, was baking and cooking and selling the food she made to help fund the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted I think 382 days or 381 days in Montgomery, Alabama. And the fact that she was not doing this by herself, she was organizing other women to do the same. And so she's the woman whose name we know best from that moment, and from that action of cooking and baking and organizing. But there were many women like her. And I think that is one of the most powerful examples of how food and baking and cooking can be used as tools for political organizing.

Alicia: To change gears from pastry, but your cookbook, Cooking Solo, is about making meals for one. And what was the inspiration for that? Because that really is a unique idea in cookbooks, which — where the portions are for four to six people all the time.

Klancy: Yeah, so for Cooking Solo, that book is definitely heavily influenced from my time living in Paris. 

So basically, when I got to Paris, it was my first time ever living on my own, having my own little studio apartment, and my first time cooking all of my meals for myself. And it was really a joy for me because I was basically getting to know my neighborhood. And one of the ways I got to know my neighborhood was by going to the little farmer’s markets, the marché, every — whatever days they were running. 

And so I would just buy random things and experiment with them. And I had this teeny-tiny refrigerator in my teeny-tiny apartment. And so I was never really making — it didn't make sense to have a lot of leftovers. It didn't even make sense to buy a lot of food. So, I was constantly making these small meals or kind of single-serving recipes. 

After that whole experience in Paris, I actually wanted to write a cookbook about my time there and to make it kind of a food memoir, with an emphasis on things I ate. And that got roundly rejected. Like, literally by 30 different publishers. But my mom was like, ‘You have recipes, you have a repertoire, you should — something's right under your nose that you could mine for another book project.’ I took that seriously. And it was also at a time when — I don't remember the year, it was either 2012 or 2013. But the census had come out saying that for the first time in U.S. history, there were more single people than married people. And that was another lightbulb moment ‘cause I thought, ‘Oh, I am also single. And I also cook a lot. And even when I'm in a relationship, I cook a lot for myself. Or a romantic relationship.’ 

I basically was like, ‘There is an audience. The census just told me there's an audience for cookbooks for one.’ Even though I use leftovers, I don't really like having them. So I really thought like, ‘Ok, maybe there are other people like me who like to go to dinner parties and restaurants, but also like to cook for themselves and don't want to be bogged down with leftover food, and just want to enjoy a meal for one.’ So, that was the inspiration.

Alicia: Well, when did you decide you wanted to write? Was that always something you wanted to do?

Klancy: I've always written. I haven't always tried to be published —

After working in bakeries and restaurants in Paris, I kind of — I actually wanted to get a restaurant job, but the chef I was working for was like, ‘You're great, but you're too slow.’ And I was a little distraught, but I also was always tired from that job. I loved it. This is like the last pastry kitchen I worked in. And I was kind of like, ‘All right, I'm not necessarily — I think I have talent and skill, but I don't really have the chops to be working in a kitchen full time.’ 

And so at the same time as I was having that realization, Le Cordon Bleu had a job opening in the recipe development department. And so I was like, ‘This is great, I can make actual money and also learn something else in the food world or under the food umbrella, learn how to write recipes and stuff.’ And so that was helpful. 

And then I started kind of writing, basically writing for free, for a blog about Paris food, or  a blog about Paris but I wrote about food. And then I thought, ‘Well, I should try to be paid, try to actually sell articles.’ So, I ended up taking this class on food writing from Alan Richman who either still writes for GQ or used to write for GQ about food. 

And yeah, so I started a blog, Klancy's Potluck. And I did a series of informational interviews with magazine editors and chefs and journalists, basically asking them about their paths and how to get a foot in the door. And, yeah, I just very slowly started building, getting clips and writing stories. I actually got an agent through one of my informational interviews, and she immediately put me on a ghost writing project. So, that helped.

I think I got into writing about food, because I realized I wasn't going to be working in a kitchen but I still loved food and wine and very much wanted to be part of the food world, so to speak, and was trying to figure out, ‘How can I do that without being a professional chef?’ 

I also work as a writer for Columbia [University]. I never talk about it, but that is another hat I wear. I wear a lot of hats. And that's another major hat I wear that allows me to live.

Alicia: Right, right. It's always important — because people are always wondering like, ‘How does anyone survive as a writer?’

Klancy: Yeah, you have to juggle.

Alicia: Yeah, absolutely. 

Yeah, that's interesting, because I actually — I mean, I always wanted to be a writer and worked in magazines, but then I kind of accidentally became a baker, a vegan baker. And then that was how I decided to write about food, was because I was like, ‘Actually, this is too much and I'm never gonna make any real —’ I was selling stuff, but it's — the margins are so incredibly slim. I was like, ‘I don't think I have it in me to keep doing this.’ And that I was like, You know what, I can write about food.’

Klancy: Totally. Exactly.

Alicia: Yeah, it's a way to stay in the world without, yeah, without losing your marbles. 

Klancy: Yeah, totally.

This was in Paris, but I actually continued this in the States, I had a sweet potato pie little artisanal business. I would sell sweet potato pies to places. I worked as a translator. I don't know, I feel like you have to juggle but you also have to figure out, ‘How can I streamline and enjoy my life?’

Alicia: Absolutely. Absolutely. 

And, speaking of, last year you announced you were going to launch For the Culture, a magazine. And it seems people have been so excited for it from day one. But it was also a pretty prescient move as people are looking to independent media more and more, especially in food. So, how has your vision for the magazine changed over the year, of fund-raising and visibility, if it has at all?

Klancy: I think my vision is pretty much still the same. I've been really heartened and humbled and amazed by the very kind and generous support of For the Culture. Nobody could have made up this year. There's no way any of us could have imagined how 2020 would unfold. I am glad that it is a project that definitely, I think, resonates with the moment, or maybe reflects the moment a little bit — again, not that I predicted that. 

I feel like I definitely heard Devita [Davison] talking about like, ‘How is this moment radicalizing you?’ And I feel like for me, I really paid a lot of attention to and learned, I am still learning, about movements to support Black trans lives. And so I feel like, ‘Ok, if there has been any change, it's that I wanna figure out how to incorporate and highlight Black trans stories, specifically Black trans women in food, in the magazine.’ 

So, that's something that when I first started the project wasn't necessarily at the forefront of my mind. But over the course of the year, I've been like, ‘Oh, ok, this is something that I need to center. I need to have thought and reflection, and make sure that these stories are also included.’ 

So yeah, that's kind of a change, but it's not — I don't know. I feel like it makes sense.

Alicia: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

And for you, is cooking a political act?

Klancy: Yeah. I mean, I think of cooking as — I think cooking allows control. And I think it allows personal control. I think it allows for supporting a different food economy, or more directly supporting farmers. 

I also think of cooking in terms of its being a political act, I think of it in terms of imperialism. I also think of it in terms of hunger and ‘how does hunger exist?’ I don't know, just moments in history and moments in, I don't know, Ronald Reagan's war against food stamps. 

So, I feel like it's all connected in food — in cooking, cooking specifically is, I think, deeply political.

Alicia: Right.

Well, thank you so much for coming on again.

Klancy: I am so grateful you had me, and I'm — yeah, I’m totally honored. It's such a pleasure. It's my pleasure. Thank you.

Alicia: Thanks.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe

Before the world disappeared from under our feet, I had the pleasure of meeting Carla Martin while she was doing field research into cacao in Puerto Rico. Her work as founder and executive director of the Fine Cacao and Chocolate Institute brought her to cacao farms around the world, and this complements her role as a social anthropologist and lecturer in the African and African American Studies department at Harvard University. I asked her about food media’s role in food studies, how to tell a good chocolate bar from one that’s not, and more.

Alicia: Hi, Carla. Thanks so much for coming on to chat with me.

Carla: Thank you for having me, Alicia. I really enjoy your newsletter and these weekly recordings, and I'm honored to be here.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Carla: Absolutely.

I grew up in Weymouth, Massachusetts, which is a town, a suburban town on the coast of Massachusetts, about 20 miles south of Boston. It is sort of tongue in cheek referred to as the Irish Riviera.

And the people that I grew up with, were primarily of Irish and Italian descent, working class, with parents who were members of local unions, etc. And as I grew, it also became a much more diverse town and absorbed many of the other immigrant communities that are in Massachusetts today. These are communities of Cape Verdean descent, Southeast Asian, Cambodian, Thai, Vietnamese, Haitian, Brazilian, and more. And so I grew up exposed to all of these different kinds of foods.

But I also had the really unique experience of generational food knowledge that was passed down. Both of my sets of grandparents were people who grew up during the Depression. And I grew up hearing stories about my grandfather being unable to stomach turnips any longer, after needing to eat almost exclusively turnips for years during the Depression.

I also grew up with a grandmother who, as soon as she was legally allowed to work, became a baker in her small town in Vermont, and learned to really deeply appreciate the local foods of Vermont, which in many ways is a place that championed local foods before local foods became like a buzzword of the moment.

And she then went on after marrying and having children to being the lunch — the exclusive provider of lunch to a New Hampshire elementary school, where she needed to cook from scratch over 200 meals every day.

And so, through her, through my other grandparents, I learned a lot about what local food meant in New England, what class or food scarcity had as an impact on food.

And then my own parents are big hippies. And so I grew up always with this kind of this thoughtfulness that they put around everything. They were always reading about something, trying to expose us to different things in our lives, trying to get us to think about what was — what were the stories behind what we might be consuming. Trying to get us to think ethically as moral actors in the world.

And so, most of my diet as a kid was, I would say, relatively vegetarian. I've gone on to become mostly vegetarian, vegan in my adulthood. And, there was all of that.

All of this was also colored at the same time by what we had access to on the South Shore. So, a lot of the food that I ate was from Shaw's Supermarkets, like it's what was there. And I can remember Shaw's Cakes as even still are nostalgically some of my favorite cakes to enjoy. They come with a 80 percent shortening frosting.

Once I was kind of old enough to operate in the kitchen safely, I would make mac and cheese and broccoli on the side for me and my brother. Stuff like that.

So, there's a long, I think, complex food history that I was lucky to be introduced to by people who were really thoughtful about it.

Once I became a bit older, and spent more time with friends, I also, through them, got introduced to the foods of these many different immigrant groups in New England. Things like linguica, sweet Portuguese bread, pão de queijo from Brazil, all kinds of different Cape Verdean or Haitian dishes, and really got to have adventures through food.

So for someone who spent well into her twenties, all of my life within about a 20-mile radius, food was in, a lot of ways, how I would explore and get to know other people.

Alicia: And how did your interest in chocolate come about? And how did that lead to your founding of the Fine Cacao and Chocolate Institute?

Carla: It actually came out of my interest in food to begin with.

When I graduated from college, I had the unique opportunity to travel to Cabo Verde, which is a small archipelago off the west coast of Africa. If you can kind of locate Senegal on the map, just look to the west of that. And that's where you'll find, with many Cape Verdean peers.

And what I was doing in Cabo Verde was teaching English. I was also, for a time, working with the singer Cesária Évora, who is one of the biggest kind of cultural exports of Cabo Verde. And as I came to learn more and more about the place, I also came to know a number of people who had spent time as conscripted laborers.

Basically, under Portuguese rule — Cape Verde’s a former Portuguese colony in Africa — people had been found to be indigent or delinquent under Portuguese law if they were unemployed. And they could be more or less forcefully sent to go and work in commodity production and other Portuguese colonies. One of the primarily — primary places that people were sent was to São Tomé and Príncipe, two small islands, also off the coast of West Africa, closer to Angola. So further south, than Cape Verde.

And what people were put to work doing was growing sugar, or growing cocoa. And I became really entranced by the story. It was the kind of thing that shocked me. I hadn't been aware that things like this happened a lot in these contexts.

And I also became really confused about how it was that people were making their way back and forth between Cape Verde and São Tomé to me, and even realized that many of the people coming back from São Tomé were disabled by the work that they had done, were left impoverished, existed in a type of indentured servitude, or a debt slavery in São Tomé.

And many of them, of course, remained in São Tomé and began to receive pensions from the Cape Verdean government, which was something that really just blew my mind that one government would be sending pensions to its diaspora in another country to support

them.

And of course, I was thinking to myself all along, this was for sugar and for cocoa, these two things that we don't necessarily even need. How could it be that these things that I had always loved as luxuries or sweet things were underpinning, were held up by such problematic labor conditions?

I then returned to the United States and entered graduate school. And I was in a program for African and African American Studies, and was one day at a local Whole Foods in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I picked up a chocolate bar from Lake Champlain Chocolates that advertised itself as a São Tomé origin. And I had it, I liked it. And I thought, ‘Well, that's kind of interesting.’

I then went to Formaggio Kitchen, which is the place that — it's the kind of elite specialty grocer in the Cambridge area, and found another bar that was actually made in São Tomé by a chocolate maker known as Claudio Corallo.

And I just became fascinated by this idea that here were these products being advertised to American consumers, as — of São Tomé's cacao, as something that was supposed to be interesting and flavorful and fabulous. But there was nothing being said about that complex production that went on behind the cacao and the labor.

So, that really drove me to try to learn more, to better understand what was going on in the supply chain, and try to really dig into it. Fortunately, in African and African American Studies, this is a discipline that provides us with all of the tools that we need to really analyze something like this.

So, I began digging in, I was writing my dissertation about something else. But I started focusing more on cocoa and chocolate, exploring all of these things. And once I graduated, I had the opportunity in a postdoctoral position to create a class at Harvard called ‘Chocolate, Culture, and the Politics of Food,’ which turned out to be one of the university's most popular classes.

And it became clear to me that one of the ways that I as an educator might draw people in to look at things like the history of slavery, of colonization, of inequality in contemporary commodity production, might be to basically bait them with chocolate and then switch upon arrival to talking about these tougher issues.

As I did all of that, I also found that I was repeatedly being approached by people in the chocolate industry, who were saying, ‘We see that you're teaching about this. How can we learn about this?’ I was tweeting at the time I was blogging, I was putting out a lot of information about what I was learning. And industry members were saying, ‘How can we basically get on this learning train?’

And that's when I was inspired to start the Fine Cacao and Chocolate Institute. I was actually advised by my mentors at Harvard, if you want to do these things and make them more publicly accessible, one way you could do that is through starting a nonprofit organization.

And so that was in 2015. I founded FCCI as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. And I knew from the very start that I didn't want to do this kind of public facing work as a lone ranger. I wanted to do it in community. And FCCI has become a way of basically building a team of like-minded academics and industry members who want to do education and research on the cacao and chocolate industries, and who want to communicate about them differently.

We do this work now in a variety of different ways. We do it through educational programming for professionals and for consumers. We do it through research, and we do it through a lot of community building and communications activities. Historically, this has been through in-person, lectures, classes, events, and more, publications. But of course, in this COVID-19 moment, we've also been able to really prioritize a lot of multimedia communication. And that's become a bigger focus over the past year.

Alicia: Right.

So, you founded this institute, kind of in the — I would — from my perspective, like the peak of the craft chocolate boom in the US. How has the chocolate industry changed, from your perspective, if it has at all, since you founded the Institute and now?

Carla: Yeah, it's — in some ways, it hasn't changed at all. In other ways, it has changed a lot.

If we look at the industry as a whole, in the past 10 to even 20 years, it has gone through a reckoning in being forced to really deal with some of its biggest challenges. It's been forced to address things like forced labor, or the worst forms of child labor, to address things like deforestation. The variety of different kinds of sustainability buzzwords that the industry is not really allowed to ignore in its work.

At the same time, exactly as you said, the craft chocolate movement has gone through a large expansion. When it really started in the 2000s, it was — a very, a handful of Lone Ranger-type chocolate operations. Since the 2010s, this number has grown exponentially. There are now more than — thousands of companies that fit within this kind of small-scale chocolate making category globally, and that are really pushing the envelope on what it looks like to source cacao, and also to produce chocolate in an artisan fashion.

That, I think, has shown that — more than just a kind of experiment, this is, in many ways, a viable option for business. There are increasing numbers of businesses that are growing and expanding. They're not growing at the same rate as, say, craft beer, or cheese, or other specialty categories, but they are growing. They are learning a lot about how to interrupt the status quo operation of the chocolate industry or venture.

Alicia: And the words that are used in chocolate, “fine,” “craft,” “specialty,” “artisan,” can be challenging for a lot of people to understand when they're trying to buy a bar of chocolate. How do you define those? And what do you look for in a chocolate label?

Carla: Totally.

Well, they always say when people are hiring somebody, an HR committee will only look at a resume for however many of seconds? And I feel like that's what getting a chocolate bar is for so many people, and that's also very justified. For very few people in this world can grocery shopping be a leisure activity or a hobby, or like for me, an academic practice. So, it's completely justified. The system is set up such that people find it difficult to understand these different categories. So for anyone who's confused, I just feel like it's important to say that you're justified in your confusion. That the system is designed this way.

And so often, what I find helpful to do is to think about two separate industries in our mind. So one is cocoa or cacao, we use these terms more or less interchangeably. The other is chocolate. There is one kind of supply chain or value chain that links these two different things. But the way that sourcing and production happens is really quite different between the raw material, cacao, and the finished product, chocolate.

So, let's just focus on chocolates, as consumers are often focused primarily on that. It's helpful then to think of two different categories of businesses. One is chocolate makers, or manufacturers. These are the people that take the raw material, cacao, and they do things to process it to turn it into chocolate. So, there's quite literally starting with a bean and taking it to a finished product.

Then there's another category of people called chocolatier. Chocolatiers take pre-existing chocolate, so somebody already took it from the bean to chocolate, and those chocolatiers turn it into other things, Bonbons, truffles, bark, etc.

They're sometimes derisively referred to as melters in the industry, if that helps people think about it. There's nothing actually wrong with working in this way. In fact, it's a very profitable and helpful business. It uses up lots of chocolate, which uses up lots of cacao. There are many bonuses to this.

Now, within that, there are different categories. So, 99% of the chocolate that is out there today, it's within what is loosely construed as sort of a chocolate broadly construed, industrial construed, etc. category.

And much of that chocolate would actually properly be referred to as candy. We're speaking now in October. We're coming up on Halloween. And 99.9% of the Halloween candy in the world is produced by three branded retail manufacturers. So, when we talk about candy, when we talk about industrial chocolate, this is an enormously concentrated value chain where power and wealth are captured by a very few.

There's also another category of chocolate that is premium chocolate, and premium chocolate gets called it because it gets a price premium. That price premium is really coming about based on a perceived value that's somehow different than chocolate candy.

But the way that I think of as helpful to understand this is premium chocolate is, in many cases, just candy wearing a fancy costume. It might be, for example, a Hershey's product that has royal purple and gold, and that goes on the shelves before the holidays. It might be Lindt chocolate bar, that also looks as though it's in a more expensive packaging. But it's still probably made in just the same way as most industrial chocolate is.

Then, within premium chocolate, there are categories known as craft chocolate. That's a category that's drawing its inspiration from craft beer and other artisanal foods. Fine chocolate, also a category that is focusing on artisanry and more. And then a much lesser used term, but probably the most academically accurate term, which is specialty chocolate.

Now, within all of this, we also then need to go back to that first category that we talked about, which is cacao, or cocoa. Within this, there are ideas about the quality of the raw materials beyond just the quality of the finished product. So, we also have categories like fine-flavor cacao, and specialty cacao.

Fine-flavor cacao is defined in many ways as sort of genetically superior to other types of cacao. Specialty cacao is defined as cacao that receives a price premium based on its perceived quality. And so, there are certain chocolate companies that are making chocolate with these so-called better primary raw materials. They're also trying to produce an artisanal finished product. And all of that is leading them to this idea of being fine craft, or specialty chocolate.

Now, I know that that's a huge mouthful, and far more than the average consumer should have to parse. It's a huge burden and it's unfair. The industry itself is still struggling to even agree on these definitions.

Just take for example, craft chocolate. Craft chocolate is a divisive term even today. It is primarily used in the Americas. There are many companies in Europe, these old-world, we could call chocolate companies, that are making products that look really similar to what these bean-to-bar small batch craft chocolate companies are doing, say here in the United States.

But these European companies are loath to be lumped in with craft chocolate. They see themselves as doing the Grand Cru vintage style wine version of chocolate. And they see craft chocolate companies in the United States as doing this kind of cowboy, bold, messy flavor operation.

So it's dicey, even within the industry. But, some of what you're hoping to better understand?

Alicia: Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, it's just so interesting, because I do think that chocolate is an entry point for a lot of people to think about supply chain issues, trade issues, the role of slavery in the past and in the present in food production. And so, I think it's just so rich, I mean, obviously, you know this. [Laughter.]

So yeah, I always think it's a good entry point for people. It was certainly my entry point to trying to think about these issues. And so I'm always so curious about how it's evolving, because it is such an expansive and — just, the world of chocolate is so vast that it is often difficult to get a grasp on.

Of course, it's a thing that through your — the institute, it — that is a necessary, such a necessary thing to exist because of how confusing and this whole world is. And that people don't know what to look for, even if they want to make better choices. And what you're talking about in terms of confusion, and how the — basically, the entire food system is set up that way to confuse the consumer.

I talk about this all the time with people where it shouldn't be the responsibility of people going to the grocery store to really dig in on the labeling and figure out where their food is coming from. The food should just be well produced and there shouldn't be all these ethical landmines everywhere in the grocery store for people. I talked about this with people who study the cattle, cattle’s effect on soil, because that's, of course, a huge issue.

And yeah, it's just, it just shouldn't be the responsibility of the consumer. And it's just so hard

to talk about all these things.

Carla: Yeah.

So, what I often try to tell people is basically you’re set up to more or less fail. What would be the ideal is, and I'm so in agreement, Alicia, is that this — basically, if you go into a store and you buy food, you should be able to be assured, just in buying it, that it was somehow good for people, the environment, the economy, etc. That is not guaranteed in any way.

And so, for people who need just a basic guide, there's kind of two categories of where you can find chocolate. One is, I would say, grocery writ large. So, this is grocery stores. This is a pharmacy. This is the site of public transportation, like airports, train stations, etc. The vast majority of chocolate that you're going to find in those places falls into this kind of industrial chocolate, or even candy category.

And so the way that I approach those is I flip the package over, I look to see the ingredients. I often hope that the first ingredient might be cocoa, or chocolate liquid, or something like that. If it's sugar, that's ok. Just be aware that what you're then getting is sugar that is flavored, like maybe milk and chocolate, not necessarily a focus product. So, evaluate those ingredients and see if they fit with you.

And then, it is better, in my opinion, to have some kind of sustainability certification at this point in time then not to have one in that type of grocery chocolate. Customers need to be skeptical of these certifications. They don't, for example, solve all social problems that exist in value chains. But they do provide a greater degree of traceability or information about the conditions of the production of those raw materials than anything else.

Then the other area where people can go and find chocolate that's been really growing, and that I hope will grow even further in — basically, in people's understanding, is the specialty category. And that means at specialty markets, or even at individual retail outlets of these different chocolate makers or chocolatiers that are working in this space.

And that tends to attract the customer that is looking more for a flavor-centric product. So, that requires an interest in things like origin, like flavor, like the conditions of its production or the artisanry that went into its production. It's like buying wine at Trader Joe's versus buying at a fancy wine shop. It's different categories of what people are looking for, and what kind of information is necessary to explore those categories.

Alicia: Right, right, right.

For this conversation series, I guess I can call it, I've talked to a lot of people who work in independent food media, traditional food media, but not a lot of food studies people. And so I'm curious how food media is perceived by someone who's working in academia and critical food studies, like how — what is the role that food media plays for people doing this work?

Yeah, I was on an NYU food studies panel last week, and it was me and just food writers. It was funny to just be watched by people who are really digging in and studying food and we're — but we're the people who communicate about these things to the public. And we're maybe not necessarily as well versed. We're always looking for academics to talk to about issues.

And so, yeah, just how is food media perceived by — in your work? And how do you use food media?

Carla: Yeah, yeah.

Well, it's so interesting, because I see food media as part of the bigger microcosm of just media. And academia in its most kind of elite and insular gut uses a lot of media.

But I am much more kind of an applied, or public focused academic. And there are, is a large number of us. There's a new generation of the way that people think about this, that see media as essential.

At the same time, both academia and media have gone through the very heavy process of privatization, the casualization of labor, and more, that has profoundly impacted what people are able to do, what they're able to say, how they're able to make money and survive, while also trying to do the important work that they aspire to. And so I see that as a big interruption on both sides of this fence, if it is a fence.

So, for me, food media is a regular part of my reading, or listening, or viewing diet. It's essential for just picking up what people are thinking about. It's an essential way, also, if you hope to communicate some of the much more, I would say complex, lengthy, wordy, different types of work that's done in academia.

And so I would never, I guess, presume to say that I know the different challenges that people in food media are facing. That said, there are a number of things that I think would make academic’s lives easier, who study cacao, chocolate, if food media — people involved in food media were to keep them in mind.

For example, approaching the study of cacao and chocolate, or the writing about it, the making of multimedia materials about it with the same seriousness as one approaches anything else would be really helpful. Chocolate is this area where we — that the biggest kind of pop culture character that we have is Willy Wonka. It’s silly in our culture, it is seductive, everyone is — it happens to me all the time.

People really think, ‘It's great, it's an escape, etc.’ However, it is just as much a part of the real world as anything else. And so approaching chocolate, while also celebrating the things that we love about it, but approaching it with that kind of seriousness would be really helpful.

Beyond that, chocolate is this kind of, I would say, poster character, as you described earlier for understanding value chains, or getting one pub right about the ethics of value chains. But a lot of what is said today is still profoundly racist. It is still profoundly anti-African. It is still profoundly ignorant about the history of slavery, contemporary labor practices. It's also often couched in very — Western understandings.

So, a lot of what people say about chocolate comes out of what they understand about wine. But wine is often being grown by white people in white places. It's a very different kind of product than a supply chain or value chain like cacao or chocolate looks like. So, there are very different factors that play into that.

So, these are the kinds of things that going into a deeper understanding of these would make academic’s lives easier, because there's a lot of noise out there in the world, about, ‘Avoid chocolate from these places, or avoid — don't eat this chocolate. It's made with slavery.’ These very kind of profound generalizations that don't serve anyone.

And it's also often coupled with a problematic assumption, that if you can just find the right chocolate, you'll be — you'll meet your salvation. You'll have checked off your moral and ethical box, without recognizing the fact that this is a profoundly unequal value chain. It was designed to be this way. It continues to be this way in the present day. And there's nothing kind of exciting and glamorous and fabulous about that side of the story of chocolate, no matter how much we might enjoy the flavor.

I see too often. And I've seen critiques of this in your own writing that I so appreciate this idea that if something tastes good, we can therefore extrapolate from that to assume that is good for people for the environment, and more. When in fact, those two things don't necessarily overlap in any significant way.

We often ask at FCCI, ‘What is the flavor of good intentions?’ No matter what the intentions might be of consumers, of chocolate makers, etc, if the effect is not such that the lives of cacao farmers are somehow benefiting or improving, it doesn't actually meet a standard that I think is a valuable one to uphold.

Alicia: Absolutely.

And for you, is cooking a political act?

Carla: Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, but I mean, so I feel like for a lot of people, this is such a personal question. It is, but so is pretty much everything that I do, feels very political. It's a thing, especially at this particular moment in the world. Everything feels highly political.

But it's also because the way that we operate in the world is — I think, we have to do things in community. We have to do things in groups. Cooking, and food are things that require doing these things, as groups of people, and that is therefore profoundly political and influenced by policy and politics.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much for taking the time out.

Carla: Thank you. It's been an absolute pleasure.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe

When it comes to wine, I admittedly try to keep myself a little bit ignorant. This is because I love wine so much: I don’t want to over-intellectualize it; I want to keep it special. One of the magazines that feels organic (no pun intended) in its approach to writing about the subject is The Wine Zine, published independently by writer Katherine Clary, whose book, Wine, Unfiltered, is similarly approachable in its voice. Both come from a perspective where enjoyment is centered, and it’s understood that enjoyment happens most when the wine has been made well, without much interference, by people who give a s**t. We discussed her upbringing, how she got into wine, and her editorial approach.

Alicia: Hi, Katherine. Thank you so much for being here.

Katherine: Thanks, Alicia. How are you? Thanks for having me.

Alicia: I'm good. 

How are you? How's life? Are you up in Hudson Valley?

Katherine: I am. Yeah, I've been out of the city now pretty much since March. I'm up in Kingston, New York, which — it's beautiful up here. It's an amazing time to be up here too, because the leaves are all changing. And yeah, it's been really nice.

Alicia: That is probably the best place to be in quarantine, I think. 

Katherine: Yeah, I think so. [Laughs.]

Alicia: Well, actually, I wanted to talk to you about — Diane di Prima passed away this week, the poet. And you posted about her food writing on Instagram. How did you encounter her food writing? And why do you think it's significant?

Katherine: Yeah. So, gosh, rest in peace, Diane. We've lost so many people this year, obviously. And for some reason, this — her death just really, really hit me yesterday. 

I have read her work, probably since, I guess, my late teens or so. I came across her for the first time actually through City Lights Books in San Francisco, where I was living when I was 18. And it's a great, kind of iconic bookstore. And it's owned by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who's one of the kind of pioneer Beat poets. 

And I had never really read much Beat poetry or Beat writing from female writers. And so when I came across her book, Dinners and Nightmares, I mean, one, the title just kind of stuck out to me. Like, ‘Oh, gosh, is this — what is this going to be about?’ 

And I started reading it. It chronicles her early days as a Beat poet in New York, the places she lived, the people she lived with, and what she ate. And it was just such a cool, kind of effortless feeling, chronicle of — almost like a daily food diary. But she really weaves a lot of her poetry in and out of it. 

And it's just — yeah, one of my favorite books ever. And like I said, in that post, I really just wish that she had written about food more. [Laughs.] But as it stands, I'll just cherish this book Dinners And Nightmares.

Alicia: It's interesting, because I didn't realize she did any focused food writing. But I know in her poetry, food does come up so much. And even in a memoir — I quoted her memoir, where she was talking about being taught to cook at a young age, and the scars from the hot oil being part of the pain of being a woman. And so, it was so interesting to see your piece, ’cause I was like, I knew that there had to be some more, just food writing from her.

But yeah, we haven't heard enough about her. And I hope that now that she has passed — and unfortunately, we'll probably hear so much more, and see the books reissued, etc, etc. 

Katherine: For sure. I hope so.

I mean, I've already — I immediately got on eBay and was like, ‘Ok, what of her anthology am I missing?’ And there was actually so much that — I maybe own Dinners And Nightmares, Memoirs of a Beatnik,’ and then she has a book of poetry, really beautiful, called This Kind of Bird Flies Backward. But beyond that, she put out so many small, self-published books. And, yeah, as soon as you check on eBay, those prices are going up. [Laughter.]

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Katherine: Yeah. 

So, I grew up between Phoenix, Arizona, and San Francisco, mostly. Bounced back and forth quite a bit when I was a kid, but those are kind of the two main homes. 

And yeah, in Phoenix, our — my eating style, and how things were in the home, were definitely much more suburban. My mom loved to cook things like chicken and dumplings. And we had some family recipes passed down, for things like yorkshire pudding. And it was just kind of — I mean, don't get me wrong, totally delicious. But, it felt like a pretty kind of standard suburban diet for the time, the late ’80s, early ’90s. 

And I should give my mom more credit, though. Actually, one of her favorite books was — Sunset magazine issued this Southwestern cookbook. I think it came out in the late ’70s. And so we did on occasion have enchiladas and her — she loved making chimichangas, which was a fried burrito essentially. So, there was some variation in there. But it was — yeah, it was delicious, kind of comfort food. 

My mom and I moved to San Francisco. And the culinary landscape, I guess, so to speak, and also just cooking style at home completely changed. Because she was then a single mother raising me. And she was working full-time. And so, I really kind of was put on my own in terms of like, ‘Let's figure out how to get dinner on the table’ and all that. 

And lucky for us, we lived in Chinatown. And I went to school in Chinatown. So, by age 9, 10, I was exposed to so many, so much incredible food. Suddenly, I was eating egg custard tarts, and cha siu bao, and rice noodle rolls, and all — just all this great dim sum. So, I think, San Francisco really kind of expanded my mind, certainly, but also hers. Her culinary style kind of shifted, then. 

And yeah, I think, the way that I was eating in San Francisco kind of carries over to a lot of my curiosity about food now.

Alicia: Right. 

And how did you get into wine and natural wine specifically?

Katherine: Yeah.

So, I won't say that I was ever really into wine until I discovered natural wine. I moved to New York when I was 18. And I think like a lot of people that age, and then going into your early 20s, I was just kind of — I was going out to restaurants with friends, and going to bars, and would kind of just drink whatever was put in front of me. [Laughs.] 

I didn't really distinguish between ordering a vodka soda, or a beer, or whatever when we were out at bars on the weekend. And wine was kind of always this thing that was for quieter nights, maybe if we're sitting in a Italian restaurant. Or I'm having a nice night at home with friends and we would just get some generic bottle of red wine, usually not spending more than like $10 on the bottle. 

I just never really thought about wine. I enjoyed it. But I really, I never connected it to anything bigger than just this alcoholic beverage. And it wasn't until I started to learn about natural wine that this whole world kind of opened up and I understood like, ‘Oh, this is an agricultural product and wine is basically like food.’ And that happened mostly because of two things. 

So, like I said, I'm up in Kingston. And I've had the privilege of spending a lot of time up here the past ten years. My partner's from the area. And a really great wine shop opened about — think, about nine years ago. And it's called Kingston Wine Co. 

And it was the first wine shop that I had ever gone into that actually felt like my people were running it. And they were young people that were really excited about what they were selling. And suddenly I was seeing these bottles that had really creative labels, and the staff there just wanted to chat about things and wanted to know what I was looking for. And it just felt like this really warm, kind of welcoming vibe. It didn't feel like it was purely transactional anymore. 

And then, at about the same time, I was up in the Finger Lakes in western New York, where I have a bit of family. And, as you might know, the Finger Lakes is New York's kind of wine country, so to speak. 

And I came across this small winery called Bloomer Creek. And it turned out that Kim and Debra, the winemakers, were actually basically New York's pioneering natural winemakers. And so I had the privilege of kind of learning from them and understanding the whole history behind natural agriculture in New York. It changed everything in that kind of one to two year time. I really kind of couldn't look back at that point and keep drinking those generic bottles that I had been for the previous ten years.

Alicia: Then you launched The Wine Zine. There have been four issues so far. What inspired the creation of that? And how do you approach the creation and curation of each issue? Does each issue kind of have a theme? 

Or basically, how did The Wine Zine get started? And how do you keep going?

Katherine: Yeah, so they are unthemed. That was a pretty early decision for us, to keep them unthemed. Mostly because the content in each magazine, in each issue, really kind of just comes from, I think, what we are really curious about in that given time. Each issue takes about five to six months to put together. And so, I think I always felt that doing a themed issue would kind of stifle us in terms of what we were able to work with. 

And also, of course, in a six month span of time, so much can happen in — just culturally with wine, but also agriculturally or politically, with tariffs constantly changing and things like that. We kind of needed to be a little bit more on the edge of our seats with how we were coming up with content. And so, yeah, that's kind of why I stay away from themed issues. 

But, in terms of how we come up with content, I've mostly been on my own for these four issues in terms of our editorial direction. So, the magazine has always really been just sort of a fanzine by me, about what it is that I'm really curious about in wine. 

For the next issue — for issue five, I've actually brought on two wonderful editors. Nadia Pugh, who's going to be my associate editor. And she's based in California, and is going to be working kind of more generally on the magazine. And then Farrah Berrou, who's based in Beirut, and she’s going to be focused on that region. 

So, this is the first time that I'm kind of bringing in two outside minds to really start to curate the content and think about stories in a way outside of my own brain, which I'm really, really excited about. ’Cause I was nervous that it was maybe starting to look a little bit too inward. 

I really have my ear to the ground in terms of new producers and new wine shops and new wine bars and what people are talking about, but no matter how much I'm paying attention, things are always going to be outside of my vision. There are always going to be things happening elsewhere that I'm just not capable of knowing. So, I'm super excited to kind of expand my team.

Alicia: And how do you figure out who you want to write for each issue? Are you getting pitches, or are you mostly assigning?

Katherine: Yeah, I'm mostly assigning. For the next issue, I am opening it up to pitches. I've mostly only ever commissioned stories just because, one, I always felt like I had an idea of what I wanted to get into the magazine. But also, I was really terrified about the moment that I opened pitches — gosh, and this probably sounds so crazy, but — that I wasn't going to be able to handle the volume of pitches. Which is, of course, we're a tiny magazine. Come on. I'm not like Wine Enthusiast or something. 

I've always been very slow and steady about the growth of the magazine. And I've always just kind of taken things at my own speed in order to not get too overwhelmed. This has always been a side project for me pretty much until last year, when it kind of became a little bit more full-time, especially with the book. 

But yeah, I've always just kind of wanted to take things slow. And for that reason, I wasn't accepting pitches, but now I think we're in a good position to, with the next issue. So, I'm excited to bring on some new writers.

Alicia: That's super exciting, yeah.

And your book, which you just mentioned, Wine, Unfiltered, is such a wonderful user's guide to the world of natural wine, which doesn't have an official definition. And so much of the coverage of natural wine and mainstream outlets has been dismissive to my — in my perspective. 

And I've always found it a little bit annoying. There was a New Yorker piece about natural wine, and it made it seem as though everyone in the world lived in Brooklyn and was having orange wine poured down their throat by force. 

But you were writing your book, kind of amid this mainstream awareness and gaze upon natural wine. So, how did you come to your way of writing about it and thinking about it? And what kind of guided you along as you were writing your book, and how you want it to approach the topic?

Katherine: Yeah, that's a great question. I was reading those articles as they were coming out, as I was writing my book. And I have to admit, I was totally freaked out. I was like, ‘Oh, my God, mainstream media is already making fun of this thing and dismissing it and writing it off as some trendy, hype-filled whatever and here I am about to put a book out on it. Is this just going to be, by the time this comes out, is — are people just going to be super dismissive of what we're doing?’ 

But the one super-grounding thing about that is, I knew that I had my community within the wine scene. And I knew I had writers there and readers, and people who really did care about the who and the what and the why. And they weren't just paying attention to what bars were pouring orange wine, or whatever. 

And in that way, I think it always felt really good to be writing a primer on natural wine, and kind of an introductory guide. Not that I could have written anything more advanced than that, because let's be honest, I'm very new to natural wine. So, an introductory guide was my speed. It was perfect for me. 

But I always felt confident in that approach, because I know that there will always be new people to this community who maybe need to have the basics explained to them. I was one of those people at one point, and I didn't really have a book like that. 

And, to your question, just regarding, I think, how I approached the book and how I — what my kind of style was with it. It was really the same way that I approach the editorial direction of the magazine. I always want to speak to people kind of at their level, and at a very kind of understanding, ‘learn with me, not from me’ approach. Kind of create a bit of a conversation, and ask questions together. 

I never wanted to be that kind of preachy wine person that's, like, ‘Drink this, not that. Or be drinking this, because it's X, Y, or Z.’ It's more like, ‘Let's kind of create this ongoing dialogue about maybe why we should be changing the ways that we drink, or what [do] these winemakers think about the way that they're farming?’ And just kind of keeping things a little bit more transparent, you know?

Alicia: Absolutely. 

And how do you define natural wine, if someone asks you?

Katherine: Yeah, so. [Laughs.] Oh, the question. [Laughter.]

So yeah, when I'm talking about natural wine, what I'm referring to is wine made with grapes that were not sprayed with synthetic pesticides or herbicides for the most part. It's minimally fined or filtered. 

So, fining is basically a process that allows a winemaker to strip sediment from the wine using a binding agent. And then a filter, the filtering process is just basically a physical filter that will remove sediment from a wine. And it has the benefit of clarifying the wine a bit, among other things. But so, no fining or filtering, no synthetic grapes. 

And what else? I should have my book in front of me. Little to no additives, let’s say. So, we're talking about no chaptalization, which is adding sugar to a wine in order to spike the alcohol content. 

Also, pretty crucial is the use of native or indigenous yeast. So, this is just using the yeast that is present on the grapes in the vineyard and in the cellar, and not using commercial or inoculated yeast to kick off the fermentation process. 

And then I think there are some sort of — there's a little bit of give and take elsewhere. But these are sort of the core things, I think, that most of the community would agree makes a natural wine. Or more simply said: nothing given, nothing taken away. Gosh, I just got that wrong. [Laughter.]

Alicia: For you, is drinking wine a political act?

Katherine: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think with anything that I think we consume, we can think of that as being a political act. With wine in particular, it touches so many aspects. How was the labor treated that was involved in the production of the wine? What were the agricultural processes? How does it look for the environment, or how does it impact the environment? I think there are so many ways that we can think of wine being a political thing. 

And also just for me, it's about where and how do I want to spend my money? Do I want to have it go to a small family farm in western New York as opposed to a giant, anonymous corporation in Napa? Absolutely. Or even spending my money at a small, locally owned shop versus a big chain. I think all of those things add up, you know.

Alicia: Thank you so much, Katherine, for coming on.

Katherine: Thank you, Alicia.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe

Charlotte Druckman is the writer of Skirt Steak: Women Chefs on Standing the Heat and Staying in the Kitchen, the editor of anthology Women on Food, and a cookbook author, whose work includes the recent Kitchen Remix: 75 Recipes for Making the Most of Your Ingredients. We’ve never met in person, despite both living in New York for seemingly forever, and this was the first time we ever chatted not via Twitter DM or email. While we have rather different backgrounds, there is clearly a certain level of comfort already assumed when writers from the New York metro area talk—and boy, did we talk. This one breaks the record for longest Friday conversation, because there was so much ground to cover about the James Beard Awards, what the meaning of food media is, why food needs real cultural criticism, and the response to her recent Washington Post piece on the whiteness of food memoir. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Charlotte. Thanks so much for coming on. 

Charlotte: I have to tell you — and in fact, you know this. I'm very excited to do this ‘cause I really love this newsletter. It's a newsletter that brought me to newsletters — seriously.

Alicia: Newsletters are difficult. I'm signed up to so many. 

I logged into Substack yesterday because I was getting all these emails about someone trying to — I think someone was trying to change my password and hack my newsletter yesterday, which was weird. I logged into my account and I'm subscribed to so many newsletters, and I don't know if I'm — I guess a lot of them aren't updated regularly, so that's not so hard to keep up with. But I was like, ‘What am I doing?’ Is everyone's inbox like this now? I guess so.

Charlotte: I'm trying to keep it to a point where I am subscribed to a number where I'm actually able to read all of them, ’cause I know me and I know if I over-subscribe at some point, I'll stop reading any of them. That's my — how my brain will function. 

So, I've so far been very limited, but I went from really, from not reading them to realizing that this is where, at least for me, especially with food writing, I'm getting most of the stuff I most want to read right now. Which is amazing.

Alicia: Yeah, that's the thing. I think a lot of people are saying that, which is nice, about food writing specifically. But, yeah.

Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Charlotte: Yes!

I grew up in New York City, specifically on the Upper East Side, which at some point, I started referring to as Stepford-land. And I'm 45. so where — this is like, we're talking 1980s, Upper East Side, which — it's always been pretty WASPy but it was probably even WASPier then than it is now. It's not really a complaint, it's more, that's more an observation because I — it was a very privileged, safe space to grow up. And I was really lucky to spend my childhood there. And I think just to have lived in New York City as a child with that kind of privilege was — I mean, that's not — that's a rare thing. That's a gift. 

That neighborhood, by the way, is also not known for its restaurants or food. And I come from a family that is one, obsessed with food, and two, completely in love with restaurants. And also, in the land of the WASPs, were Jewish. And I don't know if that — if the obsession with food, some people would argue, and the Jewish thing, is related, but maybe it is. Throwing it out there. 

But the funny thing is, I didn't actually grow up with a lot of traditional Jewish food. Unless you count nova, and smoked sturgeon, and bagels. Seriously, my mom cooked, and she still cooks. She cooks a lot, and she does it by choice. I think it's like an outlet for her. But she does not cook Jewish food resolutely, almost antagonistically. Resistant, deliberate. She didn't really grow up with it, and she — I mean, she hates it. She really doesn't like it. And I think my dad has nostalgic feelings about it, but since he's not the one cooking he kind of can't really do anything about that. So, that's just how that goes.

She cooked from Julia Child's books. But really I think more James Beard, Craig Claiborne, some of the — she had the TIME-LIFE cookbooks, and she cooked out of those. My mom is a huge recipe tearer, so — and she saves a lot of them. So, she had, has yellowed pages from the New York Times and Gourmet. And then I feel when the Silver Palate came out in the early ’80s, like I feel like that changed everything. 

And then also we went to restaurants all the time. My younger brother’s four years younger than I am. And I think once we were old enough to be taken to restaurants, they took us. So, I have these incredible memories of on a Sunday night, going downtown to The Odeon, and Tribeca, and being maybe 5 or something, and my brother being in a highchair. I don't know if they still do this, but they had paper over the tablecloth and they would put crayons down at every table so you could draw. I remember going — I remember drawing with crayons, and having a hamburger and French fries, and having no clue obviously at that age that it was this really cool place where Andy Warhol was hanging out with his friends. I obviously was oblivious to that. I just thought it was awesome. 

And so I have a lot of memories like that, and a lot of the restaurants that I remember don't exist anymore. But then, some do, like the Odeon still does. So, yeah, I had a pretty well-rounded, in terms of food, childhood, but not — definitely not in terms of the cultural embedding, not a lot from my own Eastern European Jewish heritage.

Alicia: Well, what are the Jewish foods your mom didn't like that your dad does have nostalgic feelings for?

Charlotte: Honestly, I attribute it — any traditional Jewish food. But whether or not my dad likes them, I'm not even sure. It was more the point — actually, he does. He's one of those people who likes gefilte fish. That's an example. She doesn't make chicken soup, not into matzah balls, not into chicken soup. Yeah, it has nothing to do with gefilte fish. 

I was with them this last weekend, and I made my dad start reminding me the difference between Jewish foods because I literally — I'm like, ‘Wait, what's the difference between—?’ I was like, ‘What’s kreplach again? What's varnish-?’ I still to this day get this stuff confused. I hadn't had kugel until I went to college and someone made a kugel, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is kugel.’ I didn't know. There were certain things where we would have Seder at my grandparent’s house, so I guess there I would have some stuff.

The food I hate most of all — this has nothing to do with my mom — but I hate herring. I hate it. It makes me cry when I eat it. I have a viscerally bad reaction to it. 

So yeah, those are some Jewish foods I — we never had. She always says she was a juvenile delinquent in Hebrew school, and she got in trouble for smearing hamantaschen on the toilet seats in the bath. So, I also didn't grow up with Jewish pastry in particular. I hadn't really had a babka until babka became trendy a few years ago. So it's interesting because it's not like I had none of it. But the version I had of iit was probably not traditional. And in some cases, it was a really long time until I had it.

My mom would make latkes, but she made them with prosciutto in them, so then I don't even know if they're latkes anymore at that point. Yeah, they were great, but it kind of defeats the purpose of the Jewishness of the whole endeavor at that point. 

It's interesting. And I was aware. My dad made me go to Hebrew school from age five to — feel like I was still going in tenth grade or something ridiculous, and then finally protested. So I had the education and I had a very strong awareness culturally, but food-wise: no.

Alicia: That's so interesting. 

Charlotte: Kind of a void.

Yeah, it really is. I think it's really interesting too.

Especially because I feel like Jewish food has become sort of — I mean, whether or not it's Jewish, and that's a whole sidebar conversation, right? Because I think this sort of fixation on in some ways Eastern European, Ashkenazi food, but also Sephardic and Israeli food, but the conflation of Israeli food with Middle Eastern food. And then the question of how original actually is Israeli food to Israel? That's a whole separate thing. 

But that sort of surge in interest in that food in the last few years, and then the amount of food writing that has been dedicated to it. As a food writer who's Jewish, that's been very interesting for me to see because I don't have that same connection to most of those foods.

Alicia: Right, right. 

I grew up on babka, which is funny that you didn't have it until it was trendy. I remember when it got trendy. I was like, ‘I've loved babka my whole life.’ 

Charlotte: Yeah, it was like, ‘What is this!’

Alicia: I never thought of it — I mean, obviously, I don't know. I was a kid. ‘This is delicious bread.’ And I grew up with challah french toast and stuff like that, too. That's just what happens when you live on Long Island, I guess.

Charlotte: Yeah. [Laughter.]

Alicia: All right, so I didn't plan to talk about this, but it's timely. And the James Beard Awards are trying to kind of deal with themselves, but they're not doing a very good job. I address this in Monday's newsletter, which we're talking about actually before it comes out. Yeah, what is the deal with the James Beard Awards? How are you viewing the current situation?

Charlotte: Well, I decided that the James Beard Awards were not for me. Let me just say it that way, before I go all out in my rage.

And when I wrote Skirt Steak—because first of all, I interviewed enough women chefs who talked about their frustrations with it, and you just realized how the criteria and the rules were set up in such a way that you are going to have a really homogenous pool of both nominees, but also winners. 

You just saw how it was preventing people from getting recognition in a lot of ways, and there is even stuff — I mean, for me, the thing that was the most kind of telling was finding out that — so you know how you have, in each category, how many — I forget how many restaurants are nominated. Which again, this is sort of a random thing, but I always think it's weird that the chef gets nominated in the category — but it's for a restaurant. It's sort of like, why don't the restaurants just get nominated, and then the entire team, the staff, they collectively get that award, you know what I mean? It's weird to me.

Anyway, in the category of the regional but also the national ones, where it's those — the restaurants, and then you're supposed to vote, what I learned and couldn't get over and I still can't get over this because I don't think it's changed. And this is before we even get to what went on this year and trying to redo the election and rig it so that it turns out looking more ‘politically correct’ because the, again, the criteria have set it up so that demographically people are already primed to win. 

But even in a sense before you get to that, you have this category. It used to be that you didn't have to go to any of the restaurants to vote for them in a category. So you could be from any part of the country. You could have heard of a restaurant in a category in a different region. And you could just be like, ‘Well, I'm gonna vote for that because all my friends say it's really good.’ I mean, that's already ludicrous. 

Next phase of this, where they improve things, and they're really proud of themselves when they changed this. And I think it happened a few years before I wrote Skirt Steak. The new rule was that ‘Oh no, wait. Ok, no. You have to have eaten at the restaurant to vote for it.’ Ok, fine. If you think about it, if you're voting in a category where you're saying this is the best of this category, and you haven't been to all the restaurants in that category, how does your vote count in any way? If you've only been to the one you voted for, how do you know that’s the best one in a group? I mean, it's truly just that — so, let's look at that. That's something that's really small in a sense, but based in logic. And to me, the logic in that was already so warped that I was like, ‘Oh my God, what is this? What is this system?’ 

And then you could start to see, if you were more cynical, how that would start to play out if you're talking about a region in the country that is, is sort of less dense with traveling voters. And so let's look at the Midwest ,and let's think about how many in that category, how many of those restaurants — maybe, probably they're going to be dominated by Chicago. And then you're going to have a few outliers. The number of people who even get to the non-Chicago restaurants, and then the number of people who go to Chicago, and which of those restaurants do they go to? Probably the ones they heard of, probably the ones that they have — they know publicists at, right?

It becomes rigged, and it really is a pop— people say that it's a popularity contest, and you're like, ‘Ok, but what exactly does that mean?’ This is a clear case where it's very easy for it to be a popularity contest. 

And by the way, it really operates on an honor system. So, no one's checking to make sure that you went to the restaurant you voted for anyway. I don't think you have to show your receipt. And frankly, since I think a lot of those meals get comped, there probably wouldn't be receipts anyway. 

So, learning that was the case and learning that then, I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ I mean, this thing is a sham, right? And so then we have everything that's happened in the past few years, like this sort of — from the moments of them patting themselves on the back for their seeming progressiveness, which was barely a sign of even just catching up to the times. 

And now we have what's happening now. And I'm just like, ‘Guys, just get — honestly, just cancel the whole thing.’ Cancel the whole thing because the foundation is already rotten. Again, I'm not an awards person. So I'm not sure I believe in this giving out awards to restaurants in this way in the first place. It's just clearly this system. 

The restaurant committee releasing a statement — to me, that committee’s been operating for years and years in this country in this clearly busted system. And it's only now they finally decided to release a statement about their outrage. I don't know, to me that almost looked more like a damage control press release than anything else. Which again, maybe that's cynical. 

I'm just like there have been too many problems with this system, and actually, I think there have been enough problems with the foundation that at this point I'm just like, ‘People, let's close it down. Let's walk away. I have lots of ideas if you're all hell-bent on having restaurant awards for how you might reconsider going forward running them.’ I have similar ideas for the media awards. Happy to give them away for free. Or yes, maybe just no awards. 

I wanna know what you think. I mean, you're probably — you’re — 

Alicia: I don't want awards at all. 

[Laughs.] It's been such an obnoxious thing to deal with as a writer, as a food writer. As a freelancer especially, it's like, ‘Ok, I have to pay $150 to submit a piece. And I'm only going to be able to pick one piece.’ And then I have to maybe strategically consider which category I can submit to, to have the most chance of being nominated. 

And I've submitted twice. In personal essay a few years ago, when I wrote about oysters for Hazlitt, and I submitted last year, I guess, yeah, for this, what would have been this year, a big three-part piece on Puerto Rican foodways. And neither time was I nominated. And so it just feels really bad. And I think everyone just feels really bad when it's like, ‘I paid money to just — for nothing, to this organization.’ 

You're hanging all these hopes of stability on the idea of winning the award. It's like, ‘If I had a James Beard award, would I have gotten a bigger advance for my book? From probably a bigger publisher? Yeah, sure, probably.’ And that's why we care about this. And that's the only reason is because — and I think Tunde Wey talked about this in his interview with Helen Rosner, for The New Yorker. But we care about these sorts of things because we have to. Because the continued attention means we have continued stability in our work. And the only way we can do work is with the support to do it. 

And so the false, weird system — and I was a judge, too, for journalism this year, in a subcategory. And it was a really dumb experience, frankly. It was like you’re reading all these pieces — have you judged the journalism awards before?

Charlotte: No, I actually have — I have a good — when you're — when you’re — I have a good story about this. Yeah. [Laughs.]

Alicia: Even though I think these things are stupid, at the same time I was like, ‘I'm honored, I guess, to be included in this.’ And so I'm like, ‘All right, sure, I'll do it. I want to be included.’

Yeah, like rating people's work at one to 10. In the category I was a judge for, nothing I rated highly was a finalist. I think there's an NDA involved, so I'm not going to talk about any more of it. 

I, in 2018, held — I produced, kind of, with a friend, a dinner at the James Beard House, where we brought four chefs from Puerto Rico to cook a Christmas dinner or whatever. And it was one of the worst experiences of my life. I mean it was fun and I liked it. And it was — we were doing this sort of as a — because, to — kind of to demand attention for these chefs who weren't getting attention, because people — because of the way people perceive Puerto Rican food and who's a Puerto Rican chef. 

And so we did this dinner. We had this really exhausting experience of basically just doing a fund-raiser for this organization. And in the end, I guess it paid off because the next year one of the chefs was a semi-finalist. The year after, two chefs who participated were semi-finalists for Best Chef: South. And then one of the chefs who participated was a Best New Chef for Food and Wine. But then you just see so clearly how this system works, which is — and it's so gross, because it's like, ‘Why wouldn't these chefs have gotten attention without this fund-raiser for this organization?’

And I always say this: The James Beard Foundation extorts the industries it purports to be an advocate for. It extorts restaurants, it extorts — and chefs. And it extorts writers for money, in the hopes that they will get an accolade that will ensure them continued— 

Charlotte: And fear. And also the fear. 

What I really saw in Skirt Steak was that there is this fear that if you don't participate, that then somehow you are making yourself ineligible for any kind of acknowledgment. And so you feel like you have to say yes. And that was really hard to see. It was like, ‘This is awful.’ They're just saying yes because they're terrified, that this may be their only chance to ever be considered. And that was really hard. That is really hard to see. 

When I did Skirt Steak, when I wrote the chapter on awards, I kind of sat myself down and I was like, ‘You realize if you write this chapter, that's probably going to be it for you with the Beards.’ I think that I didn't hold out much hope after everything that I learned that it was an organization that if you kind of laid any of the reality bare, that you would then be rewarded in some way. I just remember thinking, ‘Well, do you not want to have the chapter in the book? Or do you want to have this chapter in the book?’ And thinking I'd rather have the chapter and know that I did that than be worrying about this. And also now that I see how this works, at least on the restaurant side. it doesn't make me feel that good about the media side anyway. So, I don't care if I never get an award from this foundation. 

And that was how I proceeded. And there was something really freeing in it, because it was almost like I exempted myself from being allowed to care, you know what I mean? I saw what it did for writers who won. I saw all of that stuff. 

This is my funny story about that, which is that — well, two, I guess, funny stories. But the first was, right before Skirt Steak came out — so the galleys had gone out. Like those advance reader copies had gone out. I got an email from a friend of mine, who was on the restaurant committee, asking me if I would like to join. And I was like, ‘I don't think this person has read my book at all.’ And I replied, saying, ‘Well, I have a lot of negative feelings about it. And I think the only way I would want to join would be if I felt like I could actually make some kind of real difference, because otherwise why would I do it?’ And I said, ‘But have you read the galley of my book? I feel probably you should read it before you ask me this.’ It sort of was a full-disclosure thing that probably, this person, or someone on the committee, maybe they all should have read the book. And so, their response was, ‘Oh, ok, yeah, let us get back to you.’ And a few weeks went by. 

And then I got this email saying, ‘Oh, you know what, Charlotte? We're thinking that because you have a book coming out, and you're going to be on book tour and everything, it's probably not the right time for you to join the restaurant committee.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, that's funny, because the one time that someone can actually get to all those restaurants across the country would be on a book tour, so I see what's happening here. I see now that you've seen the book, and you’ve realized I cannot be on the committee. And that's cool. And we’ll leave it here.’ And that is my favorite personal James Beard story. 

I, after this, made a point of never submitting my work, like I refused. I have editors who I think did submit my work. So, I'm not gonna pretend that my work wasn't out there to be nominated. 

Women on Food was the first time that I submitted, because I wanted to make sure that the contributors to that book got whatever full possible credit and attention and visibility they could from working on that project. So, Abrams was the publisher. I think they submitted the book as a whole, and then they would — they said they would submit three essays. And I was like, ‘I will personally then make sure that if anyone else, in addition to three — if you have more than three people who want their essays submitted, I will get that done. So, I ended up submitting, I think three, in addition to the three that they submitted.

The interesting thing was it was the first — because it was the first time I was submitting, it was also the first time I really had to start thinking about the categories. And I realized how limiting they were. There's such a kind of homogenization that happens with these awards. Not just in the sense that I think, writers see what wins. And then I think they try and write things that look similar to that, whether it's in tone or structure. 

But it's also that the categories — anything that's a hybrid almost doesn't fit. It's like, ‘Well, where are you going to put this?’ There were essays in Women on Food — and it was very deliberate, and it's what I loved so much about them — that you would look at it, and you would have to say, ‘Well, it's both. It's a travel essay. It's also about restaurants. Or, it's personal writing, but it's also a profile.’ So, it became this whole thing of I don't even know what category to submit this to. And I found that really limiting, and also really interesting. ’Cause to me as a reader, the most interesting stuff that I'm reading now doesn't fit categories. Again, it's like, ‘what do those awards—?’

Something I realized, and I realized it again ’cause Women on Food was nominated, which — I was so happy for the book and I was so happy for everyone in it, but I was actually really not happy for myself. I had a very strange reaction. I started crying. And it wasn't happy tears. I cried out of frustration, and I had a really hard time articulating why I was crying. And I realized, yeah, I was frustrated. I felt angry. I felt sort of like, first of all, I think that those awards are more about the person who wrote the work than the work. And I think honestly that the awards, if you're going to give them out, should be about the work. And I think it's always collaborative. 

And I really thought about that for this book. But I also realized that I was getting congratulated by people I hadn't heard from in I don't know how long. I had texts on my phone where I didn't know who the people were being like, ‘Congratulations, this is great.’ And I was like, ‘What is this?’ I felt like suddenly other people thought I was validated because I'd been nominated for this thing. And meanwhile, I'd been working for so many years doing my thing, doing stuff that I was proud of, just because I was proud of it. And it was suddenly not until I got this nomination that it seemed people paid attention. It really annoyed me. I don't know. That's a very weird reaction to have. And again, I was really proud on behalf of the book, but just as a personal thing, something about it really upset me. I know that's really weird.

Alicia: You recently mentioned to me that you would write Skirt Steak differently now, that you would have given race more primacy of place in your analysis of women in kitchens. How would you go about doing so if you were starting to write that book today?

Charlotte: Yeah.

When I wrote Skirt Steak, I was clueless — in, honestly, in so many ways. I mean, I'd never written a book before. I think it was a combination of immaturity and lack of confidence, but also that kind of ignorance when you're aware of your ignorance, and you decide to work around it instead of tackling it head on. 

Also honestly, there was just this — my fundamental lack of understanding of the history of feminism in this country, in the United States and how white it's been. So, I was really idealistic and naive in a few ways. At that point, I thought any form of feminism benefited all women. That's not how it works. And over the past few years, I've learned that if it's not inclusive, it isn't feminism.

It's not so much that it was naive, but it's a very kind of linear academic kind of thinking, I think. I kind of thought that I could provide a template, like a methodology with the book, that you could then apply to other professions, to other disenfranchised groups in those industries. And that was what I noted in the introduction, that as a heterosexual, cisgender, white woman, I felt — personally, I felt like I wasn't equipped to do the level of analytical work I wanted to in the areas of race and sexuality, or gender identification

But now I look back on it, and I’m like, ‘That's bogus.’ Because all I needed to have done was what I was doing anyway, which was just start with the women themselves, right? I mean, the book is grounded in the experiences, and then — and the voices of the chefs who were included. And I interviewed 73 of them. So, if I had just taken the time to include more women of color and Black chefs, especially, and to ask the necessary questions of everyone, there's no reason it couldn't have included race. And that's, of course, that's how I would do it now. 

And I'd also negotiate more time in which to do it, so that I had the time to interview more people and sit with it and parse everything. 

For me, it's a huge regret. I do actually still think that the methodology thing holds up. I think it's something you can apply. But I wish I'd done it myself, and in a more holistic and inclusive way. Definitely.

Alicia: Well, how long did you take to write that book?

Charlotte: I mean, I think it was really fast, because my — I don't even remember — by the time I signed the contract, it was after I'd started. But I knew that it was going to be due at the end of August in 2011. So, I started working on it — I think I agreed to the deal at the very end of December in 2010. So, I just started immediately in January of 2011. So basically, I did it between January and August of 2011. 

I traveled for it. So, to interview that number of people, to travel, and then to process all of it and synthesize it into a book within that period of time. When I look back on it, I'm like, ‘How did I do that?’ Yeah, it was basically seven months. I did it in seven months, and I can't imagine doing it that way now and feeling good about it. 

Alicia: Yeah, no, I'm in that right now.

My book is due July 1, 2021. I expected to be able to travel for it, and I think that that's kind of having a detrimental effect on — I mean, that, and time and money generally. I thought when I was writing the proposal for this book that I would go to places and have all this rich imagery, and atmosphere, and personality to draw on to write this. And now I'm like, ‘Wait, how do I do it without that because it's a pandemic?’ 

Charlotte: Yeah, it's also — it's expensive. I mean, I was not paid very much to do Skirt Steak, and I definitely invested. The fact that I traveled and did all that stuff, I don't think that — that might not have been the most cost-efficient thing. 

I think because it was my first book, I felt it was important to try to interview as many of the women in person as possible, just to have that sort of closeness you could — in my mind, I was like, ‘I can have conversations that are more — that go deeper, that are more real.’ When I was doing cities where there was a multiple number of women, I would try and travel to them. 

I have to say in hindsight, I'm — I think — now that I've — that we do so many interviews remotely, even before the pandemic, like we — I realize that it's not essential. But I do think, in terms of — I, so I just finished reading Isabel Wilkerson's Caste and it's changed — it's had such a profound effect on me. I feel like I'm one of the Oprah's Book of the Month converts. One thing I was thinking about when I read it was just the amount of time that she had. And also, I mean, the research that she did was — it's astounding. And the traveling she did was astounding. I wish all writers could be given that amount of time, and could have the resources to do that because you read it and you're like, ‘Oh my god,’ but then you also realize it took years. 

And I feel like most book deals now, they want you to turn your book out in these really short time spans. And we do it but then we look back and you're like, ‘How did I do that?’ And you wonder what it would have been like if you'd had more time. 

And sometimes I think it's better to have less time, again, almost for cost efficiency. ’Cause it means you kind of crank it out, and then you have more time to go back to doing other work that you get paid for. But on the other hand, then I look at a book like Caste. I mean, obviously, it's a special — it's an extremely special book, and she's an extremely, just unique talent. But you look at that and you do think, ‘Wow, to have that much time and support, to be able to go do that level of research and travel is just — it's amazing.’

Alicia: Right, right. 

No, absolutely. The time thing, for me, it's better to have a short amount of time. Because I don't want to get lost in the woods, and so — and I want to focus on it and get it done. 

But at the same time, I just wish I had the resources and the global ability to do some sort of research that I had really intended to do. And it's funny, because I've basically been doing research for this book already for a few years I guess, kind of with other stuff I've been doing. 

But there's still so much I wanted to do, and I tried to convince — the last time I had a publication offer me to cover expenses and to pay me a proper amount of money for a project. I was like, ‘Can I please go to The Farm in Tennessee, which is a commune where they still produce tempeh spores that make like most of the tempeh, I think, in the United States?’ And then also to San Francisco to go to Hodo Foods, where they make tofu and yuba and other soy stuff. And then there was some other thing I was gonna stay in New York for.

But I was like, ‘I want to do a whole audio project on tofu, tempeh, and seitan and go to these places.’ And I was like, ‘This will be really good as a project, but it also it'll be really good research for my book, and I'll have it actually funded.’ But then they didn't want me to do that. [Laughs.]

Charlotte: Why, of course. Because that's the thing, they’re always like, ‘We could get you to do a story for less money.’ 

I'm an optimist about that stuff. And I'm like, ‘But Alicia, that's an amazing, that would still be an amazing series.’ And the thing is that you can do the book you're doing now and then maybe that will be your next book, or maybe having done this book, you'll get the opportunity to go do that. So I just look at it that way, ‘cause that — you have to. And because the amount of information out there is unlimited, and the way your brain processes it is always going to be that unique thing. So, if you can't get it into this book, that doesn't mean that's it.

Alicia: Right, no, for sure. And that's a good way of looking at it too. Yeah, I'm trying to not be in despair about not being able to go do the reporting I wanted to do. Because even when I was on the call to sell the book with the editor I eventually went with, I was like — she's like, ‘This is gonna take reporting.’ And I was like, ‘I love reporting. I'm excited to do it.’ And it's like, I am excited to do it. But I'm not excited to do it kind of virtually. 

Anyway. There are bigger problems. [Laughs.]

Charlotte: There are. [Laughs.] That is true.

Alicia: But for Women on Food, the anthology that was nominated for best book at the James Beard Awards. [Laughs.] You also kind of had a wide array of voices, and what was your vision for that book? And how did you decide who to include there?

Charlotte: Well, for that book, most of all, I wanted — I really wanted to make a case, or a declaration, that if women were given the space and the freedom to write what we wanted to write, how we wanted to write about it, and to talk about things that we don't get to openly, that we could produce something that was as good as or possibly better than what you see in so-called mainstream food media. Which is why that part of me was proud when the book got nominated. ’Cause it was like, ‘Oh, I guess on some level, you could say that the point was made.’

But really, I wanted to show that analytical critical thinking, that — yes, things that mix genres together. And just honestly, creativity. That it makes for better reading, and that women are more than capable of that, and that we should be encouraged to do it. And I wanted to do it in a way that was inclusive, and somehow both no b******t but then warm, that felt it kind of had a kind of a warmth to it. And I really wanted to make sure that it felt like a safe space for the women who are involved. So, that was sort of my overall thinking just going in.

I also really did not want it to be a traditional anthology. The way my brain works is that if you're going to challenge a type of writing, if I was going to go in and challenge what food writing was, then I felt like the container it was in, like the format, then that should also be messed with. I was a little bit meta. If you're going to do that, then if the box you put it in feels just as sort of confined and generic and — what have you actually accomplished? 

The same way I'm not really into awards, I'm not into that typical anthology scenario where it's like, ‘This is the best of this genre.’ ’Cause most of the time, it's like, ‘What does that mean?’ And then you look at what the criteria for it is. It's a lot of sociological and cultural bias. And again, as I complained about before, just you — again, you see a homogeneity in the work. So, I really liked this idea that you weren't choosing the work, you were choosing the writers and saying, ‘No really, let's try and do something that you haven't been allowed to do before. Just, what do you really want to write about?’ So that we could mess with that. 

And then I wanted it to be a mix of essays, but also not essays. My vision for it was, ‘Could there be an anthology you would want to take to the beach? What would that look like? What would it be?’ 

So, I anchored it with the essays. Getting the essayists on board for me, even just psychologically for knowing that things were moving along and under control, that was where I felt like I just needed to start. It was very organic in that I was like, ‘Well, before I start doing the mathematics of who should be in here, what the demographic breakdown is.’ Haha, Beards, sorry. I just was like, ‘Well, who do you like reading right now?’ 

And I had a list of — first of all, I've noticed that the — well, two things I noticed while making my list. Number one, I really seem to gravitate toward women's food writing right now. I don't know if this was always true, but definitely right now, most of the food writing that I like — and of course there are exceptions — happen to be written by women. 

But I also realized that most of the stuff I really wanted to read, and the writers I was gravitating to, happen to be Black women and women of color. That made it, in a funny way, just the whole thing very organic for me. ’Cause coming from Skirt Steak and being very aware of the lack of inclusivity there, Women on Food for me, it had to be inclusive, or else I did not want to do it. I was nice to be like, ‘I just have this list of writers I love. And I don't have to start thinking about some kind of quota thing or something. It's literally just, this is — these are the writers I really would like to have.’ 

You also had the issue of how many essays can I have? How many essays does the book need? How many are too much? Also, how much can I afford? How much can I afford in terms of how much money I have and what I'm paying everyone? So, I just kind of was like, ‘Ok, I think I can afford like 13 essays.’ And so I just started with the 13 writers that I most wanted to read. My list was longer than I had essays for.

But I just kind of started with 13, and then I was really lucky because they all said yes off the bat, but then we had two drop out early. Everyone was very responsible and gracious with their dropping out. So, don't want to make it sound like people were delinquents. They were not. And then again, it was really easy for me to fill the slots because I had more people I wanted then room so it was — and I just got lucky. 

I still think I was so lucky that people said yes, and that they said yes so readily. I still kind of can't get over that. I remember every time someone saying yes, being actually slightly floored just because it was like, ‘This is an experiment. It doesn't exist already out there, and I can't tell you what it's gonna be. But I know what I want it to be. But I also know that what I want it to be is going to be shaped so much by the people who contribute to it.’ That's a hard thing to qualify, or even when you're trying to explain what a project is going to be. 

I was just really lucky. It was literally like, ‘These are the people I love to read. Ok, let's see if they want to do an essay.; And it was like, ‘Wow.’ It's like everyone's at a party in one place. 

And then the questionnaire was very much like, ‘Ok, you need to send this questionnaire out to way more people than you know are going to respond.’ And the questionnaire was how you get all those outtakes in the book, right? The question that's thrown out, and then you get this — all of these different responses to it. That came from all of these women filling out questionnaires that I sent that were huge, as you know. 

So, I knew that not everyone would respond. What I wanted was people to only respond to the questions that they felt compelled to answer. If a question leapt out at you, that was what I wanted you to answer. And so that meant sending it to a lot of people, and then knowing that you're probably going to get maybe half of those back. And then that would sort of dictate — that everyone's responses would dictate what that content would be. 

And that was interesting, ’cause again, it was organic. And it started with me being like, ‘Who would I like to have fill out a questionnaire?’ It was the part of the book where — one of the parts of the book where — it was, I wanted food writers, but it also meant I could ask people from other areas of the food world. I could ask chefs, I could ask food entrepreneurs, I could even ask publicists. And so sort of kind of figuring out that balance. 

And then this was interesting, too. I am part of, some — this Facebook group that's — it's food, women food writers that someone started a very long time ago, I think. I do not like this group. People up there are always posting, basically trying to get other food writers to do their homework like basically being like, ‘Hey all, for a story on the best hot dogs in Arkansas, what are your picks?’ and I'm like, ‘Wait, are you being paid to do that? Hi, what do you think our job is? And we're just supposed to start feeding you our favorite hot dogs in Arkansas?’

I thought, ‘I'm part of this group. I should reach out to these women. This is perfect.’ So, I put up a post of how I was working on this book and who — was anyone interested in being part of it, and filling out a questionnaire. And I got all of these women responding, which was great, ’cause it was a lot of women actually I didn't know, and I ended up getting to know them because of the book and that — I actually loved that. But what I realized was like, ‘All of these people are white.’ And I realize in this moment that this Facebook group, I don't really know why — I don't think it was, it definitely wasn't deliberate. There was just a lack of consciousness about it. It was just all white women. They themselves basically just realized this, by the way, a few months ago. Now it seems like it's expanding. 

So, after that, I was like, ‘Oh, ok, wait, now you've got to balance this out. ’Cause you now have all of these white women who just agreed to do the questionnaire, and anyone who does it is going to be included. I'm not going to be like, ‘Oh, you can't do it, now that you said yes.’ 

So then, I already — I had had in my mind what felt like a pretty diverse group of women. But at this point, it was — now we're oversaturated with white women, truly. And so then I will like, ‘Ok, you know what, I'm gonna start from the really obvious but such a useful resource, Equity at the Table. And I'm going to branch out from there.’ And I did that ’cause again, I was like, ‘I don't want a book that is just about the perspective of white women. I've already done that, and it's just not what I want. That's not what this is meant to be.’

So, that was interesting. That was interesting, because the essay thing had gone so — just, really was so organic and fluid that it wasn't something I had to consciously think about in the same way. But for the questionnaire, I found myself having to be more focused on it just because I realized that: yeah, there are so many white women in food media and in the food world. There really are. It's not to say that there aren't women of color and Black women. It's just there are so many white women, right? 

Alicia: I've been in a food writers’ group, like the food binders or whatever. But I think that's a different group. 

But that one has had so many freaking, I don't know, drama aspects. And so many splinter groups that have had to form as a result of the drama, and it's — I just don't, I just don't mess with it anymore.

When I was an editor at Edible [Brooklyn, Manhattan], it was useful to be — put out a call for pitches or whatever. But again, there was so much — there were circumstances where it was — I was trying to suggest that I wanted a writer from Crown Heights for some specific story, and that I didn't want it to be a white person. But you would still get people who would — a white woman who would be like, ‘Well, I've lived in Crown Heights for three years. Is that not enough?’ I’d be like, ‘No, it's not enough. You're not bringing the context that I want for this story.’ It's just endless, that sort of reaction.

Charlotte: It makes you feel self-conscious, too. Because you're like, ‘I feel like I'm doing some sort of really strange form of central casting, and that’s not how this should be working.’ You just want it to be organic. I mean, I wish I had the kind of mental rolodex where it's like, ‘I already knew that person in Crown Heights.’ That's the thing. But we work in a field and a society where it's gonna take a while for that person to be someone that everyone just knows.

Alicia: Right.

Charlotte: Exactly. That's why we — you want to assign the piece to them too. It's very frustrating.

Alicia: I mean, navigating all of these people's crap all the time is very exhausting.

Charlotte: Yeah.

And also, you know that thing where you, when the white person who's like, ‘I lived in Crown Heights, why — for three years. Why doesn't that count?’ it's — you don't want to be rude to that person, and you also don't want to start giving them a sermon. You know what I mean? There's also that too, which can become exhausting, where it's like, ‘I shouldn't have to explain this to you.’ And then, ‘Should I take the time to explain it to that person? Is that a good thing to do? Should I let it go?’

Alicia: It's always that. It's always like, ‘Is it worth it to explain to this person why they're wrong?’ when they're coming at me kind of aggressively, about — And it's like, ‘I'm just trying to do a job. I'm not getting paid enough for this.’ 

Charlotte: I know. I’ve used that phrase like, ‘This is above my paygrade.’ Yeah, it's that. 

Alicia: And people talk about the emotional labor that men demand, but if you're in these groups, the emotional labor and the literal labor, the literal, intellectual labor that is demanded sometimes is just excruciating. 

But yeah, so many people don't do the work themselves, which is — Yeah. Yeah. [Laughs.]

Charlotte: That really frustrates me.

Alicia: Right.

It's like, ‘What rock do you live under that you don't understand all of — what's going on in the world?’

Charlotte: But then you know what happens? What I realize is that someone puts out the call for the best hot dogs in Arkansas, and people do respond. And those are the same people that will then go on and ask everyone for a recommendation for the best falafel in Wyoming. So I see that there's a certain thing where it's almost they're all on the same wavelength, right? But that's just not something I really want to be part of. 

Alicia: No, I don't want to be on that wavelength anymore, either. Luckily, I feel like I've gotten off that particular hamster wheel. 

But you've been writing about food for so long now, and often discussions on social media lack real nuance, or not big on looking backwards. For me, it's been really interesting to do — I don't know, to just do deeper research before you just announce something, or I don't — I mean, maybe you can talk more to this, too, but the way that everything has become so shallow. So many people who are just dependent on $200 garbage that that becomes what people think of as food writing now. 

But you know, are there books, or magazines, or writing, or resources that you wish people talking about food right now would go back to? How would you tell people who want to have a more well-rounded picture of the genre, what would you tell them to look at? I know this is like a random— [Laughs.]

Charlotte: I'm gonna preface this answer by saying it's sort of not a good answer. And it's kind of gonna make me feel like a hater, or possibly a self-hating food writer. 

But if I could send people a reading list with some older stuff on it, it would actually probably not include food writing or food publications. 

Alicia: Ah. Ok.

Charlotte: Yeah, but there's a reason for it. And I actually think the reason is — it’s interesting, and it kind of gets to why we're at the place we're at. This is my theory. Food, as a cultural genre, or really a pop-cultural genre, in the same vein as you look at art, music, film, television. It's really young, it's really amateur. We're barely out of the lionizing profile with a PR news hook phase. So the critical work, like capital C-critical work in our field specifically, is lacking because it hasn't had the time to develop. 

So I think mostly, if you look at the so-called ‘critical pieces,’ they've been limited to restaurant reviews. And I'm not even sure how much of what we would actually label criticism in the disciplinary sense, or just there being any real critical thinking, or even contextual I think applied, even applies to those restaurant reviews, by the way. 

And I was thinking about Jonathan Gold, and how we celebrate him as a food critic. But you can love his way with words. You can love his use of language in his writing so much. And you can love the Los Angeles he wrote about. But I don't think you can say that was criticism. And if you think that it was somehow countercultural, because he was writing about ‘other restaurants,’ forget the fact of his being a white guy, ’cause it’s honestly — that's not my point here. But it's this line of thinking that suggests that if something is not part of white or Eurocentric culture, it's outside of culture in general, which I'm not cool with. 

So yeah, I look at that, and I'm like, ‘Where's our legacy of cultural criticism in food?’ I think the good news is it's actually just starting to be written now, and I'm psyched for that. This is why I like the newsletter so much, because I — that's where I see it happening. 

But personally, my love of critical theory came from studying film and, more than anything else, modern art history. So, it's very nerdy, and that's what I get off on, but that's what I would be sending people to read. Just so that you see it in a field where there's been a rich history of critical thinking and critical work, so that it's actually — and you can see these generations of critics or philosophers talking to each other. You can see how one builds on the other or rejects the other. You really get a sense of that. We don't have that. 

For me, too, I think some of the most beautiful food writing actually exists in fiction. So, I would make people read Monique Truong’s novels, just because she gives you historical context, she gives you cultural context, and then she gives you tension. And she gives you a — this pure love of food written in just the most poetic prose. I think I would send people off in those directions, just because I don't think we have enough of an archive in our own backyard for people to necessarily even understand sometimes what criticism or critical thinking looks like. And I think that's the kind of depth that we're missing. 

And I feel bad, because it's not so much that I want to trash food writing. It's just that I don't think it's existed long enough in that same sense.

Alicia: No, I feel this way so much. You’re articulating a thing that I didn't fully comprehend for the first few years that I was a freelance food writer where I was like, ‘Oh, I'm gonna — because my idea about being a food writer, which started in 2015, or whatever, where I was like, ‘Oh, I know all this stuff about vegan food and all this cool stuff that no one writes about and I have this understanding of what it's like to own a small artisanal food business, and I have this understanding of how power sort of functions in these — ’cause I studied English literature.’ My background is also similar, though not to any sort of incredible level. I read all this theory in college ’cause that's what I was supposed to do. And then I was like, ‘I'm gonna bring this new perspective to it,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, no one actually wants this.’ 

Charlotte: Really, it's heartbreaking.

Alicia: And similar I guess to the James Beard Awards, in trying to get nominated but not getting nominated. But I've done all of my best food writing outside of food publications, and mostly even for publications outside the United States, like for a Canadian literary website and for a British-based website and stuff like that. 

And that's been a really interesting perspective to have, too. It's like, ‘Oh, the people who are letting me do the writing I want to do are not food publications.’ So this year, I've kind of made my peace with that in a real way. I've just stopped even pitching. I don't want to do it. 

And the newsletter I started because I was like ‘Oh, I want to be able to do, I don't know, mostly like personal essay, or just random writing that I didn't have a place for.’ And it just kind of morphed into what it is. But yeah, it's been really interesting to see that so many people want more critical food writing and just — yeah, the only people that anyone ever cites as [food critics] are people that I'm like, ‘I don't think they were doing anything that new or interesting.’

Like you said, with Jonathan Gold, where it's like, ‘Yeah, he was writing about restaurants that the major critics weren't writing about, and he was doing it in a way that was beautiful. But what real criticism of—’

Charlotte: Yeah, what criticism was there? 

It wasn't even like he would necessarily compare one restaurant's version of a dish to another. It was just really a love letter to a restaurant every week. And that's a great, beautiful thing. That's not criticism. We're talking about something different. 

And I also just want to say, ‘See, this is what happens. This is how you end up writing books.’ Because you get so frustrated with these babies that you're given, literally and figuratively, in magazines and newspapers. And you're like, ‘The only way I can really say these things, or go deep in the way that I want. I guess I'm just gonna have to make my own thing.’ So yeah, it's a newsletter, or if you want to do something really deep and researched then it's a book.

I don't know, I never thought I was gonna write a book. It wasn't something I thought I would one day do. It was more just, ‘But I want to say all this stuff, and I want to learn about all this stuff, and I want to hear from all these people. And I don't see how I can do that and make it analytical in any of the given outlets that I'm supposed to be technically writing for.’ I don’t see that.

Alicia: Yeah, it's just really frustrating.

When I used to write for The Village Voice, that was the closest I guess I got to being able to do something interesting while still being under the rubric of the food section. But that space doesn't exist anymore, either. And I think every time I get interviewed about the newsletter genre, I'm like, ‘Well, it's kind of trying to replace the alt weekly, I guess.’ Yeah, create this thing of actual criticism, where you engage with food and all the things that touch food, and also bring in other aspects of culture.

It's really interesting to me, and I talk about this all the time, I think how food is siloed as its own thing with no connection to art, or film, or literature, or anything like that. And it's really frustrating.

Charlotte: I mean, I think a lot of it comes back to money and what can be monetized. And this idea that food can only be monetized when it's seen as Lifestyle content. What that means is that it has to somehow be in — again, I feel like I put everything in quotes, but ‘service-y.’ Or what people would call fluff. 

And so, if you want to try and go deeper, and that's why — even — I look at the New York Times, and I'm like, ‘Why is it that I'll read what I think is a really fascinating food piece, but it'll be in the science section, or the business section?’ I was like, ‘Why could this not have been in the food section? Would have been — why?’ And I get so frustrated, and then I'm like, You got to stop.’ But you know the answer. And it's not changing, and you need to move on and get over it. But yes, it's that.

Alicia: You studied art history, right?

Charlotte: I was an English major and an art history minor. And within my English major, also did a weird film studies thing. It was very creative.

But, I decided — this is like a whole side story. But I had this very kind of reactionary response to my first job, which was technically in corporate America, and was like, ‘I don't want to be here. I want to be an art history professor.’ And felt it very, very strongly, and decided that that's what I was going to do. 

I went and worked in an art gallery, and then I went to graduate school, got my masters, got accepted as a PhD student at that point knowing that I missed the real world too much. I was part of this very old-fashioned, kind of absurd program where once you get accepted to the PhD track, they have to take you back at any — I could be senile and knocking on the door and be like, ‘I'm here.’ And as long as I could pay tuition, ’cause — I don't think at that point, like probably not gonna be getting any funding, but I could still come back. I liked knowing that. In my mind, if I'd had some other life, where I was making a lot of money at my job and could dream about retiring and getting my PhD just for the love of learning when I was older, that would have been a great dream. 

So, I did that. And then I went, technically went back to what was always my sort of first professional love, which was publishing, and magazines, and journalism, and writing. So, I had that. I'm actually very grateful for it because it did help train how I think, and how I look at things. And it also really helped me hone my appreciation for visual culture. And all of these things, I think, have ended up having a huge influence on my food writing. They're so related that it doesn't feel completely like it was useless.

Alicia: I don't think education could ever be useless necessarily, but—

Charlotte: I agree, I agree. You're not learning like a trade or — in that sense, you didn’t. I’d love to teach, honestly.

Alicia: It's funny, ‘cause I have this vague memory of when I was in high school and wanting to go to the Culinary Institute to study pastry. This was just based on watching the Food Network and being like, ‘I want to make humongous sugar sculptures.’ And then not doing that, and then always, kind of until I actually accidentally became a baker, then realizing like, ‘Oh, it was a better idea that I didn't do that.’

Charlotte: Don't you love your baking now, so much more than that? The idea even of a sugar sculpture?

Alicia: And I think I still probably would have ended up writing about food, but I'm also so happy that I have this education in something completely different from food. 

And like now all I read are art magazines, basically. And I feel like that's helped me write about food in a better way. I don't know.

Charlotte: It's so helpful. 

It's really funny, a small thing that I noticed — not just sort of the theory, and the way of looking at sort of material culture, which I found it really helpful for that. I always used to think that it was kind of silly. I remember I think I even said this to a professor, and it was — you were not supposed to say that. 

But you were supposed to spend all of this time describing the work of art. And I'm talking about like, you would be writing an essay for a seminar. And the thing is, you would always be including the images in the work. So I was like, ‘Why am I describing it if you can see it?’ It really would get — and then I realized, ‘Oh, this is actually a kind of a discipline, because it means that you're really looking at it, and then that you're forced to find the language.’ 

And I realized that it actually comes in very handy when you have to describe food. ‘Cause mostly you're actually kind of describing what it looks like, because it's so hard to describe flavor in a way that's going to be helpful to anyone. But you can always describe what it looks like. And so even that, I look back and I'm like, ‘Ohhhh, oh, okay.’ [Laughs.]

Alicia: Well, to get back to kind of the food media question, what have all these recent kind of kerfuffles looked like to you in terms of Bon Appétit, where we're having — here's going to be the new editor, Dawn Davis. And Peter Meehan leaving his job at the L.A. Times. Was this all very, I don't know, predictable to you?

Charlotte: It wasn't predictable in the sense that I felt — after we went through the kind of #MeToo wave, back in — what was it? I feel like it was at the end of 2017, right? That the Mario Batali, Ken Friedman, thing happened. I was kind of like, ‘Well, what about food media? Hello?’ And then it didn't happen. And so, I think I kind of was — kind of resigned myself. 

So, in that sense, I was not expecting it. And I also think it's interesting, again, to go back to this idea of the inherent whiteness of feminism, as we've known it for so long. That #MeToo was very much co-opted by white feminists. And look, in our field, we were not able to get anything done. And then I look at what happened in terms of Black Lives Matter, which I think had a huge impact on what we saw with Bon Appétit and Adam Rapoport and a lot of conversations. 

And I'm like, ‘Yeah, look who made this happen. It was Black women and women of color mostly who spoke up.’ That made me feel both a kind of awe and gratitude for all of those women, but also very disappointed in — I mean, even in myself. I was like, ‘Well, so much for the white women who dominate food media. Let’s see what we accomplished.’ 

That was a one sort of tangential thing that was going off in my head. But I was pleasantly surprised. There's another part of me, if I'm just looking at the big picture of it. I think my problem with these dust-ups is that they tend to focus too much on the personal, or this singular person, or the actors involved, and then not enough on the systems that created them, or got us to these situations as they are. That is the thing that I wished we could somehow change, that dynamic. 

I'm so glad for the people, and I really — I think that we need it. I realize that I'm very much of the Tunde Wey, let-it-die mind-set. Which I used to not be. I used to be very much that sort of Trojan horse advocate. I used to think if you could infiltrate and change from within, you could really do something. 

And now seriously, I'm like, ‘F- that. We need new models. We need a lot of them. And they need to be decentralized.’ And so yeah, my thing is more — can we start having these upheavals in a way that feels like we're having a systemic conversation?

I have been sitting on that and trying to figure this out, and it even started — I think before the pandemic, just coming off of having done Women on Food, and being like, ‘What am I supposed to do now?’ And then everything that's happened in the past few months has really made me question that even more, and in different ways. 

I think if you look at, just in terms of my work, right? If you look at Skirt Steak, or Women on Food, or even like the Piglet Tournament of Cookbooks, right? You can see a cry for help. It's the wrong way to say it, but you can see someone who really is interested in the why of things, and the underpinnings. And I sometimes like to look at that in mischievous ways. And I'm always like, ‘How can we find other approaches to talk about stuff?’

And I think the nice thing about what's happening now — just personally, this is selfish — but for the first time, I feel less alone in that. I don't want to take up too much space, and I don't want to take up the wrong space. So, it's like, ‘How do I keep doing that kind of work, but in a way where I'm giving the attention and agency to other people, not taking it for myself?’ And I think that that's the thing that's like the negotiation right now. That's the hard thing to figure out. 

Alicia: No, I think it's hard for everyone right now to be like, ‘How do I fit into this dying industry?’ Yeah, it's complicated.

Charlotte: And how do I make a difference? I mean, which is a corny thing to say, but it's — if I'm going to do it, I want it to have some impact, or be of use in some way. I don't want to keep contributing to the — to what we were talking about before, the sort of lifestyle stuff.

But on the other hand, we have to get paid, right? I need to get paid. Yeah, it's hard. Yeah, we were all talking about — I wish we could find ways to talk about it together more, literally just — how do we? For freelancers, I think, especially.

Alicia: Yes, for sure. 

No, and I mean, that's why I guess we had the Food Writers’ Workshop for two years. But this year, we had to cancel.

Charlotte: That was so, so good. You'll do it again. 

Alicia: [Laughs.] But yeah, just to create that space for these conversations that can be difficult to have. Yeah, because I think it's necessary. And I mean, this year, it would have been — yeah, if next time I guess we do it, it'll be quite interesting because of all of this. And because we'll be in the midst of the sort of recovery, I guess, from what's happened. But yeah, so we'll be able to see it, I guess, with better — with clearer vision. So, I hope that that happens, and that it’s interesting for people still, but we'll see.

Charlotte: I think it will be. We can imagine.

Alicia: Food media — I talked to Lisa Donovan a couple of weeks ago, and she was included in a piece you wrote for The Washington Post about kind of the whiteness of food memoir, which, I thought was a really necessary piece, especially as someone I had — it's funny that you even wrote it, because I had bought a million food memoirs and was like, ‘I'm gonna figure out what the hell's up with this genre.’ I was like, I'm gonna read all of these books and then I'm gonna figure out why food memoirs are really — I don't know, just something — just all the same. You were talking about before with the homogeneity of the way the Beards do things and the way the media, — how do we break out of this mold? 

I do think Lisa’s memoir, Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger, is a really fresh addition to the genre. It did create a lot of talk on Twitter, that piece, a lot of which I think was completely misguided and totally incorrect and total misreadings of what you were trying to do. But Lisa's critique was that there was short on class analysis. So, what would your response be to that? 

Charlotte: Yeah.

It was concerning to me. And not because I don't think there's a glaring issue with the socio-economic disparity or class dominance in book publishing and in food media. There clearly is. I would never argue that. There is.

But it was concerning, because that was a piece that was primarily about white privilege and about race. And as soon as you start saying, ‘Well, wait, wait, what about socioeconomic privilege?’, as a white person saying that, whether you're doing it as a way to justify your own work or to devalue someone else's, or even if you're looking at it systemically, what you're doing is decentering the conversation, right? You're taking the focus away from race and you're shifting the conversation so that, in this particular case, it no longer calls attention to the idea that Black women and women of color are not being given the opportunity to tell their stories, and are not getting memoir deals. 

One of my friends actually said to me, which was a very strong statement, ‘When the discussion is about race, you have to be absolutely destitute for poverty to erase white privilege,’ which — that really struck me. And again, as I said, I just finished reading Caste. So, it's very fresh in my mind. And, by the way, that would go on my reading list even though it's contemporary. But it really underscored that point for me, which is in the United States, race is the defining marker of caste. And class is fluid, but caste — race is fixed. So, I don't see this as like a chicken-egg dilemma, I think it's always going to be race first. And I think it definitely needs to be right now in these conversations. 

And when you see a white person push back against that, even when they have the best of intentions, and an otherwise, I think, seemingly clear-eyed understanding of how things work, for me, I think you're basically witnessing a form of white fragility. So, that's disappointing, obviously. But on that, it also makes me think about where my own white fragility is coming into play, now, or how it might in the future because truly, we're all trying to self-correct and be better, and it's an ongoing process. So, that is something I also understand.

But yeah, for me, that was upsetting. And then also, ok, this idea that somehow my being privileged needed to be addressed or made me ineligible to write about white privilege and memoir publishing. I get how it could be confusing for people who think that food writing is personal by default, or who are taking it personally as readers. I am extremely aware of my privilege, and in real life I'm actually — I'm very, very open about it. And I'm also pretty open about how my career has benefited from it, and how also — how I've been able to sustain my career because of it. 

But if you look at my work as a writer, I don't do personal writing. I don't think I'm that interesting. I don't think my life's that interesting. Or, alternatively, that I'm a gifted enough writer to make it seem like it's that interesting. In related news, I haven't written a memoir, and I’m probably — not probably going to write a memoir ever. It's not what drew me to writing or journalism. So, I don't write about my privilege in my work, because there's no place for it in non-personal writing, 

This whole thing made me think about it, and I was like, ‘Oh, where would I have included this information?’ And then should there have been a disclaimer at the bottom of the piece that read, ‘Charlotte Druckman is the daughter of privilege from Manhattan’? To me, in the context of that piece, it just really didn't seem relevant, right? Because it was about white privilege. And also because it was about memoirs.

So, that's the kind of thing where you find yourself feeling like, ‘I shouldn't even have to defend this or explain it.’ For you realize that we live in a world where, at some point, you have to, because that's what people seem to want to focus on instead of focusing on the actual piece and what it was trying to say.

Alicia: Right.

No, I thought it was really interesting, especially — this Friday's interview with Klancy Miller. The timeline of this interview now is all over the place. Before she proposed Cooking Solo, she proposed a food memoir about her time in Paris that was rejected by 30 publishers. And I was like, ‘Well, I think Klancy Miller's food memoir about Paris would be really, a really interesting infusion into a genre that is so white, that loves France, but doesn't like the — loves the story of an American in Paris, but apparently not a Black woman American in Paris.’

And so many people who argued in response to that piece were just all over the place, for one. But also, were citing memoirs being like, ‘I think lots of people of color have had memoirs out.’ And it's chef memoirs and that sort of thing. Being like, ‘These have all come out recently.’ 

Charlotte: Some of them weren’t even memoirs! Something I observed, which is that I've noticed that when women of color and Black women, instead of seeming to get memoir deals, they get cookbooks where — that are personal. And I wonder if that's a publishing tick, where that's being thrust upon them. I don't know. 

But I found out people were holding up things where I was like, ‘But that's a cookbook, that's not a memoir.’ You're proving my point. You don't even realize that you're proving my point. But you are. It's the pigeon-holing. It's the sort of place where erasure and pigeon-holing overlap,

It makes me think of Kristina Gill and Tasting Rome. And how it was kind of like, ‘Well, we're not, as your publishers who bought your book, which was your idea, we're not comfortable with a Black woman being the face of Italian cooking. But we're very comfortable with your white co-author doing that.’ Which was unsaid, but I think very much what happened. And to me that's very similar to all of those publishers being like, ‘Well, we like the Paris food memoir thing, but we're not feeling the Black woman writing it.’ It's that same kind of thinking. 

This was also crazy to me, because I think if it hadn't been for the pandemic, the books actually would have come out within five months of each other. I don't think I have seen seven food memoirs come out in one year before this ever anyway. Maybe I'm wrong, that's already seemed like a lot. That we had seven, and they were all written by women, seems like a big deal because that also. And then it's the fact that they were all white, it was like, ‘Oh god. Oh no.’ 

And it was funny, ’cause at first when I first started paying attention, I was more sort of just like, ‘Why are there all these memoirs?’ And then I started looking at all the authors, and I was like, ‘Oh my, what is happening?’ And it ends up being indicative of how book publishing works, or at least food and book publishing works. 

I wasn't expecting that pushback, because again, I have a certain — I realized this, that I'm not even, certain ways, where I don't think of myself as a controversial person or a controversial writer. I don't know what I thought would happen, but I wasn't — I just didn't expect that. I thought I was almost writing about something that to me seemed obvious. And I thought it was important for a white person to say it because again, I think it's been made really clear that it's like, ‘Why does it always have to be BIPOC who are having to carry the weight of pointing all this stuff out, and then ultimately being ignored?’ But I thought it was pretty obvious. 

The interesting thing was that all that Twitter stuff, if you look at it, it was mostly coming from white women. Which I found really interesting and sad on a certain level. And I almost felt like it was like white women policing other white women about how to be white women. I almost felt like I had broken rank or something. And that was before I read Caste and now that I’ve read Caste I really am like, ‘Wow. It's really like I broke rank. I didn't stay in some place I was supposed to stay in being accepting of a certain status quo.’ I was not expecting that response at all.

Alicia: Yeah. 

And I do think class analysis is required, especially in publishing and media because it is a — Yeah, it's complicated for me to talk about because it's — I don't feel like I came from a super-privileged background and so it's — I feel like I had to kind of bust my way into this, but even the fact that I was able to bust my way into it is a fact of great privilege. Even though the only time I was able to take a magazine job was ’cause I — finally someone offered more than like $28,000. It needs to be part of the conversation, but I think that it is true that when you're writing explicitly about race that it — that should be able to be the focus. But it is so complicated and everyone brings so much.

Charlotte: I think it should be addressed. I just — I think you have to do it separately. And I understand, because you — it's like, ‘That's my memoir. I wrote that memoir. I put all of this into it. I worked so hard to get to a place where I could write that memoir.’ I understand that. But when you start being like, ‘But wait, but wait, because this is what happened to me in my story, and it's not fair that you didn't talk about socio-economics,’ it does — it doesn't — that's not right for this scenario, where this is about whiteness. 

The bottom line is that you did get your book deal, and that we're talking about your whiteness in this context. And like that's this conversation. I mean, I look at how lucky I was, just like, it's even — For me, everything started with privilege. Everything. Let's just forget my education, and you look at my resume of where I went to school and all of that stuff. 

But even my first job in publishing was — I had just graduated high school, and my favorite relative who — she was my dad's mother's first cousin, so I think of her as a great aunt. But technically, she's a cousin with some removings. I'm not good with the once-, twice-removed stuff. But she was this special assistant. She ran the office of New York magazine for the then-editor-in-chief, who was Ed Kosner. And so I got to be an intern at New York magazine at age 18. That's ridiculous. 

And of course, I wasn't paid, which was fine ’cause I'm from New York City and I lived at home under my parents’ roof so I didn't have anything to pay for. Well, I didn't have to pay rent, you know? Do you know who the other intern was that summer? It was Ed Kosner’s stepdaughter. And there we were, in our internships and it was — I learned a ton. I worked hard. But, just that, look at that. That's how it started, and then look at everything that happened after that. 

So then, that's on your résumé. Look at everything, forget the fact that publishing in general tends to be about connections. And it can be about connections that you had even before you started as a professional. And then once you start it's always about who knows who,

right?

So, the whole thing is so — and, you're — it's operating on a very low paid salary for most people until then you get to the level of Adam Rapoport, and his golfing, and all that stuff. That's someone who also had already come from privilege. 

So, it's a disaster. It's a full-on disaster. So yeah, we do need to talk about it, but — that, when you're when you're having a conversation about white privilege, it's not the time to raise your hand and be like, ‘But can we talk about socio-economics and how hard it was for me to do this thing?’ It's just not the place for that, even though I understand it completely.

Alicia: I mean, just for everybody who is reading, when I was in college, I couldn't do any internships because they didn't pay. And I commuted to school in New York City from Long Island and I had to have a regular job to pay to commute. 

And then when I graduated college, because I'd never done an internship and I was, ‘Oh, but I'm just gonna apply for all these editorial assistant jobs, work in book publishing.’ And then I never even got an interview, but also when they put the rate there, it was $28,000 and it was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ 

I worked in the publications department of an offshore Caribbean medical school, because they had their offices—because in college, I had done work doing web design, and then doing web design, that's how I made, started to make more than minimum wage, was because I learned how to do web design. When I got fired from that job, which I got fired from when I was 22, ’cause I don't know, I just hated it. My parents got divorced, and I was just sad. And then I got brought into the office and they were like, ‘You don't seem to care about this job.’ And I was like, ‘I don't.’

I got hired at, actually funny enough, New York magazine as a freelance copy editor a month later. I got hired there. They paid me $20 an hour when I started, but I was working 10 hours a day. And then I got hired full-time at the end of 2009, and just stayed there ’til I started writing in 2015. 

I was still working 10 hours a day for the first two or three years I was there. So I was still in this position of like, ‘Well, I'm finally at a magazine, so I can't say anything.’ But I was getting paid like $45,000 and working 50 hours a week, sometimes more when it was Fashion Week. This is what this industry is.

Charlotte: Yeah. 

And I'm guessing, too, though, you were surrounded by people who were full-time. And who were coming from a place where they did not have to hustle that much, and didn't have to hustle as much at New York magazine either, right? 

Alicia: I was hired full-time, and then I was able to work from home. So, it was like, ‘All right, great. I love this.’ It was this feeling of like, ‘I'm not allowed to say anything.’ 

Right before I quit, I was starting to finally feel comfortable and was like, ‘I'm gonna go talk to HR about all this sorts of stuff, and how there's no movement for copy editors here, and that sort of thing.’ It was just stupid. I just left, and I went to be a copy editor at Food and Wine for a little while, which was also bad.

Charlotte: I worked at Food and Wine, but I worked at Food and Wine before you got there. I was there from 2003 to 2005.

Alicia: It was not a fun time. I had a six-month contract there, and I was like, ‘F- six months.’ I was like, ‘Good-bye.’ It's like, ‘I'm done.’

Yeah, well. For you, is—

Charlotte: Do you think maybe—

Alicia: No, no. Go on.

Charlotte: Don’t you think that the copyediting experience has made you though better at your job now? ‘Cause I feel like there's not enough — First of all, there aren't enough copy editors out there, and there's not enough emphasis placed on how important copyediting is. I just feel like it would probably make you a better writer and a better editor anyway. 

Alicia: I hope so. I mean, it's funny. Today I was like, ‘Oh, I should create — start a style guide for the newsletter.’ And I was like, ‘What a nerd.’ 

I love copyediting. I get to do it sometimes for print magazines, and it's always a fun experience to get back into those shoes. But then it's not a fun experience when I get back into the shoes of writers who think I'm an idiot. 

And talking about caste, someone wrote a great piece for the New Republic years ago about the caste system in publishing, and how copy editors are kind of the bottom. Even though copy editors are the ones who know how language works and how grammar works. 

Charlotte: Same with fact-checkers. Now that I think about it. I feel like they weren't even invited to our editorial meetings at magazines I worked at. [Laughs.] This is just Dickensian

Alcia: No, it's so interesting. 

For you, is cooking a political act?

Charlotte: It's funny, ‘cause I'm not sure how much I used to think about this. For me, once you start thinking about this question, I don't see how the answer's no, I'm just gonna say that.

I think yes, it's a political act, because even when you think it's not, where did you buy your groceries? Which ones did you buy? Do you only eat what you grow yourself? Maybe you're not going and buying anything, you know? How are you growing them? And then, how are you making those decisions? And if you weren't thinking about where your ingredients came from, or the labor involved in getting them here, you're part of the problem, but doesn't make it any less political. 

We are still contributing to an overall process of culture, or shopping, or producing in cooking. So, you're still part of that system and you're upholding it. When you're in your kitchen stirring your pot, I don't think that's necessarily political in the same way. Unless you're trying to make a statement with that food for whomever you're serving it to, or selling it to, or if you're supporting a cause with it. 

But I think if you're cooking commercially, where it's an exchange of money or goods and transactional, again, that — it can not be political. But me at home with my experimental baking, I don't see the part where I'm actually making my batter and putting it in the oven. To me, that's where it stops being political because it's no longer part of that exchange. But in the sense of the buying ingredients and choosing and all of that stuff: yes, it's political.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much, Charlotte, for coming on.

Charlotte: This was great. Who knows when I said, but I had a great time. I loved talking to you. So, yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me on, and doing this with me.

Alicia: Thanks.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe

Kevin Vaughn started his bilingual weekly newsletter and monthly zine Matambre early on in the onslaught of the pandemic. For me, it has become indispensable reading on the ways in which various small restaurants in Buenos Aires and food workers in the country are coping with crisis, as well as reimagining the future. While I’ve only been to Buenos Aires once and quite briefly, I loved the city on the surface but felt that I wasn’t able to quite dig in—Vaughn’s writing proves that feeling was correct. There is much more to Argentina than steak and the rather racist notion that it is more European than Latin American, and I appreciate the glimpse his writing gives.

Vaughn isn’t Argentine. He grew up in California. We talked about how he ended up in Buenos Aires, what the food scene is like, and how it feels to publish independently. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Kevin. Thanks so much for coming on.

Kevin: Hi, [exaggerated Spanish accent] Alicia, thank you for having me.

Alicia: Thank you for calling me that. So many people call me Alice. 

Kevin: [Laughs.] Alicia. 

Alicia: I know, and it makes me so upset. 

And it’s just like, ‘Well, you're from the United States, so obviously your name's just Alice.’ It's like, ‘Well,’ ’cause I say my name Alicia, so that's a more difficult — I guess. But I'll take Alicia any day.

Kevin: No one can say — pronounce my name either. I'm always like, ‘Kebin. K.’  No one can pronounce my last name, either. 

Alicia: Yeah, for sure. Absolutely not. [Laughs.] The trials and tribulations of—

Kevin: ‘Why do you have a g in your name?’ [Laughs.]

Alicia: [Laughs.]  —of being a gringo in Latin America. 

Kevin: Yeah. Totally.

Alicia: So, can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Kevin: This is my favorite question that you ask. I love hearing people's responses to this. 

I'm from California. I grew up in the Central Valley, in the San Joaquin Valley, which is actually where I think a lot of the United States gets their food from. 

So, I grew up in a really small town. Everyone kind of makes fun of me because I pronounce it the okie way even though I speak fluent Spanish, so it's Los Banos, which is a really rural, small farm town. The identity of the town is really wrapped into farming. I actually did 4-H and FFA.

And the town historically was sort of built by Basque people and Portuguese people, a lot of people from the Azores. Lot of people from Lisbon, and those are kind of the old families. And as I grew up, there was a lot of immigration from Mexico and from Central America. And so when we ate out, those were — which we ate out of the house quite a bit. Those are sort of the foods that we were surrounded with. 

A lot of fast food. My mom worked and was in charge of feeding us. And so I remember eating a lot of McDonald’s, and Taco Bell, and pizza on Fridays and Chinese food on Sunday. I think those are kind of my strongest memories, are eating out and a lot of fast food. 

My mom, she was a cook, or she liked to cook. She kind of modeled herself, I think, around a lot of recipes by Martha Stewart and Ina Garten, so very typical white people food was what we ate at home. I remember eating lots of spaghetti and a lot of roast meats, a lot of turkey and chicken. 

I was always a little bit picky. Mexican food was around, and at school actually a lot of kids in my class I remember in elementary school were — came from Mexico. Those are the foods that they brought to school, and I remember eating a lot of hot Cheetos and drinking horchata — Do you know what Lucas is? 

Alicia: No.

Kevin: It's kind of a really spicy tajín, so it's — I just remember people bringing these bags that were just spicy chili and dried lemon and salt. I mean, they're like pillars of Mexican cuisine, right? And you just lick your finger and dip it in and suck on this hot chili.

At home it was very, very white people food, but sort of once I left the home there was this curiosity. And I was always really attracted to Mexican flavors. My grandfather was also a really good cook, and he was the person that that sort of taught me a love for food. He was from California, but all of his family was from Texas. So, that was a lot of sort of very southern hospitality type foods. I remember a lot of fried chicken, and dumplings, and pies and cookies, and things like that. So, a bunch of different things. 

Yeah, like I said, a lot of white people food at home, but I was always really curious about what everyone else in town was eating.

Alicia: Right. 

So, how did you end up in Buenos Aires, first? And then also, how did you start writing about food? Which came first for you?

Kevin: I came here to study abroad, initially, my junior year of college. And I studied a major that was an interdisciplinary between political science and economics, but there was a really big language emphasis. And so I chose Spanish. And you had to study abroad basically to graduate on time. Buenos Aires was just chosen on a whim, because the program offered either Barcelona or Buenos Aires and everyone was going to Barcelona, so that made Buenos Aires really attractive by default. And so I came here.

I didn't know anything about Argentina before I came. I think the semester before I came, I took a Latin American Studies class, but it was mostly about Central America. I don't really remember talking very much about the Southern Cone. And so I came here to study, and that was like a year-long program. I went home for my senior year of school. There was something that the city in Argentina — and I traveled around Argentina for like six weeks — there was just like this thing that was — but I still can't quite describe what it was, that was pulling me back.

Sometimes, I think if I would have studied abroad in, I don't know, Moscow or Tokyo, or any other place, maybe just sort of the time in my life, I would have developed a connection with any of those places. 

But after school, I went home and worked for a year, and then came back here. And my intention actually was I thought I was going to be a human rights lawyer. That was my plan. And at the University of Buenos Aires, there's a really great human rights program that I was going to sort of do like pre-law. And then study to get into law school, and there's just a lot of red tape around that. And so, I had to get a job. 

And I started working for a bilingual culture website. And that's when I started kind of seeing the food scene. The way that I was making friends at this time was I was just — it was the very first time I'd ever lived alone — completely by myself. And so, the way I was making friends was I would just cook and invite people over to eat. And my house kind of became the space where all of our friends with — all my friends come over to socialize. And in the wintertime, I remember making lots of soups. In the summertime, we would barbecue a lot. I had a barbecue built into my balcony. 

And that turned into MASA, which was a closed-door restaurant that I ran, which is the Cuban commodores — are they called commodores — where they're these restaurants that are run out of private homes. So, cooking started first. 

And in one of those very first meals, this woman came by herself. And it was a meal that was where you’re always going to share a table. She was alone. It was mostly couples that would come. And she just kept on popping her head into the kitchen, and asking me questions about where I was from and what I was making. And we hit it off, and she had this — at the time this personal blog that she was trying to turn into a website about Buenos Aires. And so she invited me to contribute recipes. And that turned into writing about restaurants. 

I mean, it started very much as a hobby. As I kind of got more into cooking and being actually like in restaurants, in services with this pop-up, became more curious about going back to my roots with what I studied, which was very social justice, and political science, and economics, and trying to insert that into writing. So, maybe that's been six years. I kind of hit the ground running and was pitching a lot. It's really hard to be a freelancer and it's really hard to be a freelancer from a foreign country if you don't have a lot of bylines. I've written locally a lot with sort of being able to place a store every once in a while that went a little bit deeper than the narrative that's typically told here.

Alicia: Right.

And, well, I mean, you're talking about what your — what you studied, and then you're doing a kind of a supper club in your house. How did you decide to major in that and study that?

Kevin: At school, I actually entered as a film major. And, I think my sophomore year, I had to take a media theory class. And that just totally changed, I think, the course of my life, that class, because it was really — I always looked at media and film as a purely recreational thing. And this was the first class, the first experience where I was reading theory, and philosophy, and kind of seeing media as a reflection of society, and vice versa. And that just is fascinating to me, to kind of see the intersectionality of things and to kind of begin to not take things at face value. 

That was very natural for me, because very quickly in studying film, I realized I wasn't super interested in production. I was really interested in film history and film theory. So, kind of shifting to analyzing anthropology, and economics, and politics, that was a very, very natural shift. And media was always something that was really fascinating by it, especially because I've always been a writer. And I've always been a reader, and watched film, and listened to music. Yeah, that was pretty organic.

Alicia: Right.

Did you learn how to cook by cooking, or—?

Kevin: So, I was always really curious about all these foods that I was surrounded by. But I was a little bit picky, very picky. 

That in-between year between graduating from school and moving here, my grandfather was sort of reaching the end of his life. He was getting sicker. And so, I decided that I didn't know for how long I was going to be here. But I knew that if I was here for more than a year, it was likely the — that he had passed away. 

And so, I moved in with my grandmother and my grandfather, and my grandmother — this was his third wife, she was a bit younger, so she still worked. She wasn't retired yet. And so, she was out of the home. And she commuted into the Bay Area and would stay there.

I would work during the day. I had like three jobs at that time. And when I didn't have a night shift, I would come home from my job — my day job. And my grandfather, his very first job was in a military kitchen during World War II. His introduction into cooking, besides his kind of formation in the southern cooking of his family, was making food for two, three, four hundred really hungry soldiers. And so the way that he cooked was always very generous in size, and whether he was eating alone, he was always making — there was like seven things on the table. 

I was still kind of just beginning to become really curious about food, and kind of breaking down my picky barriers and just eating whatever was in front of me. And he didn't have any patience for that. It was like, ‘The food that I made is what's on the table, and you better eat it.’ 

And I would come home from work, and he would — he always decided what he wanted to eat the day of. And so I would get home, and there'd be a recipe on the table and a very, very specific grocery list. I remember one of the meals that we cooked a lot that was like fried pork chops with fried apples. And so, he was very specific about what kind of graham crackers had to be purchased to bread the pork chops. And he knew the name of the butcher, and I’d have to ask John to cut this specific — an inch exactly on the pork chops. And if we were getting apples it had to be a Granny Smith and it had to be this color and I needed to smell — he was very, very specific.

That was how I learned to cook, was we would sit in his kitchen. And he'd have a beer, and I'd make a Rob Roy. And he would instruct from the dining room table, how to cook and chop and the proper way to heat the pan and when to know when to throw it in, when to know to take it out, when to know when to flip it. So, that was my cooking school.

And that was also, I think, the moment where I really began to value the way people come together inside of a kitchen when a meal is being made. And the intimacy that's shared around a dining room table, and kind of that immediate gratification of cooking something and people enjoying it. Like I said, when I came to Buenos Aires, and that's how I made friends. I'd really kind of become addicted to that setting that happened every single day.

Alicia: I'm really fascinated by Argentina, and I always have been. And the reason I was super excited to go to Buenos Aires was just to see what it was like, because I just read so many novels and stories by writers from there. 

And then living in Puerto Rico, it's funny because it's — people will be like, ‘Oh, that's an Argentinian’ and they'll — by the way they speak Spanish, of course — but also by just the vibe, and just this nervousness about — it might be offensive to assume someone is Argentinian. Because of the connotations of what it is to be an Argentinian. 

In your piece that you wrote about the Netflix Street Food episode about the city, you took it to task for this colonial perspective. But I also think that colonial perspective, it also kind of influences how the rest of Latin America views Argentina in terms of the — and I think it was evident in — there was the person who is a talking head who was like, ‘This is the Paris of Latin America, we're more European than we are Latin American, etc.’ It's this weird mix, I think, of perspectives on Argentina. 

You live there. And so, how have you come to understand the city in the way that you do, which is so far removed from that ‘We're European. We're not Latin American’ refrain. And how is your understanding of the city changed over the time you've lived there?

Kevin: So, I've been here for 10 years.

I've been thinking about that term ‘Paris of South America’ a lot lately. Partly because of that article that I wrote. And I remember when I was deciding to study abroad here in the brochures, that was definitely sort of what was sold to us. 

And I remember coming here for the program and the program directors were like, ‘Only stay in this neighborhood. Don't go into this neighborhood because it's dangerous, or because there's nothing there worthwhile to see.’ And I was studying, and I was living in a homestay that was in Belgrano, which is on the far northwest side of the city, very upper-class and very much old money, very white looking. 

And maybe two or three days out of the week, I would volunteer on the polar opposite of the city, in the southeastern neighborhood called La Boca. And the way that Buenos Aires is set up, is that as you go from north to south, pretty much in all cases goes from these very wealthy upper class, into sort of this kind of white collar upper middle class, into this very, very middle class neighborhoods, until you reach these very blue collar, kind of marginalized spaces. If you're on the bus, and you're going from one end to the city to the other, it's really, really obvious to see that distribution of economic capital, and social and cultural capital. 

And so, from the very beginning of my time here, I never really bought into that idea of ‘this is a European space. This is the Paris of South America.’

And I remember a really formative moment in understanding the why, why that exists, why that idea is sold, is at the end of that study abroad we went to the Iguazu Falls for a long weekend. On the last day, they took us to this reserve, like this Native community. And they were showing us around where they lived. It felt like such a zoo exhibit. It felt this really ingenuine show. And I felt super uncomfortable, through this whole tour. 

And at the very end of the tour, we were greeted by all of the children of that community who were in what I assume is festive dress, and they sang and they danced. And at the end the guide is like, ‘Ok, guys, you can take pictures.’ I've always really been into photography. I really like portraiture. I was feeling a little bit uncomfortable. Should I take a picture? Should I not? But all these other people from my group just got up, and they started taking pictures in front of the kids with peace signs, or throwing their arms around the kids. Again, an exhibit of some sort. 

And that was this big moment for me to really see that negation of what it means to be Brown or what that means — what it means to be Latin, and it was so — that example is so in your face, because Buenos Aires and Argentina, the country, is — we're told there's no native people here when, of course, there were native communities here and there are various kind of military

strikes to kill off these people. There were Black slaves that were tossed into the War of the Triple Alliance on to the front lines, and were mostly killed off. 

And all of that story is totally erased. And well, what we are told is kind of the story of — we're talking — we talk a lot about kind of colonized narratives, and taking over and co-opting narratives. 

And I think the really unique thing about Argentina is not only is it a colonized narrative, but it's the narrative of the colonizer. Because if you really start to study the history of Argentina, that phrase, the ‘Paris of South America,’ what it's rooted in is the pillage of land in Argentina, Argentina's economy has always been centered around agro-exportation. When that land was taken from the Native people who lived here, and monetized, and created at the time, at the turn of the 20th century, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, that was all on the backs of these native people who were killed. 

And so all of that wealth was used to build Buenos Aires. And it was a total mark of colonization because it was this aspiration of being European. And so, there's a lot of buildings in that historic part of the city that don't just mimic French architecture. Actually, there are buildings, full-on blueprints, that were stolen from buildings in Paris. I mean, it was very consciously built to create this culture and the society that in every single way demonstrated this separation of Europeanness, and whiteness, and sophistication, and all of these things that are part of the white supremacist fantasy to dominate what it means to be Latinx. 

Once I started really understanding the nuance of that and the history behind that, and when I came back to — as I've lived through the city, I've — on a personal level, as a resident of the city — very consciously sought out other spaces, and other communities, and tried to get to know the real diversity of this city. 

And part of that is also working in kitchens in an industry that globally is very precarious. And the people who are working behind closed doors in these kitchens are generally not white. A lot of them are like Brown-bodied people from — with ancestry from other parts of Latin America. I was always surrounded by the people who are actually in the street, on the ground, who are — who make up Argentina. So, I feel like I've been a part of those communities in a way. This idea of whiteness and European, it’s just — it doesn't compute to me, ’cause it's not the city I live in and the people I surround myself with.

Alicia: And so, I mean, as you're explaining, you have this very different vision of your city than you — is sold to outsiders. And that sort of seems to be what you're bringing to Matambre. And so, what is your methodology for producing it, and also what is it that you hope to achieve?

Kevin: When I started taking writing more seriously, and moving — trying to move away from restaurant review, and trying to move more into reported stories. I think I spent the better half of 2016 and 2017, really, really chasing stories, and trying to add nuance, and humanity, and diversity to the story. 

And as I was pitching, I had some really great experiences with a handful of editors, mostly from Munchies, Remezcla kind of people at the time that were on very kind of alternative tips in terms of their food and writing coverage. 

But the bulk of the stories that I was pitching, I just — I wasn't getting any responses, at all. And there was one story in particular, where I went back to Misiones, back to Iguazu Falls. And I spent about two weeks traveling around the entire region, because there was, at the time, this — a lot of, kind of conversations in the Buenos Aires food world about what is Argentine cuisine — how, what is this — how to reconcile between immigrant culture and what was already here. And so, there was a lot of this kind of talk about rescuing native plants and incorporating food that came from other Latin communities and indigenous communities. 

So, I went to Misiones, because that is the region that is the most biodiverse and it's a region where there still are Guarani and Indigenous communities. And I was pitching this story, and it was about biodiversity, it was about sustainability, it was about classism, it was about this wealth gap disparity about these mostly European farmers who had just totally taken the land away from the people who lived there before and yerba mate, which is what's mostly grown there. It only grows in the Misiones. All the biodiversity has been taken over by yerba mate plantations.

And it was just this really rich, beautiful story. And I pitched and pitched and no one responded. I finally got this response from this editor saying, ‘This a really interesting story, but it doesn't fit into the Argentine narrative. I don't think that our readership would get it.’ And that was this moment — I was like, ‘Ok, I'm not getting responses, not because the stories are bad, but because there's this idea of a simple story and what our narrative is allowed to be, what is allowed to be considered Argentine, what isn't.’

And so I kind of retreated and was writing a lot locally. When the pandemic happened, it was — all these ideas were still floating around in my head, obviously. And Matambre, for me, is kind of — I was never — I wasn't being given the space to tell these stories and to raise up these voices. And so, Matambre for me is that. If editors aren't going to give me the space, I'm just going to take it up myself. 

That's the idea behind Matambre, is take up space. It’s become this project that I think that what I'm doing, what it's evolving into is asking questions around power structures, and how power structures are built around privilege, and talking about them as a means of deconstructing and rebuilding. 

Part of that is being really self reflective and recognizing one, the power and the privilege that we as writers have, because we have — at the end of the day, our articles are our written word, and so it's the way we decide to frame and edit, and the parts of the story we decide to tell and the parts of the stories we don't, and sort of recognizing the mechanisms of that. And also understanding who I am, which is a white, cis-gendered male from the United States who lives a very upper class quality of life in a country where that's not the reality for most people. 

And so, I want to have these conversations but a lot of times — obviously, sustainability, kind of more environmental questions are things that I can relate to in real ways. But as I'm having conversations about labor rights, about gender equity, about trans culturalism, about the trans community — all these things that don't touch me personally, that I can empathize with them, I can understand them theoretically, but I can never live those experiences. 

As I'm seeking people out, I'm — I ask myself two questions. One, by telling this story, am I having a positive impact? Or am I folding into these structures of power that I want to break down? And in order to do that, I'm asking myself, ‘When I contact this person, am I being invited into the — into their space, or am I demanding to take it up? Am I demanding them to tell me something that-’ in some cases, it's a lot of emotional labor.

I'm very conscientious, and have been really surprised by where a lot of the interviews go because — when I talked to Gloria del Fogón, and it was a really great example of this. I went to talk to her about some art project that she was working on. And we sat down and she started talking to me about what it was like to be in — a Brown immigrant woman trying to exist in this society, in the restaurant world. 

And that was her choice. I was just there. I was just listening. And I was trying to act more as a microphone than anything else. And that’s also why doing interviews was really important to me, that the format take on an interview format, so that I'm not editing these people's realities. 

It's about giving a voice and trying to decenter myself as a writer, and just kind of act as this platform for people. Every time I sit down for an interview, the conversation goes to a place that I did not expect it to go at all, which has been just so beautiful.

Alicia: And it shows, in the final product, too, that it's very organic and very reciprocal in terms of how the conversations evolve while you're doing that.

I didn't give you this question, but since you were talking about kind of how living in Buenos Aires, you're still beholden if you want to write for bigger English language outlets, to how Argentina is perceived from the outside. I guess because I wrote about awards, and in particular the James Beard awards, which are for writing that's broadly available to a U.S. audience, I guess is how they define it. 

And both of us, I guess, are self publishing or independent media creators. So, this idea of how do you define success for yourself, and how do define, I don't know, your place in the world when you're not kind of going after the same accolades or same bylines as people — as we were kind of brought up to understand as being markers of significance for ourselves. Have you thought about this? How are you defining what you want, if you're not going to necessarily be going after all of these ready — made markers?

Kevin: I've definitely shifted my goals in terms of what spaces I want to be printed in. And so, I still want to write for U.S. or foreign publications, because I think it is important that those audiences start allowing these spaces. 

Not just Argentina, it's the entire world. Whatever is considered other. I don't think that Argentina and the Argentina narrative is sold as unique in that respect. So, I am going to continue fighting for that, but I think the — that has to happen in other spaces.

And there's a lot of really great people that I hope to be writing for at some point. I'm reading Whetstone, and Vittles, and I just finished a piece for Life and Thyme that's coming out on Thursday. And really kind of seeking out those spaces. 

Because the other part of this is as I'm speaking with a lot of people, I'm kind of realizing that'll — not realizing things that are new, but really confirming to me this idea that these changes — nothing's going to trickle down from the top. The top is always going to be motivated by capitalism, and economy, and algorithms, and all of those things. It's just following the current, and this kind of different type of storytelling is really going to come from the base, and maybe then the top will understand.

But to answer your question more specifically, in terms of what — what would be successful for me, I'm already starting to see this little community begin to form from Matambre. There's cooks that have appeared in the magazine that are — that didn't know one another, that are starting to connect with one another because Americano and Shade — that are, they're both trying to work towards composting. And they're both doing that same thing. So, they linked up with one another, and they're helping each other and I'm seeing a lot of little things like that. 

And then with Gloria, she was working on this project where her and her partner, Damien, were going out onto the streets, and finding people who are living in the streets. And there's a lot of soup kitchens and things like that here. But those are soups and very impersonal foods, and there's not a lot of contact between who's cooking your food and who's eating it. And you don't get to sit down anywhere, they just hand you a tuper and you kind of go off and eat wherever. And so they started going out and speaking with people who are living in the street and forming relationships, getting to know their names, what their circumstances were, and asking, ‘If you could choose a meal, what would you want to be — what would you want to eat?’

So, they started doing this project where they were cooking food that they were told, like, ‘This is what I want. I want a milanesa sandwich. I want a pastel de papa,’ or whatever it is. And so I kind of piggybacked on that idea, and joined them with another baker. 

And part of the money that I make every month through Matambre, 10% of that goes to this project that we're building together, where — we linked up with this organization called AMMAR. And that is a syndicate that works with sex workers, particularly from the trans community and particularly from a trans immigrant community, a lot of women from Peru. And they have different centers located all over the city. And we're working with one in Constitución, which is a really stigmatized area of the city, really kind of a forgotten area of the city. 

When we form this relationship with them — like I said, we were very — the way I do with my interviews, we're very cognizant of being like, ‘We're not going to force anything here. We're here. We want to cook for you, we're-’ and we are available to be more involved than that in whatever way they want to receive us. 

And so together with the money that I donated, which was, not that much, we were able to collect a ton of other donations. And we cooked for 150 people on Thursday, last Thursday. And with our second event, we've already been able to generate enough talk in our immediate communities, where all of the meat for the next event is covered by a butcher shop. They're going to donate everything. This organic vegetable producer is providing all of our vegetables for us. We're doing these raffles where different people that I've been talking to donated stuff to the — to raise money. 

And so that, to me, trying to figure out how journalism and storytelling and the sort of, kind of, social justice storytelling can actually translate into something real. And not that I think journalism is not real, but something that's — you can grab, that you can hold on to. 

And so, that to me, that is my goal in trying to look at this from a really interdisciplinary, really holistic way. And just with one event, we're already seeing this — all these connections are being formed, which has been really, really cool.

Alicia: That's amazing. That's awesome. Are you gonna write about it — not to make it all a big, circular thing. But like, are you gonna write about that?

Kevin: So, one of the women that came, we — this bar gave us their kitchen for the afternoon. And it was our first event, so we were running behind. None of us are used to cooking in that kind of a volume. And so the coordinator, Monica, she is the one that we've been speaking directly with. And she came to get the food. 

And this woman, Mia, who was at the very first meeting with us when we left — ’cause we were kind of like ‘Ok, what kind of food would you like to eat?’ And they were a little shy. They didn't really want to tell ud. And then I was like, ‘Well, you guys are all from Peru. Would you like some sort of Peruvian food?’ And then the conversation just went crazy after that. 

And this woman, Mia, just started telling us all about all these foods that she knew how to cook because she's from the Amazon part of Peru, and her parents were food vendors. And so she knows how to make cecina, and all these different soups, and braised meats, and things like that. And so when we left that meeting, I was like, ‘She's a cook. She knows what she's doing. This girl, she's got — she's on top of her stuff.’

And she just showed up to come pick up the food, and we were running behind and she was like, ‘Ok, let me help. I want to learn. I wanna know what you're doing.’ And so, we developed this exchange. And I told her that I would really like to pay her to give me some sort of class, or do some sort of food exchange, or I can teach her how to make Mexican food and she can teach me how to make her food. And I would like to eventually do a story with her. 

But, like I said before, it's — I want to make sure that it's genuine, and I want to make sure that it's sincere, and that she feels comfortable and safe to share that story with me, and share that part of herself with someone who is completely different from her in every single aspect. 

But yeah, I mean, I'm totally fanboying over the idea of being able to write a story ‘bout that.

Alicia: That's so cool. So, for you, is cooking a political act?

Kevin: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, has anyone ever said no in these interviews?

I'm gonna keep talking. Yeah, I mean, everything about cooking, but food in general is a political act to me. I mean, every single part of it. Gloria said something really that stuck with me, which was that food has the power to dignify or humiliate. And she was sort of referencing the people who were eating, the diner, but I think that goes to everyone. That the person in the field that's picking vegetables, the person in the kitchen that's preparing it, the person who's eating it, food is everything. It represents everything: politics, economics, social issues. I don't think that there's any way to separate food and cooking from politics at all.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much for coming on.

Kevin: Thank you for having me.

I want to say, you have been so generous and so supportive of this project, and I don't think the — especially the Netflix piece when you shared it, was shared by a lot of people, but it really kind of took off. And I'm really appreciative of your support, your generosity, even though we have never met each other in real life. I mean, you've just been so, so cool, and it's really sort of — it's been very helpful, and I appreciate it a lot.

Alicia: Aww, thank you. 

I think it's funny because — well, of course I love your work. So, obviously, I've been sharing it, etc., etc., and it's been so useful and interesting to me to read about all these stories that are — things that are happening in Buenos Aires that you're not hearing about. So, it's been absolutely enriching and wonderful. 

But also, I think it's funny. This is the first time I'm hearing your voice, and I definitely expected you to be gruffer, I think. And obviously people hear my voice if they care to hear my voice, ’cause I'm — I host this every week. But I also feel people might be surprised that I'm not, I don't know, mean, or more wacky, or something. I don’t know.

Kevin: I don't want to bite people's heads off, but it's — have you ever seen the movie Network?

Alicia: I saw the play, with Bryan Cranston. 

Kevin: So, that is just how I've felt for like the last two years of — when he's just screaming out the window like, ‘I'm mad as hell. I'm not gonna take it anymore.’ That's what I feel like when I read all this b******t. And I can't take it anymore, Alicia. I can’t.

Alicia: Well, thank you again. And I'm so glad that we're — yeah, in touch, doing our thing.

Kevin: I hope to see you when all of this is over.

Alicia: Yeah, me too. 

Kevin: We can travel. 

Alicia: [Laughs.] Yeah.

Kevin: All right.

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Listen now | He's the Raaka Chocolate brand manager and a nature photographer.

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The first time I interviewed Eric, I knew he was different from other chefs. He really says whatever is on his mind, which comes from deep experience: Rivera used to work in the insurance business, then the recession hit and he turned his interest in food into something bigger. He went to culinary school. He spent three years as the director of culinary research operations at the Alinea Group in Chicago. But when it comes to his Seattle restaurant, Addo—which started in his apartment—he doesn’t really follow tradition. That’s been useful in the pandemic, a time during which he’s pivoted to selling pantry goods and frying customers’ potatoes, acting as what he calls a “concierge service.” This is why he’s outspoken about how the most famous chefs in the U.S. have acted irresponsibly during this crisis. We talked about his upbringing, the pandemic, and how chefs with investors don’t know how to do anything themselves.

Alicia: Hi, Eric. Thanks so much for coming on.

Eric: Awesome. 

Well, thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.

Alicia: How are things in Seattle right now?

Eric: I would say kind of all over the place. They just shut down restaurants again, for indoor dining. Doesn't necessarily affect us too much, ’cause we’re — we weren't doing that anyway. [Laughs.]

But everybody's kind of in a little panic mode. Everybody's kind of in like a little panic mode here, people that were doing it. Numbers are rising, and things are going back to beyond levels we were before March when they shut everything down. So, it's a lot more serious now.

Alicia: Right.

And, I mean, we're gonna get into this, but also, can you tell me what inspired — how did you decide never to open dining during the pandemic?

Eric: It was pretty simple: It's a virus that feeds off of people moving together and hanging out on the most basic level. And it doesn't matter who you are, or what performative safety things you want to do, the $25 thermometer, UV lights, or any of that other stuff is just pretty much [performative] at that point. 

So, this is something pretty serious, and I didn't want to have to open and close and open and close and open and close over and over again, ’cause I can't afford that. [Laughs.] So, I just basically said, ‘We're gonna have to be extreme. If this virus is as extreme as it is, then it's gonna take me being extreme as well.’

Alicia: Right. And so, to get back to the normal course of the interview — can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Eric: Yeah, I mean, I grew up in Washington State. My dad was military. They're both from Puerto Rico, both my parents, and they moved over here ’cause he got stationed. And then I was born here in Fort Lewis, and then grew up in Olympia, which is about 45 minutes south of there. And it's like, very secluded, suburban-style life. There was no Puerto Rican anything other than my parents, so it was very different. 

And just pretty much over here for a while and then started moving around a little bit later in life again, ’cause my dad was military.

Alicia: And were you eating Puerto Rican food, mostly at home? How was your — outside of the house, it was totally different?

Eric: Yeah, that was the only option. It was just at my parents’ house. My grandparents had moved from Puerto Rico to kind of help raise us until we were about, until I was about seven. So, it was always Puerto Rican food from them. And then everything else on the outside was new discovery land for all of us. 

So it was a matter of early on taking Puerto Rican food to lunch, to school, getting laughed at, getting made fun of, and then assimilating towards white culture, and taking Lunchables and stuff like that. And it was very, very different.

Alicia: And I know you've kind of given this story before, but how did you end up having your restaurant and being a chef?

Eric: Yeah. 

I'd pursued other things before. So I was in mortgage insurance, financial services when I was younger. And then that whole thing blew up, and I got forced out with the recession. And so then I said, ‘Hey, I'm gonna pursue something. Even if worst comes to worse, at least I can make myself some food.’ [Laughs.] So I started tinkering around in kitchens and kind of doing that whole thing, was doing a food blog, and finally hit a point where I'm like, ‘This doesn't work for me. I need it to actually be something real.’

So, I proceeded as being a professional cook. Did that for a while, worked in some cool places. And then finally got to the point where I was like, ‘I'm tired of everybody telling me how this industry should be. I'm going to do it for myself now.’ 

So I started off in my apartment as a — two seats at a time, tasting menus, literally in my apartment. And people didn't know anything other than that. They’d just come over, and they were dressed all fancy. And they're like, ‘Oh, s**t, this is just your apartment?’ I'm like, ‘Yeah.’ [Laughs.] So, it kind of started growing from there. 

I did pop-ups around the city. Any little opportunity to just get myself out there. I was working 80 to 100 hours a week, just trying to hustle. Which I still do now anyway, but — which is different. And I approached everything very differently. I couldn't get a loan. I couldn't get any investors. I couldn't get anything. So, for me, it was trying to figure out how to make it happen for myself.

Alicia: How did you do that? Were you being an independent restaurant in the truest sense of — it's you that are kind of, you have the stake in the whole thing. So, how has that made your restaurant different from other restaurants, even before the pandemic?

Eric: Yeah.

I felt there was all these gatekeepers and established brands of restaurants, and those are all the people that are getting all the attention. And it was easy for them to get the attention, whether they have fancy PR or they're just known people that have been here for a long time. I realized I didn't have that time to kind of fuss, and I didn't have the money to put it up front. So, I had to figure out a different way. 

So, it was basically creating a brand for myself and going around everybody, redirecting how things happen, how the communication goes out, how people see things. And a lot of that was more using modern technology to kind of help me do that, and pretty much just forcing that on the system. And it worked. Started having people going like, ‘Who the hell is this guy? Where did he come from?’

And I think people, as they started to try the food, they were like, ‘Ok, cool. It's not perfect, it's not amazing or whatever. But it's different for sure.’ So, there's a lot of people that have hung out with me along the way and been really supportive. So, it's been really cool. 

But it hasn't been easy. It hasn’t been fun a lot of times. But it's just been real. And it's been real, not having a lot of things that other people are afforded. And I'm cool with that.

Alicia: I just watched your kind of segment on Eater's Guide to the World. Because I've never been to your restaurant, and because I think I've mostly kind of seen what you've been doing post-pandemic happening, it was really interesting to get that glimpse at what it actually was before all of this. 

And so, did you view your role as a chef and a restaurant owner differently before the pandemic as you do now? How has the idea of what a chef is evolved in your brain, if at all?

Eric: Yeah, it was very different, because the point of view was, ‘Get people here. And then once they're here, show them what you can do, and then interact with them all over.’ So, for me, that doesn't exist anymore. And having a tasting menu and having a chef's counter, all that s**t sounds fancy ’cause it was, but there's a lot of other stuff we were doing at the time that was lower spectrum, lower price point stuff that was just, ‘Get people through the door.’

But now it's very different, because you're almost flying blind every day. There's things that people want that I figured out; it wouldn't have existed before the pandemic. So, it's made me more kind of jump into their house, figure out what's going on with them, kind of understand and talk to them and go like, ‘What do you want?’ 

And basically, what I've positioned myself as is being your personal chef. And that's kind of the relationship I have now, rather than imposing what we do here. It's the other way around. Now it's going like, ‘What do you need?’ Which is cool.

Alicia: I noticed on your Instagram one day, I think you even just fried someone's potatoes for them. So, how has your relationship to customers changed in this time? Is it more of an intimate, actual relationship? 

Eric: Yeah, it definitely is. There's more communication than there was before. Because people wouldn’t tell me things when they were here. Now, it's — they're on Instagram, or they text me, or they email me. And they're like, ‘Hey, do you have this? I'm out of that. I can't find this type of flour. I can't find-.’ And I'm like, ‘Oh, s**t. Yeah, I got that. That's easy. I don't know why you’re going — just email me.’

So essentially, I'm sometimes a concierge service. [Laughs.] And I'm cool with that. I'm trying to do as much as I can within running a business, within keeping the staff employed. It's a lot more variables than it was before. 

I've had other people go catch like crab or fish or whatever. And they're like, ‘Hey, do you want one? If I give you one, can you do this to it?’ And I'm like, ‘Yes, it's easy.’ 

It's not a big deal to me. That's what I’ve always wanted it to be. So, it's not like it’s stopping me from doing something else that's not as important or more important. I'm like, ‘F**k yeah, bring it. I’ll fry your potatoes. I have a fryer. It just sits there.’ It's kind of a cool little service. 

But it's like, the guy comes in, gives me a potato, I make fries for him. He goes home and makes poutine out of it. I mean, ok, sure. That’s great. It's easy. Probably would have taken him like an hour, and it took me like 10 minutes. 

So, it's cool. And as long as you're cool about it, the guests, and they're appreciative. That's all I care about.

Alicia: Yeah, no, it's so interesting. And it's so against what you're supposed to, or what we've been trained to believe that the chef is — so it's really fascinating to watch this from afar and see, yeah, a chef who would usually be doing a chef's table counter service be just frying potatoes. It's really wild, and it's really awesome to see that. 

And have you found — because you mentioned before not being able to afford the big PR firm or anything like that, but also not being in New York, not being in what's considered sort of a major culinary center in the U.S., how do you think that has affected your restaurant? How do you see those things and the way food media prioritizes those things, whether it's a big PR firm or whether it's being in New York or Chicago. Has that affected you, and how do you see it?

Eric: It's been really hard to get to kind of this point, of people actually realizing kind of what we're doing. Eater’s been dope, Thrillist, Infatuation — everybody's been amazing. Seattle’s massively hyping it. Everybody’s been really, really cool. It's really hard to transition what I'm doing to guests, because they're like, ‘I don't know what he did.’ Or, ‘Hey, I found out what he did over there. And then he changed it.’

And I was talking to somebody the other day. Over this pandemic, we've done over 600 variables of offerings that we have — experiences — since March. I had somebody the other day go, ‘Hey, you remember that one hot sauce you made back in July? I ran out. It’s our favorite hot sauce ever. Can you make it again?’ I'm like, ‘Well, no.’ And they're like, ‘Well, why not?’ And I'm like, ‘That was like a two-month process, and it was specifically with one farmer’s tomatoes. And that's it. I don't have anything else.’ I wish I would have made like 1000 bottles of it, but that’s just not how — it's not what we do.

So, it's a very different thing. Because then places in New York are the hubs, are looking for important people, always. And there's always that upper tier that I'm always talking s**t to. The Jean-Georges, Danny Meyers, and whatever, the people that make it easy for New York Times or whoever to talk to you, because they just know, ‘I'm gonna get f*****g free food from it.’ That's really easy. 

But then I'm over here in Seattle, it's a small market. I wouldn’t say I necessarily make an impact, but just show people like, ‘Look, there's other options in the middle of a pandemic that doesn't involve eliminating 800 employees and then asking the government for a bunch of money.’ That’s just crazy to me. So, it's me trying to show people. 

And I've been fortunate with enough talking s**t online that real writers and people who are in the press have actually reached out to me. They're like, ‘Ok, I'm going to filter this a little bit, but tell me what you have to say.’ And that's been pretty cool. For me, it's come from anger of three-ish years of — we've been doing this since day one. And it's nothing new for us. It's just showing people that there's a different way to do a restaurant. It's all the same thing. 

I don't feel bad for Cheesecake Factory down the street having to close for indoor dining. F**k them. I don't feel bad for Danny Meyer or whoever these f*****g guys are that have all the access and stuff. 

And I just saw Jean-Georges yesterday, looked at his brand-new outdoor-indoor dining thing. Fancy as f**k, man. It's really expensive to do that, and then still fueling, just bringing people in. And I'm like, ‘How and why is that ok?’ But that's just how it is. That guy's gonna end up probably on Forbes tomorrow about his indoor dining thing. And that's easy. And you kind of have to fight against that, because that's where the beacon shoots. That's the spotlight towards it. 

I was talking to Devita Davison. She was saying the crazy part about a lot of restaurants in Detroit is that none of them, almost none of them, had to really pivot that were owned by Black people, or Indigenous people, or anything else. Because she was like, they weren't trying to serve expensive food. They weren't trying to do this highfalutin s**t. So on their side, they were like, ‘No, we're fine. Most of the stuff is good in a takeout box. We're not complaining about it.’

And so when when I look at stuff like that, and then I see the other side where it's all these people going to the president and talking to him and being like, ‘We need millions and billions of dollars,’ I’m like, ‘You guys are full of s**t.’ That's not what everybody needs. It's not a catch-all thing. It's not a one-size-fits-all. It's like we need help, but we don't need the help that Éric Ripert needs. That's crazy. 

Alicia: And, I mean, it is fascinating to see, because I did a panel for FoodLab Detroit, which is run by Devita Davison. And I was on the panel with a couple of restaurateurs from that area. Women, I was gonna say, of course. And there was a woman who is Indigenous and had a restaurant in Detroit that she already was sourcing from very local farms, and selling, putting that in her food, but then now she is selling right to people. And that is such an easy shift to make if you don't have your whole ego tied up in a type of plate or something. 

And that seems to be the big difference. It's because I've seen — my favorite chefs in New York are people like Brooks Headley or Amanda Cohen, who have just done their best, and probably been pissing people off in the — for not being run in the way that they believe that restaurants should be open, despite all the science that we know. And so, it's really fascinating to watch the most famous and lauded chefs have been the ones who cannot function during this time. 

And I know, obviously, that you've been extremely outspoken about this and how stupid it is, and how you don't necessarily need a response from the government. But would you like to see a response, maybe when we have a new people in the White House?

Eric: But I don't want it to look like the way they want it to look like. I don't need it to be that way. 

I mean, the biggest part was taking care of employees. It's something that all these restaurants that got that far, they got there with unpaid stashes and paying people like s**t just so they can have their big caviar menus and all this other stuff. And that's not ok. So, if we're going to help restaurants first, I'd rather have them help out the restaurant employees that have been unsteady the whole time. They're being laid off. 

Meanwhile, you've got the David Changs still opening up restaurants all over the place and going on Goldbelly and shipping out and doing stuff. They have options. But the problem is that everybody that's being talked to is those guys, is those people, because they're seen as the beacon or some lobbyists from the National Restaurant Association. And they're just fueling that s**t. The mouthpiece for it, to me, isn't them. 

It's the restaurant employees, all those people that may never have a job again. And having things start up job retraining programs, because there's — a lot of people aren't gonna be able to work for, probably ever again, in certain places. So, giving them a shot, giving them a shot to pay their rent, or canceling it, or doing all those things that actually help the people. Not just the oligarch-style, big name, restaurateur. 

A lot of the reasons why these guys, it sounds like they're always asking for money is because that's how it is. They don't own their restaurants. They're just there by name. And the way that they get funding is all these investors come on in. And, at most, they own 7 to 10% of that restaurant. And so that's all they're used to, is when something goes bad, like a f*****g toilet explodes or there's a leaking, they’re used to calling the investor and going like, ‘Hey, we need money. Hey, we need money. Hey, we need money.’ That's all these guys are used to doing. 

So, when something bad like a pandemic happens, the first thing they do, and you see them, the Thomas Keller — ‘I'm gonna sue my insurance company.’ Meanwhile, back corner, lays these people off. And I'm like, ‘Well, that s**t’s gonna take like three to seven years.’ I know that because I was formerly in insurance.

You look at what their priority is, and it's always not guided towards the employee. And that's a big problem. I hope that this next administration looks at it that way. Because this last administration was basically business first, and it's just not okay. It's not what people need. 

A true independent restaurant doesn't have 20 restaurants. A true independent restaurant doesn't have restaurants across the country, and has licensing deals, and isn't flashy cookbooks and other s**t. That's not it, man. 

There's entire areas of our state within the international district, with restaurants that have been around 50, 60, 70 years that still don't get any press normally. Or you have them be this lauded thing. They’ll never get a James Beard award, but they'll get an American Classics pat on the back. So, it’s like the point of view for everything is just — it's so weird. And it's not right. And it doesn't serve the people that need it the most.

Alicia: Right. 

And I mean, do you think things like the way that press attention is spread — given out, and the ways that awards are given out, do you think that these are able to be reformed in order to more accurately reflect who's cooking and what people really? 

Eric: Yeah, I think it just needs to be blown up from the ground up. I mean, honestly, it just needs to be. Because even the James Beard awards, the way that they were doing it was it had a bunch of people, they’d get together, they’d talk about it, and then there's chefs that are able to vote, or restaurateurs are able to vote. 

But it's all the same people. It's all the same people, always. And it's all the same people given, passing their little torch every time. And that's watered down white b******t, the majority of people that are winning it. And you start to look at things — And I’ve said this a million times. But when you have a Rick Bayless that’s won more awards for Mexican food than actual Mexicans. You have a Sean Brock, who's won more awards for Southern food than Black people. That's f*****g insane. It's f*****g insane. 

So, it's like why are the people who are voting for these things so scared? Are they scared of Black people? Do they not know how to talk to Latin American people? Do they not know how to go and understand what good Indigenous food is? Are they scared of Japanese people? Like, what's the deal? And a lot of it comes down to, it's not representative of the people who are — is judging it. So, they're not going out there. They're not doing the thing. 

So yeah, if you're going to do it, you’ve got to blow it up. And that's kind of my thing. Otherwise, it just won't be respected and it won't be — it won't affect the right people. 

Even with writers. I just saw the thing from L.A. Times, and how they had co-people, and it was all b******t. And you look at it and go, ‘Well, why would you do that? Why would you position both people as being co-critics and then say, ‘Well, this other person won a James Beard award,’ and that makes it all better when it doesn't? So it clearly, when you start to look at it as a systematic problem, you can clearly see that if someone's gonna say, ‘Well, this person won a James Beard award and that means they're better than this other person,’ that's all b******t. 

And it doesn't really work into the factor of understanding who that person is that they hired. For them, they are just like, ‘Oh, cool. Look at my shiny Rolls Royce, and cool.’ And you're like, ‘Yeah, but it has an oil leak. And it's not very good.’ [Laughs.]

Alicia: No, it's wild. And it's funny that you say, ‘Do these people not know how to talk to Black people, the people who are judging?’ Because I remember doing an interview and — it was at Time Inc. It was for branded content. I don't know. It was like a contract thing. 

And I went to this interview, and the dude asked me, he asked me about my ethnic background. Which is illegal. It's illegal to do that. But he asked me about my ethnic background, because he wanted someone to be able to talk to the people at — I don't know, like People en Español and some other magazine focused more toward people of color. And I was like, ‘Holy s**t.’ But this is how media is — and if it's not racist, it's classist all the time. This is how the sausage gets made, and exactly why it needs to be blown up.

But do you think even, pandemic aside, in the current situation, what reforms do you think need to happen in the restaurant world to kind of make it viable, make it a — not necessarily even the restaurant world, but just politically, economically. What has to happen for running a restaurant as an independent person?

Eric: Just the biggest part is who's who, and more transparency in that. So, when there's stories written about the bigger name chefs, and — essentially, I target them because they're like the 1% in the normal world, right? And I'm like, ‘Wait, why are we checking in with those people? Why are we talking to them?’ 

That’s like talking to — when someone writes a story about Amazon and they had a bad day in the stock market, and they're like, ‘Oh, Jeff Bezos lost like $500 million today.’ And I'm like, ‘What? Why does anybody write this? This is all b******t. He's worth over 100 billion dollars, I don't give a f**k. F**k him.’ I mean, I appreciate what he's done to a certain degree, but goddamn, to a certain point, how much more f*****g money do you need? 

And you're stopping the process. And it's always that trickle-down, Reagan-style economic mind-set. And it doesn't work. It's proven that it doesn't work over and over again. Meanwhile, you have tons of other people that are sick, dying. It's the same way in the restaurant world. 

So, when you have all these vaunted brands that everybody knows just by three little letters, like TFL and JGV and all that s**t, people know who they are. And they check into them, and they're the first ones that go, and it's not what that is. 

I want to see pop-up culture — I want to see not just ‘Hey, we have 10 chefs here, and we checked off the list. And we have made sure to have six of them be Black.’ That's b******t. You have got to do the due diligence, make sure everybody's cool. But then also be aware and get other people who know what the f*****g food is, not just white people. It has to create a different point of view. It has to be different, it has to be blown up. 

Otherwise, you're going to run the same problems. You have these legacy people that have been around forever 25, 30, 40 — f*****g 40 years. And they're not being held accountable. They're not being held accountable at all. And that's from the industry on, even on the outside. And we've seen that. 

I think it was the guy from James Beard that stepped down, and he'd been there for 20 years. Like, that's a good first step. And I think he realized like, ‘Hey, even if I did something bad or not, I realized that I just maybe need to get out of the way now.’ And I think that's like a lot of things that need to happen. 

There's a lot of people that just need to get out of the way. They’ve made enough. They've done enough, good or bad. It's time to get out of the way. Go. Retire. Go to your public access television station and do your little cooking show. But seriously, there's a lot of other people that want to be in the mix that you're dropping, and having to compete with them is not okay. It's not fun.

Alicia: Right. 

And well, speaking of competing with big people, I — you got a lot of attention this year, when the Goya boycott happened, for adobo and sazón, and — which is obviously good. But I wanted to ask how — you do cook a lot of Puerto Rican food. You're selling sazón and adobo. What is the role for you of Puerto Rican food in what you do?

And I think what you do is so interesting, because you really are incorporating it into your full vision of what your food should be, and not being like, ‘Oh, hello, look, here's a-’ I don't know. It's not schticky when you do it, and — which is very refreshing, because sometimes it gets so forced into that kind of schtick thing. So, what role does it play in your cooking, those Puerto Rican flavors?

Eric: I approach it as being realistic. Because there's a bunch of things that I don't have access to with my — the food that I cook here. There's a lot of people that are from Puerto Rico that will come, and the first thing they do is talk s**t about how it's not authentic all the way down. And I'm like, Well, first off, I don't know your f*****g grandma. I don't know who you are. I know we're different families. We all have different things we do. Cool.

But I also am not going to spend 10 times the amount to bring certain peppers, and certain flavors, and certain things, ’cause then I'm gonna end up charging you 10 times as much and you still want it to be Puerto Rico prices. So, we have to take that away. 

I'm also in a city where I'm the only person doing Puerto Rican food, and it’s not even a full-fledged Puerto Rican restaurant. Because the numbers don't make it for that. People still don't give a s**t. I would be better off if I said I was Cuban food, and I did Puerta Rican food.  Honestly, that's what people would gravitate towards. And if I had a Cuban pressed sandwich, people would lose their s**t. 

But that's not what I want to do. I want to be — people to understand a little bit of what it is, and then start to go dig on their own and find out. Because then that allows them to broaden their horizons and realize that Puerto Rican cuisine isn't a one-all, one-size fits all thing, either. There's different styles, there's different ways you can make it. And there's seasonality towards it that a lot of people really don't understand. They're like, ‘It's f*****g fried food.’ And I'm like, ‘It's not all that.’ There's a lot to it.

But I'm also classically French trained. I went to culinary school, I worked at really cool restaurants. So for me, there's a touch that I want to bring to it that sometimes can be super high-end fancy or not. I can still charge $5 to this thing, or I can charge a couple hundred for it. But I want to have that point of view where anything that comes out of here is Puerto Rican food, whether it's the black truffle? That's still Puerto Rican food that a Puerto Rican guy made. 

So, I kind of want to like poke the bear always with people. They were like, ‘I've never tried Puerto Rican food.’ And I was like, ‘The f**k you haven't? You've tried my food, right? You've had it before.’ And they're like, ‘Oh, yeah.’ And I was like, ‘Made by a Puerto Rican.’ So, it’s a tongue in cheek type thing. But it allows them to kind of go, ‘This is very different. I like it. It tastes good.’ And then I'm like, ‘Well, just keep buying stuff. Well, keep supporting, and we'll be cool.’

Alicia: Well, for you is cooking a political act?

Eric: Yeah, it always has been. It's political. It's also who gets to eat a lot of the things, too, with how much money someone has or doesn't. So, there's always that thing that I'm trying to push. Within my restaurant, we have stuff that's like $5 all the way to a few hundred dollars, and everybody can still have something from us. There's not a lot of places like that. 

So, I'm always trying to bring that on a level, but I'm also trying to force down different ideas so that way, people just don't think if you buy something from someplace, they shouldn't be held accountable for the things they believe in. If they're Trump supporters, f**k them. Or if they want to go on some irrational Republican-style strategy stuff, f**k them. Or if they just mimic it softly and don't really say they're Republican or Trump supporters, but everything they do in their business supports that, then I basically will tell people, ‘Hey, they're acting in a part of the system. Whether they're saying it or not, you should really look at it like this.’ So, it really becomes political at that point. 

There's a lot of stuff within Puerto Rican cuisine, too, that happens that way. Every time somebody starts to talk about Puerto Rico that's white, or doesn't really know a lot, is the first thing they say out of their f*****g mouth is like, ‘They should become a state. I can't wait to take them over.’

And I'm like, ‘That’s not your f*****g place. Listen, man. Both my parents are Puerto Rican. I'm legit, check squared. Fine, cool. I got my little card, I guess. But I don't say whether they should be a state or not. That’s none of my f*****g business. I don't live on the island. It wouldn't affect me personally. And, I don't have any Pinta or Santa Maria ready to get fired up to take the place over again. Calm down. Leave the ship to them where they live.’ 

It's not like random guy in Idaho, someone's gonna go to this random guy in Idaho and be like, ‘What do you think we should do here?’ And he's gonna be like, ‘F**k you,’ and has this little sign up with his gun, and that's what's gonna happen. 

So it's always interesting to me, when stuff like that happens, because me, I make food. Ok, cool. And then what? I'm not supposed to have an opinion about things. What? Sounds good, Jim, that works in accounting at some f*****g weird firm that you make, like, $50, $60,000 a year. You have more of an opinion than I'm supposed to have? F**k that s**t. So, it's very different. 

And I think seeing, maybe, with Anthony Bourdain kind of being more vocal about stuff like that, people kind of like were ready to accept it more rather than just being like a Bobby Flay who's like, ‘I make food,’ you know? ‘No, I don't talk about anything. I just make food. Ta-da.’ And you're like, ‘F*****g fakes.’ That's what it is, they’re f*****g fakes. And I don't think we need that right now.

Alicia: Right. Absolutely. 

Well, thank you so much for taking the time-

Eric: Sorry about cussing — it’s my fault. [Laughs.]

Alicia: Oh, it's fine with me.

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It’s hard for me to properly state what I perceive to be the significance of Amanda Cohen. For more than ten years now, she’s been the chef-owner of Dirt Candy in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan. The restaurant was once very small (it was once, indeed, in the space that now houses Superiority Burger), then she moved it to a larger space. Now, it’s rather small again, operating only on the patio with a lot of heat lamps, and she long ago adopted a no-tipping policy in order to pay staff a living wage. She’s only ever cooked vegetables. With Lekka Burger, she’s added veggie burgers in a fast-casual setting to her oeuvre, and the result is stunning.

I don’t think she has gotten enough credit for any of this. The reasons are sadly obvious: she’s a woman, and she cooks vegetables. Even vegans, I found out recently, despise her for occasionally consuming a piece of meat or fish in order to study flavor and texture, in order to put out food that really is on par with what omnivores are accustomed to (and while I usually say “f**k the omnivore’s palate,” I have to acknowledge that when my fiancé—only recently converted to vegetarianism—eats her food, he can barely speak because he’s focused on how delicious it is).

Anyway, I’ve interviewed Amanda many times for different pieces because her perspective is so essential to me, but this is a broad one. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Amanda, thanks so much for coming on.

Amanda: Hi, thanks so much for having me.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate? 

Amanda: Sure.

So I grew up in Ottawa and Toronto in the ’70s and ’80s. And certainly, Ottawa was a winter city. It's funny, because I look back on it and we didn't have a huge amount of produce at all times. It's cold in Ottawa, in Canada, so the winter—vegetables were pretty pathetic. But my mother would always try as hard as she could. 

At the same time though, both cities were pretty international cities. Toronto is the capital of Canada, super cosmopolitan. Sorry, Ottawa’s the capital of Canada; Toronto's the capital of Ontario. And because Ottawa was the capital, it's filled with diplomats. So we had all different kinds of restaurants that we constantly were sort of going to. My dad was in government. We were meeting other families. 

And so I had this sort of really varied variety of cuisines. And I have this memory of going to the supermarkets when I was younger, and particularly in Toronto, which again is a much more cosmopolitan city filled with all different ethnicities and nationalities, where the — it's pretty exciting if I look back on it now. But the grocery store was filled with products from all over the world. 

And so if you were an adventurous cook, which my mother sometimes was — she wasn't always — we'd have really random fun ingredients in our kitchen cupboard. I think we ate all over the map. But also, it was a family of five kids. So we had a lot of pasta and pasta salads.

Alicia: And so, what got you into food actually?

Amanda: Well, I think there was a variety of things that got me into it. I am the youngest of five kids. And there's about a five-year difference between me and my — the next sibling who's closest in age to me, but all my — all those other siblings are about two years apart. So my brother's 12 years older. And then there's three sisters in between. This is a whole family history. 

But by the time I became a teenager, my mother had been cooking for about 25 years for her family. And kudos to her, she just sort of like, ‘I'm not doing it anymore.’ I swear, she looked at me and she was like, ‘You look pretty capable. You seem to know your way around the kitchen. You want to have dinner? Figure it out yourself.’ 

I mean, it wasn't quite that blunt. She didn't have to cook for a family of seven anymore, every single night. It was just sort of me and her and my dad. And I think she was kind of done with it, which I think we all understand now having cooked through the pandemic, how hard it is to cook every night. 

And I liked it. I was like, ‘Oh, this is fun, I get to figure out what I want to eat. And I get to play around.’ And I loved cooking magazines. And so I would cook recipes from them. I'm sure they were all terrible. My parents were certainly nice enough to suffer through some awful meals. 

But I liked it. I liked the challenge of it. I liked reading the recipe and figuring things out and seeing it come to life. I was a kid that was always so disappointed that I could never get what was in my imagination to come through on a piece of paper. Or I'd write a story and be like, ‘Oh, I imagined it so different.’ I’d paint a picture. I'm like, ‘I'm a terrible artist.’ But in my head, I'm an amazing artist. But something with — like a recipe, you get the ingredients together, you sort of have this idea of what it's going to turn out like, and it turns out like that. And so, that was so just satisfying to me. 

And I liked it. And it was always sort of my backup plan of what I would do if I couldn't figure anything else out. And as it turned out, when I was in my early twenties I really couldn't figure out what I wanted to do. And I was like, ‘Well, I've always liked to cook, so maybe I can just get that as a skill. If I can hold on to that as a skill, I can go anywhere in the world and I can travel and it'll just — it'll at least sort of be a lifeline for a moment while I figure out what I want to do.’ And the reality is it's what I wanted to do. I just didn't know it at the time.

Alicia: And you decided to go to the Natural Gourmet Institute?

Amanda: Yeah.

I'd been actually living in Hong Kong right after university, and I wanted more than anything to keep traveling. And so I was like, ‘Well, I have to figure out how to get this skill.’ And I lived in Los Angeles for a while and hated it. 

And I was starting to look at cooking schools, and at the time I was a pretty hardcore vegetarian. I think I’d just left my vegan stage, and I — there was no way I was going to a real cooking school. 

One of the reasons I don't eat — I mean, I eat a little bit of meat now, and fish, but particularly at the time why I didn't is I really — bones really freak me out. And so even as a kid, I didn’t like bones in my food. And so the idea that I was going to have to learn how to butcher something was really, really traumatizing. 

And fortunately, at the Natural Gourmet, you really didn't have to learn how to do that. They did actually have meat classes at the time, and I think there was a chicken butchering class and a fish class. But you were also allowed to miss two days. And so those were the two days I missed. 

But it was a great program, actually. And I look back on it now. And it's funny, because so much of the time it was like, people didn't think it was a real school. And they were like, ‘Oh, it's just a school with funny ingredients.’ And all those funny ingredients, and all the sort of recipes that we were using then, and all the courses that we were getting taught are actually now considered really cool and trendy. And it's so amazing how that's changed.

Alicia: You said you had a vegan phase. What made you stop eating meat?

Amanda: Well, I had stopped eating meat when I was 15 because, really, all my friends were. I mean, it was 32 years ago and becoming a vegetarian was super rebellious at the time. Very different now, where it's almost mainstream. But then really, it was super rebellious. And all my friends were rebelling against their parents. And I was like, ‘Oh, that seems like a good idea. I'll do that too.’ And certainly annoyed my parents enough. They're like, ‘You're not gonna have enough to eat, and what's gonna happen to you?’

But the reality is it actually — my diet didn't change. I had never eaten that much meat anyways, to begin with, and I didn't really like it. So when we started sort of having meals after I made the decision that I was a vegetarian, as it turned out there — I was just eating the exact same thing I was before and I just hadn't labeled myself as a vegetarian. And so it's not like it was a grand change in my life. 

And then when I moved to Hong Kong, and I'd probably — moving maybe a little bit beforehand, it just sort of — I had become, I think, vegan. And I think a lot of my friends and colleagues were vegan, so it was easier. I don't know now, but certainly at the time when I was living there, there wasn't a lot of dairy in the food I was eating in Hong Kong. And so it just all of a sudden, again, happenstance, I was a vegan.

Alicia: Right. 

Since your time at the Natural Gourmet Institute, you worked at so many vegetarian restaurants in New York. How have you kind of seen vegetarianism shift in this time, as a cuisine?

Amanda: You answered your own question. You called it cuisine. So I don't think that it had ever been considered really a cuisine beforehand. It was so disregarded and considered a second-class cuisine, I think, what, by most foodies and food writers and certainly the mainstream press. 

And nowadays, well, I'm not sure it's held at the top level. It's certainly in the playing field. We're seeing getting a lot more coverage. We're seeing vegetarian chefs being treated a lot more seriously. 

And what we're seeing, which I think is pretty fascinating and has been a huge shift is — and it's slow. We're not where I'd like to see us yet. But we're actually considering vegetarian chefs who started off in the vegetarian world as serious chefs, versus what was happening for numerous years, which was that you'd have a mainstream chat or an omnivore chef all of a sudden be like, ‘Oh, well, now I'm going to cook vegetables!’ or ‘I'm going to become a vegetarian for a while!’ And they got all the press. And it was you'd be a vegetarian chef next to them. And you'd be like, ‘Hello. Hello. I've been doing this for a really long time, too.’ And you were just totally disregarded because of your background. Who you did or didn't know. And I think that's a huge, huge shift and an important one.

Alicia: Right.

And I mean, when you opened Dirt Candy — for this reason, it was considered extremely radical. And how have you changed your approach to cooking, being as you're kind of on your own wavelength? You have to challenge yourself, it seems, because you're kind of in a league of your own in terms of what you're doing. Has your approach changed?

Amanda: Well, one, I'm a much more confident cook than I was. 

I think one of the things that I'll always find sad, and I'll find this sad for the rest of my career is, I'll never know actually what it was like to be a customer at little Dirt Candy when it opened, and what my food was like then. And I think it's changed so much now in this restaurant, because I have so much less to prove. But I'll also never get to really sit down and eat my food here as an outside observer. And maybe I'd hate it. Who knows? I'm pretty picky. 

But I felt like I had so much to prove at the beginning. And I think my dishes were so much more complicated. And then they had to be, but I also think they — it was a time of cooking where it was a lot more like that. And now I look at what I'm serving now. And it's a lot less pretentious and complicated. And I think I'd always wanted to serve fun food. My sort of what I didn't know I was covering up when served with microgreens. I was like, ‘Oh, well, all this f*****g stuff.’

And now I am a better chef than I was, since I opened little Dirt Candy. It's ten years later. I don't have as much to prove. And so I can let the vegetables really speak for themselves a lot more. I'm still only competing against myself, I think. And so it still allows me to kind of do whatever I want to do, ’cause there are no rules for this kind of cuisine still, which is great.

Alicia: Well, as you noted, vegetable-forward dining kind of became a thing for which mostly men have been given credit, when I go through my cookbooks, my vegetarian cookbooks from the ’70s through now, it's mostly women who have always been doing vegetarian food and who have always been pushing the cuisine forward, who made it a cuisine. And you've been so outspoken about this. 

And so I wanted to kind of ask, have you seen or would you like to see food media change its approach to how it talks about vegetarian cooking? How have you understood how gender kind of manifests in this specific approach to how people talk about vegetarian cuisine?

Amanda: Well, I think it goes back a little bit to my answer about the mainstream chefs, which is really just a coded word for male chefs getting a lot of attention for entering this field. And I think what happens is they become considered the experts much faster than the people who actually have been doing it. They come with all the credentials, like, ‘Ooh, this is my press, these are my awards. These are my restaurants.’ Versus people who've spent their entire life doing this, and probably actually are the experts in it, they don't come with all the whistles and bells. They just come with knowledge. 

And fanfare seems to have a lot more weight than actual in-depth knowledge about a subject, I think, in the food media. I'd like to see that change. I'm not sure we are there yet. It would be very nice. 

And I thought this for a while with a lot of food coverage, if we could start talking about the history of the food and how we got to covering this particular aspect of it. Because I think once you go back through the history, it’s exactly what you see on your cookbook shelves if we're talking just about vegetarian food. ‘Oh, wow. There's so many women who were writing these cookbooks and were at the forefront of this movement.’ And then you can't deny that existence. It has to become much more sort of holistic when we report on food, and not just this narrow idea of ‘Ooo, what's cool?’

Alicia: Yeah. 

And I mean, I think that this is so prevalent in the veggie burger discourse now, too, where because people have obsessed so much over Impossible Burgers and Beyond Burgers, then when you did Lekka Burger it seemed kind of — to people who don't like to eat vegetarian food most of the time, they were like, ‘Huh, it's kind of an anachronism.’ And thus, you had that New Yorker review where the Lekka Burger was compared solely to Brooks Headley’s veggie burger at Superiority Burger.

I know you had a very strong response to that review. I've always been like, ‘Well, Superiority Burger was huge and got its press because of Brooks Headley’s prestige’ that he got in the same way that you just said. If you come with the accolades and those bells and whistles, then people will think that your veggie burger is more worthwhile than the veggie burger by someone who has actually been like — I mean, not that he hasn't.

And it's very difficult because I love Superiority Burger and Brooks is great, but at the same time it's like, ‘Why is this the only standard against which we can talk about any other veggie burger in the way that fine dining omnivorous chefs could make a burger and it would still just be made of meat?’ It wouldn't be that interesting. 

But yeah, so. I don't know. How is the perception of Lekka Burger, how have you felt about the press there that you've gotten?

Amanda: Yeah, I mean it's been a real up and down roller coaster. But I want to be very clear about this. I have nothing against Superiority Burger. I think the world of him, and so my issue was always about the press surrounding it and not actually Brooks himself, who I am friends with. He’s in my old restaurant, we talked about that for months going — I sat down with him and worked through his budget a little. 

So, it's just absolutely no issues with him whatsoever. I'm so glad he pushed the conversation, veggie burgers forward and what they could be. He has this sort of really good example of what one is. I have a very different example of what it is. 

And the reality is when I opened Dirt — er, Lekka. Dirt Candies. When I opened Lekka Burger, I never imagined that my competition was actually Brooks. Brooks has this really tiny, fun artisanal burger shop. And even then, he says that burgers aren't really necessarily the whole focus there. But it's not meant to be scaled up. 

And for us, when we opened Lekka Burger, honestly, our competition is Shake Shack. I mean, that's what we want to be. And so that's who I want to be compared to. I want to be compared to the burger at Shake Shack, which actually the vegetarian burger is all around the country. That's our competition, not Brooks’ really delicious, artisanal burger. 

And even if I was being compared to that burger, then the New Yorker review really sort of took it out of the context of the burger in the end. And they're like, ‘Well, it's something about the burger. We really like this sandwich instead, and that's what people should be doing.’ 

And that really discounts a female chef coming into the space saying, ‘Hey, you know what? I want to grow really big. This is my chance to have a franchise, or not a franchise but to have lots of different locations.’ And then sort of being told, ‘No, you can't do that because you're not up for it.’ 

Obviously, the New Yorker thought that I couldn't do that, because you're not doing exactly what this person is doing and this is what all people should be doing. And I just keep thinking, ‘But there's so much room out there for all of it.’ No, it felt there was no way to compete, even though I'm not trying to compete with Superiority Burger because the only person who can do that is Brooks.

Alicia: Yeah. 

No, it was very interesting because I think it spoke to how little imagination people have when they are approaching vegetarian food. And that's really depressing to me, of course, as a person writing about vegetarian and vegan food, that most of the people — when people who don't think about these things all the time approach it, they come at it with such a narrow perspective, which does such a disservice to how we should be able to discuss this wide and varied world of veggie burgers. I mean, that's what the cool thing about the veggie burger is, is that it can be literally anything. But yeah, it's very disheartening.

Amanda: I cannot tell you, because now I'm in the veggie burger world, how many articles every day are written about veggie burgers. And are they the next big thing, or what Beyond Burger is doing with the Impossible Burger. Nestlé's next burger. This is huge. We're on the cusp of some — whether or not it works, we're on a cusp of some weird veggie burger mock meat revolution. And it's a huge, huge conversation that's happening that never would have happened ten years ago.

Alicia: Right. To see it not taken as seriously as it perhaps should be is just — yeah, annoying, frankly—

Amanda: And really ignoring how much room there is for so many different kinds.

Alicia: Yes, exactly. 

I mean, but at Dirt Candy too in the pandemic, you've sort of also kind of embraced the sandwich as a tool. Which is interesting, ’cause you — now you've had this experience doing the veggie burger and that kind of approach. Did working on Lekka Burger influence how you approached kind of pivoting Dirt Candy during the pandemic?

Amanda: Yes and no. I mean, a little bit because of Lekka Burger, I had to simplify my process so much. The Lekka Burger, it's like ten steps or less to get a burger out, whereas before at Dirt Candy it was like, ‘Well, we're at 300 steps for this one dish. But that seems like enough. We're good to go.’

So, this idea of focusing on what a sandwich is, and how best, how easy it is to make it and what does an actual sandwich mean. And we talked about this a lot, but what's the best bread for this? What's going to happen to the filling? Is it going to soak into it? What's the textural contrast between the bread? And do you want thick bread, crossbred, crunchy, chewy? 

And all that sort of went into the burger at Lekka. So, I think I had started opening up my brain to that way of thinking. But also I didn't have a choice with Dirt Candy. Lekka was a choice. There was nothing else I could do. I'm looking at this restaurant. We're reopening in the middle of the pandemic, ’cause I, again, have no choice. I have to reopen or I'm going to close. 

And clearly, my fine dining restaurant isn't going to function. It's just not going to work. I can't make that food. I'm trying to keep as few staff members as possible on board, A. to keep my payroll low. But also, I — the idea of having to let anybody else go again was just too much for me. So I have this core group of staff, which if I'm slow or busy I can take care of. I didn't want to play the game of, ‘Oh, well, I think I'm going to be busy on Friday nights during the summer so we'll hire some extra people, but come October I'm going to fire everybody again.’ It just didn't seem fair.

I have to make food that my staff can handle. But I also have to make food that people want to eat. And my customers are gone. My customers were, I didn't even understand how many, but probably were 75% tourists. 

Alicia: Wow. 

Amanda: And then, the rest — Yeah, huge. I never understood. I always would pay lip service to tourists like, ‘Oh, I was a tourist destination.’ I really, really was. 

And the other part of my customers were probably people who also left the city because they had a lot of money. And we were treated as a once in a while restaurant, a fancy restaurant. Maybe you come to us once or twice a year, which is fine. I didn't have to be a neighborhood restaurant. 

But the restaurants right now that are surviving and that are doing well are neighborhood restaurants. They're really catering for their neighborhood. And it's been very humbling for me to realize that, ‘Oooh, that's not something I did.’ And I'm not sure it was necessarily the worst thing not to have done that. But in the long term, it wasn't great. But I also wasn't thinking down the road to a pandemic when I put my business model, ‘To sell, always consider a pandemic down the road.’

We've struggled with trying to figure out, what do people want to eat and how do they want to eat it? And what do they want from me? Because what we get is a lot of people who are coming in, they’re like, ‘Oh, I've always wanted to come to Dirt Candy. Oh, you only serve sandwiches?’ And we’re like, ‘Yeah, that is all we're serving right now.’ And we are sort of revamping ourselves all the time to figure out how we can best serve our community and our customers. And sandwiches happen to be an easy — not an easy one, but universally loved.

Alicia: Right.

Do you think you'll keep them on the menu, when things return to non-pandemic times?

Amanda: I don't know. I mean, we used to have a really good brunch. And I loved it. And we had some sandwiches, and we were a much more casual restaurant then. But brunch was just impossible for us. I don't know why I'm such a bad restaurateur at brunch. It’s so hard to find line cooks. I don't know, we had a deal for ‘you get a cocktail and a pastry and a sandwich and a cup of coffee all for $30.’ And it was our party brunch. 

And I think that's a really good deal. But around the corner, there's ten places that are doing bottomless brunches, and I'm like, ‘I can't pay my rent with that. I can't pay my staff.’ And so I'm not sure I can live on sandwiches. We can't count on it. Honestly, I have no idea what we're going to be at the end of this.

Alicia: Right, right. No, I mean, that's terrifying. 

Yeah, I mean, for you what would a good response have been by the government to keeping restaurants open but also keeping people safe during this?

Amanda: So, to take a step back, I don't fault them for the response we had. Within a week of us all shutting down, basically they had a care plan in place. The PPP was there, and there were seven stimulus checks and the extra $600 a week for employees, which was great. I mean, they came up with that. We’re basically a dysfunctional government. [Laughs.] They came up with that really fast, and once the PPP was sort of rejiggered early actually did work for most people who were able to take it or who had decided to take it. 

However, it's not enough. And that's where we're at. This real problem is they have sort of — it was short-sighted, and now we need to really be thinking long-sighted. Even within the PPP, one of the reasons it didn't work is you were basically paying people to go to work. And I still think the government should have paid people not to go to work, all people. I shouldn't have made the choice to open my restaurant so that I could survive, as opposed to I'm going to keep my restaurant closed. I'm going to keep all my employees on unemployment with the extra federal aid, and then I can keep everybody safe. That would have been a choice, and that's something that I really think the federal government should have thought more of doing. But they didn’t. 

So, now we're here. And we're still stuck without really a follow-up plan, and now it's dire. And this is where I think they really, really failed us. The cities failed us; the states failed us. And the federal government has failed us. We are not getting the aid we need to keep our doors open or keep our doors closed. Either/or, they're putting us in this really uncomfortable position, where we're all having to make not even smart decisions. We're just making decisions, and it's — everything's a band-aid

And we're not going to survive without another aid package now, without even passing the Restaurant Act or something akin to it. The Restaurant Act just happens to have the most movement behind it. I won't stay open. That's the reality, come end of January. If I don't know that there's a lifeline along — on the way, then there's just no point anymore. 

Alicia: Right. That's so scary and so horrifying.

Amanda: Yeah, because it's not just me. We're looking at every restaurant. I mean, not everyone, but the bulk of them facing the same issues. And it's two parts. If we knew that we had the money coming in, it was coming at the end of January, then everybody could breathe a sigh of relief. It's coming, right? We can hold on ‘til then. But the mental toll of sort of being kept in limbo, constantly? It's too much. And then we're just sort of throwing away good money after bad money. 

And then the reality is at some point, you have to make the choice. I have to close, I'm not making enough money. I've gone from making $10,000 to $12,000 a night to $2,000 to $3,000, on a good night $2,000 to $3,000. On a bad night, I can also make $600. We're not doing well here. 

And if I close, the city loses me. But the city also loses the jobs that I have. And yes, I only have six right now. But in six months, maybe I actually could have 20 jobs or 30. Maybe I could get back up to my pre-pandemic levels come summer, once the vaccine sort of has been rolled out. And they lose the taxes I put into the city, and they lose my payroll taxes. There's a huge, huge amount of sort of economic destruction that's going to happen if they don't start sort of having this long-term thinking.

Alicia: Right. 

I mean, I don't think at this point it has, it makes that much of a difference. But you've been one of the few restaurateurs who's been super outspoken about the — having a no tipping policy. Does that make a difference, do you think, in terms of how you've weathered the pandemic or how you could survive? I know in the beginning places that had, places — people that I was talking to who had tipping, a no tipping policy, they were really weathering the beginning a lot better. But that kind of wears out after a while.

Amanda: Yeah, I mean I think actually it's been a saving grace not having tipping for a number of reasons. 

One, it actually helped us with our — the amount of money we got from the government originally because I didn't have — my payroll was higher, and so it's allowed me to sort of sustain myself a little bit longer. But I think everybody who has tipping right now is seeing that they have nights where they're only making a couple hundred dollars, or $1,000. But they still have to staff up, and you still have to have your staff here for a certain number of hours. 

And so, people are going home with not a lot of money these days. They might have gone home at the beginning in the summer when — and we didn't have a curfew and there was a lot more money sort of flowing. From also what I've read and talked to other people, the money isn't flowing as quickly as it used to. And there's a lot of bad nights. 

I walk home about 40 blocks every night from Dirt Candy, and Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, curfew or no curfew, as soon as it got cold, places are done. And I walk through the East Village, through Union Square. There is nobody in restaurants except your three or four front of house workers who are standing there waiting to see maybe possibly a few people come in. So they're suffering. They're suffering a lot.

Alicia: No, it's absolutely horrifying. And I hope that something happens between now and the end of January. 

But to completely change gears, but I guess not, no, for you is cooking a political act?

Amanda: My restaurant is a political act, for sure. I think food is so incredibly political: where it comes from, who cooks it, who grows it, who's eating it, all of that. 

And sort of when I start to think about the global supply chain, it's so enormous and it's so overwhelming how basically every plate has become exceptionally political. But I have a hard time wrapping my head around it. And I'm just starting to sort of think this through. And for years, I've said, ‘We have to raise prices.’ And I think about how much I pay for my food and how much — sometimes I pay so little for food. I'm like, ‘This is insane. And sometimes I paid so much for food, I'm like, ‘Ok, this makes a lot of sense.’ 

But like when I'm paying so little for food, I'm like, ‘I don't understand how a driver who's dropping it off got paid? How the company afforded the boxes? What does that mean how little they're paying the people who shipped it, or the people who grew it, or how much are the seeds?’ Honestly, when you start to go back through that, it's — my brain doesn't know how to process all of it. 

And it's something that I know you've written a lot about, and probably know a lot more about it then me. But as I start thinking through it, and my guess: of course, what we eat, who eats it, and how we serve it, and why we serve it is insanely political. 

And on the flip side of that, I think that food is actually politics. And this is something that sort of really comes up over the course of the pandemic. One of the reasons that the IRC has been really successful, or not really successful but it's sort of come together and we've seen a little bit of movement, is because of how many actual restaurant workers there are and how many independent restaurants there are. 

There are 16 million, or there were. That number is not as high as it used to be. But there were 16 million restaurant workers in the United States. That makes us the second biggest employer, behind the government. And that's insane to me. And then the fact that there's like 500,000, independent restaurants, none of us knew these numbers beforehand. And we were so naive. 

But when we started putting it all together, and we realized how big our voice could be, A) I think, I mean, certainly for a lot of us we were like, ‘Oh, we've missed so many opportunities.’ But now, we actually can do so much with our voices. And it's one of the few good things that may come out of the pandemic, is realizing how much power we could have.

Alicia: Right. Absolutely. And I'm excited to see if that turns into something powerful and real and effective in the future. 

Well, thank you so much for coming on the chat. I know you're insanely busy. I've been going back to your cookbook lately and in my research, and it's still so fun and original. And I just love it, obviously. But yeah, thank you so much for coming on. And good luck. Can't wait to follow along with what happens.

Amanda: Yeah, me too. Thanks so much for having me. This was great.

Alicia: Thank you.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe

Nicola Harvey is a journalist and farmer based in New Zealand. We connected about the podcast she produced for Audible, “A Carnivore’s Crisis,” because we share concerns about the tech-meat burgers by Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat that are being hailed as a climate-change savior while still encouraging monocropping in farming, processed foods with dubious health effects, and other food-system ailments.

I wanted to get her on to chat about that, as well as her forthcoming book on “food citizenship” and whether New Zealand is as great from the inside as it looks on the outside. Listen above, or read below

Alicia: Hi, Nicola. Thank you so much for coming on.

Nicola: Hi, Alicia. Thanks for inviting me.

Alicia: How are things over in New Zealand?

Nicola: Ah, look, to be honest there — oh, I hate to say it considering what's happening out there in the world. But to be honest, they're quite normal. Well, the country has sort of come through Covid relatively unscathed, and we live pretty much as we did this time last year. So, it's a nice place to be.

And I do feel so — Oh, heavy hearted for the rest of the world, because certainly heading into the holiday season when people want to be with family and many aren't able to and here we are over here making plans for family Christmases and holidays. So, I would rather not delve too much into detail because it will probably just make people in the U.S. a little mad at you.

Alicia: [Laughter.] Well, can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Nicola: Yeah, sure. 

So, I'm actually located in the middle of the North island of New Zealand. And for those who are from this part of the world, they may sort of recognize that as next to a very large lake called Lake Taupo. 

But for those who don't know the country, it's split into two islands. The North island is the most populated, full of small towns. And where I grew up was on a farm about three and a half hours south of Auckland, which is the largest city. And I was there for about the first eight and a half years of my life, so certainly not my entire childhood, and then moved into a small town and then soon after university left New Zealand and was overseas for 20 years. 

And what I ate is an interesting trip down memory lane because I grew up in the 1980s. And it was a very bland diet of mostly meat and vegetables. 

And then I recall a cookbook arriving on the scene called the Womens Weekly Cookbook. And all of a sudden, there were spices in our diet and recipes for things like spaghetti bolognese and a very mediocre chili con carne served with corn chips. And so, that was sort of the meals that we looked forward to as kids because it was something different. And I think anyone growing up in New Zealand or Australia will remember that. 

I suppose my fondest food memories come from when I was in my twenties, when I actually headed outside of New Zealand and started to eat more broadly from cuisines around the world. And that certainly was the case in Melbourne.

Alicia: Nice. Well, you identify as a farmer and are at work on a book about farming and food citizenship. I wanted to know how you define food citizenship.

Nicola: I mean, that's an interesting question, ’cause I think just to to backpedal slightly your use of the word identify as farmer is something that I just want to dwell on for a minute first because it has become a big topic of conversation for me of late, especially with other women working in the agriculture sector. 

So before I answer the second part, what is food citizenship to me, I think it's worth saying that I identify as a farmer as opposed to someone else or another title within that space because it is a specific and purposeful act to claim a voice in that space. As you might know, I think it's the same in the United States, that the majority of people working the land all claiming the title of farmers tend to be of a certain ilk. And here in New Zealand, that is over the age of 60, or certainly over the age of 45, white and male. 

So to be a woman and to claim that title farmer, is to have a voice in a space where the female perspective has largely been marginalized. And that's unfortunate because historically, and certainly in this current day and age, women are disproportionately exposed to things like food and security. Women are often at the forefront of climate change impacts, especially when it has to do with the land and our ability to access good food and care for our families via food and things like that, or care for ourselves. 

So, that is why I claim the title farmer. And it tends to amuse people here because it hasn't been considered something that has been contentious, that I have had many conversations on Twitter and Instagram with other women who are purposefully entering into that space and claiming that title. 

And then that leads on to what I'm thinking about when it comes to food citizenship. And it's actually a title or a concept that was introduced to me by a professor at Colorado State University. His name is Michael Carolan. He champions that as a term as opposed to say conscious consumer when it comes to running a line of activism or action by your food choices. 

And it's this idea that food impacts so many tenants of our life. And to say that we can shop our way to, for example, a healthier planet is to disregard a number of different ways in which food impacts people's lives, whether it be culturally or economically or through workplace experiences or justice. 

And it also to run that idea of conscious consumerism flags that some people have more dollars. Therefore, more votes. And so the idea that food citizenship might be centered in the food debate is to say that people value different things within the food scape, and that there is no shame in that and there is no hierarchy as far as I'm concerned in what one values over another. 

And so I'm interested in it from a New Zealand perspective, because we are here starting to think very seriously about ideas of food sovereignty. Who has access to what, who has access to land, who are the farmers producing our food for locals as opposed to food for commodity? So it's been a point of fascination for me for about the last two years. 

And I'm just slowly starting to unpack it from a local perspective. But that's what I understand it to mean, from a — I suppose an academic point of view. And certainly the work of Professor Carolan is that it is simply an acknowledgement that food is many things to many people, but to be an active participant in the food scape is to do more than shop.

Alicia: Right. 

And as you mentioned, you live in New Zealand. And I actually got a press release today about visiting Auckland in 2021, as it is a culinary and cocktail, I don't know, great travel destination. That's what landed in my inbox today, which was really funny because I was going to talk to you. 

And to people around the world, I think, especially those of us with more progressive politics, we look at New Zealand — we look at how you've weathered the pandemic, and we're like, ‘Wow, why can't we be like that?’ [Laughter.] And so I wanted to ask, how does that, as you were just talking about, how is that manifesting in local food politics? Is that global perception off of New Zealand? How would you like to see food politics there evolve, if at all?

Nicola: This is such a big question. And it's so topical here in the moment, especially in the wake of Covid, which has had an impact on New Zealanders. Perhaps not to the extent of other countries, but it has impacted those who are on the cusp of food and security. And I'll dive into that. 

But let's just backpedal. Ok, progressive politics in New Zealand and how it's perceived overseas is such a fascinating thing, because we have a well-known Prime Minister. Jacinda Ardern, young woman, mother, charismatic leader who communicated her way and our way through Covid with much effectiveness, and that has translated very well internationally. The reality here, as often the case with good communicators, is more nuanced, and it's not as rosy as perhaps those abroad would perceive it to be. 

When it comes to food politics and our progressiveness, that definitely starts in agriculture here in New Zealand. The primary industries are a huge earner for the New Zealand economy, which basically means a huge number of people are farming in some capacity in New Zealand. And a lot of land is used for agriculture, be it dairy, beef and sheep, forestry, growing fruit for export. 

And throughout Covid, the primary industries were highlighted as probably the key economic driver to get the country out of a potential recession. 

And the regulations that have come through the pipeline in the last couple of years from the progressive Labour government that we have now were initially seen as quite confrontational to some of the farming sector, who were not used — say that again, were not used to having their way of doing things challenged. 

And what Labour is trying to do is to position New Zealand and New Zealand's agriculture as a legitimate, clean green industry globally. So there's a lot of regulations around water quality, because the dairy industry has been culpable of a lot of pollution over the last decade to 15 years. And the water quality and rivers and streams are not great. 

They're looking very closely at methane emissions, as is the world. But there's some interesting research happening here in New Zealand that really pushes this idea that if we're to tackle agriculture’s and — agriculture's impact on global warming, that we need to take a really close look at what the gasses do in different ways. So there are millions and millions of cows that dot the countryside in New Zealand, but then they are a problem that can be solved in x way. And then we also need to look at fossil fuels, which is the same the world over.

So it's not to bundle them all together and say that agriculture is the biggest emitter in New Zealand, which it is in terms of statistics. But it's to understand how we can actually get to zero emissions collectively across the board, because that is our progressive government's target, is zero emissions by 2030. And we're not doing a very good job of it yet. We're trailing behind some of the European countries. But that's not to say we don't have good intents to get there. 

So that's the landscape in which we're working. And then the food that comes out of that agricultural sector, the majority gets exported. So this is a big point of contention in New Zealand. We produce the most amazing food, but the majority gets sold either as commodity or as high end food into affluent markets in the North. And what's left for New Zealanders is still good quality produce, but it's expensive. So most people will go to the supermarket and pay the same for New Zealand projects as they potentially would if you went to a supermarket in Shanghai. 

So there's a real sense of disparity emerging, and people are starting to get quite angry because there's fewer dollars around. Certainly this year, a lot of people have either lost jobs or lost hours. And we're just simply not able to purchase the food that we're growing here in this country. 

So the push for this idea of food sovereignty is gaining a lot of momentum. And the way that we're seeing it played out is small food producers are starting to just push aside the middlemen and get rid of this idea that we must produce for the commodity market, and setting up structures where they can take their food straight to the people who need it. There's a big push from fisheries and small farms to go from farm straight to consumer, and at a price point that makes it affordable. 

And that's a big kind of middle finger to not only the government's push to increase commodity and high-end value food exports for the dollar, but also for conventional farming and conventional food systems. So that's probably the most interesting thing that's happening for me at the moment is a little bit of a political rumbling, from a grassroots level where food producers are just saying, ‘We don't want to be part of this system anymore. It's not serving our people as it should.’

Alicia: That's really interesting to me, especially because I'm on an island colony that is also making these big grassroots push — pushes towards food sovereignty that are really difficult, really challenging. Especially because here being a colony, not having control over wages, not having control over how things are exploited, how things are imported. I now want to take a deeper look at what's going on over there, because that might be, might have some interesting things that are applicable to the situation as well because I think island nations probably have a lot more in common around this than maybe they think, just because of so many cultural and political differences. 

But you recently produced an audio series called ‘A Carnivore's Crisis,’ and I wanted to know what was the inspiration for that, the background. And how did you make it all happen, because it's really so expansive?

Nicola: Yeah, it really was a big project. 

It started from a conversation that I had with my Australian husband actually, who I drove to New Zealand to farm with me, but also one of my closest girlfriends who's another producer and she's based in Sydney. 

So, she felt very strongly that I had left her behind. So, we started talking about ways that we could work together. And it was three years ago, and I had made the decision with my husband to leave Sydney. I worked in Australia for, as I said, almost 20 years, with a short stint in London in between. And worked in the media over there, and held a number of senior editorial positions towards the end of my stint in Australia, and was with BuzzFeed for the final couple of years as managing editor. 

And I just was at the end of my teether. I was burnt out. The hours were too long. The emotional, physical drain was just too much. And during that time, my husband and I had a miscarriage. So we lost our first baby. And it's incidents like that, or moments like that in one's life, I think, people take stock.

And for me, in the weeks and months after that food took on a very peculiar and specific role. And I used it to try and heal myself to try and become not just physically strong, but also a little more emotionally robust. And it also just served a very specific health purpose. I cut out all of the things that I knew weren't feeding me, and started eating in a way that would sort of build my immunity and resilience and all of that kind of stuff. 

And that started a conversation about, ‘Well, do I need to get closer to my food source in order for me to really make a good goal of this?’ And we had an opportunity through my father to work on a piece of land that he leased. And because things just weren't going that well for us in Sydney, we said, ‘Yes.’ 

And so we made this transition from working in central Sydney on to a rural property and trying to become farmers three years ago, right at the time where some of the big research reports were coming out from the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the eight Lancet Commission and Oxford University that were taking a really good hard look at what the global agricultural sector was doing to the land and to ecology and diversity and the drain on resources. And I'm sure for your listeners who are interested in the food space, that information won't be new. 

But what jumped out at me from the media coverage off the back of that was how focused it became on one tenant of the research, which was an increase in plant-based diets, and a decrease in meat and dairy across the board for Western societies or Western countries would have the biggest impact. And yet within the detail of the reports was a lot of regional nuance, and a lot of findings and suggestions about how to best farm certain land and certain countries sustainably. And I didn't see that being reported. 

And I was curious about that, because obviously we'd found ourselves on land, farming cattle right at the time where cattle farmers had been pinpointed as environmental enemies and certainly degraders of the environment. Yet here in New Zealand, we operate a very different farming system to what a lot of big cattle ranches or what feedlotters do in the United States or in Australia, or in the EU. 

So, that was the start of the audio documentary series, these conversations about what is missing from this debate or from this conversation, and is the plant-based diet the best course of action from an environmental point of view? And that's a very important thing for me to raise, that we were looking — or I was really concerned about the environmental impacts. We didn't dive into the health implications, or the moral or ethical implications of eating meat at that early stage. I was really focused on, ‘Is the land going to be degraded by what we do here by running cattle?’

So, that was the start of it. And then we pitched to get some development money from the Australian Documentary Conference, which I'd been involved with in my previous job in Sydney. We received a little bit of development money, and then Audible, which is a Amazon subsidiary funded the commission. And they were really interested to tell the story, or help tell the story, and were also interested in pushing it out to more of a, I suppose an international audience. 

So we started thinking about, ‘Well, what's the other aspect of the conversation that we — my production partner Naima Brown and I — don't have a lot of experience in?’ And that was certainly the food and cooking space. 

And so we started having conversation with a British chef named Rachel Khoo, who was at a point in her career where she wanted to dive into something a little — I suppose a little more challenging for her audience, maybe. She'd been fronting TV shows and writing beautiful cookbooks. And she was now based in Sweden with two small children, and she was also thinking about the environmental impact of her — not only her family's eating lifestyle, but also the way that she was writing recipes for others. 

That was the style of the conversation. And so we just started developing it over the course of about six months. We were fully funded by Audible, so we had obviously budget to travel and to hire crew. And we divided up the storyline to basically try and canvass the export market and export touchpoints from New Zealand and Australia. 

So thinking about New Zealand and Australia as it's — colonies, directing their food products up into the UK and what that meant from an environmental point of view now, and then looking at the West Coast of the United States because a lot of Australian and New Zealand beef ended up in California. But California also is the hotspot for some really interesting food tech and plant-based product lines coming out of the likes of companies, such as Memphis Meats and — well, Memphis Meats has not to market yet with lab grown meat. But Impossible Burgers and Beyond Burgers, and some of the other interesting Silicon Valley startups. 

So it was, from the first conversation through to when we locked off the documentary, around 13 months of production. 

And then unfortunately, we were due to release the podcast right in the month where countries started to shut down due to COVID. So our commissioners made the decision to hold the documentary through ’til August, when it was initially slated for March. And unfortunately in that time, the foodscape completely changed, went into flux. And it would have been nice to have added another couple of chapters or episodes into that storyline to take account for what was happening in the meat processing lines, and what was happening with food logistics and people's ability to actually access good, healthy food during COVID.

So yes, that was how it sort of came together. The details of it, I would encourage anyone to go and listen. But I can dive into that, if you want me to unpack that as well.

Alicia: Oh no, they should listen to it. 

But I wanted to hear, what surprised you when you were creating this series, if anything? And did it change how you personally relate to meat or to these plant-based meat products that you were mentioning?

Nicola: Yeah, that's an interesting one. 

I think the most surprising thing for me, when I started having initial research conversations with people and trying to book talent or put together our production schedule, there were — there was a lot of fear, which surprised me enormously. I had to work very hard to get people on microphone and to put them in a space or into a conversation with me or my fellow producer Naima, where they felt comfortable to share detail and to be honest and truthful. 

And these people were primarily coming out of the farming space, but also food manufacturing, cooks, chefs. I think that was a byproduct of the two years of a lot of vitriolic conversation around diet choices and activism via food. 

So a lot of the farmers who we spoke to, before we turned on the mic, were very cautious with me. And I was accused on a number of occasions of being a vegan spy or a vegan activist. There was an assumption that I had an agenda. 

And that goes both ways. We had a very long and involved interview conversation with a UK food writer who I had — admire enormously, and they ended up pulling out of the documentary because upon reflection they thought our agenda was pro-meat and that we were working for the meat lobbyists.

Which, again, is not true at all. I may be a farmer, but I'm also a journalist. And I come from a public broadcasting background, which means a lot to me. And so my sense of journalistic integrity is incredibly important, and goes to my reputation and how I actually get work. I was taken aback by that, that they just said, ‘No, we don't want anything to do with it.’ 

And that just continued throughout the entire production process. There were so many phone calls once we were in sight, or — I had a producer travel to a valley in, north of the UK And suddenly, I had a dairy farmer on the phone to me saying, ‘You need to explain this to me again. How can I trust you? Are you sure that this is — that you don't have an agenda?’ And I was like, ‘Yes, this is what we want to do. We just want to give a platform to people to share their experiences and their expertise, and then try and craft a narrative out of those voices that offers a broad range of opinions.’

And so, I think, the end result for me hearing all of those stories and how much discomfort and animosity has kind of driven the conversation over the last couple of years led me to make a couple of decisions in my own life and in my own diet. And that has been to spend a lot more time having more conversations to try and find a space where we can talk about food and the environment, and farming’s impact on the environment in a way where — that it doesn't descend to argument. 

And my diet choices and the role that food and cooking plays within that is really important. I often have these conversations over a meal, and that gesture of sharing food is often a way to calm the space. 

And the consequence of me learning what I did throughout the course of the documentary has shifted my diet in that eating red meat is still part of it, but a minor part. And the reasons for that are very firmly focused on environmental impacts. I do believe that in the West, we need to drastically reduce the amount of red meat consumption. But that's not to say that it needs to disappear entirely because meat serves a particular role, or plays a particular role in a lot of people's cultures and diets for health reasons. 

When it came to looking at some of the replacement products or plant-based manufacturing that's going on, I have a lot of views on this and the way in which corporate or food manufacturers are peddling protein as opposed to actually producing good food. I don't eat it. I wouldn't touch it. The majority of our weekly diet is either vegetarian or plant based, but there would — nothing would convince me to purchase a plant-based burger patty. I think that they are doing consumers a massive disservice with the products that they are producing.

Alicia: Why do you think that?

Nicola: Because I think that corporate food or big food especially has co-opted some very genuine attempts to try and make eating for the planet a little easier. But the actual product that is being produced, I'm a little skeptical over what the various isolates are doing from an environmental point of view but also for our health. It's essentially baking recipes. 

And given what I said earlier, I made a conscious decision to cut out processed foods from my diet for health reasons. The plant-based burger, to me, is a processed food. And so it just doesn't serve a role, or doesn't have a role to play in my diet. 

But what I am concerned mostly about from an environmental point of view is where those ingredients are coming from, how they're farmed or how they're produced. There's an New Zealand manufacturer that I visited during the documentary, and they make high, really good quality, plant-based sausages and burgers. And the bulk of the bulk of the ingredients comes from Europe, and Canada and the Pacific Islands. 

So the Pacific Islands produce the coconut ingredients, which is great. It's good for the Pacific Islands economy. Canada is where a lot of the grains are coming from. Hemp is coming from the EU. 

And some of those ingredients, like pea — well, pea and pea-isolates, soy, corn, barley, wheat, the way that they are farmed in some of the big corporate farming spaces is as monocrops. And those monocrops might be rotated, but they're certainly not a diverse farming system. There's typically a lot of inputs in terms of fertilizer, in order to produce those crops over and over again in the same soil spaces. 

And to think that that is environmentally beneficial is concerning to me, knowing what I know now about the way in which soil has degraded over the past 40 years with the advent of conventional farming systems, not just in New Zealand but the world over, and the increasing use of inputs, whether it be fertilizers or pesticides and herbicides. 

So that's where the plant-based products are coming from. They're coming from big monocrops. Me, personally, I just would prefer to eat plants that are growing in vegetable gardens locally as opposed to products that are processed and manufactured abroad.

Alicia: Right. 

No, I agree obviously. I like to hear other people's articulation of how this works. And obviously, you know so much more than me so it's nice to hear that in such depth.

But for you, is cooking a political act?

Nicola: Is cooking a political act. How would you describe political, or how would you define? 

Alicia: Right. 

This is a question I ask everyone. And I suppose it is a bit of a trick question in that — in the answer, one must be defining what political is for them. 

I talked to Amanda Cohen, who's a chef in New York City earlier today. And her immediate response was ‘Yes, of course, it is because food, what we buy has all these impacts on the environment, on labor and on our bodies, on health, and these things are regulated by governmental bodies, etc, etc.’ And so it's really a question that is about how you view — people personally define what politics means in their own lives, or what politics means more broadly. 

Nicola: Yeah, totally. 

I mean, the reason I push it back onto you, because I've been thinking a lot about that term of what — there is a phrase that's bandied around a lot at the moment, which is ‘Food is political.’ And it's just said as a throwaway without- 

Alicia: Right. To placate. [Laughter.]

Nicola: Oh, completely.

The ability to unpack that is so important, especially at the moment. So when I'm thinking about this idea of what food citizenship means, citizenship, of course, plays an essential role in the political space and in politics writ large. 

I would say cooking is an act of citizenship for me. And what I mean to say by that is when I cook — when I put together a meal, I'm actually thinking about a very small, personal set of concerns which I hold on to because the ripple-on effect, I think, has a political consequence. 

So when I say that food, as I elaborated earlier, played a particular role in my life, when, around my miscarriage but also around the birth of my first child, my daughter. And the thinking behind that was food is the basis of my health and good health, and I wanted to never have to enter the public health system or hospital system again, as long as I could avoid it. So many hours waiting. So I didn't want to be a burden on an already overstretched health system, both here in New Zealand and in Australia, so if I could do anything to avoid being in that space I would. 

That has weighed heavily on me, because food, and certainly cheap food — there's a lot of research around this, that people purchasing cheap food are basically just offsetting — or offsetting might not be the right word, but pushing the burden onto a different part of our society. So to eat a certain way is to potentially develop health concerns, or health issues later on in life. 

But to spend time, the alternative to spend time now if you can afford to, or if the food that you have access to is at the right price point, is to have less of a burden on the healthcare system. So that in itself, for me, is a political act, but it's also about citizenship and that I don't want to be a burden on it on a system that's already stretched. So I don't know if that's a particularly useful answer. 

But there are a bunch of other ways in which cooking and food works in our house in a similar way. So it's also about knowledge, sharing, and trying to unpack the ways in which we cook for others as a gesture of community or friendship or culture. 

When I say culture, I mean acknowledging the past and current situation that colonialism has in New Zealand. So when we serve meals, what are we serving? Are we paying attention to local ingredients? And local is to say foods that can and should be growing here, not just local that happens to be tomatoes grown in glass houses down the road. 

So it's a really complicated question, and I'm not answering it particularly well. Why don't I summarize it in saying that, yes, cooking is absolutely political. But it is deeply, deeply personal in the politics that I live out. I'm also aware that to have any kind of political sway or influence, I need to live my words. 

And that was part of the reason for leaving Sydney and coming to where I am now to farm and to learn this stuff from the inside of the industry. It's one thing to say, ‘I care about worker’s rights and justice, and I care about the soil and the environment’ and to not do anything about that. So, yes, the answer is cooking is deeply, deeply political. But for me, and I hope for many others out there, it is also incredibly small and personal in the way that those politics are played out.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

Nicola: My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Your writing has been such a beacon for me this year, Alicia, so thank you for all your good work.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much. That means so much. And I love ‘A Carnivore's Crisis,’ and I can't wait for your book as well.

Nicola: Yes, me too. Need to finish that. [Laughter.]  

Alicia: That's the thing I say when someone's like, ‘I can't wait for your book.’ Yeah, I'm like, ‘Oh, me too. Can't wait to read my own book.’

Nicola: Yeah, the idea of writing a book sounded great when it was just a concept. And then sitting down for the hours has been the challenge.

Alicia: Exactly, exactly. Yes. Well, thank you again. I hope you have a great day-

Nicola: Well, good luck with your — and happy holidays for you.

Alicia: Thank you. You too, you too.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe

Jing Gao is now food-world-famous for her eponymous line of strikingly labeled Sichuan ingredients, Fly by Jing (the stuff is good). But before she launched what has become a super-successful purveyor of Sichuan chili sauce, mala spice mix, Zhong sauce, doubanjiang, preserved black beans, and more, she ran a fast-casual restaurant in Shanghai called Baoism.

This switch was brought upon by her love for ingredients—for sourcing them well, for putting them together well—and regional Chinese cuisines. We talked about all this, as well as why her product is more expensive than the commonly found Lao Gan Ma. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Jing. Thanks so much for coming on.

Jing: Thank you for having me.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Jing: Yes. So I was born in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province and food capital of China. But my father was a nuclear physicist and a professor. So we moved around with his job a lot. So I ended up growing up all over the world, really. Germany, England, Austria, France, Italy, and then Canada. So I would consider myself Canadian. I lived there for probably the longest out of anywhere else. And, yeah, so it was kind of an interesting upbringing, you know, being put into a new country with a new culture and a new language pretty much every year and needing to code switch. So I ate, I would say, you know, it was definitely a mix of different things, but a lot of home cooking. So the through line was definitely, you know, kind of, yeah, I would say like homestyle Sichuan food that my mom would make at home, and we didn't really eat out that much. So it was, yeah, it was definitely my first love, which is what brought me back to China.

Alicia: I've read that you were working in brand management in business development, what made you move toward food, and especially toward opening that fast-casual restaurant Baoism, in Shanghai?

Jing: Yeah, so I found myself in Beijing, in college on an exchange semester. And that was around 2008, so right around the time of the Olympics. And I just fell in love with the energy of the city. I didn't know what to expect when I went there, because I was so young when I left China. But I was just astounded by the modernity of it all, the energy, how dynamic the city was — just kind of the juxtaposition of the ancient, the ancient city, you know, buildings that have been around for 800, 900 years, you know, against the backdrop of skyscrapers. 

And I realized, when I was there, just how disconnected I'd become from my heritage, and from, in many ways from myself. And so I started to dig in deeper into the culture. And what I found the most fascinating was the food culture. 

Beijing is interesting, because it's the capital of China. So you have the regional government offices of all of the provinces in Beijing, and each of the offices would have their own restaurants, and they would fly in chefs from those provinces. And, you know, what people don't realize is how vastly different the regional cuisines are in China, and so it is actually really hard, even in Beijing, to find, you know, food that was super true to those regions. 

And so those government restaurants, government office restaurants, were where I started to learn about the regional differences. And I ended up helping a friend out with her food tour company in Beijing and learning even more about the history of the regional cuisines that way, and it just dawned on me how little we knew in the West about Chinese food and culture and its people and how much misinformation there was about it. And, you know, so I started writing about it at first on my blog and for different publications, which led to taking celebrity chefs around when they would come to China and doing some television work. And all of it really was with the goal to shine more light on the cuisine, and, you know, show how complex and diverse it is. At the time, I was working in tech, which is what allowed me to be in Asia. And I eventually realized that I wanted to — I always knew I wanted to start my own business. When the food writing kind of took off, I realized I wanted to create something more tangible. And so that took the form of a restaurant. I was inspired by Sweetgreen and Chipotle’s models in North America, and I didn't really see an equivalent of that in Shanghai at the time. And so, yeah, my restaurant was using that model and able to provide food at an accessible kind of price point, but also featuring, you know, a modern kind of expression of  different regional cuisines in China.

Alicia: How did you move from that to launching Fly by Jing?

Jing: As I'm sure, you know, from talking to restaurateurs and people in food, running a restaurant is no joke. It's an operational challenge. And I realized through that process, as much as we were successful doing what we did, we had international and local acclaim and won awards. It was widely celebrated. But I realized I didn't want to operate restaurants. 

The next step would have been to grow it as a chain, and what I realized I loved about the experience was the brand creation, the product creation, the storytelling. And I wanted to reach even more people by doing that. So I actually sold the restaurant to my business partner at the time, and in seeking kind of what my personal expression is within Chinese food, I went to my hometown, Chengdu, and I spent some time there, studying with probably one of the greatest living Sichuan chefs, Yu Bo. 

I just absorbed everything that he had to offer, and he was very kind to take me under his wings and read all of these century-year-old cookbooks in his library. Ate so much street food. And it was the food I remember growing up with as a child, these places called fly restaurants. And it's a very unique part of Chinese food culture. Fly restaurants are so named, because they are usually hole-in-the-walls, kind of rundown, dirty, but they are considered so delicious, like the flavor trumps everything. And so it's so delicious that it draws people like flies. They’re my earliest food memories, eating with my family in Chengdu, and so I just had such a love for them. And they're such an equalizer, as well—you have people of all different backgrounds, you see Ferraris parked next to bicycles. Everybody's literally just there, in that communion of those delicious flavors for that one moment in time. And it's something that really deeply inspired me. What I also saw was that a lot of these fly restaurants, you know, there's the old-school ones that are run by elderly mom-and-pop teams, but then there's also the new-school fly restaurants that I saw popping up. And with young people really just kind of innovating and pushing the boundaries of what Sichuan food and even homestyle street food could be. And so I was very inspired by that. 

I knew that because of the way that I grew up, and my unique set of experiences, I needed to figure out what my own expression was. And so it was through experimentation and kind of synthesizing my experience having traveled and eaten all over the world and, I wouldn't say bridging west to east, but definitely taking all of my personal experiences and putting it into my dishes, I started to cook something that I think was uniquely my own, and went back to Shanghai and started this underground supper club that I named Fly by Jing, and took that on the road, traveled to cities all over like from New Zealand, Australia, you know, the U.S., Europe, and did pop-ups. At the time, I didn't know that I was going to start a condiments company; at the time, I was just cooking and carrying my suitcases of ingredients around with me, because I realized that the flavors taste as they do in Sichuan because of the very specific ingredients, and I had spent years by that point sourcing those ingredients, and I knew that they were super rare even within China. 

I mean, China is such a massive country. The highest quality ingredients are immediately snatched up whenever they're available. And so, of course, there wasn't going to be any available in the places I was going. And cooking for hundreds and thousands of people, I saw this immediate feedback on their faces, and when they tasted the food, I knew that, okay, these flavors are universal, and people love them; they just have no access to them and have never even heard of some of these ingredients. Kind of a light bulb went off, and I realized I wanted to make these flavors more accessible to everyone and that I could do that maybe through the sauces.

Alicia: You mentioned you're not changing the flavors for different audiences, but you are bringing these flavors to an audience that maybe didn't grow up with them. And because you had this experience with Baoism, serving these regional cuisines within China, what did you change, if anything, for Fly by Jing to make it so kind of globally appealing?

Jing: So I think with Baoism, as well as with Fly by Jing, I was looking for a modern expression of those flavors that are traditional. So at Baoism, we combined different flavor profiles from different regions, and we made a red braised pork dish that is a very kind of characteristic of Eastern Chinese regions like Shanghai, but we served it almost like carnitas-style. So a pulled pork version of the hong shao rou, which is usually served in chunks of pork belly. And we also served that with pickled cucumbers, and cilantro, and peanuts that were more evocative of the Taiwanese region, and the gua bao, the steamed bun itself, is rooted in Taiwan. 

We also had a Cantonese style, like black pepper—usually that's like black pepper beef, but we paired it with crispy tofu. And so it was always kind of like, a bit more whimsical and a bit more unexpected. 

I was always interested in kind of, like, defying or giving the diner something that they didn't expect, or, you know, that they expected one thing, but having something completely different show up on their palate. 

I approached that with Fly by Jing, as well. Some of the ingredients in the sauces that we make have literally never been put together before, and I know this because of just the difficulty in sourcing and in combining those ingredients, there's a lot of challenges along the way. The way that, again, it's like—I realized that I can only, for me, I can only cook what I know, and what I know, is a kind of amalgamation of where I've been, what I've found, and what techniques I've learned. That's how I approach it, and I think my background, the products, they're rooted in tradition. And to me, that means really understanding the cultural significance, the way it's evolved over time, the provenance of the ingredients, and then made for the way that we eat today. Super versatile, something that has no rules bound to it, that you can add to your existing kind of lifestyle.

Alicia: The Fly by Jing tagline is “not traditional, but personal,” and have people kind of pushed back because I know that there's been so much demand for this idea of authenticity, especially around cuisines like Chinese cuisine. What is the response to that? And also, is that tagline kind of a push against that already?

Jing: Yeah, you're right. It is a push against that. 

We launched a couple of years ago. So I actually moved to L.A. about exactly two years ago to launch Fly by Jing here. And, you know, we came up with this rebrand just a couple of months ago, and we started working on the rebrand about a year ago. And at that point, you know, we'd already been in market and I definitely started noticing a lot of people trying to put us in a box—in a neat little box that will allow them to understand what we are, because we were the first modern Chinese chili sauce company to launch in the U.S. At the time, in 2018, Lao Gan Ma had been around, but definitely had not reached kind of the mainstream cult status as it has now. 

I found a lot of people were, you know, because our first product was a chili sauce—and we have many products that we've launched since then—but because our first product was chili sauce, a lot of people would say, ‘Oh, is this just a gentrified version of Lao Gan Ma.’ Or, you know, you know, ‘I've been to China once so I know what chili sauce is,’ like, ‘is this gonna meet my expectations’ kind of thing, or, you know, ‘I have a Chinese girlfriend, so I know what this is all about.’ 

A lot of it was coming from people who are not Chinese, and trying to kind of make it fit in their minds. Even some Chinese people or Asian people would have kind of, I realized, this very ingrained view in their own minds of what Chinese food should represent. And I felt like it was often prescribed on us. Growing up, my parents would tell me, or, growing up, we were always very cost conscious. And Chinese food—you know, this is a very common thing with immigrant families— the more authentic it is, the cheaper it is, the more authentic it is. And so, there's definitely a lot of connotations, I guess, around the cuisine and what it represents to so many people and so, I wanted to move us away from that, because to me, this product is such a personal expression to me that I knew the ingredients had never been put together before, these ingredients have never been exported before. And so this tastes different to even people in my hometown in Sichuan. 

My family tasted it and they're like, ‘Oh, this is different. This is interesting.’ Because everybody in China has their own chili sauces and homemade condiments, and everyone's is so vastly different. Some have meat inside, like beef, and some have dried seafood, some have black beans, fermented fava beans—everyone has such a different way of making these sauces that most people in China just eat their homemade stuff; they don't even buy stuff from the stores. 

So I wanted to show that we're not just a monolith. Asian food, and just even Chinese food, and even breaking it down even further, Sichuan food. It's not something you can neatly fit into a box that makes it easier for you to comprehend. There's so much complexity; there's so much depth; and every version of it deserves its own space to be, and so that was the impetus behind the rebrand and and calling it a very personal product. And since we did the rebrand nobody has—well, you know, people who don't know about our brand and just kind of see it on a surface level will still try to place their judgments on it, but for the people who have seen our rebrand, our customers and people who are interested in digging deeper into these things, their response has largely been very, very positive. And people really get it.

Alicia: I saw you on Instagram, I think this weekend, kind of responding to people with the idea that you've gentrified chili crisp or something. And I had already written this question because I know that people especially—it's a woman-run brand, it has really cool branding, there are people who are going to say that t's too expensive and that sort of thing. How have you responded to this publicly? What is your go-to response when people say that the brand is more about this kind of millennial aesthetic, rather than motivated by flavor or important sourcing and that sort of thing?

Jing: Mm hmm.

The people that make those comments, they don't really say it's for the aesthetic at the expense of these other things, because I don't think they dig deep enough to know about those other things. But usually it's like an ad or something like that. You know, they're just seeing it for the first time. And I think the assumption is always that, again, I think there's such a perception of—their perception of whether this is just an expensive chili sauce is very much colored by people's views on the value of ethnic food, right? 

Broadly, and in this case, Chinese food, and Chinese food history in this country has been one that has been forced to be very cheap, because of expectations, and evolved this way because of many different factors, one of which is the Chinese Exclusion Act in the 1800s. The immigrants that came here had no choice but to produce Chinese food and change it up based on the available ingredients, and based on expectations of its value. And so, for a very long time, Chinese food is seen to be extremely cheap and affordable. But as a result, it's become extremely popular and proliferated. There's 50,000, Chinese restaurants in this country alone. So it's arguably one of the most popular cuisines here. And so everybody has some interaction or some kind of connection to it. And so people feel that very personally, and have very, you know, strong feelings about what it represents in their mind. There's definitely a lot of pushback on the price. But that pushback I find is, oftentimes has not been very thoughtful. Because if you think really about it, what does a price of a product—what are the components of that, it's the people behind it, making a living wage; it is ethical sourcing; it is transparent sourcing. If it's a product that tastes incredible, any chef or anybody who's cooked knows that what you put into your dish is everything, right? The same dish made with different grades of ingredients will produce completely different things. I think there's not enough thought put to that.Our response usually is just explaining that this tastes different from everything else, because this is made differently from everything else. People also forget about economies of scale. They want to compare—because when you see an ad on Instagram, you kind of tend to think that you equate all of these companies the same. So it's like a small, tiny company, you're seeing the same ad on the same platform as a giant monolith, or giant company. They often think that we're maybe at the same scale of something like Lao Gan Ma—it is a billion dollar company, and we're completely bootstrapped. I was the only employee up until August of this year of this business. Actually, I wasn't even on payroll. It's comparing apples to something completely different. We do explain it without judgment. We're like, Look, we can't compete against the economies of scale of something like Lao Gan Ma, but we can be proud of the quality of our ingredients, the intentionality behind it, the the craft behind it, and we're a very small team and female minority run. Usually, the response is excellent. We've seen a lot of white men apologize to us on Instagram. We also recognize you can't win every battle and so we don't need to sweat about it. We sometimes will have some fun with the trolls and troll them right back. 

Alicia: I read that your business kind of boomed during the pandemic, which I think has happened, you know, for a few kind of artisanal brands in food doing stuff that will make people's home cooking more interesting. You mentioned that you just hired people—how has that been, to kind of grow so quickly? And under these kinds of conditions? How have you adapted to that?

Jing: Yeah, so, this year has really been unimaginable in so many ways. It's been a crazy year for me personally and professionally, as it has been for so many of us. 

I think, at the beginning of the year, we were still just kind of growing at a steady pace; we were probably 20 to 30%, month over month. It was completely bootstrapped. I didn't have venture capital funding; I didn't have 1000s and 1000s of dollars to pump into advertising. So it was growing largely organically, through word of mouth and through media mentions, but in March, when there's so much uncertainty brewing, and my factories on the ground were also shut down since the beginning of the year, because of COVID on the ground in China, there was alot of uncertainty, and it was quite scary, especially as more and more kind of blatantly racist comments were popping up on our socials. We had no idea whether this business would make it. 

But then in April, we had a really glowing review about us and feature about the product in the New York Times by Sam Sifton, and that coincided, obviously, with the lockdown, and we saw sales spike immediately. And with the New York Times article, we actually sold out of three months’ worth of inventory overnight. It's obviously—it was great, but it was also highly distressing, because the factories were not up and running yet. And so I had to overcome a lot to get that up and running again. And it's just seemed like at every corner, there was a new challenge, a new issue that was sending us back, and we started taking preorders, which was a godsend, because we probably wouldn't have been able to survive without it. We eventually had about 30,000 people on a preorder list. Because we were also being very communicative and transparent with our customers, as to all of the delays and the reasons and we were also donating about 10 percent of our sales at that time to organizations feeding the frontline. And, and also, in June, two organizations that were doing essential work in Black communities, I think a lot of our customers were very happy to support, to wait for their product, if it meant that their money was going to support these causes. 

There were obviously also some people that were just extremely adamant that they needed their chili sauce immediately in a pandemic. Luckily it was very, very few. But yeah, I mean everything from, you know, setting up a whole new supply chain in the U.S. because the Chinese bottlers were unable to do it. And to you know, custom delays of up to a month, to the sauces literally breaking the machines when we got to the co-packer so we had to bottle 30,000 jars by hand. All of these things just—it was endless issues. 

But when we finally got our stock back, which was about July, the feedback from customers was incredible. You could see that as soon as they received it, they would come back on the site and buy four more jars o give to their friends. I think this year has been really a landmark year for us. And I was able to hire four people. We're actually doing a little kind of 2021 strategic planning session right now, and I'm so excited about all of the different directions that we're going, and all of the opportunities that we have ahead of us. We started as C-to-C. And out of necessity, because it is just the most efficient way for someone without capital to get started. But now we are looking at entering retail this year, and, and some new products coming down the horizon. So I'm very excited about that.

Alicia: That sounds amazing. And so for you, is cooking a political act?

Jing: I think so. It's the reason why I got started with this, I felt like. There were so many factors that I couldn't control that were coloring the way that people looked at Chinese food and looked at me as a result, and I hated categorization more than anything, putting people in boxes that make it easier for you to comprehend, but that grossly misunderstands or underestimates them. 

With Chinese food, it's always been kind of at the lowest rungs of what's known as the hierarchy of taste. And that's the value that we prescribe to different cuisines that really is colored by the value we prescribe on their people and the immigrants from those countries. So there's no, there's no doubt, in China, the Chinese food has value, but I found that in the West—countries like the U.S., which ends up influencing global culture as a whole through the power of the U.S. media—I felt like there was something I could do here,  which is why I chose to base Fly by Jing in Los Angeles, and in the U.S., I wanted to tackle the problem at the source. I think through the work of newer companies like mine and some of the new-school restaurants, even, that have opened in New York and L.A., run by young people who are really pushing the conversation forward about what Chinese food is and what it could become, we are working to make it be more seen. The byproduct of that, and I think, with my rebrand, I was telling a very personal story that was around seeking belonging and coming home to self, and I found that our goal is really now becoming creating space for all of these different stories to exist, because they deserve to be told, and it felt highly vulnerable for me to share my story. But the amount of feedback that we got, and then the people that really connected to that, from all walks of life, really showed me that this is a universal thing. And so through what we're doing in something as little as a Sichuan chili oil, hopefully we can create space for everyone to tell their stories.

Alicia: Thank you so much, Jing, for taking the time out to chat.

Jing: Thank you so much for having me.

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I have been a big fan of Claire Sprouse’s work since way before she opened Hunky Dory in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. Through Tin Roof Drink Community, she’d been challenging the bar world to think sustainably and work differently. And by opening Hunky Dory—which used to be a place I went regularly after getting a manicure, to zone out at the bar and think—she has put the ideas into practice. We spoke late in 2020 about how she got into the hospitality industry, how the restaurant has been weathering the pandemic (it’s currently closed for the winter), and how she researches sustainability. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Claire, thank you so much for taking the time out to chat.

Claire: Hi, thanks for having me. I'm a huge fan of your work, and so this is very exciting for me to be on your show.

Alicia: Thank you so much. I'm a big fan of yours as well. So can you tell me about where you grew up in what you ate?

Claire: I grew up in Texas. My mother is Filipino. She was also a nurse and worked a lot. So, to be honest, she would cook Filipino food every once in a while, but we ate a lot of fast food. And Ragu bottled spaghetti sauce and things like that. But aside from all of that, we always had mango and rice on the table. That's a very distinct memory, like every single meal, whether it's breakfast, lunch, or dinner, there was always mango and rice. And it didn't matter if it was Domino's Pizza or Chef Boyardee. There was always mango and rice on the table. As an adult, though, I spent a lot of time in Houston and got exposed to a lot of different foods and definitely expanded my food diet and vocabulary beyond the fast food chains as an adult.

Alicia: Well, what led you to working in the restaurant industry?

Claire: I got my degree in art history and anthropology, and I was doing some nonprofit museum work in Texas and Houston, which has an amazing art scene, and was making the rounds of unpaid internships. And I was like, Oh, I should probably make some money. So I actually started at a small restaurant, just because I knew a lot of the staff there from hanging out the same local bar, and started as a server and fell in love with cocktails, which has been my focus more or less since then, and worked as a barback and kind of made my way up into the bar manager role. All at that same restaurant.

Alicia: What has kept you in the industry, and what has led to you focusing so much on sustainability in bars and restaurants?

Claire: What has kept me in the industry, honestly, leading up to that first couple restaurant jobs, bar jobs, I did have a very tight professional community, like the art museum world is very competitive and kind of isolating, in a lot of ways, your work. And so I really liked this team mentality. We're all up against all the odds, together, and so I really, I really loved that kind of ethos. So just getting it done, and working together to make that happen. My first restaurant job was this kind of fancy barbecue place, and the woman that was the chef-owner there, she was really leading the way in kind of the farm-to-table movement in the early to mid 2000s in Houston, and then in a city that was so meat-centric, especially at that time, that definitely informed a lot of the ways that I initially thought about what restaurant food could be and what cocktails could be. And then kind of coinciding with that, I started doing a couple shifts at another restaurant. I think I was working at three different restaurants at the same time, because I was just really hungry to learn everything about the industry and get a lot of different experience. I started working at this nose-to-tail restaurant. There were some chefs that used to work at St. John's in London, and very much took that model and just transplanted it into Houston. And so I learned a lot about nose-to-tail cooking, in terms of meat, in terms of animals, and how a lot of that was rooted in cultural and historical necessity, so I was kind of seeing both sides of the spectrum: these heritage techniques that a lot of them came from the countryside in Europe, and then seeing it in a setting, going into fancy cocktails from garden to the glass.

I don't think I thought about either of those things in terms of, ‘Oh, I'm like starting my career in sustainability.’ But I was just like, ‘Oh, that's really smart. And that makes sense. And why isn't everybody doing this?’ 

I eventually moved to San Francisco and started digging deeper and more intentionally into sustainability. But when I was out in San Francisco, that started from a perspective focused on water, which kind of circled back to these initial experiences I had, and in the restaurant industry, and so it all kind of came full circle once I got to San Francisco.

Alicia: And how has sustainability colored your career since you started to focus and dig in intentionally into these issues?

Claire: Oh, my gosh, once you start thinking that way, you can't go back, and so it's the lens that I looked through everything. 

To be honest, when I first started doing it in California and speaking about it, and saying the word “sustainability” and cocktails and restaurants out loud, I was working on one particular project, and I was actually really nervous, I was like, ‘Oh, I don't know if this is something like a standard I want to be—it's something I want to hold myself to, but I don't know if I want to publicly be held accountable to it.’ Because it seemed really daunting. And a lot of the information out there isn't made for restaurant people, when you talk about carbon footprint; I read books about carbon footprint, it's like they're written by carbon footprint nerds and not people that are working 12-hour shifts and also trying to learn about wine and hospitality, and so it's very daunting at first, and then I realized that was kind of where I could fit in was, I do have a high capacity for that type of research, but also I’m not afraid to email the author of a book and be like, ‘What the hell are you talking about? Like, okay, but what about normal people?’So I found that my place that I could carve out for myself that felt also needed was distilling this information in a way that not only was approachable for restaurants, people who are juggling a million other things, but also finding the access points that were more accessible for all. I think a lot of people think of sustainability as expensive produce and solar panels and, you know, precious cocktails, and it's certainly precious, low-waste cocktails, and it certainly is all those things, but there's also all these other elements that go back to those food waste or farming perspectives that were what I thought were just smart when I first started bartending. There's also little things that help improve the bottom line of restaurants, like saving electricity and water and gas and also food waste. Those items, even though they're not as sexy and talked about, I found that they're really useful when we have set an industry that operates on such small, razor-thin margins.

Alicia: And when you opened your own space, Hunky Dory, how did you kind of bring that perspective into the building and and the model that you've been pursuing?

Claire: Well, a lot of the work that I've been doing, I thought of Hunky as the place where that could come to fruition in a way where I was making solely—I was the sole decision-maker, but also in a way where I thought it would be even, like more people could relate to it because up until this moment I was mostly doing a lot of consulting work. It's very different when you're playing with other people's money—and not even money, but time is always a luxury to devote to these goals. And so, I was like, ‘Oh, this will be great. I'm opening a restaurant with very little money in essentially a turn-key space,’ meaning, I bought an existing restaurant, and we have to make use with whatever equipment that had been here the last few years, and the bones of it, we didn't plan on changing, and also, I was doing everything by myself and can continue to do that. So, definitely cut out that time as a luxury perspective, but I was excited, because I thought I was like, ‘Okay, this is a chance to really do things on my own terms, but also make it relatable, and continue to share the things that I've been preaching about so much.’ 

We've been open for a year and a half-ish; we celebrated our one-year anniversary in February, right before shutdown. I think that we have accomplished a lot, but there's still a long way to go. And I think that's okay, even for somebody that has such lofty goals within sustainability. We're just trying to chip away at all the angles, so carbon footprint, water, food waste, so on and so on.

Alicia: And how have you been running the restaurant since the pandemic began? You know, what have you changed? What have you—how has that been, basically?

Claire: Everything's changed and right even just the easier decisions that we were a dine-in restaurant, we did some takeaway, so we didn't really have a lot of single-use material here; we were very picky about the materials that we did choose for to-go cups and things like that. And prior to this, we had reusable straws, bamboo straws, and now everything is a single-use, because we're relying more on takeout. 

But also, when we reopened with our staff, we didn't feel, I think, as a team, didn't feel comfortable handling guests’ plates and cups after they were done eating with them. We weren't really in a position to hire back all of our staff, so we had to do away with the porter position. And so everything is single use. Like if you have a sandwich outside, you throw away the paper; every cup is single use. It's made from recycled plastic. And then we're also doing a ton of packaged, bottled cocktails, and that's all in plastic. Before I'd say, it's all a give and take, because some of these things that are elements of being sustainable are at odds with each other. Like, you might always tell everybody that like you should figure out what is pertinent, urgent for your geographical area. So maybe when I was in California, I focused a lot more on water and agriculture. And then in New York, it felt very necessary to think more about trash, even though water is still an issue here. And I think a lot about carbon footprint, and because we're on the forefront of that, as an industry or the trendsetters here, but sometimes those elements are at odds with each other. And in that now, that's even more amplified like that. Your value of, you know, not using plastic is more a priority over your staff safety. It's not right and right. And so you know, there's a lot of sacrifices that we have to do, and then there were other things like our composting partner had to take a really long pause because of the city being tapped out in terms of people and resources to keep composting going. They're finally getting back online. 

We're, for the most part, all the stuff that we've done, other than those big items, we inherently built into all of our systems. And so we still don't have a lot of food waste; we're still running a very water efficient program;I still walk around turning all the lights off for everybody, whenever they leave a room. We found funny little ways to think about it. Like, the lights on our new patio are all solar-powered. We try to still kind of create community around sustainability. We turned our dining room into a retail store, and so a lot of the things that we carry here kind of speak to that value. So we have reusable straws and bottles and paper-free toilet paper. I sell toilet paper now. Like all sorts of things, and we carry books that talk about sustainability, and not just in food, but our lives,, and there's a lot of books on food in general, and I think a lot of them speak to those points as well. We're definitely not carrying, like, Bobby Flay's cookbook; we have a lot of books that—even just now, I just did a big purchase of a lot of books that talk a lot about Native and Indigenous farming and stewardship of land, and that all ties into the sustainability that we really strive for, and try to promote.

Alicia: You've pivoted the restaurant so much in this time, into doing retail, to going outside, and that sort of thing. Have you felt supported by the government locally in these changes? And in these pivots? How do you see the restaurant industry, you know, kind of recovering from this? Like, is that possible?

Claire: I would say no, at any level. There's certainly been things I'm grateful for, like outdoor dining, an extension of that. But you know, a lot of it, I've been pretty involved with some of the restaurant owner groups here, and trying to watch the politics play out in real time is extremely frustrating. And knowing that, people are really struggling out there. Sometimes the decision gets me that like, because a staffer in Albany is like, ‘Oh, I love to-go cocktails, we should keep them.’ Like those really key decisions are kind of just being made without, a lot of times, without the input of the people that are most affected. 

I was talking to somebody recently, and I think a big part of the reason why the restaurant industry hasn't gotten support, in the way that we've needed is that we haven't really been organized in our existence. You know, in the modern restaurant industry's existence. Everybody's focused on their own thing and their own PR and you see these groups complaining about the hotel or the airline industry, or the cruise ship industry, getting bailouts and things like that, and it's because those groups are highly organized, and they've been advocating and lobbying in various ways over the years, and the restaurant industry has not historically done a great job at that. So we're kind of two steps behind where we should be, slowly playing catch-up, and I think that hopefully some good will come after the election and hopefully—well, unfortunately, it probably won't come on a federal level until spring, and that'll be very late for a lot of businesses.

Even with all these people kind of speaking out, too, I worry a lot about whose voices are being heard and who's kind of taking up space at these tables? Obviously, the restaurant advisory board to Trump was an example of how that really shouldn't look, you know, even the small restaurant advisory, they had a lot of people representing the big chains and it was ultimately I think all men and mostly white men, and I kind of see that playing out too on a local level. So I've been thinking a lot about ways that that should change, when you have a lot of conversations being had about small businesses, and the owners and workers of them, and are the people speaking on our behalf representative of the people that are most affected by what's going on? And the answer is no. And so that is kind of where I've been shifting a lot of my focus this time.

Alicia: What would a governmental response be that would be beneficial to independent restaurant workers? I know that that would have to be such such a broad, and, you know, reach into so many different  sectors of the specific industry, but what would be really helpful in your perspective?

Claire: I hesitate to speak on a federal level, just because it's, so much of the problems that I think workers and small business owners face are, they're just different from location to location, and that same Band-Aid won't fit for all.

But I think, you know, obviously, gosh, universal health care would be really great. And, you know, I think that just the acknowledgement and protection of undocumented workers, which are such a huge backbone of our industry is, you know, I have to say, I was super naive about that aspect of, of it all, until we shut down and I started getting everybody on unemployment and our staff and kind of understanding the ins and outs of it all, I was pretty shocked, because I ultimately paid, still pay, unemployment taxes on our undocumented workers, and so that's really hard to watch and see. 

I think that, you know, we're all kind of—it doesn't feel good to see a lot of people having to choose between how safe they feel, and going into work. And, you know, I would understand, like, we can't all be shut down forever. But we need to start thinking about what this means long term, instead of just kind of putting on little Band-Aids and pretending that it'll be over soon. 

You know, I think a lot of it has to come down to the fact that our, the restaurant industry, you know, again, we operate on such small margins, so as owners, it doesn't really give us a lot of space to be more accountable or provide more support for our staff. So where does that change? I think, you know, real estate reform, a certain amount of tax reform for the hospitality industry, is really necessary. And then right, there's an initiative and I'm not actually sure the status on it right now, but it's to expand SNAP benefits so that more restaurants can accept them. And I think that is a really key piece of legislation that benefits everybody ultimately, and, you know, getting more subsidies to farmers that are small farmers and farmers that are, you know, shifting toward more like regenerative organic farming so that those foods are more accessible. Are those are all big key pieces to me that I've been trying to do a lot more research on and seeing where we can as an industry be active in those conversations and not just thinking about the next big crisis or thinking about propane heaters, but how are we choosing to make sure that we'renot falling back into the same cycle where we were not an active participant in the conversation surrounding food and the people that make it happen. 

But it's so complicated, and it reminds me of when I started getting more into sustainability. I was like, ‘What is carbon footprint?’ And so I'm trying to make those same phone calls that I was making back then and trying to get anyone on the phone that'll explain to me where the pressure points are and who's doing what, and the frustrating thing is that it's political. I've never in my entire life hated a system more than politics. It's so gross. I don't know when this interview will air, but tomorrow's the big day, and we're actually closed for the week of the election, just because I didn't want to be open around it. I remember being at a bar in 2016, and how the wheels fell off very quickly, on all levels, and I was like, ‘Oh, let's just give the staff some time.’ And, you know, and we're getting some projects done here as well. 2020 is a hard one. My boyfriend last night was like, ‘Despite it all, you're having a great year, you got like this great press.’ So when I look back ons ome of these, like, ‘What was your best year?’ I don't want to say 2020. It's hard, tough. It's hard to lean into the silver lining in it. 

I think it's definitely a wake-up for a lot of people, so that, I think, is a point of optimism.

Alicia: Well, for you is running a restaurant a political act?

Claire: I never—I guess I never explicitly said that. But I guess I've always found that, you know, when you're purchasing something like food, or hiring people, like how could it not be? The decisions we make, to buy produce from certain farms and to spread awareness about composting and sustainability and the way that we choose to care for employees and our community is? Yeah, I mean, especially right now, it's more political than ever.

I think at the beginning of Black Lives Matter this year, and the height of the protests, I was trying to take time and ask myself, ‘Who is my community?’ “Community” is a word that is thrown around quite a bit. And I was just trying to be like doing some journaling and trying to reflect and be self-critical about myself and my business and all the things that I think I stand for, and thinking about what about who is my community, what does that mean to me, and who do I want to be in community with, and it's not just like standing in solidarity with certain values and people, but also using our this platform, my business, the power that we hold here to, to speak out about issues as well. And so I'd say that it has to be political, if it matters to you and it matters incredibly so much to me and definitely matters to the people I want in the neighborhood, that I want to be in community with. So yeah, I take that role as a route. Like as a huge positive privilege and something I really try to hold myself accountable to every day.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much for taking the time, Claire.

Claire: Thank you, thank Thanks for having me. Um, I'm embarrassed to say I just woke up so... 

Alicia: No worries. This is wonderful.

Claire: Great, thank you. And thank you so much for all the work that you do as well. I learned so much from your perspective and, and then some of the books and the people that you point out to is like such a great rabbit hole to go down every time I get one of your newsletter. So I love it.

Alicia: Thank you. Thank you.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe

Bettina Makalintal has, in a relatively short span of time, become a mononym in food media. People know who the Vice culture writer is, what her voice is, which subjects she covers, and the compelling angles she takes on them. From Bettina’s writing on cake or font trends to thoughtful longform pieces, she is an indispensable voice. We discussed how she got into cake, how she balances short- and long-form writing, and what she’s most looking forward to when we’re all vaccinated. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Bettina, thank you so much for taking the time out.

Bettina: Hey, Alicia, thanks so much for inviting me to talk with you.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate? 

Bettina: Yeah, totally. So I grew up in suburban Philadelphia. And I moved there when I was five from the Philippines. So what I ate was sort of like—I feel like it was sort of all over the place. Like my mom just watched the Food Network a lot and like, read a lot of cooking books, and, you know, different newspaper columns, and just try to make foods from like, a lot of different inspirations. So honestly, I didn't actually grow up eating a ton of Filipino food, I feel like I ate sort of really inspired by the fact that I was just like, in the United States, and like, sometimes a Filipino food, but really, it was just like, not really tied to any cuisine in particular. 

Alicia: Mm hmm. Right, and how did you end up getting into the food world?

Bettina: Yeah, I mean, I think I mean, I think because of that, I was sort of, like always very into food, like, I would, I would read cookbooks, and watch the Food Network a lot. So it was always sort of like, the thing that I liked. And I sort of always wanted to, you know, I always wanted to be like, the food travel host who would go and eat things, and then talk about it. And so it was, that was sort of like not top of mind for me, I think for like most of my life. And then when I got to college, I sort of realized that, like, food media was a thing and was something that I could potentially do. And I ended up sort of working in the food in like, food service for a while. So that was sort of how I got into it. And then just started like freelancing and getting into the media side after that.

Alicia: Right, right. And, you know, I said this, that I was gonna ask you about emo, but from your tweets, you were into that kind of music. And so I wanted to ask, what are your favorite bands? And like you did that scene have any impact on what you eat? What you think about food, because I write so much, obviously, about veganism and like, how tied that was to those kinds of scenes.

Bettina: Yeah, totally. I mean, like, so basically, for like, my favorite bands. I mean, it was really just like, you know, the ones that were big. So honestly, my favorite band for a really long time was Brand New. But I also loved Taking Back Sunday, basically, like the entire Fueled By Ramen roster, and just that whole, like Victory Records adjacent like, popular internet band scene. 

And I think I've never thought about it in terms of food until you sort of brought up this question. But I think it did actually sort of influenced my approach to food in that when I was growing up, my best friend and I would go into Philadelphia a lot for shows, and sort of that was my way to be sort of like independent, like, I was sort of free to just go around the city and do whatever. 

And there was the Malaysian restaurant that was right by this venue that I went to a lot. And that was sort of like the first restaurant that I really became like a regular at, like my best friend and I would go there a lot. And she was not familiar with—she didn't really eat a lot of like, Asian food or anything like that. So this was sort of one of my early experiences of helping someone explore new cuisines and try new dishes together. And it became a favorite spot for us. So yeah, I mean, I think in the sense of like, the emo scene gave me a lot of independence. And that sort of helped me discover food and like eating on my own. And figuring out sort of what I liked, like independent from my parents.

Alicia: Right, right. Now, that's so fascinating. And yeah, how did you get into writing about cake? Because for Vice, you have a column called Cake Hole? Like, how did that happen?

Bettina: Yeah, totally. It's, I mean, I think that this has sort of just been like, a—I spent a few years like decorating cakes. And so I just sort of like started keeping an eye on like, what people were doing. But then sort of recently, I sort of fell into sort of like the Instagram cake scene a little bit more. And the column was sort of just like born out of like, my editors being really flexible and just being like, okay, you're really interested in this. So they've let me sort of explore my little internet obsessions in that way.

Alicia: And how did you kind of get into writing about not just food but you know, trends really on the internet, you know, the font of gentrification, and that sort of thing? Like, does that intersect with your food writing at all? Or, or do you see these things as separate?

Bettina: Yeah, I mean, I think that like I don't, I guess I don't really think about them too much. As far as like, what the writing I do is categorized as and I think I mostly just appropriate from the point of view of like, writing about whatever is interesting to me and whatever, sort of like taking up a lot of my mental space at any given moment. So yeah, I think that just like, I think that the internet is a really interesting space to sort of look at the way culture is formed. And so I think most of that, like most of my attention is in the food side of things. But I also do, I feel like, I need to be limited just to writing about food, you know?

Alicia: How do you kind of balance you know, bigger ideas of what to cover with having to write at that staff writer pace of getting stuff out there? You know, I know you've had a few features lately that have been really big hits like you're right about your work on that. The book by the Filipino food writer, that was a big hit, and other things that kind of really grasp people as more long reads, but how do you balance, like the ideas for longer pieces and the ideas for shorter pieces? And that kind of workload?

Bettina: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I feel like one of my big problems is sort of like, I sometimes can, like, be I generate ideas as sort of a form of procrastination. Like, the idea part is never really the hard part for me, because I feel like I'm always like, adding like, a bunch of new ideas to my list. But yeah, I think that for me, and like, also I’m like huge sort of perfectionist and wanting, feeling like everything, you know, everything could be a little bit better, I could find a slightly more perfect source, stuff like that, I feel like for me, part of it is sort of understanding that at a certain point, you sort of just have to accept that like, the thing is done, like not everything is going to be is going to be written with the goal of being like, you know, really long or like really, like, really incisive, or something that you're going to submit for awards and just sort of figuring out there like, some things are a little simpler.

You don't necessarily need quite as much sort of time. Or as many birds even.

Alicia: And you know, you have a very, you know, personal food aesthetic as well in your food photos. So how did you come to be really a cook, because I do feel like some food writers don't necessarily have to be a good cook, but it always helps, I suppose. But you do seem to be a very good cook, someone who can work with recipes, change them. I saw that you made a miso carbonara but you use mushrooms instead of bacon. You know, how, how did you learn how to cook? And how did you develop your kind of personal approach to cooking?

Bettina: Yeah, totally. I mean, I think that's an interesting point. Because I feel like some food writers are very much on like the restaurant end of things. And some food writers are much more on the home cooking end of things. And I feel like I've, especially over this year, I've realized that like, I feel like I'm much more drawn to sort of the home cooking side, in part because it works a lot better for my budget to cook everything. 

I mean, I think I learned how to cook mostly just by like watching my mom, like if I think about it, there's only like, maybe two or three dishes that she sort of, like explained to me like how to do, but it was sort of just like out hanging out in the kitchen a lot while she was doing stuff and sort of just like ambiently learned techniques and things like that. 

Really, for me, it's sort of just been, it's like, especially over the pandemic and I have to like cook a lot more for myself, it sort of just been drawing on all of those things and realizing like, you know that I just know the technique for doing certain things, and I can play around with it. I'm definitely not a very, like recipe-oriented cook. And I feel like when I do use recipes, I really like mess with them a lot. Like, you know, like, I didn't follow like that miso carbonara, you know, super closely, but I think I like to use recipes as inspiration and then sort of play around based on like, what I know and like what I have around. 

Alicia: And how has the pandemic kind of influenced your cooking at all?

Bettina: For one thing, I'm cooking a lot more. I think that I've since I've sort of been living on my own, I have like always cooked a decent amount. But you know, living in New York and then like working a full time job and commuting, I feel like it was really easy to get into the thing of just like, Okay, well I'll just get like a slice of pizza on my way home or like I'll stop by this place. But I think that since the pandemic has started I've sort of just realized that—and it sounds so full of myself, right—but I realized I'm actually a pretty good cook. And most of the food I can make I'm very happy with and I don't necessarily feel the need to like get food elsewhere. So it's been a fun way to sort of like lean into that and just sort of like play around a little bit more and I feel like I've just landed on a lot of things and formats that I make that like are foods I really enjoy eating but are also are really fun for me to cook.

Alicia: And you know you write for Vice and so I've kind of noticed over time and have been frustrated over time by how a lot of food writers really can ignore things going on in politics that or business that have an effect on food, but at Vice it seems like you have a little bit more freedom to make those connections, especially because you know people that you work with are all are covering those those aspects. You know, I was just citing a piece about how plant-based meat that people are coming out with now, like Impossible or Beyond, that has its roots in Chinese cuisine, which was not something that other people were tackling quite as deeply or as kind of just blatantly, like explicitly covering that. So how do you feel, you know, that you're allowed to kind of make more bigger statements about food, because you also did one of the few critical pieces of Tastes the Nation as well, which was Padma Lakshmi’s food show that was, you know, a bit nationalistic?

Bettina: Right. I mean, like, I think that, like, the thing that really has worked in my favor, sort of at Vice, is the fact that we're not, you know, I feel like we're doing the food coverage that not a lot of other websites are doing, I think, just sort of in a really sort of different space, like, we're not doing a ton of restaurant coverage, we're not really telling you, like, what to eat. And so I think that gives me a lot more chance to sort of take risks and sort of think about things like food in terms of much bigger context. 

And I think that also like, you know, these are like the way that class and race and colonialism have influenced food or things that just like personally, interest me and that matter a lot to me. And I think I've just been really lucky that like, if I come to my editor with ideas that want to get a little more critical or incisive, about what food culture is, you know, they sort of trust that it matters to me, and therefore it's something that's worth pursuing. Yeah, I mean, I think that's been really helpful, but I'm sort of not like, hampered by having to do product announcements, or restaurant opening pieces and things like that. I can exist in a very, almost like looking at food, culture, and food media with a much broader eye.

Alicia: I mean, you do write so much about social media and so much about being online quote, unquote. And, you know, for me, and I think because of the pandemic that has become so much of a piece of our lives, even more so than it was before where it's just really our only venue for expression and contact with people in the outside world. And you told James Hansen for an interview at In Digestion like, “what's exciting to me is that now foods relationship with being online appears to see people favoring things that are less branded, and more individual.” And it's interesting to me, because I'm writing about cake right now in cake decorating, and you've written a lot about cake, and how kind of the aesthetics shift over time, and you can see people kind of going into the same vein as other people. And, you know, I think in cake, specifically, there's a very heavy social media influence on what people want and what people you know, think is a good cake. And, you know, right now it's like, very organic. In decor, it's not using fondant, it's not using heavy food coloring, but like, before this moment in cake, I thought there was there was a lot of—there was that, you know, tons of food coloring, like make a shag cake, make a unicorn cake, and now we're in a moment of a really organic cake decor. And, you know, so like you said, things are less branded and more individual, but at the same time there is this kind of constant influence that is, you know, not necessarily something you can shake off. So how have you been thinking about social media and food right now? Like, do you see that continuing the trend toward being a little bit more individual, even if it's not, you know, what everyone else is doing?

Bettina: Yeah, absolutely. I think cake is a really interesting way to sort of watch how these things play out, in part, because like, it is such a distinct niche on Instagram, but there's also so many, like, styles and like, different sorts of ways, the way cake is playing out. It's like, really interesting to watch, I think. Even a few months ago, when I started sort of writing about cakes, I was thinking, these messy cakes, I think that's going to be maybe, this will be the peak of the trend or so sort of, it'll become like, over after that, you know, but I think that even in the past few months, I think that there have been so many other trends sort of coming out of that scene, that I think that even if something feels very, like popular, and like it's been done a lot.

I think the scene is sort of just continuing to expand and try new things. I think it's really interesting because so much of this is not being guided by any one creator on Instagram. Like, I think it's a lot of people are sort of in communication with each other in a various, in a very friendly way. It doesn't seem like people are sort of trying to take over the scene, like it doesn't seem like one person wants to have, like, the monopoly on this stuff. Whereas like, you know, some of those sort of other trends did feel like, you know, someone was trying to build a brand out of a certain cake visual that was very polished and instagrammable. But this growing wave to me feels much more like, everyone just sort of wants to be inspired by each other, and create work that's fun and exciting, but isn't necessarily something that they're owning, or that they want to be the only person who's doing that, you know,

Alicia: One you've been posting a lot—what trend you've been focusing on a little bit, right, is the more like maybe classic American bakery style cake, but that has kind of gone in a weirder direction, like a very, maybe Amy Sedaris type direction. When did you start to notice that and do you feel like it's very interesting that that is happening alongside like, these more organic like, maybe rooted that Sqirl aesthetic cake?

Bettina: There is a big resurgence of vintage, playing off the like classic, like Wilton designs look. But the thing that's really interesting is that over the past few months or so people have taken to write much like sillier statements on top, or use colors that are not necessarily, you know, traditional American dessert looks. A cake has frosting that’s traditionally and vintage inspired, but it's completely black, for example. Or there was one the other day that said, like, “I still can't believe Dan was Gossip Girl,” just like things, like, your expectations about what you should see on a cake.

Alicia: Do you bake cake like, or is it just kind of a more intellectual pursuit?

Bettina: So I used to decorate them for work several years ago. But the thing is, I actually don't really like eating cake. I don't have a sweet tooth at all. I'm very much like a salty food person. So I sort of prefer cakes from an observant and like visual standpoint and sort of like what are the trends, but I'm not really—I keep saying that I want to bake cakes. I finally got a stand mixer. And so I have baked a few cakes, but the thing is, I want to bake them and I want to decorate them and I want to experiment with what they look like. But then I'm sort of left with this cake that I don't want to eat. Like when the pandemic is over, and I can have people over I can like bring more people food. It'll be something I wrote for the moment. It's sort of like, my boyfriend and I don't need a bunch of cakes.

Alicia: For me, it's great to have family and friends very close by to bring cake to because I also make a lot of cake. And have to do something with it. But yeah, you mentioned, you know, when the pandemic is over, when we're all vaccinated, you know, in that beautiful future, you know, what are you looking forward to most food-wise for when, you know, you don't have to cook every meal at home yourself?

Bettina: I mean, honestly, that's the thing I'm looking forward to the most, is—over the past almost year, I feel like I've really honed my cooking skills, but I feel like I'm not really able to share it with anyone other than posting pictures of them. So that's really the thing, because I feel like before this, I really took the concept of gathering for granted. And I was like, you know, always coming up with an excuse for why I couldn't have people over for dinner, like I didn't have the right plates, or I didn't have the right serving bowl or whatever. But now I'm realizing that that stuff doesn't matter very much. And really what I want to do is just cook for people and come together over meals again, in a way that I'm creating the experience.

Alicia: And for you, is cooking a political act?

Bettina: I mean, I think so I think that, I think that my daily cooking, I don't know that. I don't know that I think about it terribly hard. Like I'm sort of just sustaining myself. But I feel like the part that feels really political to me is sort of like revisiting those cultural dishes, and the things that my family used to make or just learning more about Filipino food than I maybe haven't even eaten before. 

Because I do feel like this act of understanding your history and understanding this broad culture that largely has not traveled from the Philippines to here like in my family, like I think that it's political. And then I'm sort of reviving these histories that may have gone unspoken or not written down. And understanding the broader history of the culture that I come from. 

I feel like I'm always sort of searching for more understanding of what being Filipino means, and I think that I have found a lot of resources. I felt there's a lot of things that I've learned about recently, but I feel like one one thing I struggle with is making those foods. 

I do a lot of like versions of things that I grew up with. But there are also a lot of those new dishes that I'm reading about, that I've never had before, I haven't necessarily made some of them because I feel like for one thing, I don't cook a lot of meat. So sometimes I'm trying to sort of get inspiration from these cookbooks, but they are sort of more meat-centric than I want to cook with. So yeah, I feel like I think that cooking is political in the sense that learning these things, and understanding these histories, but I also—I'm figuring out how I feel about actually cooking some of these dishes.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much for taking the time today. 

Bettina Yeah, totally. Thank you so much for taking a minute for reaching out to me.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe

Tamar Adler wasn’t in the best mood when we recorded this interview, and she apologized once we stopped recording. I didn’t think there was anything to be sorry for, but I appreciated learning that it was due to trying to get her town, Hudson, New York, to make their vaccine information available in languages other than English so that they would be accessible to people who needed it.

I think it helps to know that’s what was on her mind while listening or reading to this conversation about how impossible it can feel to make the world a better place through writing, when it is in doing that anything really happens, that anything really changes. But while Adler doesn’t think her best-selling book An Everlasting Meal: Cooking With Economy and Grace did what she hoped it would do, it did change how I cook, and I am positive it had that effect on many others as well. It’s easy to consider her a bit precious, a bit twee—associate her closely with egg spoons. But she’s much more than that, and once she gets talking, you see how much bite and real care is there.

Here we discussed her many stops on the way to becoming a food writer, the demands of social media, how she picks her topics for Vogue, and why food media just kind of sucks. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Tamar. Thank you so much for taking the time out to chat.

Tamar: Hi, it's wonderful to talk to you. 

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Tamar:I grew up in Westchester, New York, which is about an hour and a half south of where I live now. And because you were so generous in sending some of the questions that you wanted to ask me along beforehand, I thought about this one a lot. Because I realized that there are these like—there's a tendency to try to narrativize one's own life in a coherent way, and that every time I answer a question like this, I tell one version of the narrative, and that it's actually not super coherent. 

And like I was remembering that I ate chocolate Pop Tarts for breakfast, which I've never put into any story of what I ate because I also had this kind of unbelievable, gastronomical upbringing because my mom is an incredible cook. And it was—my mom was a developmental psychologist, but she worked in a really, really hard area. She worked at Albert Einstein in the Bronx, and specifically with foster children with developmental disabilities, and their foster parents. And it was just like, it was just hard, and grueling, and she had terrible stories. And she was really beaten down and she took refuge in the kitchen. And so she cooked incredible food. Like, I used to take smoked mozzarella and eggplant and pesto sandwiches on focaccia to school and just like, it was not, you know, it wasn't standard. She loved it. That was a big part of it, but I hated food. And she was a super young mother; she had me when she was 24, she got married at 19. The fact that I hated food meant that if ever I wasn't eating, she would like flip out and try to find a way to compensate for that. So it was like this funny mix of—my father was 11 years older than her and Middle Eastern. So we had this like, really amazing Mediterranean, homemade diet, where like, there was hummus every meal, and Israeli pickles and olives, and like, this sort of very, you know, like, rooted and real culinary existence. And then also, I was a picky skinny kid. And so I had, like, every kind of sugary cereal you could possibly want. I had, I mean, maybe not Lucky Charms, but only because they weren't kosher. But I had like, Cinnamon Toast Crunch. And chocolate Pop Tarts, that was like a several year long thing. And then sometimes a chocolate Pop Tart and Carnation instant breakfast in the hope of like, you know, just like getting me to wear, you know, pants that wouldn't fall down and stuff like that. Yeah, so it was like a mix of hyper-processed, just anything that a kid would eat. And, you know, like, the Mediterranean diet before that was even—I mean, I'm sure it was a thing, but certainly wasn't going on in a lot of my friends’ houses.

Alicia: And I mean, that's so interesting, because obviously the next question is that you were an editor at Harper's before you turn to food and now that I know you didn't like to eat as a kid, it's especially interesting, I guess, to understand how you made this move in your in your career. So how did that switch happen?

Tamar: Well, that was another—it's another thing where I think I've tended to narrativize it one way and it is other ways, too. Because when I was, I was an editor at Harper's for I guess, three years, during that time, I developed a just a real, like a full, full passion for cooking. I was just totally, I was in love. I loved reading food magazines. And I loved, you know, going to the Chelsea Market and buying Italian olive oil and I loved the farmers’ market and I loved learning about food sourcing and about organic and biodynamic farming. 

But I had kind of a false start with food because I got—I was really, really in love with it like, like the way you fall in love with a human. And then I thought, well, you know, I was so young, I was like 22, I think, when I got to Harper's and I just got really lucky and ended up kind of like, rising there. So I was a, you know, a full editor, but I was like, you know, 23, 24, 25, really, very kind of early in my grown-up life, and I decided that I wanted to go to see if I—I like decided to give myself this test where in order to test my love of cooking, I would get Gabrielle Hamilton to let me work at Prune on the weekends, but not quit my job as an editor. And that that was just gonna like—that was going to answer the question. Which is a super like, it's a naive and charming and bold thing to do now thatI think about it. 

But she had said, like, ‘No, I'm not gonna let you do that. And I don't think you're gonna really learn anything this way.’ And then I was super persistent, and there's this wonderful story that I've told a billion times where finally she kept on, like, saying no, or no, it was I hadn't actually talked to her yet. I would go to Prune at lunchtime, and talk to people who were working in there, and they were like, she's not here. She's not here. And then her pastry chef, like the third time I went, her pastry chef was like, ‘Well, if you're an editor, why don't you write her a letter? Because she's a writer.’ It was a long time before Gabrielle started, really started her writing career. So I wrote her a letter. And she actually called me and when I got back to my office at Harper's, there was a voicemail for me saying, like, you can come in, and so I ended up somehow convincing her and I would work. I worked brunch there. Which was terrifying, right? On Saturdays for three months. And I never told anybody at Harper's, but it went okay. I mean, it sometimes didn't go okay; she pulled me off the line once, I was like burning hundreds of dollars’ worth of food. And, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't really smooth or effortless, but it was happening. But then I quit. After three months, I was like, I can't. 

At that point, I really wanted to—I was feeling quite ambitious. And I felt like I needed to work weekends at Harper's, too, because I wanted to, like rise and excel. And I just felt like I was like between two worlds. And she was like, great, you should definitely not be a cook, like go back to Harper's. And then I quit Harper's not that long after that, like maybe six months or a year. But I didn't quit to cook, I actually quit, when I did quit, I quit because I thought I wanted to go to law school. I felt like I was—it was like part of wanting to cook was that I wanted to not be sitting in this chair so far away from life. Like, you know, it was just so removed. And Harper's especially was so removed on so many levels. I just felt like my heart was turning black. And so somehow, like the fact that I wanted to cook and the fact that I wanted to go to law school seemed very connected. 

So I studied for—I quit Harper's, studied for the LSAT, and while I was studying for the LSAT, I worked as a personal chef and a research assistant for Dan Barber. And then when I ended up becoming a real full-time cook. I was supposed to be going to law school; I deferred for a year. And I was going for immigration law. So I was sort of on the fence about Georgetown versus Michigan versus Chicago and I ended up deferring from Georgetown.

And then during that year of deferral, I just became—I had to choose, and cooking sort of had me in its grips. So that's the super-long and but totally fragmented story.

Alicia: And I mean, that's so fascinating. And so when did you decide to start writing about food?

Tamar: I tried to write about food while I was an editor at Harper's, but I was too scared to do it. And I wrote one piece and I showed it to the deputy editor and he said, ‘Well, what I've learned from this is that you can write but you would have to rewrite this entire thing. It's not—it has to be rewritten.’ It took me years to just get it together to do that, and the idea of rewriting it was too overwhelming. And so then I guess it just got, I was just scared. I think I always wanted probably to do it, but it was—it was like beyond, it was beyond terrifying. Nothing else was as scary as the idea of writing or writing about food. And in particular, writing about food because it felt so frivolous. Like the main reason that I didn't just write about food from the beginning was because it seemed frivolous beyond anything else I was doing like Harper's, although it was obviously kind of removed and intellectual. And not like service-oriented. The observations in it were valuable. And cooking has always seemed useful to me, because you're literally feeding people and giving them joy. And obviously, immigration law is important if you're on the right side of it. But the idea of like, I was—I was just really like, I was scared and ashamed of the frivolity of it. And so it just, I think I always wanted to do it, it took me decades, really, to let myself do it from a combination of paralysis andmoral paralysis. And I don't know what the other kind would be personal paralysis, self-confidence.

Alicia: Well, how did you? How did you figure out a way to write about food in a way that made it not frivolous for you?

Tamar: It was because of the thing that I started writing about it. I started writing a few like free pieces for this, San Francisco—I was living in San Francisco because I was cooking at Chez Panisse. And my friend Sasha had zine called Meatpaper. I was involved in the meat world, because I actually started the first meat CSA in the country. Back then, because it was San Francisco, like you could do anything, it was kind of like that. You literally could just decide you wanted to do something, it started happening. 

So I was spending all of my time buying whole animals and having them broken up and then distributing them according to this crazy, sort of non-mathematical butchery algorithm that I had worked out. And so because of that, I was like in the meat world, and I started writing pieces for Meatpaper, and they're really like turgid and like so overwrought, but it was a beginning. And then I wrote one or two pieces for civil eats, which were also pretty bad. But it was like just writing for these local, these local places, mostly, from my perspective as a, you know, meat activist. 

And then I was having drinks with a friend of Alice Waters, Chris, who—wait, what's her name? Katrina, who was like one of the founders of Wired Magazine, or maybe one of the first editors, I don't know, she's like a brilliant sort of polymath. And we were having martinis. And she was like, I've always wanted to write How to Cook a Wolf for today. And I, like almost fell off my chair,

because I was like, but that's my life's work. Like, that's what I am put on this earth to do. I'm like, I was born to do that. And then I said, Why don't we do it together? And she said, Great.

And we were gonna do it by sending stuff back and forth. And then it was like, I got tricked into it. I mean, she didn't mean to, but I just kept on sending her things. And she wasn't sending anything back. But she was sending me really good edits. Like I remember one of them. She said, This seems digressive throughout. And I was like, wow, wow. Wow. But then because it was so offline and just not part of anything, I was able to write because I was just writing her emails, right? And then after like a month of that, she said, You know, I'm not doing any work on this, but you basically just wrote a book proposal, so why don't you just go with it? So that was my 20-year-long way of backing into the thing that I had wanted to do forever. 

Alicia: And so that book, which I'm assuming became An Everlasting Meal, you know, was about making cooking seem, you know, simple rather than complex. And you told The New Yorker when it came out, “One way we get back to the stove is to treat food less fetishistic.” And, you know, do you think that that has happened, it's been ten years since the book came out, is food being treated less fetishistically? In the right way, from your perspective?

Tamar: No, no. Nothing. I mean, like, yeah, so I mean, also that I didn't even answer your question. But so I thought that An Everlasting Meal didn't feel frivolous to me. It felt like, it felt like good work, you know. So that was why—that's how I was able to do it, was that I was like, this is good work on this planet. And that's what I want to do. It's gotten more and more fetishistic. I can't, I have had so many times of like, real. I don't know, beyond depression, about it, like, sense, like, real senses that I haven't done anything. And that, in general, this, the whole field is like, at a point where I can't even reach it and shouldn't try and to just find other things to do with myself to make money because I like—that was before Instagram. I mean, you know, with with obviously a little bit of a parenthesis around pandemic, thinking about food and pandemic experiences of food and a parenthesis around, you know, growing awareness of the longtime erasure of traditional and indigenous and black food pathways. 

But for the most part, over the last ten years, food has gone on being fetishized and become more and more and more fetishized, and entire personalities have been built on, you know,

co-opting food personalities co-opting traditional dishes and, no, I found it. I thought, like, I was so naive, I thought I could write a book. And obviously, not that many people read it. So like, maybe you could write a book and like every single person could read it and that could be all you had to say on it. But I was just, I really thought I was so innocent. I was like, I'll just write this book. And then everyone will have it. And then everyone can just do the stuff in it. And they'll be totally untethered from all of these awful systems, and we can, like, live better lives and be kinder to each other. But that was not true.

Alicia: Well, I mean, how do you define fetishistically? Because I think, I mean, in my perspective, people think that those who kind of care about food and where it comes from and like would be a person who joined a meat CSA are who is perceived as fetishistic, rather than, you know, people who are focused on consumption or the way something looks on a plate. So how do you define fetishistic and food? 

Tamar: You know, I would like to look up what the word actually means. Like, you know the answer? I think it comes from, like charm, like, lucky charm. I don't know. Like, I'm going to look it up while we talk. Because I have this really amazing dictionary. Um, just the sound of it. It's really old. So it has to be in a special box. 

I think that some people could join a meat CSA out of a sense of fetishizing food and I don't know how I interpreted it. I think that food has to be, I mean—some people would say that like Italians fetishize food, right, but it seems like when we eat… I think Wendell Berry, but I forget who said it, but that when we eat we're consuming existence. We are killing every time we eat. There is a degree of kind of the magical and the sort of the mystical and the horrible about all of it and it should be treated like that. 

[Finding the word in the dictionary] Fetishism, fetishistic. Oh yeah, I'm right. Fetish, artificial sorcery charm made by art; artificial factitious material objects supposed among certain tribes to represent in such a way or be so connected with a supernatural being? 

Alicia: That's not how we use it now. 

Tamar: I think that, to me, it was the determining of something that should be sort of personal and simple and human and sensual into this level, into this—the system of capitalistic symbols that everything seemed attached to like whether you could get it and like kind of, like having the— it's like having the experience and not reflecting on you and consuming it seems very detached from actual personal experiences. And I guessI've thought of he way certain personalities get fetishized, turned into like a symbol of your own value, or what you are rich enough to have access to and the way certain objects, you know, that if you have a certain kind of pan means you're a certain kind of serious cook and like this, this sort of identifying it with a projection of yourself as opposed to experiencing it. That's how I guess I thought very, very vaguely of fetishization.

Alicia: And it's so true that that continues and kind of proliferates, and maybe is more true now, as you said, now that Instagram exists, and I, you know, I struggle with this, of course, it's like how much I'm performing a personality for other people around food that is bad, or it's just yeah.

Tamar: The fact of performing it is bad or the personality, your performance.

Alicia: I mean, I don't think—I hope the personality isn't bad. But I think the fact of performing it is, is bad and inauthentic. And I'm trying to figure out a new way of doing that, I think, so that it's not, it doesn't feel bad. But yeah, it's like, I don't know, it's funny, because, you know, Instagram. I mean, this is an interview of you—but you know, Instagram reminds me of what I would post a couple of years ago, and like it was, you know, different from what I would post now. In terms of how thought out it would have been, you know. I didn't think about it as much back then as I do now. Which I don't like, but at the same time, it's hard to get back to being having it be more natural.

Tamar: Because you feel like now you're plotting it? Sort of because you're plotting it in a maybe strategic way. And then it felt more—you weren't so strategic?

Alicia: No, absolutely. Yeah. But I mean, I also have like, way more followers now. So it's this kind of necessity of not being as personal, I suppose. Which is just a weird thing to happen. Like, the more popular your work becomes like the less you can actually be yourself for people, I guess. But maybe that's not true. Maybe it's just a—

Tamar: Yeah, I don't know if it is or not. It's definitely something that I have been thinking about because I never, I was never on Instagram. I resisted it during the writing and publication of my second book. I'm working on a third book right now and I have like, after hearing people say for ten years, you have to engage with people on social media, I finally started posting stuff on social media and it's been on Instagram. I've always been, I mean, Twitter—I’ve always been just like, I'm just, you know, upset about the state of the world and my message and nobody really knows what I say, but it's different pictures of food. 

But I have been thinking a lot about it because I've been thinking about the way it’s cultivated, personality is actually often. Some reckoning happens when people realize how cultivated they've been? And yeah, there's a degree to which there are individuals who are really, who are extroverts and who benefit from a kind of open exchange, like who actually it doesn't cost them. 

Like it costs me. I share things with people and I find I find it all very costly. Anything that isn't just like my actual life is costing me. But there are people like really thrive, I think, through an honesty that is nourishing to them that it's interesting that that it is a medium that can bring out, you know, a kind of like this—there is a channel on which lots of people can talk to one person with some amount of clarity and honesty, but I don't think very many people are good at that. And so there's just like—high jinks ensue.

Alicia: Absolutely. Well, I mean, how has being on Instagram been? I mean, did you get on it because of the publishing ecosystem kind of forcing your hand?

Tamar: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, not forced my head. But like, realistically, I need people to be conscious of my next book, because my second book, I really didn't do anything to promote. And I think I also made a lot of assumptions about, like, what people needed and wanted in a book, and it really didn't sell. And that that stinks, because this is how I make money, right? And so there are all of these things that I have not done. And I'm not a very visible, just not very visible person. I never tried to be or wanted to be. I just had this idea that I could like, write the books that I wanted to write. And they weren't—like, they weren't platforms. I didn't want a platform. I wanted to go on writing books. But that's, I mean, I think that probably works for a novelist, but it doesn't work for like a slow-writing, hamstrung, paralyzed food writer. And so I did join it in the hopes of it making more people excited about my next book, because I

need people to buy it.

Alicia: Right now, it's such an odd situation to be in. I have a friend who writes cookbooks, and also does not want to be on social media, and just is in this situation of, you know, where does that leave her in terms of whether her books will actually sell and it's so strange that basically, it seems like social media is such a massive part of that in a way that maybe it wasn't before. And it is really, it's costly for people who don't have a natural inclination toward it. And it's, it's not, you know, a fair situation. But who knows.

Tamar: Tell her to call me if she needs someone to listen and totally understand. I'm here. 

Alicia: Yeah, I know, it's a very strange position. Now I feel really, you know, I feel you know, very sympathetic toward it, even though my situation is like basically the opposite situation. 

But you're also now a contributing editor at Vogue and you've been there for a while, you know. How do you decide which food subjects you cover for that kind of audience, like the more fashion audience?

Tamar: I don't think anybody reads my Vogue stories. I've been in doctors’ offices, I mean, not in the last year, but I think I've been writing for—I've been writing for them for like five or six years, I think, maybe. A long time. And all of my doctors have always been on the Upper East Side, because my uncle is affiliated with Lenox Hill on the Upper East Side. So I have lots of doctors’ waiting room experiences on the Upper East Side and all of them have Vogue in them. And I mean, it probably hasn't been like five times, but I have seen at least twice people thumbing through Vogue, stopping—I've seen this happen in a hair salon, too—like stopping, you know, for the amount of time you do when you're reading Vogue on the pages and just like “$1200” and then get to the food and just like, go right past it, like nothing. So I think there are like five people who actually read them. And I think I know those five people, and they write me and they're like, I love the Vogue story.

So I don't—that's not really there. It's more like there are elements that need to be in it to evoke story. But I have always chosen what I'm going to write about for them based on what I wanted to spend my time finding out about, for the most part, so, like, weirdly, I mean, I've only done two or three profiles for them, but they were of Questlove and Enrique Olvera. And you know, I've written about like, sardines, broth, food scraps, like it's very—and to some degree, you get, like, because it's Vogue, and there is a tongue-in-cheek quality to a lot of their photography, certainly, like a lot of their art, and, in general, it's a lot of smart, mostly ladies, sitting around a room. So like, you know, kind of the weirder something is often the more attractive it is there. 

But I've always—that has always been a place where my choices have. I mean, they haven't been immoral. But there have been certain pieces that have been amoral. Like, I did write about learning how to make mille-feuille, just like, who cares, right? I am terrified—well, post pandemic, I'm not terrified of baking, but I used to be terrified of baking. So it was just like, you know, a stressful and funny experience. But a lot of the stuff that I've written for them has been about, you know, ecology and environmental responsibility, and using all this stuff. And if a trend shows up that happens to allow me to talk about—I just got to write a piece about, oh, well, whatever, it's coming out. There's a piece in April that sort of could have been a trend piece, but actually is about how it's not a trend, you know, so I think because nobody reads it, it's kind of been the secret place where I get to write about things that are interesting to me.

Alicia: And, you know, because you're writing mostly for Vogue, and you're writing cookbooks, you don't necessarily have to kind of wade into  the more food media sector, I suppose, and you've mostly written for non-food publications from what I can tell. How do you perceivethose magazines? How have you kind of negotiated your place in that ecosystem? Or lack of place in it? 

Tamar: I mean, it's much more lack of place, right? I certainly have been—this is certainly something I've been very plagued by recently, but by remaining outside of an ecosystem that I really didn't like, I may have rendered myself entirely irrelevant. And that is just in terms of like, you know, self-image and self-confidence and earning potential that I feel a little bit like, that might be coming home to roost. Um, that is not the right way to use that. I don't know how to actually, you know, right. 

I've stayed outside of the food publication ecosystem, because I don't—I've never liked it. When I first moved back to New York, and I was writing An Everlasting Meal and right after it came out, I had a personal, a modus operandi, I guess, a kind of like a principle, which was anything that paid me $1,000 or more, I would write. I was just like, I can't afford to turn down something that is $1,000, more than $1,000. 

But then, I had a column in the Times Magazine for like a year, year and a half, and then I was feeling overwhelmed with that and Vogue and books, and so I chose just Vogue, but I was able to not change that. I didn't use that rule anymore, and I didn't want to write for—I don't really like food publications very much. I mean, I love Whetstone. I think it's gorgeous. I'm so excited about For the Culture. A billion years ago, in like the year 2000, I loved Saveur. 

I've never really been into the other stuff, ao I haven't navigated it probably great to my own detriment professionally. I was reading, I guess, probably via Twitter, this interview and statement that Food and Wine did with the chefs of a restaurant called Masala y Maíz in Mexico City. That I thought was a great interview. And I loved the things that the two chefs said, and one of the chefs whose name I now forget, but it's a couple, and one of the two chefs said, like, you know, food media is—I'm totally paraphrasing—but he said, food is processing all of these, all of this food tradition, and all of this food history, for a general audience, and so there is a lot of levels of processing that you have to think about, like it's taking something. I don't think he used the word processing, but as I was reading it, I thought of like taking a potato and turning it into a Pringle. You know, like, I would rather it be a potato. 

And I think, I've always felt a little bit like, what am I doing here, like, you end up with all of this, all these side effects and like, in recent years, a lot of it gets everybody sticking their foot in their mouth, but actually, people have always been sticking their foot in their—their feet, their foot—their feet in their mouths, and like having a white guy write about how you eat pho and, you know, putting hot sauce on on mole, which is what happened with the Food and Wine thing. Like, right? I'm not totally comfortable with that. With that processing, I think it's—I have certainly been part of it, I don't mean that I'm like, somehow above or outside of like having done it, but I think there's, I think I have a level of discomfort with it as a way of, like, interacting with the foods and the traditions and I don't take a ton of pleasure in it. I think it tends to cut a lot of important people and things ou, and it's a shitty way of making money in a shitty system right now.

Alicia: It was interesting, because that interview, it didn't really start to make the rounds on Twitter, except when Soleil Ho shared it. And I had seen it being shared a lot on Instagram. And it was interesting to me that I didn't see the writers from Food and Wine sharing it and it's been interesting to me to watch food media sort of perform its own, you know, quote unquote, reckoning and kind of not really interrogate itself, you know, to kind of treat things as isolated incidents and not as kind of a pattern of behavior, as you explained, of taking things and kind of dumbing them down and making them palatable to to the the American audience. It's really been an interesting moment, I suppose, but a very alienating one, I think,or anyone who's thought of these things before.

Tamar: Now, you always seem like you think there is some—I don't know if hope is the right word, but like, that you could envision a food media ecosystem that is less extractive?

Alicia: I do. I do. And I think you know, as you mentioned, Whetstone, and I think that's a great example of it. And I think that I've been, I guess, you know, I've been writing about it in my newsletter, you know, with the idea of translation and kind of approaching a food magazine in the way that some art magazines approach art—not to say that they're perfect, but to say that, you know, they are taking perspectives from the places of origin and translating them into English, not translating them for the audience, but simply translating them into an legible language for the audience. I think that that's a really—there's so much potential there. And now I've seen a little bit of translation now happening more, but it's mostly just translating words into Spanish for that audience, which is, you know, that's a start, but I think that the global perspective of a magazine like Whetstone is extremely, you know, non-extractive. And I think that in independent publishing, we're seeing models, but I mean, of course, I would like to see, you know, Bon Appétit, you know, because it has such a huge audience, take kind of that perspective, but I don't know how it would work with its voice because you know, it's a bit frivolous in tone. And I don't know how it would work to not be frivolous.

How do you do Bon Appétit without being frivolous when its whole thing is being frivolous? I don't know.So, you know, they took away Gourmet to make, to just have Bon Appétit. And now it's like, you know, this is what we're left with. And this is, you know, the most widely read food magazine in the United States. So, you know, you can't completely ignore what they do. But it's, it's really terrifying to see what that is. And what kind of influence it has. 

I do have hope, though, that things could change. But I do think that, you know, for that to happen, like I was saying—like when you have the Food and Wine situation where you're going to do an interview to talk about how they got this wrong, or you have, like Grub SStreet writing about the abuse at Mission Chinese Food, you need to take more of a look at the whole process that has created this moment, in terms of how the media has been culpable in contributing to these things. And I think not having that kind of media culpability is where, you know, things are gonna just keep being wrong.

Tamar: I've been curious and watching and reflecting on my reactions to things over, you know, the sort of, I don't know what the right word is. I mean, you said reckoning, so let's do like reckoning and quotes. But, you know, I do wonder—I get this image of a kind of people, people being, I don't know, the suits upstairs, going like, ‘have we slapped ourselves on the hand sharply enough?’, like, ‘Are we forgiven?’ You know, this sort of like, I think that they're there. It's not that I don't have hope. But I do wonder whether there's a little bit of an irresolvable power issue, where I feel like the people in charge want to be forgiven by the communities that they have never written for or given any power. I don't know how you as a person in power get forgiven by people you've never given power to. I don't know what this is like, I don't. I wish I were a philosopher so I had models for how this could be like, I don't know what the catharsis and shift would be.

And I, again, I don't mean to, like, make myself not part of this. I'm a white writer who's had tons of opportunities. And I've never run a magazine, but I can't, you know, I don't mean that I'm excluded from it. But I do wonder how—I don't know, any models for how it happens.

Alicia: Neither do I. I mean, I have ideas, of course, but you know, no one's gonna put me in charge of a magazine. But for you, is cooking a political act?

Tamar: Of course. Yeah. It's, I mean, it is always it ever for it is for everybody. I, again, stupidly really thought that when I wrote An Everlasting Meal, I was providing people a tool for self-sufficiency and sovereignty and a way of becoming less reliant on the food industry and the, you know, the mendacity of our corporate industrial food culture.

And, you know, it's not that easy, but I continue to believe that the more skill people have in their kitchens, the less reliant on corporate America and corporate global north we are—I think that's  actually pretty common sense—when we don't need them anymore, then we have more power, and I've always felt like the means of production in our hands. It's a vital shift. I don't think it can happen super usefully independent of structural change, you know, our agricultural system that demands huge surpluses has a bigger impact than whether or not you make your own flippin’ pizza dough. But I think it's absolutely political and for 100,000 reasons, but one of them is knowing how to cook is actually liberating and can make you less dependent on all the other stuff, and and I think that for so many and all of these beautiful ways for so many cultures

to have an ability to, you know, persist. 

I'm thinking of, you know, cultures where there were—like Syrian food. A lot of refugee populations were like, when you’re un-land-ed and the thing that you are able to keep are tastes and smells and all of that. And that eventually the hope is to have land again. And then as soon as one does, one would plant the things whose tastes and smells one remembers. I mean, that is the most fundamentally political thing, right? What we want when we want land is to grow our food. 

I think maybe that's part of why I, you know, have felt so—there was so much discordance between the inherently political nature of food and stuff like, you know, unicorn ice cream trends. Because that's a political statement, too. But it's always felt like, no, you're just saying, f**k you. I know you know. 

I always keep Wendell Berry somewhere on my desk. And there's one part where he writes about how the impulse of charity is, like, true it might come from some idea of doing good, being divine, but that actually, you can't be good. You can't do charity, unless you have skills, like you have to be able to be a good neighbor. And cooking is, you know, one of the simplest ones. I'm not a good builder; I’d like to be a good builder. I'm getting a little bit closer. But you have to be able to do stuff in order to be a good community member, and you have to be a good community member in order to be able to do anything on a larger stage.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

Tamar: You're welcome. Good to talk.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe

Claire Lower, senior food editor at Lifehacker, and I had the idea to interview each other at roughly the same time. I did her “How I Eat” series, and now here she is in my conversation series. I’ve been very interested in her work for ages, despite our very different approaches to food and recipes. A Food Network show with us co-hosting would be a take on the Odd Couple trope—the omnivore and the mostly-vegan. (For some reason, this is the best way I can explain it.) Nonetheless, there is deep mutual respect. When she put MSG in a martini? I felt that. I wanted that.

In sum, despite our differences, we vibe, and I’d love to drink a martini with her in real life one day. Here, we talked about the importance of unions, how she writes recipes with class consciousness, and how she ended up in food despite studying chemistry. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Claire. Thanks so much for coming on.

Claire: Thank you for having me.

Alicia: How are things going? You're out in Portland, Oregon, right?

Claire: I am in Portland, Oregon. [Laughter.] And it is — it's interesting out here. It's rainy now. 

But it's been a crazy past couple of months. We've got a lot more white supremacy out here that I think people realize. [Laughter.] 

Alicia: I mean, I think there had been — even before all this, there had been a lot of press, I guess, about the whiteness of Portland. There was a W. Kamau Bell show, I think, about it that I watched.

Claire: Oh, really? 

Alicia: Yeah, but I get — but you didn't expect all this, I'm sure.

Claire: Not when I first moved here, but it makes sense because it's such a white place. Oregon was founded to be white. It has a very racist history. I mean, I'm from Mississippi. So, it's a different kind of racism because there in Mississippi, you're around Black people. You have to live with them. And you don't get this weird racist, white echo chamber like you do out here. It makes sense. It sucks. 

But yeah, every year — I mean, this isn't new. Every year, they've been doing this. Every summer they come down, the Proud Boys or Patriot Prayer come down and they yell. [Laughter.] I usually try to go down there with a union contingent and counter protest. But, they suck. But other than that. [Laughter.]

And the pandemic.

Alicia: Of course, yeah.

No, usually, I haven't been asking people how they're doing, really, for this podcast. I mean, not because I don't care, but because I don't want to — for posterity, have it all be kind of tainted. I want these interviews to happen as though we are in a — not in the worst thing that could be happening. 

But, I mean, at least we're almost not in the absolute worst thing because Trump won't be president soon, hopefully.

Claire: That’s true. That's one stressor that has been eliminated.

Alicia: [Laughs.] Yes. And I think — yeah.

Well, I think the first question, though, will get me to the question I want to ask you right now from this. But can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Claire: Yes, I can. 

So, I already mentioned I'm from Mississippi, originally from a very small town in northern Mississippi called Aberdeen. I think the closest town anyone would have heard of would be Tupelo, which is where Elvis was born. That's the nearest claim to fame. 

And then when I was six years old, my parents got divorced. And my mother moved to Los Angeles, which was a complete shift culturally and food wise. Completely different. 

My mom actually fit in really well there, because she's kind of always been into eating health healthfully or healthily, however you wanna say it. Whereas I'm not. [Laughter.] For me, it was not the best fit, but — like for breakfast, she would toast a piece of Ezekiel bread and then pour flaxseed oil on it instead of butter, and then put an egg on top of that. And she was like, ‘It's just like butter.’ I'm like, ‘It is nothing like butter. It's not like butter.’ So, that's her. 

But I would go to Mississippi at least twice a year and visit my dad and my grandmother. And my grandmother and my stepmom also heavily influenced how I eat. My grandmother — it's weird, ’cause she hated cooking, absolutely hated it but did it almost every day. So, she was very good at shortcuts. She really embraced processed foods, canned foods, but it always tasted really good. But it was like, ‘Why does this taste good? Oh, you put a stick of butter in these green beans.’ [Laughter.] So yeah, it was kind of the two extremes of my mom and my grandmother, and I'm kind of somewhere in the middle. 

But yeah, moving to Los Angeles, that was a big shift. ’Cause before that the only pizza I had had was from Pizza Hut, and it was the barbecue pizza. Not that Los Angeles has a strong pizza identity, but just the types of foods that I could suddenly try. And I’d love them. Like elote, the corn on a stick that we would get in the park with mayonnaise and chili powder. And I was like, ‘I didn't even know we could put mayonnaise on corn.’ [Laughter.]

Alicia: Well, how does being — well, for one, how did you end up in Oregon?

Claire: Ok. 

So, I was in Los Angeles, and I was going to community college at PCC. And then I met my ex-husband at Coachella through mutual friends, but we met at Coachella. And then he was living in Florida. So I moved to Florida, ’cause I wasn't — I was just in school, and I wasn't so far into a program where I couldn't do that. So, then I lived in Florida for seven years. And then we just wanted to not live in Florida anymore. 

And one of my friends from school — actually, almost all of my friends from school ended up working at Intel, even though we all went to the University of Florida. ’Cause I was a chemistry major. So then, my friend Matt was just like, ‘Hey, you should move out here.’ And we were just like, ‘Ok.’ 

And my dad had actually — he didn't always live in Mississippi. He had lived out here for a while when I was a teen. So, I grew up coming up here for the summers. And I knew I really liked the weather, ‘cause I don't like being in sun. And Florida was killing me. It was just too hot all the time. I had to have six weird-looking moles removed. [Laughter.] The sun is not my friend. So, I'm better suited to this climate. 

Yeah, we moved up here. And then like a year later, we got divorced. [Laughs.]

Alicia: Oh my God. [Laughs.]

Well, how did you end up working in food? You studied chemistry? 

Claire: Yeah, so I was — how did it happen? I mean, I was always really enthusiastic about food. I cooked for my roommate in college and ended up cooking for her boyfriend somehow, ’cause she couldn't really cook. So, I would cook for all of them.

And I was always really enthusiastic about food. And I was working as a lab tech at a big — in space and defense, if you can believe it. And I was kind of very uncomfortable with the defense part. But it was the only job around at the time and it was just running an NMR spectrophotometer, which was super f*****g boring. 

But so in the meantime, xoJane came into being, and I was reading it. And the only food coverage I really saw was either relating to people struggling with eating disorders, which is important writing that should be done, and — or related to dieting. And I was just kind of like this — that's fine, I was like, but I just — I felt like there was a void of just talking about food as a source of fun. [Laughter.]

That’s just what I pitched to Emily McCombs. So I was like, ‘Hey, I just noticed that there's this area of content that we could’ — hell, hate that I just said content, but ‘There's this area of coverage that we could be talking about, food as like a fun thing.’ And my first article was about peanut butter and pickle sandwiches. And I think I tested out a bunch of different pickles. [Laughter.] So, that was the first one. 

And then I just kept pitching them. And I kept my job for a while. And then before I moved, I quit that and I kind of just gradually transitioned into taking, getting more assignments, being able to do it full time. And then I was freelancing for Lifehacker, and then they offered me the full-time position. 

Alicia: Nice.

Well, yeah, you occupy a very interesting space in food media. I feel like you are one of the few people who really does recipes mostly. You focus really on recipes. 

And how did you kind of come to your approach, that is this really funny and irreverent — in the world of food media, which is very reverent — approach to marrying the highbrow and lowbrow? I've talked to you before, because I love that you put MSG in a martini. How did you arrive at this approach? How do you kind of challenge sort of classist ideas about what food is and what it can be and what it should be in your work?

Claire: I mean, it comes from two different places. 

One, it comes from my family. Until my parents’ generation, my family was pretty poor. My grandfather, both his parents were dead by the time he was 15. And he had to quit school ’cause his older sister was in the tuberculosis sanatorium, and his younger sisters were still in school and he didn't want them to have to quit school. So, he dropped out and worked full-time to get them through school. So, I kind of grew up, particularly at my grandparents’ house, with those kind of attitudes about food influencing how I enjoyed food. 

And also processed food, canned foods — a lot of them taste good. They just do. There's a reason they taste good. There's a reason they were invented. They were invented to prevent food spoilage, to make food more accessible to people. And I just feel like a snobbery against it, it helps no one. 

Particularly ’cause, like, I think people are lying if they say that they don't enjoy American cheese on a cheeseburger. It's scientifically engineered to melt perfectly. If you have a really good burger, you don't want a cheese that overpowers the meat. If you really think about correct application, there are correct applications for some of these food. I'm not saying that everyone should drink only Coca-Cola and eat Doritos all the time and just eat hot dogs, but you can appreciate these things in a balanced way. And you don't have to be a classist dick about it. 

So, it's kind of me being defensive of my family, my background. But also, not everyone can afford — I hated the phrase ‘clean eating.’ It's disgusting. It's so classist. ’Cause you're implying that other food is dirty, and that if you don't have the money to eat organic, locally sourced vegetables, that you're somehow morally deficient. There's no place for that in my world, in my view of food. 

That was very rambling. I hope that—

Alicia: No, that was wonderful. 

No, I mean, it's funny, because, yeah, I mean, you're talking to someone who's never eaten a piece of American cheese. Not because like it wasn't around — well, I've always had a very bad relationship with dairy, because I'm basically just lactose intolerant. American cheese was always, was — cheese has always been something where I'm like very, very, very picky about it, because I know it's going to make myself sick. And when I was little, I just didn't — I don't know, I just didn't like it. 

But I understand that you — that it has a purpose, and it has its place. And it really is very difficult to kind of marry the perspective of we should make locally sourced organic food accessible to people, but at the same time it doesn't have a moral significance beyond its ecological or economic impact. It doesn't say anything about the person who really likes American cheese. 

And yet, if we even fix the whole food system to be agro-ecologically locally sourced and everything, there would still be American cheese. And I think that people come from a very either/or perspective on food.

And in your work, how do you speak to kind of a broad audience? I mean, I think I know this now, because now I know that you studied chemistry. And so now it makes a little more sense. But how do you make sure that you're speaking to people in a way that, I don't know, just acknowledges all the complicated realities around food? And what is the response from the Lifehacker audience to what you do?

Claire: I mean, I think I've cultivated a fairly friendly comments section. Which is, I mean, it's very different from the comments section I had at xoJane, which, I mean, I actually — I liked that comment section in its own way, ’cause the ones who regularly commented on mine were — they were pretty nice, actually. 

But, I don't know. I mean, it seems well received. I do get the occasional very angry email. I don't know, I get some really weird emails. But it's usually a fringe thing. If it gets a lot of traffic, I start getting weird emails. And that's why I know like, ‘Oh, this has reached a different audience than I'm used to.’ 

I don't know. My kind of philosophy to a lot of the bigger food problems is I'm really hesitant to put the blame on the consumer in our current system, ‘cause if you take something even that sounds like it's gonna be more ethical and good from the beginning, like Beyond Meat. People think, they’re like, ‘Oh, good, it's vegetarian. I'm not hurting animals. Therefore, it's better.’ But now you look at how it's being scaled up. What are the labor implications of that? How is that stuff being farmed? Who's farming it? It's really hard to find that information out. 

So, consumer politics don't really go that far in — under capitalism. I try to stay away from that. I think people can make all the best choices within their means. It's also again, if someone's working jobs and working two jobs and barely surviving, I'm not gonna nitpick their food decisions. I can say that they're not ethical, and the system is not only making it hard to make ethical decisions, it's making it hard for them to make enough money to make ethical decisions. 

I don't know if that answers your original question. [Laughs.]

Alicia: It does. 

And it's interesting, because I see you kind of tackling this and being approachable to your audience in this, and still teaching people how to eat well. And when I say well, I mean in an enjoyable and pleasurable way. And I think that that's so — that's not present enough, the idea that you're not just writing for people who live in Brooklyn and work in media. 

And I don't know if you feel this way — I know. Because, I mean, I grew up in New York. So, I was always in New York. But because I'm from Long Island, I always had this other perspective on things that — and I wasn't trying to be someone who was not from Long Island. And so, I always had this different perspective on things. And you're living in Oregon; I don't know if you've ever lived in New York. 

Claire: No, I haven’t.

Alicia: So, I think it's a completely different perspective on how people eat and how people survive. 

What is your perspective on the more — I guess, I'm gonna say mainstream food media, which makes me sound, I guess, like a right-wing crazy person. [Laughter.] That media, New York–centric, major urban center–centric food media, from being recipe focus, from being at Lifehacker, which is not a food publication per se. How do you see everything that's kind of going on in food media and what's being published?

Claire: I will say, being at Lifehacker, I do feel very lucky because I have a focus. And the focus is to make eating and cooking easier for people. It's Lifehacker, it's not — so it keeps me from spinning out into weird super niche, sous vide projects and things that take — because for one thing, I write two articles a day. So I don't have time to spend weeks developing a recipe. So, there's that. That kind of keeps me very focused on service journalism. 

I mean, I don't mind a bougie recipe. And I don't mind a super-scientific recipe, where it's honed in to be optimized or whatever. But I take issue with the idea that either one of those is the best way to do something. I really don't like in food media, where they're like, ‘This is the best way to do it. And if you're not doing it this way, then you're s**t. Then you shouldn't even bother.’ ’Cause that's so stupid. And it's so prohibitive, and it's — frankly, it's just, it's classist. 

I mean, there's so many ‘reckonings’ going on right now. But I mean, you can tell looking at the outcome of some of these reckonings that the people who own these companies, the CEOs do not care about these reckonings. They don't care about these issues. They will say they care. They will make little changes. But at the end of the day, they don't care. 

I do think that a really important part of both restaurants going forward and food media is we need to unionize more. And I know the L.A. Times is already unionized, and they're still treating — I'm blanking on her name. I'm so embarrassed. 

Alicia: Patricia Escarcega.

Claire: Yes, they're still treating her like s**t. But those are things — you can put salary minimums in contracts. We have, in our contract at least, every role has a salary minimum, which kind of prevents huge discrepancies of two people doing the same jobs. But I think it's important to keep unionizing, keep building strong contracts, because that's the only way you can actually fight CEOs and fight bosses. Collective action is the only—

And Twitter's kind of a weird sort of collective action that can kind of work in that way, ‘cause you get enough people piling on and you will see some shifts. But for real systemic changes, I think you have to organize. And you have to contractually organize against these people.

Alicia: Right.

And were you into unions? Were you with labor? [Laughter.] Was the significance of unionizing, when did that become significant to you? The importance of unionizing?

Claire: That became significant to me when I joined a union, really. Gawker (RIP) was already unionized when I got the job at Lifehacker. So, I just joined. And right around that time, actually, I started dating my current partner who is in the painter’s union and introduced me to a bunch of other people who were in various unions. And those two things, really. 

I mean, I can immediately — joining the union, I can immediately see how much better it was to have a union than to not have a union. To have salary minimums, to have health care, to have paid time off, to have severance. Those things were, to me at least, unheard of in media.

And that was all five years ago, and now a lot more sites are unionized. So, it's a lot more commonplace. But at the time, it was not common for a media blogger job to have these built-in protections.

Alicia: Yeah, no, yeah. 

I came from bigger magazines, that it was never even talked about. I never thought about it. I never knew that it was something possible. I was like, ‘Well, I have a white collar job. And so I don’t get to complain about anything. I never get to say anything. I don't have to care that I’m worked to the bone, because I sit at a computer and I don't get the same rights as everybody else.’ I mean, I don't know where I got that idea. But I mean, it seems pretty common.

Claire: Yeah, and I think it's petite bourgeois guilt, kind of. You're not working class. 

I mean, ’cause you look at construction unions. And sometimes, I do get — not frustrated, but you look at construction unions. And people will die on those jobs, right? It's different. The stakes are very different. But that doesn't mean that even though it's a ‘cushy job,’ you still — no matter what your labor is, you deserve a fair wage for your labor. You deserve health care. You deserve time off. 

America is so insane around the issue of earning your time off, or earning your salary. Earning the right to just live in a space that isn't a complete dump. These aren't things you have to earn. These are things that everyone deserves. Everyone deserves a decent space to sleep in, and some time off every once in a while. 

I do think it's interesting, yeah, because when — actually when I first started dating Wyatt, I was a freelancer. And he was like, ‘Oh, have you ever thought of joining the Freelancers Union?’ And I was just like, ‘No, why would I think to do that?’ And now, I'm a union thug. [Laughter.] 

Alicia: I love it, though. I'm so excited that this is happening, and that it's been happening. And it's funny because I left my full-time magazine job right before this kind of started, and so I was always a little bit angry I haven't gotten the chance to do the union thing. But it's just such a necessary thing that's happening.

And it's funny because I was writing a little bit about what is happening to Patricia, and ideas of prestige and how they manifest in a material way for a lot of people. But for people who don't already have money, working in media is really difficult. And so, you count on accumulating prestige in order to even make a living. And that shouldn't be how it is. 

Claire: Prestige is f*****g nonsense. Any form of it, whether it's hipster cred prestige, or this kind of older, New York media prestige. I just read — it came out in October, but Chris Crowley wrote about Mission Chinese, and just how there was rampant abuse at that place. It presented as such an inclusive, progressive — and it doesn't matter how these places present, whether it's a media company or a restaurant. It does not matter how they present, unless you have a — what's the word? 

Unions are workers defense organizations. If you don't have some sort of worker’s defense organization, workers will be exploited. That's what happens under capitalism. Even the bosses with the best intentions, eventually, things go bad because of capitalism. 

Alicia: It's so hard to just not finish every piece with just, ‘It's bad. Capitalism is-’

Claire: I know. I feel like I overly simplify it. But it really is so hard to make any real changes in the current system.

Alicia: No, it's real. It's real. 

And for you, is cooking a political act?

Claire: Cooking is something that pretty much everybody has to do, outside of politics. I think it can be political. I don't think it's inherently — I mean, again, it's hard to divorce — it's not done in a vacuum. So everything we do has little political consequences, but it shouldn't be. It should just be the act of keeping yourself alive. Even staying alive can feel political sometimes.

Alicia: For sure. Yeah. Well, thank you

Claire: I just — Oh, you're welcome. Sorry.

Alicia: No, no, thank you so much for coming on. I'm sorry. I think we have a little delay, causing me to make noises that I shouldn't be making. But yeah, no, thank you so much for coming on. And I love everything that you do. I think it's such a breath of fresh air in food. 

Claire: I love everything you do. I feel like your work is so much more serious than mine. [Laughter.] 

Alicia: Well, we don’t need everyone to be so serious all the time. [Laughter.]

Claire: That's true. You're so thoughtful, and I just — Yeah, I love the work you do. So, thank you so much for having me. 

Alicia: No, thank you. Thank you.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe

When I heard about the informational website KnowYourAlcohol.com, which launched early this year, I wanted to hear from who’s behind it. As I wrote about in “On Booze,” I’m pretty fascinated by how spirits are made and the culture around them. The very fashionably designed site provides really simple explanations for how the spirits industry works, and who is working against the conglomerate ownership, lack of transparency about ingredients and sourcing, and how bigger brands are now adopting “indie” aesthetics to trick the eye.

The site was developed by Haus in partnership with Good Liquorworks (the folks behind Good Vodka). Haus, a line of apértifs developed by Helena Price Hambrecht and her husband, Woody, was made out of a desire to capture botanicals with the grapes they were growing on their California farm. Now they sell them direct to consumers across the United States. We discussed how she got into this business, how they developed the brand, and why it’s important to her to bring transparency to booze. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Helena. Thank you so much for coming on to chat today.

Helena: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Helena: I grew up in a food desert in rural North Carolina, which may be surprising because I live on an organic farm now. But I, you know, I was raised in a small town, it was the 90s when organic produce hadn't quite made its way across America yet.

And, you know, I had a mom who made $11 an hour and we ate a lot of processed food. I was pretty much made of processed food until I was in my twenties and moved to California.

Alicia: Why did you move to California?

Helena: I knew that I needed to get out of North Carolina. I'm the daughter of a Norwegian immigrant. So I'm this, you know, I'm this interesting mix right of Southern and Scandinavian. And I just, I knew there was a bigger world out there and I needed to go find it and in the south wasn't quite for me. So as soon as I graduated college, I kind of picked a place on a map, and moved to Cali with $40 and knew that I wanted to work on the internet.

Alicia: Wow. And yeah, you had a creative studio. So how did you move from, you know, having a creative studio to launching house your beverage line?

Helena: I have a very strange but useful career for building Haus. I got my start doing PR for startups. So I got my degree in public relations. And I liked the internet. So I wanted to go do PR for the internet. And that's what I ended up doing. I worked my way in the door, ended up running comms and biz dev for startups in my early twenties. And then, very long story short, I saw an opportunity to, to do branding work in Silicon Valley.

I've been a creative since I was a small kid, and I could tell that Silicon Valley was starting to shift from kind of an engineering culture to a more designing, you know, creative culture. And long story short, I ended up building a creative studio that served a bunch of different startups and a bunch of the big guys too, like Facebook and Google and Twitter and Uber and Airbnb. It was a very, it was a really good run. My twenties were great for my career. But then I ended up marrying a booze guy. Haus happened because a techie married a booze guy.

Alicia: How did you launch this line of amaros with all these different kinds of botanicals? What was your husband doing in booze that kind of made this the right fit for you guys?

Helena: Yeah, so, you know, when I moved up here, I started immersing myself in the alcohol industry, because it was interesting to me, actually. You know, I worked in bars for many years from like, 18 to 22, so I knew that side of alcohol, but I didn't know the industry side. And really quickly, I noticed that it seemed to be a bit behind. You know, it hadn't embraced the internet. I learned that they hadn't because it's actually almost impossible to. There's this three-tier system; it's been around since Prohibition, and, if you make alcohol, you've got to go through it. You've got to go through a distributor who ends up selling you to retailers and restaurants, and that's what my husband was doing when I met him. 

He was making beautiful wine and beautiful apertivo. He was, you know, farming on his family's farm, and he was doing everything right by the traditional industry standards. Like, he got the cool-kid distributor; he got in all the best bars and restaurants in America. But when you have to go through that many gatekeepers, you kind of lose control over your product and how it lives in the world. So these aperitifs that he made to be drunk on the rocks like they are in Europe, they ended up just being a sprinkle in like a super-boozy, ten-ingredient cocktail. So you know, his product wasn't being served in the right way. Customers had no idea who he was; they didn't even know they were drinking it. 

To me, it seemed like, Man, this industry really isn't kind to independent makers, like they really don't have any control over their product. And it's almost impossible to get national distribution unless you're owned by a corporation who has that leverage to get you those placements. And at the same time, I was going through a drinking dilemma that you might be able to relate to, which is just part of being a, you know—like a hustler and a social person, and you're drinking all the time. Like, you know, there are definitely weeks when I'm drinking every day, whether it's a conference or business dinner or catching up with friends or just hanging out with [my husband] Woody like, alcohol is a big part of my life and most of my friends’ lives and it was really starting to get to us like the downsides. You know, like the hangovers were getting worse and we were having to like, work off the calories and our sleep was suffering and our joints were hurting. And I couldn't help but think like, why is there not a better way to drink? Like, why is this thing that we do really often causing us so much pain? 

And, you know, so I started looking into it, I couldn't help myself, I wanted to see like, what's going on with booze, like, what's going on with my generation? I have a hunch that we're looking for something better, because I've seen it happen in every other industry, right? Like, I worked in Silicon Valley for ten years; I saw all of these other industries have to shift to meet the higher standards of millennials who really care about quality and transparency and authenticity. And looking at alcohol, you know, I saw the opposite. I saw 96 percent of liquor is owned by a corporation. And that pretty much all, in North Carolina, where I came from, we only had access to corporate products. And if you're an indie brand, you're kind of stuck with your local market, maybe you're in a cool kid bottle shop, or you have to, like, you know, just have people visit your winery, or distillery. And all of this was kind of blowing my mind. 

I had a hunch that aperitifs were what our generation was maybe looking for. They checked all the boxes, you know: they were more sessionable; they were lower in alcohol, so you wouldn't accidentally get wasted and super hungover; and they are the original better-for-you-alcohol— they were made for medicinal purposes, centuries ago. They're botanical; they're sophisticated. They're really popular in the rest of the world, but not in America. Like, there are just all these signals like Man, this might be what this generation is looking for. And I talked to my husband about it. And I was like, Man, I wish we could build, you know, what I see in other industries. I wish we could go build the Glossier of alcohol and just sell to the drinker. But it was my understanding that you can't—you’re liquor, you have to go through three tier. And that's when my husband said, Oh, actually never thought about this, but the kind of aperitifs that we make, you can go direct to consumer, you can just sell it online, and I was like, dude, we got to go sell this online. Like we gotta go. We got to go build an alcohol company of the future.

For us, it wasn't just about aperitifs. It was about building a company that put the drinker first instead of the distributor, or the bartender, or like the corporate buyer, like, let's go make the booze that this generation wants. And like, let's go check all the boxes of what they're looking for, from like, the quality, the authenticity, the transparency, make it easy to buy, deliver it to their door, like give them a direct line to the makers, like just do it totally differently than what's out there and see what happens. And that was, we had the idea. In 2018, we had a three-month-old baby, so it certainly wasn't good timing. But we launched a year later. And now we're a year and a half old, and it's going really well.

Alicia: And how did you kind of decide because you are going direct to consumer, you're not focused on being in the back bar at the cool places—even though that now that is irrelevant—but how are you marketing to folks? You know, I've seen I've seen the bottles on like, every cool person’s bar cart that I follow on Instagram.

Helena: I think our secret was we were the first brand to just go after the drinker. Right? Like, we didn't go after any of the traditional folks; we didn't even reach out to liquor writers or traditional food and beverage writers, like we were focused on the drinker. That really worked out for us. 

And because I think the drinker has kind of felt neglected for a long time, and they didn't even know it. So when they saw, you know, our story, or why we launched and, you know, kind of the problem that we were passionate about solving, they were like, Whoa, I have this problem. Like, I feel terrible, you know, after I drink, and I'm not satisfied with the options that I have. 

In the beginning, you know, we didn't have any money to put into marketing, so we relied entirely on word of mouth. And I think the strategy that we had in the beginning was, let's make this the best thing that people have ever had. And not just the liquid, like my husband makes amazing booze. Like, I wasn't worried about that. But it was everything like let's make the packaging so beautiful that they're proud to share it on their mantle. Like let's make the unboxing experience feel really tailored and and premium. Let's ship it so fast that they're amazed at how quickly it arrives. Like let's do everything just miles and miles beyond what the industry standard is. So that people are so impressed that they tell all their friends, and all of our growth in the beginning was through word of mouth. 

Alicia: And, you know, I am from New York and had been living and writing there for a long time. And there is such a strong sense of New York alcohol, like from craft beer to wine to distilled spirits. That really  opened my mind to all these issues in alcohol and how we think of it and how it's so tied to these corporate brands. And these are all things that we wouldn't accept in food, but that we accept wholeheartedly in alcohol. 

I think maybe it's changing a little bit now that, you know, craft beer is obviously huge, that's already had its moment, but natural wine as well is having its moment. But for you in aperitifs, in spirits that time hasn't come yet. What are some of the issues that you're really trying to make your buyers, or your potential consumers aware of that makes you different from those brands? 

Helena: Yeah, I think a lot of people just didn't realize that it could be better, right? You know what I mean? I think, I think there is this assumption that like, Oh, it's alcohol, like, whatever, it's

a vice, I'll take what I can get, it's gonna make me feel bad. It's just part of the package. 

I think there is this assumption that your hangover is coming exclusively from the alcohol. And it's like, oh, man, if people only knew that it's coming from so many other things, too. It's like all of these kind of Frankenstein additives. It's the difference between eating McDonald's and eating a farm-to-table meal, you know? You feel worse when you eat McDonald's because it's made differently. And it's the same for alcohol. 

I think there's just been no conversation around it up until recently, and I think that's for a reason. It's industry knowledge, like all the insiders know, but I think there's been consequences to speaking out, or at least perceived consequences, because in alcohol, traditionally, you depend on the big guys, you depend on the distributors, you know, your only chance at selling your company would be to one of these big corporations, and you don't want to be the whistleblower; you don't want to be the person to call out an entire industry, because you're going to get blacklisted. And for us, I think we have a little bit of that extra freedom, because we aren't owned by a corporation, and we don't plan on being owned by a corporation. And we don't have to depend on distributors. So we have a little bit more freedom to spread these messages. 

I also think it's timing, right? It's like, there are movements, that where you can just sense that there's a groundswell happening, and that people are kind of ready to talk about this. And food really paved the way. For booze, I think just the transition from conventional to the growth of organic and farm-to-table eating. So I think people are finally ready to even receive this message. And we're happy to be the people to talk about it. I think there's a nuance like, we don't want to make people feel bad for their other choices, right? Like, what do you and I, we enjoy plenty of, you know, conventional snacks or beverages from time to time. It's more just about, like, we want to just arm people with information, so that they know how to make an informed buying decision. And if they are buying something conventional, at least they know. They know how to tell the difference between something that's made by a corporation and made by someone independent, because it's almost impossible to tell when you're just looking at the bottle.

Alicia: I's so fascinating, because, you know, as I said, I've been kind of following how this shift has been happening in alcohol, but it is such a slow shift. And it is such a difficult one to discuss. Because it's true people do think of alcohol as a vice and as something that will inevitably make them feel bad. And as something that, you know, comes from some faceless corporation. Gin is Beefeater and whiskey is Jameson and rum is Bacardi and people don't think about it that much beyond that.

But in launching knowyouralcohol.com, you kind of are calling for more transparency. So what are some other brands that you can suggest that are also kind of working in a sustainable way and in trying to change the public perception of alcohol?

Helena: Oh, man, there are so many, like that's another thing that many don't realize. We're not the only brand on earth that's, that's, you know, ethical. There are so many brands that came before us that are doing it right. You know, ethical winemakers, ethical distillers; they just don't get any national play because they can't get national distribution. So you can really only find them at cool kid bottle shops in Brooklyn or L.A. Or sometimes you literally have to go to the winery or distillery to try them. It's like such a problem, you know, with distribution. It boils down to that. 

But, you know, if you go to Know Your Alcohol, we have a full list that you can start with. There are plenty more, but you know, it's like Empirical or Forthave Spirits in New York. I'm sure you know them. Good Vodka, obviously. Yeah, Hanson and Sonoma County, amazing winemakers like Martha Stoneman or Mountain Tides. There's a lot happening. But, you know, it's just hard to find them. And this is just the starting point.

Alicia: What are some of the challenges that smaller producers face in getting out there? Is it just distribution? Or, you know, is there a problem in media not communicating these sorts of ideas or not communicating that this is happening, and that this is a new movement in alcohol?

Helena: It's really, it's deep and systemic, right? Like, distribution is always going to be a problem. I think the reason why we're still the only DTC (direct to consumer) brand in the space and have no real competition in that way is because it's so hard and so expensive to become nationally compliant. And that's even if you are a wine or a vermouth, and you can go national in the first place. It's just prohibitively difficult. And so you do have to rely on distributors to make it easy, but distributors—they're not going to prioritize indie brands over corporations with millions of dollars to put into marketing. It's like having that risk set for a distributor. 

So corporations and distributors are always going to be working together to de-risk their own opportunities. I think the future is really in the internet starting to open up, like regulations are starting slowly but surely to open up. COVID helped so much with that. But I think it's also on the drinker to go seek better brands. It really is, it's as much on the maker as it is on the drinker to go and pursue well-made indie makers as much as they're pursuing the really convenient corporate brands. It's really just beginning. And I don't think that there's any clear solution yet. But a big part of it is going to be on the drinker to decide that they're going to change their buying habits and move their money from corporations to Indies.

Alicia: I mean, it's so difficult because these, these people have so much money. I'm here in San Juan, and Bacardi really owns the rum space, but they have zero transparency around their sourcing, where this molasses is coming from, and how those workers are being compensated, and then how it's being processed. It's just really difficult to make changes there, because they're just so big and so powerful and so deeply associated with the category. And I've written before about, you know, how labeling laws are an issue because you can have something like Good Vodka that tells you on the label, what it's made from, and when and where, but if you wanted to make that a big policy change, I think there would be a lot of blowback from very powerful people. But do you think that there are changes that could be made to labeling laws that would make the category better and better educate the consumer?

Helena: Oh, yeah, I mean, I think change is gonna come, but it's gonna take the drinker again, you know, helping push those changes. Drizly was just bought by Uber this morning for $1.1 billion, which is a steal, in my opinion, because they've totally put the power into the buyer, right? Now the buyer, instead of going to the grocery store and being like, okay, I only have these choices to choose from, they're able to look at every retailer in their metro area, and they're able to make a more informed choice about what they buy. And they're able to read more about the brands because they're on the internet instead of in the store. And it's really putting more power into the buyer, which is really exciting and brands like us who launched with the idea that we were going to make something that had the drinker in mind and we're growing faster than pretty much any alcohol brand ever. You know, I think we're showing slowly but surely corporations that it is important. 

And if companies like us and companies like Drizly continue to take market share from the big guys, it's going to show them they have to change. And it's going to be a process but it's gonna, I really think, it's going to take outsiders like Haus and Drizly to go and just show that if you put the customer first, you can win. Like, you can actually take meaningful market share and that is what is going to force these guys to change.

Alicia: And for you, is drinking a political act?

Helena: Oh man,it's all about accessibility. You know, it goes back to where I grew up in North Carolina and not having access to good food and certainly not good alcohol and, even still, if you go to the ABC store where my mom lives, there's no indie brands in that ABC store. It's 100 percent owned by corporations. And so one of my biggest motivators for building Haus is to make a brand that has indie values, but is accessible to people outside of cool kid bottle shops in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, that's accessible to people in North Carolina or anywhere in America. It's a really profound shift that, if we can be a pioneer of that, that's real impact, and it's really exciting to be a part of.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

Helena: Absolutely. Thanks for chatting.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe

I’ve been following Emily Gould’s writing for so long that I can barely remember a pre-Emily Gould time in the internet discourse. She has been an influence and a role model, if I’m being honest, and her vulnerability, honesty, humor, and growth have been so wonderful to watch over the years. She’s done so much: personal blogging, Gawker blogging, a memoir (And the Heart Says Whatever), her two novels (Friendship, Perfect Tunes), and her essays at The Cut and other outlets. She’s also been a publisher, with Emily Books, which focused on first-person women’s writing.

Food comes up everywhere, even when not the focus—even when it’s maybe just buying a bottle of water when you shouldn’t, when the money’s not really there. It’s there in her models of domesticity and adult living. We talked about all of that, and she gave me great advice on a recent situation that transpired on Twitter, and I’m very grateful to her for that openness. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Emily. Thank you so much for taking the time out to come on.

Emily: Oh, it's my pleasure. I'm so excited to talk to you.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Emily: I grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland. I had the experience that I think a lot of people around my age had where I was raised by parents who had kind of been a little bit hippie-tinged in their — the way that they thought about food and eating, and had sort of gone through phases of — like my mom had every single cookbook that Mollie Katzen has ever published, from Moosewood to The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. 

And so it was a combination of that kind of sort of cheese and bulgur casserole type of ‘70s vegetarian food, and also the food that my parents had grown up eating, which was a sort of — I don't know. I remember my mom's sort of classic, weeknight dishes when I was growing up were stovetop mac and cheese with bread crumbs on it and a side of broccoli, steamed broccoli with lemon and butter, which is actually an totally awesome meal. Yeah, just stuff like that. Not a lot of meat in the rotation. A ton of pasta, because it was the ‘80s. 

I mean, my mom's a really good cook. My dad is the son of assimilated, very assimilated Jews from Long Island who — my grandmother really did not cook at all. And her one signature dish, other than a brisket that she would make for Passover, but her other signature, maybe a dinner party dish that she would make is chicken that was somehow basted with I would say French dressing, the orange kind that comes in lemon. Disgusting, overtly disgusting. But they were great at ordering all of the right things from a deli. That was a real skill. So yeah, that's basically my Cloner legacy. 

I'm half Jewish and half WASP, like so many of the absolute worst people in the world. [Laughs.] And my maternal grandparents were actually really, really, really really good cooks and who always had a green salad with every meal with a really garlicky dressing made and the same giant wooden salad bowl, and ate a lot of food that they grew themselves because they always had a garden in their backyard. Yeah, the stronger, I guess, culinary influence. And my grandmother grew up on a farm and taught my mom how to cook, and my mom — That's why my mom is an actual good cook.

Alicia: [Laughs.] Well, how did food become kind of a focal point in your life? Because while it's never the explicit focus of your writing, even when you wrote your really great essay about domestic goddesses for The Cut, you were writing more kind of about womanhood than food. 

But food is always there, and even in that — the visions of a perfect future that you wrote about in your 2014 essay ‘How Much My Novel Cost Me,’ as you can tell, I went through your whole oeuvre yesterday. The food is always there. And how did that happen?

Emily: I guess, because I think a lot about domesticity and sort of the idealized domesticity, what making a beautiful home and life can mean, especially for women, and how that butts up against our lived realities. 

I think something really, really formative for me was having a job in my early 20s where I worked at a publishing house that helped — that mostly published cookbooks, which I talked about in that domestic goddesses essay. 

I re-read that domestic goddess essay recently, too. It's such a time of going back with our lens of right now and looking at our past work and being like, ‘Oh, cringe! Oh my god.’ I feel like I was really gross about Nigella in that essay, and I just talk about her boobs a lot. But actually, Nigella is a great writer and I sort of failed to focus on that part of it because — so, the publisher who I worked for was the American publisher of Nigella and also, I guess, Jamie Oliver, so people like that.

Yeah, so this was when I was first living with a boyfriend. I was sort of playing house. Really, there's no better word for what I was doing. Well, I mean, I was actually cooking food and actually making dinner. But we weren't really building a life together. We were just sort of having this sort of fantasy of ourselves as adults.

I was cooking from these cookbooks and sort of imagining myself into the role of adult woman who is the one who determines what the household will feel like and tastes like and smell like, and that stuff seems so — it's politically charged. It's emotionally important. It's care work. Everything is sort of encapsulated in how you feed your family. I was imagining myself and this boyfriend as a family, trying to imagine myself into a future, I guess.

Alicia: Right. 

And, I mean, you are a mom now. Have you thought about how you kind of conjured the idea of what that would be like versus what the reality of it is? I mean, I know you do. You write about it in your newsletter all the time. [Laughs.]

Emily: [Sad trombone noises.] Actually, I wrote an essay about this. Such a bummer essay, but I wrote an essay about this in a really great Charlotte Druckman anthology, Women on Food.

Alicia: Yes, I have it. Yeah.

Emily: And I just wrote about how different my reality is now from the fantasy that I had as someone who was single and really had very few caregiving responsibilities. 

I mean, the pandemic has been really hard on my love of food. The Helen Rosner essay about how she has sort of given up on loving cooking really resonated with me, because, I mean, sometimes I'll go through phases where I'll get really interested in new recipes again. But mostly it is just this really dull chore for me right now, every aspect of — from not being able to easily shop it at different markets, and to just my kids, trying to manage my kid’s relationships to food, i.e., hoping that they'll eat some of it so they then don't come to me at bedtime saying, ‘Mama, I'm hungry.’ And it's like, ‘Wel, you had the last three hours to take a single bite of the completely wonderful meal that I made for you, darling, and now you're gonna eat Sydney's yogurt that comes in a tube.’ A lot of tube yogurt, it's not something I'm particularly proud of. 

Yeah, it's a bummer. The specific, very specific future that I had fantasized in kind of a joking way in that essay about money that I wrote when I was kind of — I guess I was working on that essay when I was turning 30, or maybe in my very early 30s and wasn't married, didn't have kids, really struggling with every aspect of my life and career and finances and just figuring — trying to figure out how to move forward with all of that stuff. And I thought that I wanted to be a novelist who lived in a brownstone, was married to my then-boyfriend, Keith, and we had children. And I wrote all day, and then served them a delicious dinner at night. And I think I said, ‘Like Jennifer Egan, but I don't know if she cooks. Like Laurie Colwin, but not dead.’

And I guess some parts of that wistful dream have come true. Not the brownstone. [Laughter.] Like everything that you can sort of succeed at or attain in life, you finish one level of video game and the reward is that you get to the next level of video game that just is harder and has bigger, scarier monsters. [Laughter.]

So, I feel like I have actually — the brownstone is a big exception. But I'm married to Keith. We have two wonderful, although very irritating, children. And I do cook dinner every night. And I do write novels. It's all happening except I really, really hate most parts of it. [Laughter.] And I'm still the same person who managed to basically squander a fortune in the service of writing a book that I would rather have each of my fingernails removed with pliers than have to open and read again. I mean, no regrets, I guess.

Alicia: No, I mean, it's interesting, because, I mean, obviously, for you, you're a person who's written so much about your life. And so there is all this documentation of what you thought your life would be, and then what it becomes. Which, for me, is always what I've wanted to read. This is why I love the internet. This is why I was on LiveJournal. I want to know the journey of a person's life. Having someone ask you, ‘How did your dreams measure up to your reality?’ is — it's not the intention in being a writer, I guess, to have it all add up. It's just to be — to write it down.

Emily: Yeah, I mean, I want to allow for the possibility that everyone is always changing and fully growing, etc. I feel exactly the same way about blogging, and — in all of its forms and the Internet that you do. All of my online writing is sort of, to be maximally pretentious about it, sort of a durational performance project that is the documentation of my, at least my own

narrativization of my own experiences. 

But yeah, it is jarring sometimes to come up against a younger version of yourself, and what she thought she wanted, or what she thought was gonna be — what would make her happy?

Alicia: Right.

Yeah, it's the thing that everyone actually has gone — been through, but not everyone has documented. But I think documentation is important and powerful and necessary. 

And I mean, you were talking about the brownstone. And one of the other things you write about with such clarity and honesty is money, and I have never written about money. And this would probably be the first time I'm acknowledging that I'm a person who's been in and out of debt. Of course, ever since I decided to be a freelance writer, it's basically a game of taking on debt and then paying it off. But I feel I'm not supposed to be that kind of person. I'm supposed to be a person who has a handle on these kinds of things. 

But for you, why has it been important to talk about the reality of money and being a writer, and how those things don't often make sense together?

Emily: I think I focused on it so much, because it was part of my — really, my project for a long time starting in, I guess, my late 20s was this sort of commitment to radical honesty in writing. 

And not just my writing. I was so interested in and committed to sort of the potential power of First Person narratives as tools for, I guess, communicating. I really felt so strongly that if people could just have more exposure to female interiority and female subjectivity, the world could change around that. And I felt it was just something that had been really missing from my education and my culture, cultural exposure thus far. And so, that's why I started this publishing project where I mostly published first person memoir and neo-memoir novels. And I was so committed to it. 

Maybe as sort of the larger culture caught up to it in various ways, I started to move away from it. And right now, I feel really, pretty far from it. I mean, the pendulum might swing. I might come back. But I think I also hit sort of, for myself, the limits of what I was comfortable with, in terms of being that transparent, being that available, letting people into that extent. I don't know. 

There's that Magnetic Fields song and it goes, ‘No one will ever love you honestly. No one will ever love you for your honesty.’ It took a while for that to land for me. I mean, people might appreciate your honesty. And people might have a voyeuristic relationship with your honesty. And if they're honest with themselves, they might realize that if they're hate-reading you, they're still reading. 

I don't get off on being a provocateur. I know, some people really like to make other people angry with their writing. And that's not me. Unfortunately, I think that I'd be much more successful and prolific if I got off on making people angry. But I just don't, I don't get anything out of it. And I do want to be loved. I'm a Libra with Aries moon, Aries rising. And that's just something that I know about myself now. 

I would not write that essay today, because I just wouldn't be able to get it up to be that brave and that honest. I know what the consequences are. I also feel there's just more at stake than just me now, because I have a family. And because I have my best friend who I ran a business with for so long. And I still feel if I really, really screw up, it'll ricochet onto her. I can't risk her life and livelihood or my consequences of my — me running my mouth off for my family, my kids. It's just changing calculus.

Alicia: For sure, no. 

And I mean, that was such a helpful answer to me, because I feel I'm still in the idea that being honest can change how people think. But maybe I'm learning now that it doesn't actually have that effect.

Emily: Eventually, with a lot of sort of reflection and private writing about this kind of thing and therapy is that I do still — I have the same ideals. I definitely have the same ideals. I think the path there has to be less individualistic and more reflective, as with everything. The power of one person exposing the material conditions of their existence is it's powerful, but it's intrinsically limited. 

I mean, imagine how much more powerful if every single freelancer you knew published a very straightforward accounting of — or just tax returns. I mean, Jesus Christ, it's not like you have to write an essay. There's already a spreadsheet. If every publication had a masthead that just said everyone's salary right after their job title that's much more straightforward then a soul-searching essay.

Alicia: Right, no. 

I think we come up a lot against all these weird ideas as freelance writers, especially how there's this constant — people constantly saying, ‘No one can really make a living as a writer. Everyone is secretly doing something else.’ There's just constant conspiracy theories about how people make a living. That's why I think I do feel honesty is such an important part of it. 

But you're right that it doesn't matter if it's only a few people, because there's still going to be these conspiracy theories about how writers make a living that are, for whatever reason, super common and pervasive. Yeah, I did a weird CNBC video once that I really regret about money.

Emily: Oh, yeah? I need to Google it. Interesting. I would not have—

Alicia: No, please don't. It's horrible. 

But I was at a point where I really had — I think it was 2018. I didn't really have enough work. 2018 was the year where I actually got money back as a freelancer, which never happens so that tells you how much money I made. And so a friend’s sister, a friend I used to work with at New York Magazine, her sister worked at CNBC and was, ‘You're interesting. Will you do this?’ I think she was buying bachelorette party cupcakes off of me that had little chocolate penises that I made. And she was like, ‘Do you want to do this thing about money?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, fine. I'll do the video about money.’

My picture’s the icon for the series. People send me pictures all the time of it. I'm like, ‘I didn't know it would have such a long life.’ But luckily, I don't think anyone in my field has actually seen it until I've talked about it now, probably. But just such an embarrassing, stupid thing. 

But again, just this idea that ‘I can be super honest and transparent, and that will be a useful thing.’ And it's like, ‘No, it actually isn't. It just makes me feel a little bit naked all the time.’ So yeah, it is what it is. [Laughs.]

But kind of in a related vein you wrote a really amazing piece for The Cut about shame. And one of the lines was, ‘Being hated quickly became something that I took for granted as the price of doing business.’ And I feel like in a similar vein to being honest, there is this kind of anticipation of being hated if you're a writer on the internet. I don't know if you feel — how your thought, thinking on that has changed.

Emily: Oh my God, I feel since I wrote that it's only gotten worse a little bit. I mean, I spent most of 2019 working on that essay. I sound crazy. It took me seven or eight months just writing various drafts of that essay to finally figure out what I wanted to say with it, and it was excruciating the whole time. I mean, I had a really, really good editor who I loved and had a quasi-therapeutic relationship with. But it was really hard to make myself go back there. And especially because I'd written sort of versions of it before, so I had to figure out what do I want to say this time that's different and also not plagiarize myself?

So I've already said, I want to be loved. I don't want to be hated. But I guess at that point, I had accepted that being hated was, yeah, the price of admission. It really makes me feel so sad to think about all of the people for whom being hated is not the price of admission structurally and never has been and how just the-

Obviously, this should go without saying, but it shouldn't be that way for anyone. It's tricky. My friends tease me sometimes because I have a very — I have a sort of knee jerk reaction to anyone who is the main character of the day. And I feel automatically defensive of that person, kind of no matter how much they suck, because I just know how bad it can feel to be that person. And of course, they're not necessarily experiencing it the same way that I would or that I have. My friend Jessica calls it ‘your Eva Braun thing.’ [Laughter.] I’m just like, seriously like, ‘Guys, come on. She's not that bad.’ [Laughter.] I don't actually feel that way about literally Eva Braun. 

It's so hard and so complicated. Everyone has their own relationship to attention and notoriety, and sort of how much they're willing to put up with in order to get their sort of often very paltry rewards of being public in any way. But I guess the more experienced I get in this realm, the trade off just really does not seem worth it. I often wonder what it would take for me, what would be the final straw for me to just really say goodbye to it forever and be a recluse who only emerges every five years or so, does the bare minimum of book publicity and then goes back to my monastic cabin somewhere.

You can tell that that's not my actual personality. I love people and being in the world and connecting people and connecting ideas. The price is high. It's too high. It's too high for almost everyone. But I'm currently still willing to pay it. I don't know how much longer I will be willing to. But for now, I still am. 

Alicia: It's the complicated question of the day, I suppose. 

I mean, everyone's like, ‘I want to just be so successful that I cannot be online.’ And it's like, I don't know if I would — there's a level for me where I would not be online. I don't know, for myself, whether that exists. And now, I have to ask myself that question all the time. Yeah, it's a weird one. 

Well, to get back to food, and I'm sorry, I asked you like a bunch of heavy questions about- 

Emily: You can tell I just want to talk about you and what the last couple of weeks have been like for you.

Alicia: [Laughs.] Yeah, it was weird. And I mean, I think that's why I'm asking you the questions I'm asking you. And I don't want to have an advice session about it. But I think I'm asking you those questions because I'm interested in what the price is that I'm willing to pay to have attention. And I don't know if it's necessarily attention, or just a career. And feeling a little bit blamed for my own ‘success,’ feeling like people think that I did something specific to make people pay attention to me, other than just write things. 

Which is, I think, a stranger feeling even than someone coming after me for pretending to be someone I'm not. I mean, that was something that was easy to disprove. So while it was strange and traumatic, it was easy to disprove. And so it wasn't that difficult. But the thing that really bothers me is when people act like I have done something to bring this upon me. And there's some sort of ‘both sides have a point’ which has emerged, which was really strange because I feel the other person did not have any point at all. 

So that's why I think I'm focused on these questions, because it's like, ‘What does it cost to be honest? And what does it cost to accept that people aren't going to like you when we all want to be liked?’ I have a Libra moon, a Libra Mars. I don't know if that makes any difference. 

And yeah, it's just this thing where it's — I'm constantly asking myself, ‘Have I done something to make people hate me, and not even just hate me but also think that I am a person without feelings?’ Because that's another kind of strain of thing. And that emerged as well last week, and was just kind of an offshoot of what Beejoli did, which was that some people just didn't think I was deserving of sympathy, or — I don't know if they didn't think I was deserving, but they express zero sympathy in acknowledging the events, but then express zero sympathy. And I was like, ‘I don't really know how to deal with that.’ That's a weirder thing for me to deal with, is feeling like this person doesn't think I was wronged in any way. 

All the offshoots of the situation were more significant to me than the situation itself, if that makes sense. And so, of course, that's why, yeah, I'm asking these questions. Do I need to be less available? Do I need to care less, or is this just what it is to be a writer? I don't know.

Emily: Do you want advice? 

Alicia: Of course! Yeah! [Laughs.]

Emily: I used to always give advice, and sometimes I need to check myself because obviously not everyone — sometimes I don't know what I'm talking about. But with this situation, I feel I have-

Alicia: Yeah, you have experience.

Emily: I have some things I potentially could share, and they might work for you or not. 

I mean, I think part of what you're coming up against is that you are hitting the point in your career, and your sort of being known as a writer and a person where people think that they can talk about you and that you are not part of that conversation. You are existing on some lofty plane, where you will not be a witness to every interaction that takes place about you or your work or what you mean. [Laughs.] And that's a weird thing. It can feel really bad. 

Its consequences are not necessarily all bad. And it’s totally normal to experience it — It feels terrible. It feels terrible. I think one of the weirdest things that I've had to sort of doula friends through who are just having their first book published, or their first big article that makes a splash is that success and failure are flip sides of the same coin. And oftentimes in the moment of them, they feel — they can feel identical. And you have to sort of mourn what you thought it might feel like to be known. Because I think people expect that it will feel like being perfectly understood and loved in all of your particulars, and just unconditionally, positively, warmly received. 

And it doesn't feel like that. Instead, it can feel like not being a person. You become an idea rather than a person to people. And that means that it's time to set your notifications to really tight, really, and decide whose feedback actually matters to you. It's probably going to be a really short list. Later, you can focus on remaining just open enough, and having still some appetite for novelty and new connections and new friends. But at a time of sort of peak attention, and I want to say crisis but it's not necessarily crisis ’cause the crisis can be success too, you need to just lock it down and focus on the people who are the real people who care — who you care about, and who matters to you and what their opinion of you is.

And none of this requires you to be a perfect person who's always right, and who has these perfect opinions and political positions and behaviors. It doesn't require your writing to be perfect or flawless, either. You can even have been wronged. It's just focusing on your core self, the people who affirm and enhance that core self, and the people — and the communities that you actually want to be a part of rather than the sort of larger community of people who want to have some aspects of themselves associated with you.

Does that make sense? 

Alicia: No, it makes complete sense. 

I have a good friend who's another food writer, and he has another — he has his first book coming out this year. But he had a kind of incident similar to what I dealt with last week. And basically what he's done is to stop tweeting, stop posting anything. And I'm like, ‘I don't know. That's not in me.’ But I can shut out the people that I don't care about. And that's definitely what I need to do. And that makes so much sense, that it's just kind of a point at which you need to just only focus on the echo chamber. And sometimes I'm like, ‘I don't know if that's fair. Maybe I should hear what other people have to say.’ But yeah, it's too damaging and too distracting to know, I think.

Emily: Yeah. 

You give something up, for sure. Yeah. To me, it seems the only viable path forward. Yeah. Seems the greatest minds of my generation seem totally warped by having to be constantly responsible to a lot of people for their every utterance. It's not how our brains are meant to deal with social interaction.

Alicia: Not at all. 

Well, thank you for that.

Emily: I’m a noted psychologist and a neurologist, so. Done a lot of research on this.

Alicia: No, but thank you so much for that. I honestly was conscious of not wanting to ask you for advice. I was like, ‘No, this is an interview about your work.’ But I had this kind of subtextual thought while I was writing these questions, where I'm like, ‘I'm asking her for advice without — ’ [Laughter.]

Emily: I like giving advice. And I don't get to give it as often as I like, ’cause that — my best friend is like, ‘I just want to complain to you. Don't try to solve everything.’ I’m like, ‘But it’s my honest opinion! I know how everyone should live. Just not me, but everyone else.’

Alicia: Well, to actually get back to your work and your work that has been in the food sphere, which was — you did a series for The Awl, I guess, like 10 years ago, The Awl obviously being the website that everyone mourns, now. ‘Cooking the Books,’ where you cooked food with novelists usually. And I think if you were doing this now,for a website, I think it would be — people would love it. People love watching people cook online now, which is, I don't think was the case back then. But what made you want to get into that, and what kind of was the — not just the inspiration, but what was your goal with that?

Emily: My friend Val, Valerie Temple, is the filmmaker. Or she had a camera, I guess. And she was living in Philly at the time. And I love her, and we don't get — we didn't get to see each other very often. And we just kind of wanted to have a project together so that she would have an excuse to come up to and be in New York once a month and sleep on my couch. And we would spend the day making this Internet TV show. And then we would go out afterwards. And it was our friendship reconnecting time. 

I mean, you can't tell from the quality of this thing. Because it's so sad that we were making this thing before everyone could make a much better TV show than that on their phones now. We were making it in 2009 or 2010 or whenever, and we were actually using cameras and shooting in my apartment's kitchen. And we would spend a lot of time putting black paper on the windows so that the lighting wouldn't be appalling, but it was still pretty bad. 

I don't know. I just wanted to have a collaborative project. We had no goals for it. We were really just making it for kicks and for fun. And then, they posted it on The Awl because they were just willing to do that. And I was, ‘Thank you.’ 

We just did it for as long as we could. I mean, it was a lot of work. And we did it basically until I moved out of that apartment, and then I moved into a place where the kitchen was much harder to shoot into. It was more of a galley. Your standard New York kitchen. 

This place was more of a — it's just a third floor of a brownstone, so it was always kind of all one room and — with a little island that we could stand at while we talked to the camera. 

And I just wanted an excuse to talk to writers who I admired, too. I kind of can't believe the people who we got in there. We had some real disasters though. Book publicists are so desperate for any kind of coverage for books, and so when — people sort of pitched us who didn't necessary know what they were getting into. And then it's this completely amateurish situation in someone's apartment. We had some people who were like, ‘Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no.’

I wish I could remember the woman's name. She was a British food writer who, I think, was very sort of famous. An older person who had had a long career being taken very seriously and writing for all of the major food publications. And she got really upset because the pudding that we were making from her cookbook was clearly not going to come out very well. We were like, ‘It's about improvisation and experimentation. We can just fake taking bites of it and saying that it's yummy.’ And she was really sad and really offended. And we never ended up airing her episode. Because I think she thought she was going on a real TV show. 

Yeah, it definitely worked out a lot better with people who are sort of more game — the episode with Tao Lin is still one of my favorites, the one where he’s taking bites off of a cucumber and then spitting them into the salad bowl. That’s an absurdist moment, really, really a moment. 

Anyway, yeah, I loved doing it. I'm probably not a person who's meant to be on camera. But it was still really fun for me to do. 

Alicia: Right.

Well, for you is cooking a political act?

Emily: You sent me this question in advance, so I had some time to think about it. So I've really been thinking about it. 

I mean, I think to the extent that it is for me a political act, it connects back to everything that we talked about before about idealized visions of female domesticity and the people who've had success sort of reclaiming it and making it a career. And I didn't end up going in that direction. I think the path sort of forked for me in a way that foreclosed that direction. And now, I feel for me not cooking would be much more of a political act. 

I mean, my husband is a — I really don't want to sound like one of those people who's like, ‘Well, my husband really shares every responsibility.’ Also good for you, and also I just don't believe you. That’s not structurally possible. And if it is, it's just made possible by money, not him being an intrinsically better feminist. 

They're things that he does, and there are things that I do. And cooking is definitely a thing that I've always done. And when we were much younger, I really thought — I hated the idea of having anyone else's input in the kitchen, or input in what we would eat and what kind of groceries we would buy. And I wanted to be solely responsible for it, and have it be my thing and have something else be very, very discreetly his thing. 

And now I'm just like, ‘Look, somebody needs to heat up these broccoli nuggets. It does not have to be me. I'm not better at that.’ And I get no joy from it. And it's not a creative act for me. To get back to the place where cooking would be a part, me using the creative part of my brain in a satisfying way, but I've been thinking and talking so much lately about social reproduction, social reproductive theory, feminism, and anything that's just something that is the baseline of what you do to keep the machine running for another day. That doesn't feel something that I necessarily need to be involved in. 

So for me, yeah, I would like to — we're just doing this whole interview about food and I'm like, ‘I want to think about food less. I want to grocery — be involved with grocery shopping less, and I want to figure out a way to make that sustainable for my family, for everyone's family.’ I no longer have a vision of myself typing away at my novel all day, and then serving my family the delicious homemade food at night that they gleefully gobble up and say, ‘Thank you, Mother!’ ‘cause no aspect of that is realistic. Feel all of it should be taking place in a brownstone. That'd be really cool. I'm just putting that out there to the universe, Please, $2.5 million dollar brownstone, fall into my lap somehow. Climb into my lap like a warm puppy and just stay there.

Yeah. Probably not gonna happen. I’m just putting it out there.

Alicia: [Laughs.] Well, thank you so much for coming on. And I wish that we could have talked about your novels, even — Ok, I haven't read Perfect Tunes yet. But I want to, and I read Friendship years ago, and I really, — I loved it. I don't know how you feel about it now. But I loved it when I read it. 

Emily: I'm still a fan.

Alicia: Ok, good. [Laughs.] I was like,’ I can't tell which book was the pliers book.’

Emily: And The Heart Says Whatever. Which people like. It's not a bad book. It's just, for me, it's the book that I wrote when I was 28. Do you want to read a tweet that you wrote when you were 20? No.

Alicia: Yeah. No, I understand. 

But yes, thank you so much, again, for taking the time out. And for the advice.

Emily: More where that came from? Get at me, hit me up anytime. I'm your loyal subscriber and I'm at your disposal.

Alicia: [Laughs.] Thank you so much.

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Listen now | The chef and community organizer talks occupation and moving to a worker-owned model.

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I met Jenn de la Vega at The Brooklyn Kitchen in 2017, when it was still in Williamsburg but wasn’t operating as its old self. She came on to do prep for a fundraiser there after Hurricane Maria, for a burgeoning nonprofit meant to keep the hospitality industry on the archipelago afloat. She was working, and still works, as an editor for the seminal food zine Put a Egg On It. Her attitude was so chill that she adapted easily to the work and the vibe—no questions asked, no ego fluffed. As I discovered in our interview, that’s how she does everything: with a plan, with chill, with good yet assertive vibes.

Jenn has catered extravagant weddings, developed recipes for cookbooks (namely with the brilliant Nicole Taylor), and made a big pivot from working in tech to do it all. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Jenn. Thanks so much for coming on.

Jenn: Hi, Alicia. Glad to be here.

Alicia: How are you? How are things? Where are you right now?

Jenn: I'm in Brooklyn, New York. I would say sleep is not easy to come by these days. But I'm happy to report that I got my first vaccination last week.

Alicia: Nice! As a food service worker?

Jenn: As many things, yeah. [Laughter.] I'm glad that New York is moving along. 

Alicia: Yes, they are moving things along and that's very nice to see. 

Jenn: It is awkward. I'm sorry that I said anything because I do see people online being like, ‘I got vaccinated!’ and then people are like, ‘How? How did you do it?’ Also, persistence. It’s been refreshing.

Alicia: No.

I mean, for me, it's ‘everybody needs to get vaccinated.’ Who really cares how they go about it? We just need to freaking do it. 

But I'm happy to hear that you're on the road to immunity. [Laughter.] It's going a lot slower here, but I'm happy New York is on the mend. 

Jenn: Yeah. 

Alicia: Yeah.

Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Jenn: Sure. 

I grew up in Hercules, California. It's a small Bay Area town on the coast of San Pablo Bay. I read some history recently, because I'm starting to write a little bit about this little town. And it used to be a dynamite factory in the 1800s, so it had a key part in a lot of gold rushing, I think.

Alicia: That's wild.

Jenn: I know. 

It was a lovely little town. And my grandparents, aunts and uncles all lived within 20 miles in El Sobrante, California, and what I ate as a child is very different from what was available and around. 

My folks loved food. My grandma had a bustling garden full of fruits and vegetables. I liked carrots because they were good for your eyes and my eyes were going at a very young age. I'm not sure how much credence to give to that, but carrots all the time. Fruit snacks and McDonald's. [Laughs.]

Alicia: Wow. [Laughs.]

Jenn: I know. I had every birthday up until I was eight years old at a McDonald's. They had the best playground. They even had like a program for birthdays, a whole activity day. I wish I had a photo of it because there's this purple character, Grimace. You remember Grimace? 

Alicia: You remember Grimace, yeah.

Jenn: But in the playground, there was a jiggly sort of thing that you stepped into. It had prison bars as a tummy. And if I only knew then fast food is a prison. It’s smiling and holding the bars, that's kind of my childhood. [Laughter.]

So I was picky, and really into the things that I saw on television, I was commonly sitting at the dinner table with my arms crossed, pouting, getting yelled at about never finishing my plate. So, here's a word for this in Tagalog. So I'm Filipino American and there's a word, takaw-mata, which means, ‘My eyes are too big for my stomach.’ [Laughs.] Or I am some kind of ungrateful American. [Laughs.]

So, mealtimes were not something that I looked forward to. I drank a lot of soda. I was severely underweight through most of my life. But I have this experience that I'm noticing among first-generation Asian Americans is that we're sort of stumbling through our own personal histories and trying to connect back to it. I call it my great cultural backpedaling. I sort of revel these days in inauthenticity. 

And I'm not really one person to define the food of the Philippines, just because my family is from there. I'm also from California and have lived in New York for 15 years. So I would say that the palate has widened since childhood, but it continues to be a journey now.

Alicia: Right, right. And how does being part of that diaspora reflect in how you cook, if it does it? 

Jenn: It’s sort of sprinkled in these days. I had an opposite reaction to all of the fast food and convenience food of my childhood. I thought that French cuisine and technique was the way to go, and then I dropped out of culinary school because it wasn't the way for me. I fell in love with Spanish tapas just because I had a small appetite. But digging into the history of that, it's dangerous and sad and really intertwined with Philippine culture. 

And so, that's sort of been the crux of my — the beginnings of my writing portfolio has been the history of the Philippines mixed with new techniques and things that we thought were the way to go are not really the way to go. [Laughs.]

Alicia: Right, right. [Laughs.]

And how did you even come to focus on food? I know you used to work in tech.

Jenn: Oh, yes. Ugh. [Laughter.]

I got into cooking for others in college, through dinner parties. I wasn't much into cooking for myself. In fact, I actually mess up a lot of cooking for myself today. Before technology, I was working in the music industry, and it was going through a paradigm shift as far as promotion goes. I was one of those people that sent CDs to radio stations and magazines. When it was shifting from CDs to digital, people were requesting mp3s over CDs, we were saving on postage. People were starting to lose their jobs. I was burning out. And to cope with that, I started serving grilled cheese out of my house on Sundays. And it was sort of a good time to quit one industry and jump into another headfirst. 

But as I said before, I did not love culinary school. [Laughs.] And working in restaurants, you don't automatically get health insurance. [Laughter.] And that made me accept a job in technology. 

I was between kitchen jobs, and a friend from music called out of the blue because I'm a very avid tweeter. It wasn't a job that had been defined yet. A community manager, a social media manager, was very new a decade and a half ago. And my only question for that person was, ‘Do I get health insurance?’ I didn't really care what the job was. I was like, ‘Do I get health insurance?’ And I did. So I worked at a startup under a big film company, technicolor. This is all in TechCrunch. If anybody's curious about it, you can go check it out. 

But I was using all this newfound money to build out my kitchen, because food is something I still cared about. I loved having dinner parties. And so I was starting to buy all those fancy ingredients I could never afford. I got a food processor, making my own hummus all the time. So it really leveled me up in my spare time. But I had zero, zero concept of saving money. [Laughs.] I had always come from this position of scarcity. It was a very hard lesson after I had left. 

But my job sat in the middle of social media and curation. The big selling point was a big human team working with algorithms, because algorithms cannot tech — tell you context or narrative, no matter how smart artificial intelligence is. It can read vocabulary. It can tell us search volume and sentiment, but not a complete story. And I thought that was incredibly fascinating and helped me a lot in the way that I talk about my work and other people's work online. 

But just the shorter story of it is, it went through some kind of acquisition. I tried to explore this career seriously, but I had no desire to move to upper management. My momentum as a chef on the weekends started to pick up. I was pulling doubles. You can't spin that many plates that long. And I made this really long, six month plan to leave to start my own catering company. And that's kind of where we were as of 2019, until everything changed,

Alicia: How have you changed your business model in the pandemic?

Jenn: Oh, my goodness. 

So I was slated, or was in the middle of negotiating eight weddings as of January last year. And thankfully, I had already started to freelance a couple years before that. And so thanks to a residency at TASTE Cooking, I was able to start my first public pieces about food. And I had always dreamed of it. I've always wanted to be a writer, I was a LiveJournaler. [Laughter.] A lot of my writing has been in my social media posts. It was a matter of stringing it together and really holding on to a thread of an idea. 

But I took a strange path into this. [Laughter.] So while I was working at that tech company, I was trying to insert more food content into the workflow and responsibilities. Because I was reading so much news, my job was to surface news. And so if I could surface more food news or be in charge of that specific vertical, it would make me a little bit happier and to round out the knowledge that I was after all the time. If there is a chef or a food editor to be interviewed, I jumped at the chance, 100%. And if there was a conference my company took me to, I'd be lined for any food people, or even just hovered around the catering people just to watch. [Laughter.] That obsessed. 

But I learned about digitally native copywriting and optimization. And I learned how to talk about myself online. I don't like to. I don't like writing my bio or puffing my chest up, ‘I'm a food writer now!’ and pushing my glasses up over my nose. But I know that a lot of writers are timid about promoting their work. The big lesson for me, it was not about going viral in one moment but creating a consistent hum and an actual body of work that we can always be referencing whenever there is some kind of opportune moment or moment of learning or teaching. 

But as far as craft and practice, go, or — I was reading cookbooks before bed, getting my food handler's permit. Every event that I catered on the weekend — so, I'm still working 100% this whole time. So I'm doing things on the weekend, burning the candle at both ends. But every event that I did, added new equipment to my inventory. I added new people to my staff. I was in a time of my life that I lived for that crunch, the productivity crunch. And you'll hear that term in tech and the games industry. Lots of folks are speaking out now about labor practices and preventing crunch. But it was pretty normal for me to work 70, 80 hours a week and still stay up an extra hour to just kind of pursue the culinary knowledge and the craft and writing. 

And as I said before, no one can last that long. And this is an interesting turn, and I don't think people know that this is an option for them. But I asked to go part time at my job for a summer to join an innovation lab. 

So NYU had a program called the Innovation Lab, which was under the interactive telecommunications program. And I'm gonna keep pushing up my nerd glasses, like, ‘What does that have to do with anything?’ And that's kind of it and why I was drawn to it. It did come out of nowhere. And I craved some other creative outlet that wasn't food. It was somewhere I could solve problems with my unique point of view. 

And it was cool. Museums came in with a design problem, and we'd split up into teams to solve it. So, for example, the Met museum has a large collection. And people check it off their bucket list, but they never intend to return. And I mean, I know because now they can't really return. But theoretically, how do we get people to return physically and digitally? And I loved thinking about this problem. And I landed on, ‘What if we made a Chrome extension?’ because people hoard their tabs. How many tabs you have open right now? I have like five.

Alicia: Always at least five, yeah. [Laughter.]

Jenn: Yeah.

And so for every tab that you open if you have this extension, it shows you a cat from the Met museum's collection. So you're exploring art, but also this passive thing that you do all the time. 

But those are the kinds of problems that I like to think through. And art installation and digital UX were now a new lens for me to apply to both a day job and in event catering. And that's kind of how my catering perspective sort of opened up. It sort of blossomed into something new. Because I thought catering was just, ‘I'm going to provide this platter for you.’ But it became more of a production thing for me, of the little minutiae of the colors and the flow of the event and just experience, people experience. And so, that was incredibly amazing and valuable for me. And so, I loved the idea of artists residences. And that's how I joined TASTE, and was speaking to Anna and Matt about it. 

And then after I quit my job, my first step out the door was another residency at Kickstarter, which is a place where I've funded a few of my stranger ideas. I have hosted parties where the goal was to collectively create pornographic food videos, one. Not incredibly explicit, but more like popping 100 egg yolks in one day was a goal, or creating as many kinds of nachos that we can create and then sort of looping all that footage together into something that we've made as a community. And I love challenging what a party should be. And just cooking for people is exciting for me. 

So I took this creator's residency very seriously, but also spent that time figuring out what is freelance, what is an invoice, what is a budget, who was a mentor. I still don't know. But important lessons from that have been enforcing rest, creating boundaries. Especially when you head into a creative field, you have to have lots of boundaries. And taking the time to figure that out was life changing. But that's now why I sit squarely 100% in the food world.

Alicia: Nice. Yeah. [Laughter.]

Jenn: Lot of work.

Alicia: Yeah, of course. 

I mean, you manage a lot of projects right now. I know you're working on a few cookbooks all at the same time. You're writing for outlets. How have you kind of moved into that recipe zone with cookbooks?

Jenn: That was part of the pivot. 

It started a long time ago. It was through cooking competitions, actually, where I've met a lot of the collaborators that you might recognize today like Emily Hanhan, Cathy Erway, and Nicole Taylor, who — they've all joined these cooking competitions in Brooklyn and stood next to me trying to — not sell, but these were ticketed events where people in Brooklyn would bring a pot of chili. And you could serve them to hundreds of people, and people would vote. And there was a winner. And at first, there was no prize or money involved. But it started to have a money prize. This series was called The Takedowns. Matt Timms organized all of it. And he started to introduce other kinds of food. 

I got an email from a roommate saying, ‘Oh, you love cooking? Why don't you try this?’ And so I did. And I got addicted to it. I love competition. But most of all, I love the community of it ‘cause there's so many quirky people that enter competition. [Laughs.] As reality television can show us, there are a lot of personalities out there and a lot of really great ideas. 

But I met Nicole Taylor through that. And after she got her first book deal, we — she asked me to just test one recipe on her first cookbook, which was the Up South Cookbook. And I was getting into, getting comfortable with food writing and writing my own recipes through the residency. And I just sort of put it out into the universe. I wrote up sort of my goals for this. It was at the same time as the artist residencies and figuring out my life. 

But I did the thing. I did the Internet manifesting thing and told people on LinkedIn — I hate LinkedIn — but I did it on LinkedIn, on Facebook. Everywhere that I am present on the internet, ‘cause as somebody who grew up on the internet, why would I not use it to tell people what I need and want in life? And I was just putting it out there. If people don't know that I want to do these things, then no one's ever going to know. And thankfully, Nicole was paying attention around that time when she was working on The Last O.G. Cookbook. And so, that's how I joined that project. 

And I really enjoy the production process. It’s very similar to making an album, except we have a longer table of contents and more editing passes and things like that. But it really spoke to the iteration part of my brain from technology. As you refine a product, you look at features that work and don't work and rely on community feedback and tasting to refine it. And I really enjoyed that process. 

And so it wasn't necessarily a pivot-pivot when the pandemic started, but more of a weight shift. I'm shifting my weight to another foot. And hopefully I can come back to catering, but very, very lucky to know Nicole and to work with her and flesh out these ideas. But yeah, it is more weighted in the direction of freelance and writing these days then events. But I'm glad I got my shot and hopefully gonna get there, get the second one in it.

Alicia: Right.

Well, you do in your catering such wildly unique events, like the weddings that you do. And I know you've talked about — you just said that it comes from that same sort of problem solving. But what is your process when you are doing an event like that? Where do you come from and what questions do you ask to determine how to kind of create such a unique approach? [Laughs.]

Jenn: Yeah, I joke that I'm the opposite of Franck from Father of the Bride. [Laughter.] He has this big ass binder with all the prices listed out and just these ’90s printouts. I look at that YouTube clip a lot whenever I'm feeling down about catering. [Laughs.] I look at that, because my method is way more flexible and unsustainable. 

I love that it's unsustainable. I can't create inventory or consistent recipes if every menu is different. And I find that really exciting. That's where my online handle comes from, Randwiches, random sandwiches. Personally, I don't like eating or making the same thing twice. But I know that's necessary for creating and finalizing something, as I've learned through the years. But I used to have a random sandwich delivery service in New York and that's how I built my internet following. I love that project. But it is unsustainable. It is just me delivering sandwiches on foot all over New York City, and it gets tiring. And that's sort of inspired me to look into actual catering. 

So, when it came to weddings, it started with friends that I knew that I couldn't really mess up with them. Anything I did, I was an angel. [Laughs.] But before the pandemic, I'd ask to meet up with a couple at a bar or restaurant, and I'd go through a journalistic battery of the venue, the vibe and their story. 

And I'd ask them questions like, ‘What foods did you have on your first date? Do you remember that? What do you cook together now on a normal day, or on a special day? Is there something you make when you feel bad? Are there any family favorite dishes? Are there any favorite restaurants?’ The big question of dietary restrictions, allergies, and picky family members, because sometimes that can create a little bit of stress. And pie in the sky ideas. I love entertaining the pie in the sky ideas, because I treat it like a design brief mixed with a band's backstage rider list. 

We start throwing out the big ideas that we can anchor a menu on and then bring it down to earth as we reconcile the cost and the venue. [Laughs.] And we visit that venue and ask all the questions and make sure that we can do it. 

I have a bleeding heart for smaller budgets and a little bit more of a DIY hybrid. If you're looking for a package you just point at, I'm not the person you should be working with. I'm way more collaborative. I'm not going to turn away Mom's dilly beans that she pickled for you over the course of the whole summer. I'm going to encourage Grandpa to go catch all the salmon for the reception. And those are the real things that have happened because I'm open to it as a chef. I have no ego about like, ‘This is my menu and you should choose it.’ It's more about the story you are trying to tell, and I find that so, so exciting because I want to be able to help you tell it.

Alicia: Right.

And it's interesting, because so much of cooking and being a chef is understood as a very ego-driven thing. And how do you kind of see your role then, as a cook, if it's not about your ego?

Jenn: Oh my goodness.

I'm a conduit, absolutely a conduit. I'm shepherding in some way the feelings that you're having that day, and it should come out as joy in the food. And I want to celebrate that as much as possible. 

Obviously, I love a good party. [Laughter.] I mean, my entrance into cooking for others has been dinner parties through and through this whole time. Weddings are even offices or whatever it is that you're celebrating — celebration has always been the center of everything that I do, mostly ‘cause it comes from my family. I have a huge ass family, and any excuse to gather is something that I didn't realize that I valued at up until this moment. [Laughter.] I’m currently processing as we speak. 

But I have a lot of cousins. Every graduation, every tooth, every step, every everything has always been a reason to cook something. And my family has always been a part of that. And I live across the country from them. So now it's changed into all of their cooking endeavors, they'll tag me ‘cause they know that I'm a chef now. They want to show it off. And I love that.

And it's sort of bled into another thing that I've done. Another new thing that I've done during the pandemic has been live streaming on Twitch, which is typically a video game streaming platform. But there was a whole division of people who now cook or talk about food. And I started a little talk show called Attack the Pantry, and it is geared toward the 101 community of cooks who are a little scared of it. And I love deep diving into ingredients and talking about their potential.

And we sort of ripped off the idea of Chopped, where we asked the audience to give us some ingredients and then we pretend that's our basket and sort of mentally prepare ourselves for, ‘What can we do with that?’ And I enjoy it very much. It's the favorite segment of the show.

Alicia: And your own cookbook. You've only done one of your own cookbooks, right?

Jenn: Mm-hmm.

Alicia: Yeah, Showdown. It's about cooking contests, which you mentioned earlier. But what was it about the cooking contest that you liked and what made you want to create a book out of the experience?

Jenn: Oh, man.

I was addicted to the thrill of competition, that the — some of the prizes were hilarious. [Laughter.] A year's supply of bacon is very vague. But I'm here to pop the bubbles that it's not as you expect, a pallet of bacon arriving at your front door. It is coupons, people. It's coupons. [Laughter.] But it was exciting to thirst for those things. 

And I became friends with a lot of the competitors like I mentioned earlier, and I treated it like it was my culinary school. Because I didn't like culinary school. I did not like the brigade to graduating to a line cook in some restaurant where it's not my food. I didn't want to be an executive chef somewhere. I wanted to create, create, create. 

And iterating through competition was something that helped me learn about recipe development, because if I never wrote it down I couldn't do it again or fix it. So I started to take notes and create all of these huge tomes of ‘Ok, that didn't work.’ And I would go through a testing regimen for each recipe. 

And I remember there's this photo I took a long time ago of eight meatball sauces that we were trying out like, ‘Oh, is ginger work here? Is parmesan rind work here? How much spice do we need?’ 

And I don't really talk about it, but I was — I started as a biology major. And I had this sort of mental breakdown in the laboratory where we were learning about titration. You have two long pipettes that drop single drops into a beaker, and it was driving me insane. You drop one drop and then write it down. 100 drops later, I'm staring at it like, ‘Why haven't you changed? [Laughs.] I want to just pour the whole thing in. And with cooking, I still get my little obsessive research mode, but also I can pour whole things in there and be like, ‘What happened?’ [Laughter.]

But yes, after a long time of competing and writing the recipes down I thought about like, ‘Oh, I've always wanted to write a book.’ I had this checklist when I was little, ‘Write a book. Go to the Olympics. Make a film.’ I wanted to do every single large thing there was, like, ‘Write an album.’ And I can safely say that yes, I have written an album. And yes, I have now written a book. And now I'm going after other things, but still sitting in the food world. 

But yeah, so all this competition helped me hone the skills. It took me about eight years to actually win anything. I kept at it. And along the way, I kept winning wonderful kitchen prizes. This is why I have expensive Le Creuset. I could never afford $300 Dutch ovens. No way. I mooned about it, I dreamed about it, but I never imagined that I would buy them. 

So through competition is how I outfitted the rest of my kitchen, which I don't think is possible so much anymore in Brooklyn, ‘cause it's not an active series anymore. But Instagram definitely still has contests that I've won a few items through photo styling contests. And that's sort of also where I developed that skill. 

And when you work on a cookbook, you under — you realize that all of these jobs are specialized and they're different people. But because my cookbook was a little more bootstrapped — I hate using that word, that's such a whack word. But because I had a smaller budget, I sort of was a lot of those things. I styled my own book, I developed my own book, and I'm starting to understand the value of that. And now, I can offer that to other other authors and work with them on it. So, that's really exciting. 

I just wanted to document that period of time. And I'm really glad I did, because it's not happening anymore or won't come back for a while, I don't think. But if I may brag, I have a seven foot trophy in my house from a barbecue competition. And that was a different series that was really eye opening for me. I didn't know anything about barbecue or the history of it. And my very presence there was powerful, I think, looking back on it. I'm a short Asian American woman standing in front of a fire burning herself like, ‘Ow!’ 

But making my place there was interesting. I have a small title, a small bestowed title of grillmaster. And when you Google grillmaster, it's a lot of larger men in the South, scattered among the South. I'm a Northern-ite. [Laughs.] And not a lot of them are women or tiny, tiny Asian women at that. And so I love that I am contributing to the fabric of it and trying to break down what it is to be a person at a grill. I like that that book has sort of cemented it, or at least held my place in that atmosphere.

Alicia: Right. 

And for you, is cooking a political act?

Jenn: Absolutely. Yes.

I may not be outward about it on social, but I think seizing creative control and shaping a career that doesn't follow that typical path is a statement. And I think the wedding and event industry can be very mechanical and focused on a capitalistic bottom line. And while I'm engaged in capitalism on many different levels — I'm sure you have that sickly exhale every now and then.

But what's important to me or what's become important to me is creating safe work environments and events and leadership. My leadership is not top down. It's very sideways. I learned this from both technology and a family member who has a restaurant. I prefer to go sideways than up and down. I'm very open to collaboration and to ideas for improvement and efficiency, and above all, just learning. I'm constantly learning. That is the perspective that I always will have and hold on to. 

And the people that I work with will always have something to teach me. That's so exciting. And so, this aunt or great aunt who lives in Bacolod, which is a tiny town, tiny island in the Philippines. She runs a restaurant called Mely's Garden. And I asked her, ‘What happens when someone is sick?’ She says that everyone knows every station and recipe so anyone can step in. And none of the recipes are gate-kept in someone's brain. It's not in some secret room, made a ways, whatever. When you're sick, you stay home. And that kind of care regarding labor and wellbeing really stuck with me. And so, I sort of build that into the relationships and events that I do. 

And like I said earlier, injecting my stories into barbecue and into the fabric of barbecue is political and powerful. I want to change the face of what American barbecue can be and what a grillmaster looks like. That's very thrilling. [Laughter.] And so yeah, my politics are tiny but I feel I make progress in a very empathetic way. Very community-oriented way. And it makes me so happy to be able to relate to people on that level and to give them that kind of safeguard that they want. I am not some kind of predator that's going to leave you destitute, because that's what happened to me and I would hate for that to happen to anybody I worked with.

Alicia: Right. Well, thank you so much.

Jenn: You are so welcome.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe

When I talked to Mark Byrne for my piece “On Booze,” I was so excited by the free-flowing conversation that I knew I had to do a proper interview. He’s a journalist turned distiller who has co-founded Good Vodka, made from coffee waste. While it hasn’t turned me into a vodka martini person (nothing could rip me away from gin), it is a gorgeously vanilla vodka with a rich mouthfeel that has changed my mind about the spirit. Someone once told me vodka is simply a “feat of engineering.” Good Vodka proves that’s not necessarily true.

We discussed how he made the decision to leave magazines (an easy one, it seems), how corporate booze green- and virtue-washes their real planetary impacts, and how alcohol can become sustainable again. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Mark. Thank you so much for coming on.

Mark: Thank you for having me.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Mark: Yes.

So, I kind of bounced around a little growing up. I was born in Southern California, and then moved to Kenya when I was very young and lived there for several years. And then we moved to Appleton, Wisconsin, which is a paper mill town in northern Wisconsin, in the early ‘90s. And then in the late ‘90s, moved back to Africa, this time to Zimbabwe for a year. And then back to Appleton. And then Appleton is where I graduated from high school, and then I never went back.

Alicia: Oh, ok. [Laughs.]

And what kind of food was present during those times bouncing around? Did you get a good sense of the kinds of differences and cuisines from those different places?

Mark: Yeah, definitely.

I mean, in Kenya, obviously the food was very regionally specific there. For I think about a year, we lived in a little village called Igunga, which is in the western part of the country, near Lake Victoria. And that was a very rural, very, very rural village. And so, that was kind of traditional Luhya food. I don't know. I just struggle to describe it in any way other than kind of maize-based staple dishes. And so, that was what we had over there. 

When I moved to Appleton, obviously, that was a very different type of cuisine. [Laughs.] Culture shocky. So, Appleton—there's a lot of malls and fast food and stuff like that. But my dad had actually been a chef when he was younger. He'd been the head chef of a restaurant in St. Louis, and he was a very confident, competent cook. I've never seen him open a recipe book in his life. He was the main cook in our household. I would say it was pretty traditional fare. I mean, he liked French food a lot. He was a Francophile. And, so I'd say on good nights we'd have a filet mignon with a couple of side dishes. And he was really into trimming the meat himself. 

And then around, when I was 12 or 13, my dad started working out of town. So, he'd fly out every Monday and fly back on Fridays. And my mother did not cook at all. In fact, I've never even seen her in the kitchen. So at that point, it became my mom would leave money on the counter and we'd order pizza. 

And then when I was 15, I got a job in a restaurant, kind of like a high-end, white tablecloth place. And I pretty much just every night, I just had a family meal there. And that's where I got most of my sustenance through the end of high school.

Alicia: Did you like cooking? Do you still cook?

Mark: I love cooking. Yeah, I'm the primary cook in my household now. Yeah, I love cooking. Absolutely.

Alicia: [Laughs.] Awesome. 

And you started your career in magazines. Why did you want to work in magazines, to begin with?

Mark: Uh. God, I don't know. I mean, that's such a complicated question. 

I'm gonna answer this in a way that I feel like is really cliched and apologize in advance for that. I've always been good at it. All my teachers had always been like, ‘You’re really good at writing.’ And I was kind of a really bad student in every other aspect. And so, that was kind of the thing that I latched on to and was like, ‘There's a pathway here,’ that seemed like one that I could excel at. And what I really liked about it was it was a portfolio-based pathway, where if I could present, if I could do a good job on a writing assignment, if I could publish something, then it kind of made up for lacking the other credentials around academics. 

And so, I kind of just took that path. I thought, ‘Ok, I'm gonna publish a lot. I'm going to be a real self-starter and pitch a ton in college and have a real clip book by the time I’ve graduated. And then, that will kind of make up for the fact that I'm just an astoundingly subpar student.’

Alicia: [Laughs.]

And did that work out? Is that how you got into your first jobs? 

Mark: Yeah, it did.

I got my first internship in Chicago, at Chicago Magazine. That was a fact-checking internship. And at that point, I had been working on the school newspaper, I was at Columbia College in Chicago. It's an art school. And I got an internship at Chicago Magazine that I wrote while I was there. I pitched a bunch of different sections and wrote for it. 

And after college, I applied to New York Magazine, having never been to New York. I'd been to New York at that point for like a week. But I definitely did not know New York from Chicago, from Appleton. None of it made any sense to me. But I used my cousin's address on my résumé to imply that I already lived there, which I did not. And I had a pretty good clip book at that point. I've been writing for a lot of small publications around Chicago, and probably five or six different magazines and zines. And coupled with the, what I would say, the minor lie that I already lived in New York, I got an internship at New York Magazine, which at that point was a full-time, minimum wage position, but full-time. 

I had to figure out how to move to New York. I moved to New York in like four days. I found an apartment on Craigslist, went back to St. Louis, where my family was at that point, and then drove back and basically moved into the first apartment I saw, which was this terrible loft in South Williamsburg. 

And then I started in New York, and I wrote for every section while I was there. I made myself kind of indispensable in that internship, and they kept me on afterwards. I'm good at being annoying until I get something published. 

Alicia: And then, yeah, what were you writing? What kind of stuff were you focused on writing?

Mark: I was kind of just doing everything. 

I mean, at that point in my career, I was like, 22, 23. I worked a lot with the books editor, Boris. And so, I was doing a lot of book, kind of collating reviews and figuring out what we would pass along to Sam Anderson, who was the critic at the time and kind of made myself in charge of the book galley room. I ended up editing this little section called Agenda, which was at that time-I think it's changed a lot since then-but at the time, it was five or six things that you could do in the upcoming week.

I did a thing called the Recession Index, which was a cool little-so, this was obviously 2008, and the economy had just tanked. And so, we started putting together a little-an index of, a documented data sets from the recession. So how many Lehman Brothers bankers had been fired that week, or things like that. They were kind of quirky. I'm struggling to think of a good example. How much Brooks Brothers stock was down. That kind of stuff. 

So I was doing that, and I was doing the book stuff and I was doing Agenda. And I was writing little culturally, things. I don't know. I mean, I was 22. So, I was writing basically anything that I could.

Crucially, I was also doing a lot of Party Lines reporting for Jada [Yuan], who was that time, at that point, kind of the queen of Party Lines. And that was great, because that meant I would get sent to some ridiculous celeb party, where I wouldn't have to buy myself dinner because it'd be passed hors d'oeuvres. So, that was a real like, act of kindness. And then, all I had to do was kind of find a couple celebrities and ask them questions. Unfortunately, that's the thing of my job that I was the worst at.

Alicia: Really? 

Mark: Oh, yeah. I'm incredibly shy about—I don't like to approach people at parties. It's not what I do. So, I ended up doing-kind of side kicking it with other reporters. But for the most part, I was just there for the hors d'oeuvres, to be honest.

Alicia: Right.

How long were you there? ’Cause I started there at the end of 2009.

Mark: I left in the beginning of 2009. So the middle of 2008 to around, I guess, mid-2009.

Alicia: Well, how was it that you decided to leave the magazine industry? And are you completely out of it now, or is it— [Laughs.]

Mark: I would say, I'm pretty pretty much out of it. 

So from New York Mag, I went to—I ended up going to grad school at NYU. In retrospect, I have no idea why I did this. It seemed like an opportunity to write a thesis and do another thing that I could then pitch into a portfolio. So, I was writing a thesis about the independent publishing industry, which I was really interested in at that point. And that was kind of I thought of it as an opportunity to just kind of write a book proposal, basically. I was really interested in how indie publishers were innovating against the big houses, which is still kind of a fascination of mine, just like in alcohol. 

And I was there for three semesters. And then, I was also working at Esquire. I'd gotten a job as a fact-checker at Esquire. So, I was doing that on a regular basis, too. And then I'd also was—had started working at this distillery, Kings County Distillery, which was where David Haskell, who's now the editor-in-chief of New York Magazine, had started this distillery and asked me to be their first employee. Which is another kind of great kindness of his, just teach me how to make whiskey. 

So, I was doing a lot. And this was 2010. And then, at the end of 2010, my dad died suddenly and I didn't finish grad school. I was one credit shy of it. I had to stop going to classes, ’cause I was kind of grief-struck. Like two weeks later, I got a job offer from GQ. And that was just kind of just very, very shocking to me, but also amazing. I quit grad school; I quit Esquire. And then I sort of wound down my time at Kings County Distillery and started doing—started working at GQ, and I kind of dove into that headfirst and was there for five years. 

And the reason I would say I left magazines is, I started to see a pathway around alcohol was opening up for me. It seemed like something that was worth pursuing. And at the same time, I started to kind of look down the line a little bit at what my magazine career might look like. It was looking to me there were maybe a handful of jobs that would be available in magazines in 10, 15 years. Perhaps this was imposter syndrome, or a lack of confidence or whatever. But I didn't see myself as one of the people that would have those jobs. I saw a couple of people I was working with, I was like, ‘These people will be the three remaining editors-in-chief in this industry.’ And I was like, ‘I'm gonna be fighting for senior editor scraps into my 40s and 50s, and still not going to have a retirement.’

At the same time, I'd started to do this consulting work around liquor. I've been writing about liquor for a long time. I knew how to distill, and the consulting work was a lot more interesting to me. So, I basically started thinking of it as basically writing display copy, coming up with a name for liquor brand, or, excuse me, writing a label copy for it. Coming up with brand voice stuff is really just writing a really good caption or a really good headline or a really good deck. And that's stuff that I've always been really good at. I'm really good at writing in brief. 

And so I started doing that for liquor brands. I realized it was an entire kind of niche industry there. And so I did that for about a year or so, to just kind of give myself the confidence that it was something I could actually do. And then I left GQ. At the same time, I knew in the back of my head, I was working on this vodka project—which I think we'll talk about—I was aware that I needed to focus more energy on that, more energy than I would be able to had I continued to have that full-time 10 to 7 job.

Alicia: Right, right. 

And working at Kings County Distillery, was that your real entry point into the spirits world or did you have any interest in it before that?

Mark: Yeah, that was my entry point. 

I mean, I had an interest in it, so far I'd like to drink and talk about drinking. At that point, I guess I had a liberal arts student interest in craft beer. [Laughs.] I was like, ‘Oh, cool, this IPA, whatever.’ 

But yeah, at that point, again, I was like 23 when I started at Kings County Distillery. And I very quickly was like, ‘This is fascinating.’ And that distillery was interesting, in particular, because it was the first licensed distillery in New York City since Prohibition. And David and Colin, who started it, were pretty much self-taught distillers. And so that meant, we had a little library there on one of the shelves in the distillery. And basically everything that we knew about making alcohol came from that library. It didn't come from apprenticeships or preconceived notions about how you should make liquor. It was us reading books on the chemistry of distillation, and trial and erroring our way around recipes. 

So, that was a really deep end kind of—jumping into the deep end way of learning about alcohol. There's nothing surface level about it. So by the time I ended that, I felt like I had a really clear understanding of not just how our bourbon was made, but how alcohol in general was made. And I took that with me to GQ and started writing about alcohol. And I’d say that experience really informed how I wrote about alcohol, because at that point I was really interested then in where grain was sourced and how it was sourced and how craft brands were innovating in ways that the big brands weren't. And that that obsession kind of led to just kind of how I wrote about it.

Alicia: How did your understanding of the big brands versus the smaller brands, how did you get there, too? Was there a moment where you were—you realized that there was a huge difference in these ways of doing things, and that maybe one way was a little bit more destructive rather than constructive? How did you bring that to writing about it, and how did you bring that to working in the industry?

Mark: Yeah, that's a good question. 

I guess the first thing that kind of tipped me off was the way that people would ask about liquor on tours. We would do these little tours over at our distillery. And it became really clear to me that there were all these preconceived ideas about what bourbon was and what it had to be and what it had to taste like that were not—that didn't occur naturally. They happened as a result of decades-long misinformation campaigns, where a lot of the big distilleries in Kentucky wanted you to believe that bourbon could not be made outside of Kentucky, even though that had never been true. 

And that kind of stuff, every tour, there was somebody that would ask about that, ‘How can this be bourbon if it's not made in Kentucky?’ And then there was also—they would taste it and they'd be like, ‘This doesn't taste like bourbon.’ And I'd be like, ‘Well, I mean, what do you—if you think that bourbon tastes like Maker's Mark, that's not true, right? There's something messed up there about how we're putting flavor profiles into the world.’

And a lot of it is because a lot of these distilleries basically share resources to the extent that a lot of their product is made in the same distilleries from the same grain and very, very, very similar mash bills. So, people would kind of come in there with this idea that if it didn't taste like Maker's Mark and Knob Creek, which are functionally identical, then it wasn't—then they were like, ‘Well, why does it taste wrong?’

And that was something that I just kind of mentally went to war with that. What is this idea that we have that something has to taste this way? Bourbon is just something that is made in America made from 51 percent corn and put in a barrel for at least a day. That's all that it is. And it can taste like so many different things. I really wanted to dive into where those misconceptions come from and how we can challenge them. So it was less about at that point the-specifically about the sourcing, and more for me about like, ‘What can we do to challenge the notions of what bourbon is and what alcohol is in general?’

Alicia: And I think that this is such an interesting thing, because then—we've talked about this before when I wrote “On Booze”. But the idea that brands really own the flavor, and they own the categories. And so many times people don't ask for a spirit, they ask for a brand. And I think that this happens across the spectrum in food, especially in the United States, where people really connect food products to brand products and that they won't think of maybe mayonnaise as something you could make with eggs and olive oil, but as Hellman's in a jar. Or chocolate isn't a pod of cacao, it's a Hershey bar.

But I think that it's less questioned, of course in alcohol. And I guess it was Prohibition, maybe you can talk more about that. But how this kind of understanding of where alcohol comes from was totally cut off. I mean, yeah, what do you think is the cause of this that—I mean, obviously, it's money, that the brands have money. There's this real disconnect between the origins and everything. And that's why there's brands, like Tito's Vodka can say that they're handcrafted, or they're—People make a big deal about a spirit being gluten free, and it's like, ‘Well, of course, there's no gluten in it.’

How is this misinformation so powerful in alcohol?

Mark: I think conglomerization is a big part of it. It's that conglomerization demands things to be kind of, processes to be combined. The entire reason that companies like Diageo and Beam Suntory and Brown–Forman, the entire reason they're so profitable is because they share so many resources across brands, and to some extent, it doesn't even make sense to talk about those brands as distinct things other than labels. It's that they're creating all this stuff in the same places, and then it goes to a bottling line and at the bottling line they kind of decide, ‘Which of these spirits is it going to be?’ 

That's kind of what happens in product generation, too, new products development is they have—the liquid is the last thing that they think about. What they first think about is, ‘What's the name going to be? And what's the path gonna look like, and how is that going to appeal to the demographic that we want?’ Because the liquid inside is the easiest part. It's already done. They're not interested in changing that, because it would be so disruptive to their efficiency to do that. 

These are companies that have these gigantic industrialized supply chains, one big farm feeding one big wholesaler feeding one big distillery, which is basically like a big ethanol plant. And then that's churning out neutral grain spirits, like 95 percent alcohol, basically pure, into a series of little, but also still big distilleries that are then putting it into barrels. It would be so disruptive to their bottom line to have to break out the different pieces of that into interesting parts. 

To say, ‘Okay, we're going to source at this one little farm that's making a really amazing batch of something this year,’ just getting like the logistics involved in that. The trucks to move that stuff from the farm to their processing facility is way more expensive than they would ever—then they would ever agree to. It's really they've built up these efficiencies. These efficiencies compound on one another, until you basically have something that if you want to start a new spirit at a big house, the question is not, ‘Where will the spirit come from?’ The question is, ‘Which of our pre-existing spirits are you going to put into a new bottle?’

Alicia: Right.

And how has the craft movement in spirits pushed back against this, and how are—do you think it's being successful in this, or is it being successful maybe only in tiny pockets where people really have access to these things?

Mark: Honestly, the latter. The latter, that’s the approach.

Yeah, yes, absolutely. That is a part of it. Has it been successful? I think it is in the process of being successful. And I think that you're seeing the big houses kind of realigning against these new expectations for the kind of numbers that craft brands could, can do. And to them, that means—and then, forgive my cynicism as I recount this, but to them it means purchasing a craft brand and incorporating it into their pre-existing supply chain. 

So if they see a small bourbon brand doing something interesting, they’re not interested in the liquid inside of it. They're interested in the label and people's relationship to that label. The way that it's changing the industry—and again, I understand that this is kind of a cynical way to view this—is that they're seeing that they have to talk about their spirits differently, because they're seeing that those craft labels are having an impact. They're not looking at that, though, and saying, ‘We need to make our spirits differently,’ because that is off the table. That's not a thing that they're going to do. 

So, I think that a lot of them see these craft brands that come up and say, ‘We use estate-grown corn.’ Or talking a little bit more about their mash bills, and what they'll say is, ‘Oh, that's interesting. That's ok. We can do that too. We can have some buzzwords about our harvest or whatever on the label.’ 

And if you pay attention to the way that some of these bigger brands—I'm not going to say which ones, but if you pay attention to the way their labels have changed in the last five years, you will see this influx of dialogue around sourcing. And it's almost always just vague to the point of nonsense. ‘The best rye fields in Poland,’ or whatever. They—

Alicia: Oh, I know what brand it is. [Laughs.]

Mark: Yeah. That was not as coy as I thought it would be. I would say that they're changing the industry in that way, although it is a label-deep change for the most part.

Alicia: No, and it's so obnoxious because it's such an obfuscation of the issues. 

There's so much virtue-washing, I think, in alcohol as opposed to other food aspects. When we're talking about food, it could be really difficult to feed someone like Oscar Meyer hot dogs or something and tell them it's like, ‘We're doing something good.’ But Bacardi—I mean, whatever. I'll say what brand because I don't work in the industry. But they'll pay someone money to support a festival or something that's about diversity in the industry, or education around the history of Black work in the industry or brown work in the industry. And then, where does their molasses come from? It's on another level in the alcohol industry with all this money. And it's just really upsetting constantly to see, because people don't really listen and people don't really have a consciousness about it. And also, that access point is really difficult. 

So with Good Vodka, which you've launched last year, how are you thinking about how to bring your product to more people, to not just have it at Duke's Liquor Box in Greenpoint? [Laughter.]

Mark: We are in more liquor stores than that now. We have expanded a bit, and I do want to expand a bit.

I see Good Vodka as a platform. I don't see it as a brand. I see it as an opportunity to rethink the way that not just how coffee fruit is processed and discarded, but also how alcohol can be made. And it's important to me that the vodka’s the proof-case in this. The vodka is how I say, ‘Here's what we can do with this.’ I'm not ashamed to say my sights are set on anything that has a neutral spirit base. I want to prove that we can make a number of different products from coffee fruit. That's what's interesting to me about it, not just—we're not just one product. That's something I'm working on. 

The reason this is so complicated is because it involves the supply chain that is—it’s new. It's novel. It's never been done before. There was no movement of the coffee fruit wastewater from point A to point B before we started doing it, and there would—it actually had never been imported to the United States before. So cascara is having a little bit of a moment, and there is now some importing of dried cascara. But what we use is a fresh, ripe fruit concentrate because that's where the sugars live. That's where there's the most sugar. And that's just every step that we grow is a new—it involves more logistical work just to get it from, again, from point A to point B. 

So that said, I've got a scalable model in place with the Colombian Coffee Federation. I'm seeing how the vodka does. I'm seeing how people respond to it. And then hopefully, later this year, we're going to launch our second product and—

Alicia: Ooh.

Mark: Yeah.

And that will be very exciting as well.

Alicia: Nice. 

Well, to step back, how did Good Vodka come to be?

Mark: I was doing some consulting work around liquor, as I mentioned. And I had become kind of disillusioned by some of the projects that I was working on, continued to work on for several years after that. [Laughter.] It was this time where the—like I said, the big clients, the big brands, were changing their label copy or coming up with new products that, again, they wanted to present as millennial-appealing. The way that they wanted to do that was by talking more about their sourcing and using this craft language, and in some cases also talking about sustainability.

But it was really frustrating to me because again, I would ask, ‘What is interesting about the liquid? What are the ‘product truths’ that we can put in a label copy?’ And the answer to that would be, ‘TK’ [magazine speak for, “to come”], right? They don't have them yet, because the product truths are the least important part. To them, again, it's ‘We're gonna take this label, we're gonna put it in front of some focus groups. And then if it does well, we're going to launch it into the market at a price point that we feel like there's an opportunity to carve market share out of.’ And that process precludes interesting spirits. It doesn't give an opportunity to really innovate there. 

And so, I was doing these projects where all I wanted was one to be like, ‘Here is an interesting liquid. We started at square one, accomplished some interesting s**t here, and we just need you to describe it.’ What I realized was that was actually—they would never give me that assignment, because that would be so easy. It's incredibly easy to sell a product that has an interesting liquid inside of it, but that's not what exists on the market. What you're selling is a vibe or a mentality or an emotion or a time to celebrate, or something. You're selling a captain character with his leg on the barrel, or like a sea creature. That's why they have these fanciful names and made-up backstories. Think about all these bourbons that have someone's name on the front. That name is not associated with the product. You can't trace back a history of Captain Morgan to how rum is made. 

So, I was doing that. And I was starting to feel someone needs to make a spirit from square one, where what's interesting about it is built into how we make it, not just—not the other way around, not, ‘We have this liquid and now we need five ways to describe it that are good.’ But what if the way we sourced it was already good?

And at the same time, my business partner, Tristan, was starting to play around with coffee fruit. He had gone to visit a coffee farm in Guatemala. He had seen this pile of fruit in the corner and become kind of fascinated—Tristan had worked at Kings County Distillery with me—he'd become kind of fascinated with the opportunity to distill it and play around with that. At that point, he was at Booker and Dax bar at that point, a very experimental cocktail bar in the Momofuku empire. And he kind of for a couple of years after that kind of kept this fruit in mind and thought about the opportunities there.

Then, we linked up. And I thought, ‘Okay, this is the opportunity to do the thing that I want with the thing that he wants,’ and kind of combine these ambitions and use the coffee fruit to build a spirit from the ground up that can speak to these things that people actually want in the spirit, which is transparency, traceability, eco-consciousness, and, at the end of the day, deliciousness.

Alicia: And how did you bring that to market? What would have been the challenges and the—-just the necessities of making a spirit like this and bringing it to market? 

Mark: Yeah, I mean, it took six years, so there were a lot of them.

First of all, we had to figure out what we were—where we were gonna process the fruit and how we were going to process the fruit. And then once we got down there, we also had to think about what piece of the fruit we we're going to process. So if you think about the piece of coffee fruit, there's the cascara, which is the shell, the husk around the fruit. And then there's a layer of pulp, which is kind of a mushy, sticky, pulpy stuff. And then there's the parchment, which is a kind of a paper around the bean. And then there's the bean. 

And like I said, around that time—so this is like 2015, early 2015—there's a little bit more of an economy growing around cascara as a tea, which is something that was actually—something that was occurring in East Africa for a while, traditionally, but hadn't really taken place much in Latin America at all and certainly not in America. 

And so we started looking at that cascara tea, this dried tea substance, but we realized that—two things. First of all, that we weren't getting as much sugar out of it because it had been dried and just wasn't retaining the sugar in a way that was efficient to distill. 

And two, that there were new economies kind of being built up around this that were subverting its byproduct nature, were becoming profitable to grow a coffee fruit specifically for the purpose of drying and selling the cascara. And I was looking at that, and—especially as Starbucks and Blue Bottle were kind of looking at that too. And to me, that was not a byproduct. That was a product-product. If you're gonna install tens of thousands of dollars of equipment on a coffee co-op to dry cascara and you're going to pick it for its ripeness, specifically for a kind of cascara flavor profile, to me that seemed a little bit like not what I was interested in. 

But at the same time, we started looking at the coffee wastewater. And the wastewater was really fascinating, because it was basically in certain types of coffee processing, semi-wet processing, they were washing the beans, washing the pulp off of the beans and ending up with this liquid that had a lot of suspended pulp in it. And in that pulp, sugar. And we realized that if we could take that wastewater and concentrate it, we could make a syrup. Kind of like an eco-conscious molasses. And that's where we started focusing then. 

So everything that I've described to you in the last two minutes was six years of work, but it was like—but each of those steps along the way took a year. And then eventually we got to this wastewater. We did a lot of tests on it. We shipped a hobby still down to an AirBnB in Colombia in Santa Marta and spent a month down there just distilling coffee fruit. 

And eventually we had a product that tasted kind of interesting, too. It was a brandy at that point, so it was one step before a vodka. And we tasted it. We thought, ‘This is delicious. It can only get more delicious. If we distill it one more time, it’s just going to be just incredibly pure but still have some interesting notes to it.’ And at that point then, we started working with the Colombian Coffee Federation to build out a logistics network with us to work with their pre-existing network of co-ops and farmers to source the wastewater. 

And the other thing I'll add to that is that this wastewater stuff can't be used as fertilizer. That was important to us, too. It's too wet, and it just ends up creating methane emissions. So, when we were looking at the cascara, one of the farmers down in Colombia said to us, ‘You can take this stuff, but basically, then an organic farmer is gonna have to go out and buy a new fertilizer source.’ And it became equally important to us to not disrupt that already good reuse chain. So, the wastewater was really interesting for that reason.

Farmers in Colombia also get fined if they don't dispose of it properly, but it's expensive to dispose of it properly. So, a lot of them were just eating that fine. So for all of these reasons, we started working on this wastewater material. And the Coffee Federation helped facilitate that.

Alicia: Awesome. Yeah. 

And how has the response been from consumers? I know you launched at an odd time when it's not like it's gonna be in cocktails and that sort of thing. But how has that been?

Mark: Yeah.

So, I kind of imagined it as being a well spirit. I wanted it to be in cocktail bars. I wanted it to go in cocktails. That's where our network was strongest. But for obvious reasons, a lot of cocktail bars aren't really operating full capacity right now, and many of them are closed down in general. So, we put it in a few bars just to kind of seed it out there and see how it got used and see how people liked it. I thought we'd sell a case a month for the first year. 

But what actually ended up happening was a lot of liquor stores reached out to us and asked if they could bring it in. And that's been really fascinating to watch. I did not imagine the spirit would have a life in liquor stores that it does. I struggled to imagine people trying a new vodka when they go to the wine shop. 

But I think it does a good job of kind of selling itself on the bottle. And I think that the same reason that we imagined bartenders would like it, liquor stores like it too. Because it's something interesting to recommend. There's an interesting story to it. There's an interesting thing about it, for the same reason that it was easy to write the copy on the front of it because it's not hard to tell that story. I think shop owners like to be like, ‘Here's a bunch of things about it,’ that aren't just ‘It's gluten free’ or ‘It's handmade in Texas.’

Alicia: And like you said before, that you want Good Vodka to be a platform. Does that mean you want it to be something that kind of teaches people where alcohol comes from and that it could be made from waste?

Mark: Yeah.

Well, when I said platform, I mean I want a lot of different alcohols to be made—I would love to sell neutral alcohol made of coffee fruit to somebody that was thinking about buying corn ethanol from a gigantic industrial ethanol plant. I would love over the next few years, as people imagine what their new, ready to drink spirits could be, if they went a step beyond thinking that it has to begin with neutral grain spirits from Kentucky or Indiana. 

I, at the same time, to your point, I believe that simply telling people more about their liquid challenges the bigger brands to do that as well. And so, as I've watched that happen, as I’ve watched the language change a little bit in the way the big alcohol companies conceive of their labels, what I see is them kind of getting challenged by the little brands to disclose a little bit more. 

And I think that they're doing it kind of weakly, but at the same time I think that that challenge we made. I think that we can say, ‘Here's the harvest season. Here is the specific region. Why don't you put a harvest season on a bottle?’ It's mystifying to me why more brands don’t do that. It's the thing you said, the coffee always comes from somewhere. The grain always comes from somewhere and it always came from some time, too. I've never wanted to overlook that about alcohol.

Alicia: Right. 

And yeah, it's interesting because I was talking to Helena from Haus. Did you guys collaborate on the ‘Know Your Alcohol’ website? 

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Alicia: Yeah. 

And we were talking about how she was able to kind of sell directly to consumer with the-their apéritifs and that sort of thing. And her whole thing is about accessibility in that way. But with ‘Know Your Alcohol,’ how did you decide on the most important things to say to the consumer? I mean, you said your thing was brevity in writing as well. How did you kind of figure out how to communicate with people?

Mark: I thought a lot about those tours that I used to give at Kings County Distillery, and what were the things that people asked that I wanted them to know going in. What were the things that sort of stopped the tour and had to be explained?

The fact that people don't know that—I hate to keep ragging on these two, but they are such a good example. The fact that people don't know that Maker's Mark and Knob Creek come from the same manufacturer. That's such a crucial point of how you look at the liquor store shelf, that you have to understand that 99 percent of these spirits are made by ten distillers. And that those distillers make them for pennies on the dollar. 

And not to get too specific about this, but most vodka brands, those big market vodka brands cost their producers about 75 cents to make, including everything, including the grain, including the distillation, including the bottle. And then, that's their entire cost of goods. So these are incredibly profitable. Their profit margins are something like 75 percent. They've been really, really successful for these companies. And it's really, really hard to compete with that as a craft brand. You can't get your cost of goods to 75 cents, unless you're buying 10 million bottles at a time. So, that makes them more expensive. That means that if you're going to have sort of a craft brand and you want to break even, you have to sell it for a little more, then that puts you out of this kind of this purchasable tier for a lot of people. 

I think that kind of thing is really important to me that people know why some of those brands are able to be so cheap, and why other brands need to be a little bit more expensive. At the same time, we sell Good Vodka pretty cheaply considering how it's made, and I'd say pretty much break even because I didn't want it to be a luxury spirit. I don't see any interest in making another Tesla when there's no Prius on the market. It's not interesting to me to have something that people have to conspicuously spend in order to do the right thing. I wanted it to be the exact same ‘consumer decision’ to buy the eco-conscious brand as it is to buy the regular brand.

Alicia: Right.

And I mean, you’d mentioned that you're living in New Paltz and you're the primary cook in your house. How do these ideas manifest in your everyday living? I feel like that's always the question people have for me. Especially living in New Paltz, I'm assuming you have some really good produce.

Mark: There's a really good co-op up here. One of the reasons we moved up here, my wife and I, was because it was a really amazing co-op in New Paltz.

I really like being near farms. I love being able to know where things come from. When I do eat meat, I prefer it to be traceable. I'm not gonna say that I'm any sort of vegetarian. I’m not, and I would like to be more of one. I do try to be intentional about how I choose meat products in particular. And it's important to me to kind of know where they came from and know that it's not a gigantic factory farm. 

And how does it manifest in my life? Oh, God, I don't know. Probably not in as many ways as it should. I don't know. I guess I don't want to make it seem I moved up here as a live off the grid kind of thing. I realize that when I talk about spirits I make myself out to sound like I'm waging war against the consumerists and all of that, but, and in a lot of ways, I fail those tests, too. 

I like having a little bit of space between me and my neighbors. I like New York, but I never really felt like that was a hometown. I don't actually feel I have any hometown. I never felt that way about Appleton. I didn't feel that way about Kenya or Zimbabwe. I didn't feel that way about L.A. I kind of feel comfortable anywhere, to be perfectly honest. I like traveling. And I like kind of parachuting in somewhere and making a home there.

Alicia: Right. 

And for you, is drinking a political act?

Mark: Making alcohol certainly is a political act. Drinking, insofar as I try to be intentional about the choices that I make, and in that intentionality I think there is a kind of rebellion, then yeah, a little bit.

But to me, it's making alcohol, I think, because it is so much the—not the path of least resistance, because we've chosen to do it the hard way, is absolutely political to make those choices. It is hard every day to not just buy neutral grain spirit from the same place that all the distillers, that all the big distilleries do. It's challenging, and it's challenging to tell that story.

But at the same time, yeah, I think this is something that I think is important. And to take this full circle a little bit, I feel part of what growing up a little bit, just spending time in Africa as a kid did to me was it kind of made it so that I didn't see the self-pathology of America that I think is hammered into a lot of kids. And I have a great deal of skepticism about how—about America in general, and about how our, the things that we consume, are made and sourced. And a lot of that comes from having kind of moved to Appleton as an outsider with having come from a very rural village in Kenya. 

I don't know. I don't take for granted that we should be able to buy cheap alcohol from gigantic conglomerates. To put it how you do, it always comes from somewhere, right? That's kind of my mentality as well.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

Mark: Thank you. Thank you as well. 

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe

I met Emily Stephenson one day years ago at a café right by our then-apartments in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. She had emailed me because I was an editor at Edible Brooklyn at the time and wanted to discuss my work. I was jealous of her work, though, because she developed recipes for cookbooks. Eventually, we collaborated on the Food Writers’ Workshop, along with Layla Schlack, attempting to demystify food media for a bigger group of writers through a ticket price of $13.50.

Emily has since written two brilliant cookbooks with her own name on them: Pantry to Plate and The Friendsgiving Handbook. We talked at the end of last year, when Pantry to Plate was coming out, and I wanted to hear about her decision to leave social media that has become such a big part of being a writer and cookbook author. (This was the second to last of my interviews done with poor internet, so please excuse any audio glitches.) Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Emily. Thanks so much for coming on to chat. 

Emily: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. 

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate? 

Emily: Sure, I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago.

We grew up eating—we had a lot of takeout and fast food, for sure. We also—I've been thinking a lot about this, like, service that no one I've talked to has ever used, but kind of like saved my family since both my parents worked full time. It was called Market Day, but basically, kind of like a Costco, Sam's Club thing where you order in bulk, but then pick it up and buy it at the school. And so like, once a month, we would go and just pick up a bunch of boxes of frozen entrees and stuff that then would help with quick meals during the week.

Neither of my parents are super into cooking. And were just, you know, stressed with having two kids and time jobs.

But my mom is also super into gardening. And so like in the summer, you know, she would grow green beans and tomatoes and stuff. So we would have that for a couple months a year. There was a really great farmers’ market in the town where I grew up, but because it's the Midwest and the climate doesn't really allow for like an abundant farmers’ market, you know, for more than maybe like three or four months a year, that was kind of like just limited to the summer.

Alicia: Right, right. And so how did you get into food? Because I know you went to culinary school, you worked in restaurants—what was your path—

Emily: No, I didn’t go to culinary school

Alicia: You didn’t go to culinary school!

Emily: It started as just like an interest. I think from just watching a lot of Food Network in like junior high school I got, like, into cooking as a hobby.

But, you know, I don't know, just like, as a high school kid didn't occur to me that I could be like cooking our dinners every night and also was, you know, like, busy with schoolwork and extracurriculars. And then when I went away to college, the way that it worked at the school, I was you lived in a dorm for the first year, and then most people moved to apartments.

And so I just kind of was forced to learn how to cook when I was 19. There weren't any good restaurants in town. And you know, I was on a budget anyway. So that's when I got really into it and more into cookbooks and just doing a lot of research. 

The first year I was cooking, I wasn't a vegetarian, but I kind of didn't do a great job staying healthy as I learned to cook and felt kind of terrible after that first year, so decided to become a vegetarian. And so that also required a lot of education and research and just trying to stay inspired and like what to eat, that would be exciting and kind of healthy.

And I kind of had journalism dreams. They were very vague and not formed when I graduated, but was hoping to get a magazine or newspaper job or something and kind of keep food more as just like a hobby.

But I graduated in 2008. And, you know, it was just not a good time to pursue that work. I remember having like this, like, you know, a few steps removed connection. He was like an editor for a news wire or something. I talked to him a few months after I graduated. And I was like, yeah, I'm like, I would love to work for like a newspaper or magazine. You know, like, do you have any advice and he was like, just find another industry. Do not attempt to get a job doing this. And I, I don't know, I think I was just a little bit overwhelmed and really took that to heart and so kind of went another direction. 

I had gotten an internship at Slow Food USA. It combined my interest in food and politics. I was working on, they were sort of taking a turn towards more actual advocacy. And so I was working on a campaign about the Farm Bill and the school lunch portion of that. And so I worked in food nonprofits for a few years and it just wasn't quite satisfying. It still didn't have the writing component that I wanted, and had always just continued to just be interested in, reading about and learning about food and buying cookbooks and cooking for people all the time. I ran a supper club for a couple of years and just cooked for big groups in my apartment.

And I this moment after my second job where I just I realized that development in programs and nonprofits just was not what I wanted to do. And my current job was comfortable enough where I had the space to sort of figure out what it is I did want. 

I went on a vacation and I bought a book while I was there. It was one of the few souvenirs and it was Claudia Roden's The Book of Jewish Food. And I was flipping through it on the plane on the way back and I was like, I want to do this somehow. Claudia Roden has turned it into a job. And I just imagine she's sitting in her beautiful  London home and she's just writing cookbook after cookbook.

I was like, I want to figure out a way to do this. Like, I want to write. I love cookbooks. I love cooking. I think that maybe I could do this.

Which was very ambitious for someone who had made very safe career choices until then. But I

had talked to a few people who are kind of in the food media world. Everyone had told me that like culinary school was a waste of money. And if you just got restaurant experience, that would be enough. 

So I had made a plan to work in restaurants for a couple of years. And then after that would try to figure out how I could get into media and publishing. And just by coincidence, or chance, I saw that Food52 was looking for an intern to work on their first cookbook. They had signed a multi-book deal with Ten Speed. And I don't know, I just think because it was exactly what I wanted to do, my cover letter just stood out.

I got the internship, which was great. So I think I was like, 27 at the time, it was like a little bit of a career change. Thankfully, it was weekends only. And so you know, since it was an unpaid gig, I was able to work. And also get that really great experience.

That was Genius Recipes, Kristen Miglore. And it was mostly just doing recipe testing, research, kind of some like admin and project management stuff as the book went on. And it was great. I loved it. I was like, Oh my god, this is like exactly what I want to be doing. And when that ended, I went to work in restaurants for a little while, just ’cause I didn't have anything lined up. So I worked as a line cook. Sorry, this is like very detailed. 

Alicia: Oh, it's great. It's great. To be detailed. 

Emily: Um, it was like kind of a windy path. But once I got started, I felt like things kind of fell into place. So I was in restaurants for a little over a year. And thenI guess at some point, yeah, maybe like a year and a half later, one of Mark Bittman's longtime employees was going to grad school and so he was looking for someone to come join his team. And he got my name from Food52. And I remember being—I was working at the restaurant, and I checked my phone after service one night and I had this email that was just like, from Mark Bittman. Subject, Hello.

I thought It was a weird promotional email from the New York Times or something.

But yeah, he said he'd gotten my name. He was looking for stuff, was I interested. And so yeah, I applied for that. I did an edit test. I wrote, I think, like an outline for a cookbook chapter, went through a few rounds of that, and got hired. And so that was not too many steps away from deciding that I wanted to write cookbooks, to getting a job that was pretty much full time and writing, you know, working on his books, and I knew, kind of from the outset, I think, because I had started researching and also just loved cookbooks and was really familiar with them that I had started to see a lot of names pop up, in multiple books, and especially working on Genius Recipes, since that is a collection of like other people's recipes. Like you look through a lot of books and you look at the credits. And, you know, I would start to see Melissa Clark's name appearing in places that I had never seen or, even, you know, like Peter Meehan co-authored a few books, and I was like, oh, like, this is a job like I could find a way to like, pay my bills, writing other people's books.

And that was really appealing to me at the time because also it's like, you know, you get to work with someone who's really knowledgeable. Get to do the thing that you love, and then I get to learn and make a great product. So that was always kind of the goal.

And I've been trying to get into restaurant co-authoring for quite a while. I have yet to make that work, but in the meantime, I was able to also write to have my own small cookbook, and that kind of came about because I had been working kind of in publishing with Food52, with Mark Bittman, and was just like really hustling and emailing any editor, agent, whoever who would respond to me, meet with me, let them know what I was looking for and if they needed someone kind of behind the scenes, whether it was like ghostwriting, co-authoring, recipe editing

At that point, I knew because I didn't have like a following of my own, that was probably more the work that was going to come my way than writing my own big cookbooks.

I think you know within the last however many years it's become fairly clear that you need to have quite a following of your own to for a publishing company to take a risk on you 

Alicia: I mean, do you want to have a following of your own? I mean, I think you don't, right?

Emily: Something that i've just come to accept is like Ii have such a fraught relationship with that part of me who would love to be a public figure, and Ithink fame is always—famous is perhaps a strong word, but at least being well known in a smaller professional community, but there's also something really unappealing about it to me and I just—I  don't have the desire to do what it takes to build that and I feel like if it's kind of, for a while everyone was like, ‘Oh, you should have a blog. That's the secret to success now,’ and I was like, ‘I know, but it's a lot of work. It's just not quite what I want to be doing and if I am doing it just because I have to and i resent it, what's the point? It's not going to be engaging. It's not going to be original.’

I don't know, and I am at this kind of crossroads now where it's like i don't want the Instagram following and so like do I need to rethink what I want to do because it has become again in the last like however many years a big part of being a writer and being in publishing? I don't know. I think there's maybe like a ceiling for people who don't have that kind of following and maybe I’ve reached it.

I also just like have such a fraught relationship with social media. Ii've been taking a break from Instagram and Twitter for like the last maybe two months or something and it's been pretty great. I don't want to go back.

Alicia: I can understand this completely because even though I like enjoy social media and always have and, you know, since I was a preteen, have been on LiveJournal and just on the internet and have you been like—I love, I love, I love posting.

I think because for me, I have a lot of social anxiety about actual human interaction, so for me it's always been very nice to have the medium of the internet, and that's always been that way. I’ve been able to express myself kind of more honestly as a person, but now that like my newsletter has been quote unquote successful and I have more followers on Instagram and Twitter, it's so annoying and so toxic for my mental health and I've had to, because, you know—

Before I was pretty much in control of stuff. I didn't have tons of random people in my DMs or tweeting at me and so I just didn't have a fraught relationship with it, but now I’ve had to really control who can respond to me and that sort of thing because it's just so taxing.

Having to try to have boundaries and like, for me, I feel like i don't know is it rude if someone DMs me asking—like, someone I've never talked to before and I post like an Instagram story of a necklace that I'm wearing and they're like where did you get that—I just get a request for like did you get that and like I’m then I'm like is it rude if I just delete this because I don't want to interact with this person and I don't know this person, like the knowledge of where my necklace is from. 

I know so many people in our world, in the food world, who have assistants who deal with that stuff now because it becomes too overwhelming and that sort of thing and I'm like—I don't think i'll ever get to that level to actually pay someone to do that, but at the same time,now I completely understand like why someone has an assistant who filters through their email, because yes, people are really overwhelming.

Emily: Iit's like this tool that started out as something personal and then became professional and none of us really had a say or a choice in that. Maybe I'm sabotaging my whole career by feeling this way, but it's not like outlook or like Slack, even, a work tool that I can turn off at the end of the day. Especially the thing about the algorithm, you know, that it's designed toget you kind of like riled up. I feel like the algorithm, especially on Twitter recently, has really perfected itself that it just like—it was just taking over my life and I just don't want to feel like I have to do it, and that feels important to me enough that I might need to reconsider some some career choices based on that.

But I don't know, it just feels like a necessary boundary at this point.

Alicia: It's totally necessary and it's interesting to watch people who've tried to kind of like balance that. Like I know Korsha Wilson doesn't really go on in on social media unless she has something to say. I respect that so much and I wish I had that boundary for myself and I probably should try to cultivate it.

But it is really interesting to think about how these these platforms can affect one's career when one works in media and what a real effect it has, more than one's talent, frankly, on on what they're able to do.

It’s bad, but your latest cookbook, Pantry to Plate—it which ended up being way more timely than i'm sure you expected. How did that come about? Was that your idea, was that the publisher’s idea? What was the market—what were the forces that made this book come to fruition?

Emily: So both of my books, both published by Chronicle, were kind of a continuation of sort of what I talked about earlier where I, again, because I am not a public figure, kind of coming to writing a little bit more of a different way, and so because I had experience with Mark Bittman and some other projects I had worked on kind of being like a jack-of-all-trades, it was like you know, ‘here's the idea, go with it. Make something good.’ 

So that was sort of my skill and so Chronicle, for some of these smaller books, I think it's more identifying a need in the market, something that is timely and will sell well, and a lot of the ideas come from like editorial meetings and then it's a matter of finding a writer. The first one worked out perfectly because I had been hosting Friendsgiving since I went away to college at 18, so I had a lot to say on that one. This one, kind of similar—they were like we want to write a pantry book and the idea, the thing that will make this one stand out from all of the many, many other pantry books is that the ingredient list is going to be really small and tight and so it'll really be a book that stands alone. Then after some back and forth about what my ideas were and how I would make that work, then we can go to writing. So they came to me with the idea both of them but it was always just the prompt. First one was Friendsgiving; this was pantry book only 50 ingredients, go.

I liked that it was that collaboration, and I do feel like I've been really. I was able to have the connections and they thought of me for these books and also, I don't know, sometimes the market’s really saturated. There's a lot of books sometimes, it's hard to identify what is different and what will sell. I think it's like, publishing companies—it's their job to identify those things, so it was nice they were like, ‘all right, pantry book, we know we're gonna sign it, we know it will sell well, take the idea and run with it.’

Alicia: How did you kind of approach doing this? Is it a reflection of how you cook or was it kind of a more foreign sort of approach?

Emily: I think it was a little bit of a combination. I started because I knew it was a limited number of recipes and only 50 ingredients, so I made this giant spreadsheet of both the pantry ingredients that I like to use and also, because everyone's pantry looks different, but doing some research for a lot of the general servicey kind of stuff out there—all the pantry ingredients you need, you know, stuff that that gets mentioned over and over. It's definitely a very, you know, entry level cookbook, and so I wanted it to be ingredients that hopefully a wide swath of people will like to use and cook with. So anyway, making a spreadsheet with that and trying to figure out which ingredients will go the furthest and in that process, having to cut some stuff that I use all the time and depend very heavily on but wouldn't be able to use in as wide an amount of recipes. For instance, I love vinegar. I cook with vinegar all the time, but trying to get a variety of flavor profiles and dishes and ways of cooking, it seemed like citrus was going to be more versatile, so the acid in the book is citrus not vinegar. That kind of thing.

Once i landed on the list, I only made a few tweaks in the writing process, but once I got to that part, I think it is how I cook once I was able to start working mostly full-time writing cookbooks. I found that I had stopped using recipes when I was looking at them all day. It was kind of the last thing I wanted to do and so pretty much where I've at now and how i'm still cooking is just like, looking at what I've got and figuring out something from that

It was a great way to write because I would just reference this list of 50 ingredients and I was like, okay, I want to make a chickpea soup or something. Here's what I'm working with, what sounds interesting? So that was actually kind of a fun process, and again mostly how I cook in my day to day life.

Alicia: So what do you think makes a cookbook stand out in a very, very crowded market? And also I wanted to ask you like what, for you, what have been the formative cookbooks? Because you've talked about this but I don't think you've named yet what was super important to you.

Emily: Definitely How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman. That one. I think I had been a vegetarian and cooking for maybe like three or four years at that point, but it's so helpful and it's so flexible, and I think it really does a good job of teaching you how to be nimble in the kitchen while also just having so many ideas. It’s a really great book to go to and you're like, alright like, you know, I bought this green at the store and I don't know what to do with it—what are some ideas? I have these greens from the farmers’ market that are about to go bad, what can I do with them? And so that's probably like the book that i've used the most

It’s funny. I've always loved cookbooks as items to collect and I think that maybe recently it's become more about the collecting than the using, especially as I am looking at cookbooks and recipes all day. I cook less with them and I'm trying to think if there's any in the last couple years that I really enjoyed or read, and I was just like reading them cover to cover. I think the storytelling and the philosophy and just the way that a person packages their cooking life is very fascinating to me. 

There's a lot of ngreat restaurant cookbooks that I've loved to read but have never cooked from. I remember getting I think it was the Night and Market Cookbook—I just really loved reading that; I felt like I learned a lot. It was a great book to spend time with. My Name Is Ice Cream by Dana Cree— I just loved that book. She made ice cream seem so technical but also appealing, but then I worked on an ice cream book for a little while and I never wanted to make ice cream again, so again, it just sits there as a book that I enjoy and love to reference sometimes.

You're also asking me at a funny time because all of my cookbooks are in boxes right now. So it's not like I can look at them and be like, Oh, yeah, that one. I'm kind of theorizing, like who do I

I know. Unfortunately, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian really stands out as the one formative one that really changed how I cook.

I know I've picked up so much from books. I'm sorry. I'm blanking on any other ones. I'm sure there's more.

Alicia: We worked together with Layla Schlack to try to create an equitable food conference with the Food Writers’ Workshop, which I think was mostly your idea. But right now, it's like, kind of I know, you're sort of like, working tangentially to food media now. But, you know, do you think there's hope for food media to become more equitable, more kind of open? I mean, we talked about how social media platforms and audiences are probably far too important in terms of one success in this industry. So like, do you have hope for food media? Like, what do you want to see change?

Emily: I don't know. I mean, I feel like you're catching me at kind of a, like, pessimistic time. But I mean, I guess like the flip side, right, to social media is that people who are good at it, and who are willing to put in the time and effort, it's a way to create a career outside of the traditional pathways. For me, it's like, I was able to get to where I am. I mean, maybe I could have taken a different route. But all because, you know, I was able to do an unpaid internship at a New York media company. And, you know, I do want to be open to the fact that that is a path for some people. It's not one that I think will work for me, but, I don't know, it's, I feel—it's like how much change can really happen if it's like these giant companies that hold so much power, you know, it's like Conde Nast, and perhaps the New York Times, or maybe like listening to some of the feedback they've been getting, but it just feels like we put so much emphasis on these big institutions and give them so much power. 

And like, I guess one hopeful point is maybe crowdfunding, and I think that there have been like, specifically with my interests, and I like cookbooks, you know, people who have tried to shop around a cookbook. Editors don't bite for whatever reason. And so they just decided to crowdfund it. And I think, you know, the problem with that is that it is just a lot more like time and effort on the writer’s part, but I think, you know, if someone believes that they have a good idea, and you know, and hundreds of other people do, too, that maybe some more kind of interesting, and different books can be put out, kind of like what we were talking about before, even with my book, there are a million pantry books and big companies kind of just often keep doing what works, but I think they do pay attention to crowdfunding as well. I feel I can think of one book off the top of my head, there's probably been more, the Eat Offbeat Cookbook. They're like a catering company in New York that employed refugees. It was like a work program through the

—I can't remember the organization—anyway, they had a super successful crowdfunding campaign. So much so that it got the attention of publishers, and they were able to finish the book.

I guess maybe it's a mind-set shift to  not needing the stamp of approval of a publishing company, either. You know, it's like you'd write, you write your book. And hopefully, if you can get the funding to support your time to get it out, and people will find it. And it's perhaps not the most satisfying answer, but I feel like it's like one bright spot in an industry. I'm otherwise feeling like, I don't know, I'm kind of like holding my breath and waiting to see what happens. 

Alicia: Yeah, no, it's true. And I do think that it's funny because when you ask people what are they optimistic about in food media, the answer usually is something like self-publishing. And that is a big shift, I think.

And I think it's a very interesting shift. And, I mean, it's also kind of a problematic shift. I mean, as a person who has a newsletter that I self-published, like people, there are people and there's been this backlash—I think it's over now—to the idea of newsletters and not having an editor, etc., etc. And it's like, well, this is what I do for a living and have done for a living, but I stopped being able to make a sufficient living at it, doing it in the, you know, traditional manner. And so what am I supposed to just like—what was I supposed to do? Especially independent, right? Especially if your backup plan is usually to just work in food, and cook people food, and then you're in a pandemic. This isn't the time to do that, you know, then it's like—this is kind of a way of getting through that. But yeah, I hope that the respect continues for self publishing. But I also think it's very, yeah, state of corporate food media that people have been like, we have to take this into our own hands, because there's no one who's doing this properly. 

Emily: As someone who has kind of invested in traditional publishing, and I don't know, though, it's—it's a tough time. I think, let's check  in like, a year and see if any of the stages of stocks that have been happening, I feel like that's kind of where I'm at at the moment. 

Alicia: And, you know, for you is cooking a political act?

Emily: I think I, you know, I, I feel like this is an answer that quite a lot of other people have given, but when I really do think about it, I feel perhaps not me at home cooking. I don't think of it as a political act. But I do think like, getting ingredients is and my only personal philosophy has been kind of all over the place on this. I feel like I started off, you know, working at Slow Food and a little bit, as they were trying to shift their mindset to is to how political exactly is cooking and eating, and then, you know, periods where, as a, you know, freelance writer, it's like, my budget was so low, I just felt like I didn't really have the ability to really think through where my ingredients are from, but—and I think it's one thing that I really appreciate that you speak so much about—but I do think that we have to put a lot of thought into where our food comes from, and how we get it, and to the best of all of our abilities in our situation, try to make choices that feel good.

It feels really overwhelming. I feel like there's so many different things to take into account. And it can be hard. But I think when you get on autopilot, and I don't know, just mindlessly buy things from the grocery store, I feel like the chain of effects is so much longer than any of us ever really think about. That is something that I definitely—I am trying, you know, to be much more mindful of. 

Alicia: I think that's so—that's interesting. And I'm excited to see how that manifests for you now that you're in L.A., as opposed to living in New York.

Emily: Everyone’slike, the farmers’ markets are so great. I'm excited to get back into that,that lifestyle. So yeah. 

Alicia: Well, thank you. 

Emily: And obviously there's more to it than that.

Alicia: Awesome.

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When the opportunity to interview Dr. Badia Ahad-Legardy upon the release of her book Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture (next Tuesday) landed in my inbox, I couldn’t say no. To discuss food with a literary scholar? Of course.

There is an entire chapter on food in the book, relating current expressions of Black identity in cookbooks and restaurants to past Black power movements. It is illuminating, especially in its discussion of Bryant Terry’s Afro-Vegan, for making connections that would usually go unstated, because—simply put—we so rarely see literary scholars or critics talking about food. It is vital and necessary.

We discussed the under-sung deliciousness of carob, the “complicated space of food studies,” food and the Black Lives Matter movement, and the cultural role of the restaurant. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Badia. Thank you so much for taking the time out today.

Badia: Thank you for having me. I'm excited.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Badia: Sure. 

So, I grew up in Chicago in the Hyde Park community. So, I think it was made perhaps most famous by Barack Obama. That's where he lived in Chicago. But we were there long before Barack Obama got there. [Laughter.] My grandparents actually migrated to Hyde Park in the 1940s, so it's where I grew up and where my mom grew up and so forth. So yeah, that's where I grew up. 

It's really interesting, because I have actually very few recollections of what I ate between the ages of, I guess, between when I was born and nine years old. And I was thinking about that, like, ‘What did I eat in those years?’ And it's so interesting, because my parents got divorced when I was nine. And I literally cannot remember the foods I ate prior to that. I don't have a recollection of what my mother cooked during that time. But after that, we moved in with my grandmother once they divorced, and I remember so many of those meals. 

And it's, I guess, a cliché, but my grandmother was an amazing cook. And my favorite food was okra. [Laughter.] One of the few people who's really attracted to, I guess, the slimy texture. I really loved okra. She would make these wonderful Parker House rolls that I used to schmear with a ton of butter and grape jelly. And desserts, of course. So I think five-flavored pound cake was my favorite. 

And interestingly, my aunt, who was also living with my grandmother at that time, she was and is a naturopath. And so she would take me to the health food store and buy me all kinds of treats. And my favorite ones were the carob covered raisins and the root beer sodas that were clear because they weren't—they didn't have the artificial coloring, so they tasted just like root beer. So, those were my favorite things to eat growing up. 

Alicia: Wow, I love whenever carob comes up in a conversation. [Laughter.]

Badia: Yeah, I was really—I shouldn't say I, but my aunt was really an early adopter of carob.

Alicia: Yeah, it's always just very, very specific. And it's just a very specific time. And I love that. And yeah, I'm always saying, ‘We should bring carob back.’ I don't think it was as bad as people remember at all. [Laughs.]

Badia: Well, the interesting thing is I actually don't like chocolate. Yeah, I'm not really a chocolate eater. Never have been. But carob was my jam as a kid. So, I don't know.

Alicia: [Laughs.] Amazing.

Well, why was it important for you to include a chapter on food in your new book, Afro—Nostalgia?

Badia: Sure.

I didn't really think that I could write a book about nostalgia and Blackness and get away with not writing a chapter about fo—about food or some reference to food. I think food and music are such key touchdowns of nostalgic memory. So, you hear something and you get transported back to a moment in time, or you eat something and it has the capacity to take you back to a particular kind of memory or a set of memories. So that's a really personal, I think, relationship between food and memory. And nostalgia plays such an important role in that. 

So in the book, I wanted to go a little bit beyond just kind of the personal nostalgic relationship that we have with food and really think about how it plays out in the Black culinary space. So, showing how chefs can play really important roles in evoking memories of this imagined historical past, and how those are really kind of tied to a certain kind of politics but also a sense of the future of Black food. 

Alicia: Right.

And you note in this chapter the “complicated space of food studies.” And I wanted to see if you could elaborate on what you mean—define as food studies and why you see it as a complicated space.

Badia: Sure.

Food studies is very broad, which is one of the reasons I think it's really complicated. And as I understand it at least, it's really about exploring the relationship between food and identity. And you can approach that from so many different angles. So you have public health, or environmental sustainability, or literature and folklore, sociology. I mean, all of those areas can really speak to the relationship or a certain kind of relationship between food and identity. And I think just because it's so vast, and it's so nebulous—and it's also a really, a fairly new field. That's one of the reasons why I think it's really complicated. 

It's funny. I was listening to Eve Ewing, and I'm not sure if you're familiar with her, but she's—yeah, amazing sociologist, writer, speaker, poet. I mean, just a brilliant individual. And she did a little Instagram Live mini-talk. And it was so fascinating, because she talked about the notion of pre-existing health conditions and how that's being played out right now in the trial of Derek Chauvin, and—being used as an attempt to prove that George Floyd's body was already broken, that there were kind of pre-existing health conditions at play. And we've also heard a lot of that around Covid, especially when it comes to communities of color. 

But when we think about something like pre-existing health conditions, so much of that is tied to issues like poverty and food access and food deserts and food justice. And these aren't natural conditions, but they're the product of a myriad of social injustices. And I think food plays a really important role in that. So there are many reasons why I think it's a conversation—complicated space. There's so many conversations happening about food and food waste. There's so much to say. 

And I think for me, at least when I was writing the book and just doing some reading around this, it was really hard to try to find a way in, actually, as someone who's coming to this work from a very different vantage point. And that's probably why this chapter on food was the most personal for me, because I actually used my own food memories as a way to participate in what I saw was a really kind of expansive conversation.

Alicia: Right. 

I mean, it's funny, because I started reading a book this morning, published in 2003. And the writer, who I think is a philosophy professor named Lisa Heldke, she was saying, ‘It's in the last ten years that food studies has emerged a little bit.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, boy.’ And it is still such a fractured area of study. 

And I think part of it is that nostalgia connection that it is—you have to come into it from a personal perspective. And you're talking about you using your memories. She begins this book as well with her own memories. And I'm like, ‘I don't think you can get into food without connecting it to nostalgia, connecting it back to your own identity, which is such a fascinating—’ Yeah, that's why it's so wonderful when other people write about food. I'm a food writer, so I only write about food, really. [Laughter.] That’s why I love reading other people write about it.

Badia: My background, obviously, is as a literary scholar, right? And I write about a lot of things, but I usually write about books. [Laughs.] But I do eat a lot. And I read about eating, and I read a lot about food. Again, I could not really figure out how to situate myself in this conversation without delving into the personal. But I think that's one of the reasons why that chapter for me, at least, was one of the most rewarding to write as well.

Alicia: Of course.

And the lack of pork in your home growing up is part of that, as well as the focus on Dick Gregory and Bryant Terry, who are big parts of this chapter. So, I wanted to ask ’cause I—I always ask people about this—but what is your relationship to meat as an omnivore? And I know you don't eat fast food. That seems like an interesting kind of relationship to food, as a conscious omnivore. [Laughter.]

Badia: Well, again, I guess going back to thinking about how your memories or food or your relationship to food is really formed, I think, at such a young age—or at least for me, it's formed at such a young age. And until you posed that question, I have to say, I had actually never really thought about my relationship to meat. Do me and meat really have a relationship? But I guess we do, because I do consume it. What's really interesting is that in high school, my mom and my stepdad stopped eating red meat. But I didn't. I still eat red meat. [Laughter.] My husband does not eat red meat at all. But I do and our kids do. 

So if I'm honest, I'd have to say that I think my relationship to meat really is the result of having had such a restrictive diet as a child. So growing up in the Nation of Islam, and then also on top of that, I had a lot of food allergies, which I have now outgrown thankfully. So if I'm honest, maybe my unwillingness to not eat meat is pushing back on what I perceive to be a really confining way to live for a good part of my kind of growing up. 

And honestly, you know, I don't know if I reject ‘fast food.’ I definitely preach the gospel of moderation. And I think if you want a fast food meal every now and then, get after it. 

But I'll share with you a really striking memory. When I took my kids to this art fair in Chicago, and—they were about ages around 8 and 11 at the time. And I got them popsicles. And the popsicles were made from fresh fruit, but they weren't unsweetened or anything and there was still obviously sugar present. And both of them said that their popsicles didn't taste right. And I was like, ‘What’s going on with these popsicles?’ 

I tasted the popsicles. And they tasted like the fruit that they were labeled as. So, the strawberry popsicle tasted like strawberries. The mango popsicle tasted like mango. But they were so used to that kind of artificial strawberry flavor, and an artificial citrus flavor, that the recognition, or the kind of expectation of having a popsicle that was the flavor of the actual fruit was something so foreign to them. And that was, quite frankly, heartbreaking for me, right? And I was like, ‘Ok, yeah, we're gonna do some things differently here.’

So, I think when I'm thinking about the kind of choices that we make as a family, I don't want them to feel as though or understand that natural foods in their natural form are something that's foreign. I want them to at least be able to recognize the foreign thing is the actual foreign, artificial thing that you're eating. I think that's why, at least for us, fast food isn’t a—we don't do that on a regular basis, I'll say.

Alicia: Right.

Yeah, no. And it's always interesting to talk to parents about this, because you have to negotiate food in a whole new way and figure out how to pass on your relationship to it without making that the whole thing and that sort of thing. I asked because you mentioned your kids asking for fast food in that chapter, and I was—it's always interesting to understand how people, yeah, make and negotiate those aspects of life because—yeah. [Laughs.] 

Badia: And I think that what I've tried to do also is not make them feel guilty about having it because then that is a whole other thing. And I talk a little bit about this in the book, but I had a lot of shame around food growing up. And that's never a healthy relationship to anything. So, I don't want them to feel if they're out with their friends, and the choice is to—they're both teenagers now, so—and the choice is to go to McDonald's or whatever, that they have to feel bad about doing it, or they lie and tell me that they went somewhere else or something like that. But I do want them to be able to strike a balance. 

Alicia: Of course.

Yeah, in the chapter you also write that Bryant Terry's Afro-Vegan is about making tangible and accessible the relationship between food and emancipatory politics. In what kind of ways and venues do you see this relationship being made nowadays in culture broadly, if you do? I mean, I think that's such an important intersection, of food and emancipatory politics. And I've talked to Bryant Terry about this before. As you are a literary scholar, how do you see that manifesting? Because I also want to understand how food for non-food-focused people, where you see it and where you see it as important?

Badia: Yeah. 

Well, interestingly, I just think that, right now, we see it kind of everywhere, right? So in the aftermath of the summer of 2020, where we saw national racial unrest and second wave of Black Lives Matter, the notion of Black radicalism and imagining Black freedom, I don't know if it's been more visible to me. [Laughs.] So, it certainly is more visible now then even when I was writing the book. 

So if I'm thinking about even renewed attention to Black cultural creators, and I—I'd be remiss not to mention folks like Thérèse Nelson and her Black Culinary History project. Also, the work of Cynthia Greenlee at The Counter, anti-racist projects happening everywhere, even popular culture. 

Oddly enough, I just saw the first episode of the new season of Top Chef last week. [Laughs.] And something that I was immediately struck by was, I don’t know if I want to call it an eagerness, but it kind of felt like an eagerness to really put West African cuisine on display. And that was something that was really fascinating to me. And I think it would be easy to kind of critique that as like, ‘Oh, this is empty symbolism,’ and ‘What does this really mean?’ But I also think the restaurant industry, like so many different industries, faced a racial reckoning in that moment. And it's clear that a lot of folks, at least to my mind, are—seem to be trying to do things a little differently. 

So I see this relationship between food and kind of a politics of liberation honestly operating in so many different spaces. Musically, in terms of literature, in terms of obviously food. But certainly, I think in a kind of popular cultural sphere we're seeing a little bit more of that conversation come to the fore. And I think it's a direct result of, again, the events of summer 2020. 

And I think it can be really easy to see these endeavors as merely historical. But in the book, I talk a lot about this notion of nostalgic reclamation, or nostalgia as an act of reclamation. So, what are you reclaiming? What are you trying to kind of get back to? And I think it's really a way to imagine the past. It’s a particular kind of memory. But it also does a lot of work for us in the present and provides a good deal of inspiration for the future, which I think is really at the heart of nostalgic projects. 

So, I see that—see it all over the place. It’s interesting. I was talking about Hyde Park earlier where I grew up, and there's a new-ish restaurant there, Virtue. And the chef is Erick Williams. And even if you go on the site, he has these kind of archival images of the American Black South on the website, and really kind of pointing to that space and that time as a mode of inspiration for what he's doing in the restaurant now. But I would say that it's not just kind of trying to recapture that very moment or the cuisine from that very moment in that space, but it's about kind of using that as a starting point to create something anew but also, really not forgetting the foundation of where all this came from.

Alicia: And in the chapter as well, I mean, to talk about restaurants, you discuss Marcus Samuelsson’s Red Rooster and specifically Sam Sifton’s review of it. And you bring up the difficult role that a restaurant has in changing its neighborhood, especially—this is a Black restaurant in a historically Black neighborhood in Harlem. 

Do you see the restaurant as having a duty to occupy a role that is not simply about gastronomy, a role that actually kind of is in service to the neighborhood and in kind of anti-service to gentrification? [Laughter.] We've been talking a lot about what is the role of the restaurant, especially because in the pandemic they've been laying people off. It's been a site of transmission. Line cooks have been deeply impacted by the pandemic. So we're talking about, ‘What is the restaurant?’ And so do you think the restaurant has a cultural function beyond being kind of just a business, that's a showcase for a chef, especially kind of in that context of Red Rooster?

Badia: That's a great question. 

I mean, I have to say, normally I get really nervous when I hear words like ‘duty’ and ‘responsibility,’ especially attached to roles that Black people are supposed to play. [Laughs.] And I am definitely, just by the way, anti-gentrification, just to let everyone know. 

I would say that honestly when a restaurant or any business for that matter occupies a space within a neighborhood, especially neighborhoods that have been neglected, that have been forgotten, marginalized, there really has to be—to my mind, at least—some sense of responsibility for how your presence in that community is going to affect the lives of the people who existed there long before you. So, I do feel like there is some responsibility there. 

And the reason why I even talk about Red Rooster in the book is because it's—it really does exemplify how complicated nostalgic projects are, right? So, on the one hand, nostalgia is a feel-good emotion, which is really what the book is about, right? So it has the capacity to be energizing. It can be life-giving; it could be comforting. And even in the name, Red Rooster, is obviously an homage to the Red Rooster of the Harlem Renaissance era. So you kind of think about that moment, and the kind of images that it evokes of this vibrant Black Harlem. But nostalgia also has a really dark underbelly. And it's one that is often informed by historical erasure and violence. 

So with Red Rooster, we see a little bit of both sides of nostalgia at play. And I see it as a space that's really grappling with that. So, that's one of the reasons why I really wanted to kind of focus on it, because it obviously—even in its name, invokes this kind of historical relationship. But we have to think about the work that it's actually doing in that, their community right now. 

In terms of whether restaurants have a cultural function? I would obviously say yes. I'm not sure if restaurants, though, always know that they have that function and they're aware of what that function is and what role that they play in it. So when I think about a restaurant, I think about things—again, not as a person entrenched in the food space, but location, menu items, price points, waitstaff, seating arrangements, decor, music. I mean, I think about all the things that go into the making of a restaurant. And it is such an overtly political space.

I was thinking about a time when a few friends and I went to brunch in this neighborhood, Wicker Park, which is a bit of a tony, predominantly white neighborhood in Chicago. And my friends and I were the only Black patrons in the restaurant. And if anyone knows Chicago, we are a deeply segregated city, right? So you go to the North side, it's mostly white. Southside, mostly black. 

So, we're in Wicker Park. We're having brunch at this restaurant, only Black people there. And this Biggie song comes on the loudspeaker. And it's a restaurant, so it's still somewhat muted. But you know Biggie, you hear the song, that must be the explicit version. And the N-word is all over the place in the song, right? So, here we are in this space. The patrons are mostly white, the waitstaff is mostly white, the cooks look to be mostly Black and Latinx. And I was thinking in that moment about how our experience of the space in that moment was very, very different. 

So, restaurants are not neutral spaces. I think that some of them seem to intend to operate from a place of neutrality without recognizing that for many people, whiteness functions as a neutral. So I think that restaurants would do well to think more deeply about the cultural functions that they serve, and the roles that they play in the communities in which they exist, right? 

Alicia: Yeah, no, I think I asked that question, of course, out of interest. But also I'm writing a list of restaurants in San Juan for a food website, the essential restaurants of San Juan. And thinking about that, these questions of these areas that have been so deeply gentrified. And here in San Juan, gentrification is tied to Airbnbs. It's not necessarily tied to actual residents, because the economy is so based on tourism. And so thinking about, ‘Who is this restaurant for? Who is this serving? And how is it changing the neighborhood?’ is just such an important consideration. 

And yeah, that idea of like, ‘Who is comfortable in these spaces?’ is such a big one when it comes to food that I don't think people think about enough. From farmers’ markets to restaurants, who is comfortable and who is being served?

Badia: Yeah, exactly. 

And also, you kind of think about—I'm not a restaurant owner, I don't aspire to be one. But I imagine though that you do have a vision of the space. And I honestly don't think that, especially in many of the spaces that I've been to, there is a good deal of consideration for the kind of diversity of people who potentially could occupy that space. And I think when you're coming into, especially, again, particular kinds of neighborhoods, you really have to be mindful of the power that you wield within those spaces, and also how your mere presence, again, can really alter not just the lived experiences of the people who are there, but really the future of those communities in irreparable ways.

Alicia: Right.

And for you, is cooking a political act?

Badia: Ok, so I'm going to be the consummate academic here. [Laughter.] Nothing that we do or say escapes the realm of the political, so I would have to obviously put cooking in there. 

And can I just tell you how much I love this question? Because I thought about this, and I'm like, ‘It's cooking. It's not just food. It's not just eating. It’s the act of cooking.’ And so yes, I would say that food is—I mean, that cooking is definitely a political act, and—as much as our politics are reflected in the choices that we make on a day to day basis. So, ‘Am I going to get takeout, or am I going to cook in my kitchen? Am I going to fry, or am I going to bake? Am I doing the cooking, or is my husband doing the cooking?’ And how these decisions get made, I think, are inherently political. So, I would have to say that cooking is very much a political act.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much again for taking the time to chat today.

Badia: Thank you for having me.

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My fiancé is making me a martini as I put together this interview with Jackie Summers, and I think he’d appreciate that. What we have in common is that we are writers and boozehounds. But Jackie is much more than that: He was the first Black distiller to be licensed in the United States since Prohibition, to make his delicious Sorel liqueur, and is a fabulous public speaker on matters of equity in hospitality. I first came across him when I was assigned to write about Sorel, and I’m thrilled that we’ve been in touch ever since. But I’m more thrilled that we got to have this conversation about his work. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Jackie. Thank you so much for taking the time out to chat today.

Jackie: Absolutely. It's a pleasure to talk to you. 

How have you been? 

Alicia: Oof. 

Fine, good. A lot of work lately, which is a double-edged sword, as we all know. [Laughs.] Thankfully, people are getting vaccinated, so hopefully things will be different soon, but just kind of missing inspiration a lot. 

How have you been doing?

Jackie: Like you, I have been busy doing the pandemic. As you said, it's a mixed blessing in that the way in which you're busy is not always the way in which you anticipated.

Alicia: Right. Yes. 

Well, how did you anticipate being busy, and how are you actually busy?

Jackie: I had all of these plans for 2020, which did not happen. And things went entirely different directions, which I'm sure we'll get into in this conversation.

Alicia: Yes.

Well, can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Jackie: So I was born in Queens, even though my company is called JackFromBrooklyn. The interesting part about the story is my father was Muslim, and my dad—my father was Muslim and my mom is Christian. So right off the bat, there was no pork in the house whatsoever. My mom and dad had a conversation early in their marriage that they were just going to worship their gods and not ever discuss it. But there was just no pork in the house. 

And I remember having this revelation. We were on a road trip; I was five or six years old. And the family stopped at a Bob's Big Boy diner for breakfast. And I smell bacon for the first time. And I said, ‘Mom, what is that?’ And my mom said, ‘Well, that's bacon, son.’ And I said, ‘Mom, can I have some bacon?’ And she kinda looked at my dad, and I could tell that the look—the look, in retrospect, said, ‘We're not at home. Technically, yes.’ And my mom let me have bacon for the first time. You remember that scene in Close Encounters, where he just makes a mountain of mashed potatoes? Six years old with a mountain of bacon. [Laughter.] Was looking at my dad thinking to myself, ‘Why did you keep this from me?’

But really, I'm Caribbean on both sides. On my mother's side, from Barbados. On my father's side, from Saint Kitts [and] Nevis. Well, I didn't know there was a word for this when I was a child. We were largely pescatarian. We ate a lot of seafood, fish, vegetables, fresh fruit, fresh greens, baked goods. My mom was a home mom, so there was always something fresh baked in the house. But the general rule was, you could pick it out of the—off of a tree, pluck it off—out of the ground, or cook from the ocean, because those were the options that my ancestors had.

Alicia: How did you end up getting into food? I know you've written a bit about becoming the cook in your family. How did that happen?

Jackie: So, I mentioned that my mom was a home mom. My relationship with her developed by hanging on her apron strings, literally. So, she would cook. She would bake. She would fix all this food for us. And my job was, I was the family taster. She would pick something and then give me a taste and go, ‘Tell me what this needs.’ And I was like, ‘Mom, I'm a kid. I don't know what things need.’ She’d walk me through spices and herbs and go, ‘Well, this is basil. Here's how it tastes. This is oregano. This is how it tastes. These are the different things that are our tools to cook with. And here's how you use them.’

But what I figured out in retrospect as an adult, was all of the recipes had stories with them. So learning how to bake, there were stories about my mom baking as a kid. Learning how to make hot sauce hearing stories about my grandmother's hot sauce. So what I realized was, as the person who inherited mom's recipes, the responsibility for cooking, I also became the steward of the family stories because all of our stories were tied to food. 

Alicia: And I know that you had a different career before you got into working in beverage, writing about food. Can you tell me about that career? [Laughter.]

Jackie: I had a few different careers, actually. I spent 5 years on Wall Street. I spent 10 years in advertising marketing. I spent 10 years as a publishing executive. Somewhere mixed in that I was an underwear model, and somewhere in that—true story—mixed in that, I was a music producer. So I did a bunch of different things before I found myself in the spirits industry, specifically, in hospitality, in general.

Alicia: And so, how did you end up in food? I know you wrote for Esquire about starting Sorel, your liquor brand. And your main motivation you said was in wanting to day drink and enjoy life. And for me, too, I think, choosing to go the independent route means a lot of work and a lot of stress and a lot of insecurity and uncertainty. But at the same time, it also means actually getting to enjoy every day of your life, if you're able. And so, how has that dream that you had when you launched Sorel come true?

Jackie: Well, it's funny. I was a director of production in digital for a fashion magazine a decade ago, and I had a cancer scare. And they told me pretty much I had a 95% chance of death. And the thing that made most sense to me to do right before my surgery was go on vacation. So I consented to this surgery that I didn't expect to survive, and then nine friends went and rented a beach house in Cancun. And just the best vacation in my whole life, and just great food and great conversation and good booze. 

And when I woke up from the surgery that I didn't expect to survive, I thought to myself like, ‘I can't go back to my old life now.’ I have this very specific memory of my first week back at my day job, getting into a four-hour argument with the director of photography because she felt the pinks on the cover of the magazine we just printed were too pink and the grass wasn't green enough. And I thought to myself, ‘This is my life? I can't do this anymore.’ And again, having just come off that vacation, what I really want to do is I wanted to be on vacation again. 

So yes, in a sense, the idea of being around cool people all day long and talking about things that mattered over good food and good drinks is born of this moment in time where I'm surrounded by just great friends and having the best time of my life. The reality is, there's responsibility tied to this. There is business that needs to be conducted every single day, which affects people's lives that allow me to do this thing. There are difficult conversations around racism and sexism and ableism and homophobia, and all of these issues of our day that I'm engaged in daily. 

The idea of eating and drinking for a living sounds great. And I'm not going to say it's not great. It is. I love what we do. I've seen the world. I've traveled. I've had just fantastic meals. I've met amazing people, but it is not frivolous. There is a seriousness tinged to everything that we do.

Alicia: Did you want to address that seriousness? Was that a part of what you wanted by entering this world, or was that just kind of a necessity?

Jackie: A little column A, little column B.

Alicia: Yeah.

Jackie: I don't think it was what I initially intended, but the year that I launched my business was the year Trayvon Martin was killed. And I couldn't not speak up. And I noticed that talking about this in a public way was considered divisive. It still is considered divisive in many circles, but I had to reconcile the idea that a lot of the people that I was doing business with were, if not outright, downlow racist. You have this choice you have to make. ‘I'm a new business person. What do I really want to do? Do I want to keep my mouth shut and just try to make as much money as I can? Do I need to speak up?’ And I had to speak up. I had to address these things. 

I didn't mention this. But when I got my liquor license in 2012, I was the only Black person in America at the time with a license to make liquor. So being that guy, and having those conversations, in 2012 was difficult. It was difficult. 

But the interesting thing about having that conversation is it leads you down the path of the entire spectrum of privilege and oppression. I am a cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied male. I've got so much privilege, despite the fact that I live in a country that has been racist from its inception. Do I have oppression? Absolutely. Is there anyway that I can address my own oppression and not intrinsically fight for everyone else who's oppressed? No. Addressing racism, by definition, means I've got to speak on sexism. And I've got to speak on ableism. And I've got to speak on homophobia. I've got to speak on all of those things. They all matter. It all connects. It all intersects. You cannot fight for your own rights at the expense of anybody else's.

Alicia: Why do you think that the food and beverage industry has put these conversations off? And do you think that the conversation has gotten better and louder in the last few years since you began your business and started doing public speaking and writing on these issues?

Jackie: I think that food and beverage, like all other industries that are mired in white supremacy, didn't have to have these conversations. Nobody was making them talk about this. And because no one was making them talk about this, folks were willing to just continue business as usual, with the idea that if you talked about these things, you are going to be shunned and wouldn't be able to conduct business. 

And I always feel like that's—you have to be able to pick and choose the fights that are worth fighting for. And that moment in time, when Trayvon Martin was killed, I think we will mark in 50 years as the beginning of the new Civil Rights movement. I do not see how that doesn't become the—from the death of Trayvon Martin to the death of George Floyd, that period, this decade that we just lived through, starts off this whole—we're going to have this conversation, and you don't have to like it, but you're going to—Can I curse? 

Alicia: Of course.

Jackie: You are going to f*****g deal with this. You're going to f*****g deal with this. There was a time in this country when you could kill enough of us to keep us quiet, and that time has passed. You cannot kill enough of us to shut all of us up anymore. We are done. We're done. 

So the conversations in food and beverage, I don't think, are in and of themselves essentially different from the conversations of any other industry that is mired in white supremacy. But I do think we are uniquely positioned to have these discussions, because so much of what we do is born from people of color. We can't talk about rum without having a conversation about colonization. You can't talk about whiskey now without addressing the fact that Jack Daniels was taught how to make whiskey by a slave. Thank you, Fawn Weaver with Uncle Nearest, for making everyone know the story. We can't talk about dive bars or cocktail bars without David Wondrich doing the history and acknowledging that Black people started all of that in this country. All of it. 

And for the detriment to all of us, most of that history was erased. And we're fighting. We're fighting, not only to make sure that all these stories get told, but that they're being—that the history that's happening right now is told as well. All of this matters. And this is something that I've become very passionate about. You have to really make it a—you have to consciously elevate these stories. The people who write history decide. And what you don't elevate, you’ve consigned to the midst of history. 

Alicia: And I mean, that's why it's so important that you write I think. Because in that Esquire piece that I mentioned earlier, you wrote, ‘And in this country, where a lot of drink culture is owed to Blackness, very little of it is owned by Blackness.’ And I know that you went through a situation recently—it might be ongoing, I don't know, if they issued a correction—the New York Times named a different distillery the first Black-owned distillery in the country, though you have proof that it is you. 

And I think about that, and the significance of narrative and the significance of who tells these stories and what gets erased and what does not. So as a writer, you own your own narrative, but at the same time, you're still always having to work against the miswritings of this history. 

So, how is being a writer significant to this, in your experience of being a distiller?

Jackie: So this was fun, and it is ongoing. 

New York Times did put out a story recently, where they named somebody who was not me, the first Black distiller post-Prohibition. And I wrote them a letter that said, ‘Oh, love the article. By the way, you made a mistake. I actually had my license a year before that guy.’ And the first response I got was, ‘Yeah, we're not going to bother with that. It's just not important.’ 

So I did the thing that I do, ’cause I have a platform. And I took it to social media. Always on social media, then they called me. And they said, ‘Oh, well, we discussed it with our experts. And our experts said, ‘You don't have a distillery.’ And I said, ‘Your experts are wrong.’ And I kind of feel like it's necessary at certain points in history, to say to whoever people think the experts are, ‘You're wrong.’ At a certain point, the Supreme Court said, ‘Women can’t vote,’ and someone had to say, ‘You're wrong.’ At a certain point in history, someone said, ‘Marriage is man and a woman,’ and someone had to say, ‘You're wrong.’

I got into this argument with the New York Times and sent them a copy of my liquor license, which has the words distiller and distillery on it, with a date. And they didn't print the correction. What they said was, ‘It is now unknowable, what the first distillery is post-Prohibition.’ And I said, ‘That's not true. You made the statement before. And you had no problem making it before. I don't know what your research was before. I don't know who fact-checked it before now. But now you're saying, you're unwilling to do the research.’

And this is the funny thing about erasure is, it can be intentional or it can be just laziness. There’s that which is unknown, and there’s that which is unknowable. The size of the universe is unknowable. Finding out who had the—who was the first licensed distiller post-Prohibition, that—There are records for this stuff! You could know this if you wanted to. So to choose not to do the research is willful erasure. And erasure is violence. Erasure is violence. 

So, I happen to be someone who got—who has feet in both worlds, as you mentioned. I am a distiller and I'm a writer, which means I have a platform to speak my own voice. And I'm at the moment of pitching a story, which hopefully will be published in a publication that has as much gravitas as the New York Times, about the nature of erasure. Who gets to tell history?

We only have Black History Month, because so much effort went into erasing Black people from history for centuries. We only have Women's History Month, for the same reason. Women were systematically erased from history. Women are women all year long. I'm Black all year long. Your history isn't limited to one month, and neither is mine. But until we get to the point where we get to tell our own stories in our own voices, and they're elevated to the same height as the people who have, up until this point, controlled the narrative, we have to fight for this. 

So, having my own platform is one thing. But I still need access to the people who control the narrative to go, ‘Here's the real story.’

Alicia: Why do you think that they did not offer a correction? Do you think it really was just laziness? I think the New York Times got rid of all their copy editors and fact-checkers, which would explain a lot. But yeah, why do you think that they have no interest in changing what they publish?

Jackie: I don't believe it was laziness. I believe this was intent. Again, the opportunity, having made a definitive statement, the opportunity to make a secondary definitive statement was presented to them, and they declined. There's a lot of what I'd like to call performative wokeness that happens at the Times because their newsrooms, like most media newsrooms are predominantly white. And so, they literally get to decide whose story gets told them and who doesn't.

And the interesting part to me was in the middle of this fight with the New York Times about erasure, their editors put out this page-long article about how they know, how they're aware that they have racial problems in their newsroom. 

So, if you're going to ask me why? Polite white supremacy. Just to be clear on what I mean when I say that, there are lots of people who think that storming the Capitol with Confederate flags is white supremacy. And they’re right. White supremacy is also going, ‘Yes, I'm aware that you have the license that says you're the first Black person to ever have a distillery after Prohibition. But no, I'm not gonna bother to make it a point to say that. Thanks anyway, though.’ Both are violence. Just because one is polite, doesn't make it any less violent than the other.

Alicia: And to kind of go backwards, can you tell us about Sorel and what it is, how you make it? Obviously, no proprietary secrets. And the kind of process that you figured out to create the shelf-stable liqueur.

Jackie: So, you've got to go back 600 years for this story. This is tied, like most things to do with colonial capitalism, to the slave trade.

They begin to import hibiscus flowers from West Africa around the same time they start to import human beings. And they make a tea out of the flowers, ’cause it’s got all of these great medicinal values. It's an antioxidant, and it's an antimicrobial. It has more vitamin C than most citrus fruits. It's a natural aphrodisiac. Hibiscus is great for you. 

British naval officers all had a stipend of rum as part of their pay. So, they would put rum in the tea as a preservative. And so this beverage, which came to be known as sorel, S-O-R-E-L, gets distributed throughout the Caribbean. 

And depending on where you fell in the slave route, in the spice trade, it would have different other spices mixed in. For example, if you were in Jamaica, you would get hibiscus with rum, with almond and allspice. If you were deep in the spice round like Trinidad and Tobago, you would get Indonesian spices like cinnamon and nutmeg. 

This goes on, again, for centuries. My grandparents emigrated to this country exactly 100 years ago. And so I got this culture from my parents, who got it from my grandparents. So this is a beverage I was raised with. I've always known it. I've been making a version in my kitchen for 20 years, more than 20 years. God, I’m old. And like all Caribbean families, I believed my version was the best version. 

But when I decided to launch a liquor brand, I thought to myself, ‘Of course, I'm going to try to bring my heritage to the world.’ At which point you ask yourself, ‘Why has nobody done this before?’ And the joke I tell at this point is if you think you have an idea so good, and no one's ever thought of it before, it's probably a terrible idea. [Laughter.] There’s probably a reason why no one has done this before. 

And to be clear, Alicia, I had, I have zero background as a food chemist. None. I am not a food scientist. I had no background in liquor. I knew no one in hospitality. But I am stubborn. The first 600 attempts were discouraging. [Laughter.] On attempt 623, I came up with a version that can't be broken. You can open it, close it, come back in six months, boil it, nuke it, freeze it, leave it sitting out in the sun, leave it in the back of the car. Both through stubbornness and research and luck, I developed the version of the spirit with which you can't break. 

And the thought behind my general company is, if sorrel sat in the Caribbean for hundreds of years, waiting for somebody to discover how to make it stable, how many other beverages like this exist with centuries of culture, with distinctiveness that only the culture that consumed it really knows about, that are waiting for somebody to bring it to light? 

So, I really believe that my mission somehow has become twofold. The first is to find these things, these hidden gems that have been laying up there for centuries, figure out how to make them not just shelf-stable and commercially saleable, but legitimately authentic. If a Caribbean person tastes sorrel, they know. If it was in any way not true to itself, you would never hear the end of it from Caribbean people. These things have got to be authentic. 

At the same time, we have to have the conversations about the cultures that make these things and why, again, they've been erased for centuries. Because what we don't elevate, we erase.

Alicia: And how was it getting it to market?

Jackie: It was interesting in that no one had ever seen a Black liquor brand owner before. So most of what I got when I walked around New York City was, ‘Oh, deliveries are in the back.’ No one believed I owned the brand or created the brand from scratch. 

But it was so critically received that people tended to get over that. It performed incredibly well in bars. It performed incredibly well in stores. And I'm looking forward to having to get back on shelves by summertime.

Alicia: And can you tell us about how that's going to happen, because this is exciting news?

Jackie: Not really. But stay tuned.

Alicia: Ok. [Laughs.]

Yeah, no, I'm very excited that it's going to be back. I think people are going to be more ready for it, maybe. Do you think so?

Jackie: I think the world changed in necessary ways. And it had to. It had to. I cannot take credit for the fact that the world changed. 

But I can say, I've been running my mouth about these things for a f*****g decade now. And now, you can’t enter spaces in hospitality and not have conversations about how we can keep women safe, and how we can kill sexism, and the fact that we should have equal pay, and the fact that we need to normalize Black bartenders. Now, these things are part of our everyday discussion, as they should be. 

And again, I don't take credit for this. I am glad to be part of a movement where a lot of people have decided to get on board, not just the people who are part of oppressed groups but people who have seen a need to use their privilege to make things more equitable for everybody. I am glad and proud to be part of this conversation, but the world changed because we're changing it.

Alicia: Absolutely. 

And as hospitality comes back to life after the pandemic, what are you hopeful for?

Jackie: So, one of the things that everyone said, as soon as all of the restaurants shut down was, ‘How are we going to get back to normal?’ And my intrinsic response to that was, ‘Why would I help you get back to a normal where I was never welcome?’ So my feeling is, there has never been a better time than right now for people who have been marginalized, whatever that marginalization is, to figure out how to build your own table. 

I spent years teaching this seminar course across the hospitality circuit, ‘Build a longer table.’ It's a great slogan, build a longer table. I mean, it sounds good, right? It was, ‘Be inclusive, and I have some, and I'm going to extend to other people who don't.’ Alicia, no one did a damn thing. Sound and fury and anecdotes and statistics signifying nothing. I stopped teaching that altogether. 

I'm hoping that in a post-pandemic world, whenever that happens, people will be more motivated to figure out how to do their own thing, and establish structures from the ground up that aren't based in white supremacy. And for the structures that continue to exist, post-pandemic that were there before, it is a worthy question to ask any individual or organization, ‘What are you doing to undo your complicity with white supremacy?’ It is one thing to say that the problems are systemic, but systems are maintained by people. And people can change things if they are so inclined.

Alicia: And how do you feel your personal writing fits into your larger work as a distiller as a speaker on these issues?

Jackie: I feel like there is a depth of understanding which I need to reassess on a daily basis. The things I perceived yesterday, or a week ago, or a decade ago, those things have changed today and they'll be different tomorrow. And I feel the need to continually ask myself whether or not I am full of s**t. 

There's a James Baldwin quote that stays stuck in my heart like a knife. ‘Your slogan hides your truth.’ You have to have the courage to despise your slogan. It's easy to string pretty words together, and be pithy and quotable. But am I hiding behind something that sounded good as a quote, instead of actually digging deeper and going, ‘Well, here's the truth behind that statement. And it's painful to admit this, but here's what really needs to be said. And it might not be as pithy but it's honest.’

So, I feel like with my writing, I'm trying to be more honest about my understanding of the world and my understanding of my role in it. 

Alicia: Are you planning to write a book?

Jackie: I've got a publisher of works, just shopping—I've got my agent, who I love. I'm signed to Pande Literary. It’s fantastic. And they're shopping a book of mine right now, but it's not what you’d think. An illustrated fairy tale for adults about how to deal with social justice fatigue.

Alicia: Wow, that sounds great.

Jackie: And it is called The Garden of Infinite F***s.

licia: I think that'll be really success—People will love that name. I think that'll go well.

Jackie: The idea is, everyone makes a joke about how they're all out of f***s. And they have been out of f***s. You have run out of f***s. F***s mean you care. So if you find that you are out of f***s, you're not allocating correctly. That's a distribution issue. 

And so hopefully, the book, when it gets published, will show in a fun way how people can effectively manage the firehose, systemic abuse that we're dealing with today. It’s always something. But if you let yourself get upset about all of it, nothing gets done. So hopefully, this book gets out. And it will give people a fun manageable guide to how to not run out—how to have infinite f***s, and how to not burn yourself out.

Alicia: Right, which is so important. That's all we talk about now, is burnout. [Laughs.]

And for you, is cooking a political act?

Jackie: So I think not only is cooking a political act, I think grocery shopping is a political act. I mean, you can't really do your own cooking unless you're doing your own grocery shopping. It is important to know the food supply chain, and I think that’s gotten extremely brought to fore during the pandemic. 

Where is your food coming from? Who's pulling your roots out of the ground? Who's slaughtering your animals, if you’re eating animals? How is this getting to your door?I have been on a long path for the last few years away from eating meat for highly personal reasons. To be clear, I'm one of these people—I think meat is delicious, person. But I have privilege. And privilege means I've got responsibility, and responsibility means, ‘Am I acknowledging my role in the fact that meat production in this country is a horrific thing that's destroying us?’ I can't change the industry, but I can change my own behavior. 

And this is one of the things that I learned from your writing. You're one of my favorite writers. This is true, I’m psyched about this. One of the things I learned from you was that veganism, it's not a pure course towards clean hands of the food processing industry. There is industrialism with processed foods. Someone's picking your food out of the ground. How is that person being compensated? We live in a country that happens to be incredibly focused against immigrants right now, but at the same time, unwilling to pick or grow their own food. How the f**k does that work? 

So I feel like not just cooking, but grocery shopping is an incredibly political thing that one has—you have to be aware of these days. ‘Where's my food coming from? And to the extent that I can make the difference in my life, what's my footprint like?’ 

One of the biggest differences that I made over the pandemic is, there's a guy who ran—there’s a guy in Astoria, Queens, who was running his parents’ Chinese restaurant. And they hit hard times when the pandemic started, and he decided to convert his restaurant into groceries and get the groceries into delivery. 

And whereas I was initially getting my grocery delivery from Whole Foods, now I get all of my groceries delivered from asian-veggies.com. I know who's doing it. I know where it's being sourced. It's a local business. It's all good food. And I don't have this weight of, ‘I'm supporting this organization that may or may not be caring for workers in a particular way’ weighing on my shoulders.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much again for taking the time out today. This was great.

Jackie: It is always a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much for your time today.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe

Ronna Welsh, owner of Purple Kale Kitchenworks in Brooklyn and author of The Nimble Cook, is an expert at using waste that others wouldn’t think twice about throwing in the garbage. I wrote about her cookbook when it came out in 2019 for Edible Brooklyn, and I was most taken with the recipe for garlic skin vinegar. This was a book in the vein of Abra Berens’s Ruffage and Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat that took an old-school approach to recipes: Here, you’re taught how to cook, how to use ingredients, rather than just how to make some specific dishes. It is invaluable.

We recorded at the end of 2020, but because of myriad technical difficulties, I’m running it now because it’s only just been stitched together. We discussed her path to being a teacher, her approach to food waste, and true sustainability. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Ronna. Thanks so much for taking the time. 

Ronna: Yeah. Hi. 

Alicia: Thanks so much.

Ronna: Thank you.

Alicia: Yeah, for those listening, we've had some technical snafus today. But we are getting through it. 

So, Ronna, can you tell me where you—about where you grew up and what you ate?

Ronna: I grew up outside of Philadelphia, in the suburbs. And I don't recall much about what I ate. 

Well, food was really important. We were really big eaters in my family. What I most remember is holidays and holiday food and Jewish holiday food in particular, and the stuff that my mom made for those holidays. 

But growing up, we ate a lot of convenience foods day to day. We relied on canned vegetables and powdered mashed potatoes. My mom worked. So for her, the luxury of getting dinner on the table in an instant was really valuable, was really important. High school years, we ate a ton of frozen meals and canned soup. So I grew up eating, really a voracious eater, but with very little experience cooking.

Alicia: Right.

And so, how did you end up as a professional cook?

Ronna: Almost by accident, because I was in my twenties and a graduate student in Texas at the University of Texas. And I was in a field that was really academic, really cerebral. I was in my head a lot, and became disillusioned with my studies just at the point where I was finishing a degree. And one day stumbled into a friend of a friend, who told me that she was leaving her job as a cook, and did I want to apply?

So as I was finishing my graduate degree and writing my master's thesis, I also took this job in a sweet little café in Austin, Texas. And that was my first taste of what it was like to get my hands dirty and make something. And it was the process of making something, I think, which was so compelling to me. 

Alicia: You stayed in the kitchen instead of, I guess, pursuing what you were studying in graduate school. Why? Why was that your direction, your path?

Ronna: Everything was tangible in the kitchen. I loved the reward of cooking, of taking raw ingredients and turning them into something that then somebody else ate: of going into the kitchen in the morning, turning on the lights, filling the pots with water, filling the dish sink, getting the cash register ready, cooking all day, working really hard. And then taking the kitchen down at night so that you closed it and put it to bed. And then the next day, you got to repeat the whole thing over again. 

There was a satisfaction in that [that] I had been missing for me in graduate school. And there was an immediacy and a gratification to it, to getting my hands dirty, to the physical work, to producing something in real time and witnessing others make use and love it. And that itself became something I felt I needed to have.

Alicia: And you note in your bio that cooking professionally wasn't a help when you began your family and started up children and needed to cook at home. What were the differences there for you and how did you learn to overcome them?

Ronna: Cooking professionally teaches you tremendous skill. It teaches you how to move fast. It teaches you how to create good systems of prep and production. But at the same time, you have a lot of support that you don't have at home. We don't have dishwashing crews at home. We don't have people bringing us ingredients. 

And the real, for me, the fundamental difference is that when you are working in a restaurant, even one where a menu might change pretty frequently, you're always working with a menu or a set of dishes that then you set out to prepare. So, you come into the kitchen in the beginning of the day and you slice the onions so that you can put it on your station for this one particular dish. And you get everything ready so that when orders come in, you can make these various dishes with the highest quality, really efficiently and seamlessly. 

The difference with home is that an infant becomes sick, or your fridge stops working, or you drop the chicken on the floor. And so this nice tight system of planning and prepping and executing falls apart with the mishaps of life. So I quickly realized that it wasn't skill or experience that was going to serve me well as a new parent, but it was the ability to adapt, the ability to be nimble. So to start from where I was, which was a tired new person, I'm sorry, tired new parent, and then to be able to craft systems that enabled me to feed myself and my family in spite of my new circumstances became really important to me. 

And that's how I made the shift from cooking professionally to then beginning to teach.

Alicia: For Purple Kale Kitchenworks, how did you kind of blend these two approaches to cooking, the professional and the home, into something that was accessible to new cooks?

Ronna: Well, accessibility was really key. And, for me, I felt that the home cook needed, benefited from a change in perspective, one where you focused on ingredients rather than recipes, on what you have rather than an idea of what to make. And while that initially feels pretty intimidating for cooks, it actually is the simplest and most accessible place to start. 

So for me, I try to teach people to look at the ingredients they have in front of them and ways to prepare those individual ingredients, and then ways to take those individually prepared ingredients and build dishes with them. So it's sort of an elemental, fundamental approach that starts not with an idea of what you're going to eat but ends up with something delicious by just using what's in front of you. 

Alicia: And then in your cookbook, The Nimble Cook, which came out at a time when it seemed that cookbooks were starting to kind of refocus on teaching techniques and methods rather than recipes to be followed to the letter, yours focused a lot on reusing waste. What was your vision for that book, and how did you adapt teaching in person to teaching in writing?

Ronna: The food waste part became, was kind of a bonus, I think. 

While I had done a lot of writing and incorporated the idea of minimizing food waste into my classes, it was never the point. Nobody likes to waste food, and I didn't need to tell anybody that. But I did need to provide people with some ideas about using food, whether it's parts of ingredients that they might otherwise throw away or leftovers from a dish they made the night before, about using these ingredients so that they could follow them to where they might lead. 

So for example, if you have a head of cauliflower that comes with all of its greens intact—and it's a fresh head of cauliflower, not one that's been sitting on the shelf for a while—then you begin to nibble around at the leaves and realize that they taste very much like a cabbage and can be used on their own. And what you've done is you've seized an opportunity to make use of something in front of you rather than throwing that opportunity away. 

A lot of what was in my book was just a direct result of materials that I used in class in combination with so many conversations that I had in people's homes and in the classroom itself. The workbook that I used in my class became fatter and fatter as time went on and my classes became harder to fit into even five hours, that it became clear I had more material than just for the classroom. And I set out to try to take the things that people most wanted to know, and distill them down into a system where I could teach people through the book.

Alicia: And how did you kind of figure out the recipes in the book that would be the most kind of accessible? For Edible Brooklyn, I wrote about the garlic-scrap vinegar that you make. And that's something that sounds very kind of heady and very nerdy and maybe not something that the average home cook would like to attempt, but at the same time you make it very approachable. How did you create that voice in the book?

Ronna: Well, I had to really balance the emphasis on strong, simple, good technique paired with really good ingredients with this option to explore ideas, and explore dishes and combinations of flavors that were—these ingredients could take you.

In the case of garlic, if you looked at a head of garlic on its own, then it leads you to mince it or to slice it or to do what you would normally do. But if you had a bunch of garlic, then all of a sudden in preparing that garlic, you have a whole bunch of peels that—and when, in moving them to the trash, becomes sort of more to reckon with as an aggregate as a pile of peels than they would have if you had peeled one clove at a time. 

And it's in seeing possibilities in things like that, that then help you build new ways to use them. So the garlic-peel vinegar came about, because I had a whole bunch of garlic that I had long neglected and was not able to use up just by mincing and chopping. And so one day, put them in a pot of water and said, 'What the hell?' I turn the stove on and cook them away. What I got in the end was delicious, soft poached garlic that I had no plan for, but was—I could immediately put to use, because of how good it was. 

But then I also had this kind of broth in the pot as a result of cooking so much garlic in this amount of water, and I saved that broth. And then I had the peels themselves, which were all of a sudden soft, but when they came off of the garlic cloves were tacky with some of the garlic itself. And so, it's just a simple act of putting those peels into a bowl instead of straight into the trash can, which clued me in to the fact that maybe I could do something with them. 

So in the same amount of time that would have taken me to dump them in the trash can, I instead got a bottle of just cheap red wine vinegar and glugged it on top. Came back to it the next day and was fully prepared to still throw it away, but instead realized that I had a delicious garlic-infused mellow vinegar at my disposal. 

I think the trick with the cookbook is to remind people that the point is never the garlic vinegar. The point is just to see an ingredient through to the extent that you want and it's possible for you, and understanding that even though the garlic vinegar does not give you dinner, it remains part of your kitchen toolkit and your arsenal. So that maybe in a couple months’ time, if tomatoes come your way, you slice some, remember that you have this garlic-infused vinegar that you can drizzle on top. 

And what you've done is create a little plate of food with the ease of opening a package of cereal, but one that is as presumably elegant and thought out as if you were sort of brainstorming new options for a new tomato menu. 

The thing about food waste for me is that whatever you can save has value if not immediately, then certainly later on.

Alicia: And yeah, as food waste has been kind of the most, I think, popular aspect of sustainability conversations in food. And I do think that people find sustainability in their—when they think about it in terms of food and in terms of cooking, they find it very overwhelming. How do you broach the subject of this in your classes?

Ronna: Well, I think that people come at it in their own way. And I personally believe in smaller local food economies and certain kinds of growing practices. 

But it's not up to me to tell others what to believe. So I think the most powerful thing I can do is show them that by choosing the very best ingredients they have access to, that will make them better cooks. 

Again, back to the head of cauliflower. If you have a head of cauliflower where its florets taste almost sweet because it's so fresh, then you need to do little to it to make it into something you can enjoy, certainly less to it than you would if you had a head that was wrapped in cellophane and maybe tasted more of plastic or supermarket shelf then of itself. Then it needs more work, then it needs to be corrected. 

So to let people know that great ingredients actually make it easier to cook well, I think is more compelling than to tell them they should spend their money at the farmers' market than at the large chain grocery store.

Alicia: And for you, is cooking a political act?

Ronna: I think that to the extent that it is an act itself, to the extent that I make things, maybe. For me, it's about bonds between people. The idea of nourishing somebody else is really powerful. It's also really elemental. It feeds me at the same time that I'm feeding others. 

When this whole pandemic struck, and we all were at home, as much as I cooked before the pandemic, I found that I cooked nonstop all of a sudden at home; I cooked everything and all the time, and it was just for my family. My classes were canceled. My studio was shut. But it was the fact that there was something I could do, something that I could make and something that I could contribute that made me feel a little less helpless in the face of all the things going on. 

I don't know that that's a political act. But it is one that I approached with intention and trying to support and nourish others. So, I suppose it could be extended into one. 

The other thing I think that I want to try to do with cooking but also with teaching is—and this comes back to the question of sustainability—I'm really interested in helping people cook the way they want to over the long term for the long haul. For me, true sustainability is making it work day in, day out, not only when you have time to make a menu plan or only when you have time to go to the grocery store. 

I want you to be able to walk into your kitchen and to find a source of confidence, a source of  empowerment in it to be able to say, 'Ok, what have we got? Let's figure this out together.' That, to me, is how cooking becomes part of your life, how it becomes less of a task and a chore, and more of just a practice and a habit. 

The only way that we can truly sustain feeding ourselves and feeding our community is if it's something that makes us feel gratified rather than tired most of the time.

Alicia: And I think most people are feeling quite tired, right now? [Laughs.] Yeah. 

Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

Ronna: Thank you so much, Alicia.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe

Irene Li is a hilarious writer on serious issues, which I discovered when she sent me her piece, “8 Totally Achievable Ways to Show Up for Racial Justice… When You’re White and Own an Asian Restaurant!” She’s also the chef of the former restaurant Mei Mei in Boston, which has become a packaged dumpling company, as well as a project manager at Commonwealth Kitchen, where she’s helping Black and Latinx restaurant owners make their businesses work better for them.

We discussed how her social justice work influences her cooking, and vice versa, as well as her new job. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Irene. Thank you so much for coming on to chat today.

Irene: Thanks so much for having me.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Irene: Yeah.

So I grew up here in the city of Boston. And my family is Chinese American. And so, we ate lots of Chinese food at home and also all the other things that a kid can find to eat in Boston. So tons of grilled cheese and pizza and mozzarella sticks. Cheese was a big theme. And we ate kind of more classic Chinese homestyle food for dinner every night, like white rice and stir fry. And it was a while before I figured out that not everybody ate that at home every night. So I definitely remember some sort of consciousness around that developing at some point for me.

Alicia: Well, what did that consciousness kind of mean for you?

Irene: Well, I think there were the points where I started going over to friends’ houses and realizing that there was not always a rice cooker on the counter but always a microwave. 

But having a lot of fun with trying different foods, and bringing friends over to try food at my house, I feel like I was really lucky in that the friends who I had were always really interested in eating what was going on in the Lee house. Rice porridge, like shee fun or zhou, is a big feature of my childhood. So if you need to make a big pot of something and you only have a little bit of rice, that's how you do it. 

And one of my favorite memories is taking the turkey carcass after Thanksgiving, and making a big pot of rice porridge out of that. And I have some great memories of my friends and I just lying on the floor of my house on this really plush rug, because we had just eaten so much rice porridge and we couldn't bear to move. So there was a lot of that. [Laughter.]

Alicia: Well, you are now a chef. And you work at your family's restaurant. But you did a lot of other things before you decided to do that. Can you tell us kind of what you did before that and what made you want to get into the family business? 

Irene: Yeah, so it's actually kind of funny. 

The family business for my grandparents was owning and operating restaurants. So my paternal grandparents had one restaurant in New York City, and then one in White Plains, New York. But as is the sort of tale of so many immigrant families, they ran a restaurant so that their kids could pursue higher education. And so both my parents are actually doctors. We kind of joke that it skips a generation. But I'm fortunate in that my—where I fall in the sort of generational path is that I had pretty much all the things that I needed when I was growing up, and so I could sort of choose based on my sense of self-actualization to go into restaurants. 

And so my brother initially had been working in fine dining, and he had this idea to open a food truck. He was watching way too much Food Network, and he's definitely an ideas guy. And so it was his idea for us to open the food truck in 2012, and then we opened the restaurant in 2013. So in a way, it's kind of a full circle around the kind of immigrant restaurant owner story. 

And prior to opening the food truck, I was really interested in different social justice and food justice issues. I was going to school in upstate New York and getting really interested in farming and the kind of economics of farming, and just going to the market every weekend and buying a vegetable that I had never seen or heard of and then take it home and try to figure out what to do with it. And so all of those things kind of collided when I got the call from my brother.

Alicia: And so, how does that prior experience that you had influence how you work in a restaurant? 

Irene: Well, I think that for a while I thought of food as kind of an escape from the very sort of complicated political and social issues that I was interested in. When I was at Cornell, I worked in a men's maximum security prison facility as a college level course instructor. I was really interested in a lot of issues around the living wage and the One Fair Wage, and cooking on the weekends was kind of how I got away from that. 

But of course, things came full circle. And the more I got interested in food and the restaurant industry, the more I saw that a lot of these issues that are deeply rooted in our history of slavery in the U.S., in so many of the struggles of different immigrant groups—those are very much present in the restaurant industry to this day. And so I kind of feel I came all the way around this corner. And now that's what's most interesting and exciting to me about the restaurant industry, is addressing those issues.

Alicia: And how do you do that? Is it something that manifests only in your writing? Or is it something that really manifests in the day-to-day work in the kitchen and in the restaurant?

Irene: So I would say prior to COVID, we were trying to build Mei Mei Restaurant as a model for a fairer form of employment, as a business that really invested in its team. And there were a few different ways that we did that. 

We had a very, I would say, sort of positive culture overall. No yelling, no throwing things, which is—in a way, it's kind of wild that you have to say that. But of course, we're talking about restaurant kitchens. 

So we had a staff that was typically majority women-identifying, majority person of color-identifying, and with a very big LGBTQI group as well. And so in a lot of ways, we were able to kind of cultivate this space that for the most part, I hope and believe was safe for many people who may not have felt safe in other parts of the restaurant industry. 

We also did a lot of work to try to educate our staff and also our guests on how the industry really works, what's sort of going on under the hood. And so in early March of 2020, we hosted this public event where we showed everyone our profit and loss statement for 2019. And we really wanted to just kind of start a conversation about when you buy a $20 plate of pasta, where does that money go? 

And I think consumers are very narrowly focused on what's on the plate, because it's the most immediate thing. And so that's why you read so many Yelp reviews, where people say, ‘I could have gone to the grocery store and paid $4 and made this myself.’ And yeah, that's the secret of restaurants, is they’re scamming you and food costs are only 20 percent of the menu. 

And so, that financial transparency is something that we had been practicing internally with the staff for several years. And so, we really wanted to take that conversation kind of on the road and see what people would think about what the kind of realities are in the industry, where the average, independent mom and pop restaurant only clears about 4 to 6 percent profit in an—in a pretty good year. And then of course, days later the pandemic hit, and we were all in even sort of deeper water than we were before.

Alicia: And what was the response like to that event from the public?

Irene: The event was awesome. We also broadcasted on this thing called Zoom that I had never heard of before. It was wild.

We got such a great response, especially from the people who were able to attend in person. They asked tons of questions. And as a speaker, I tend to be a little bit more honest than maybe my partners or team would want me to be. But people asked about my salary. They asked about the ways that I still felt we had to improve. 

We did a feature with Eater, and that generated a lot of conversation on Facebook. And some of it was not entirely positive, but even that felt great. Yeah, if you think I'm a moron because of what my books say, let's talk about it. You can show me your books, or we can just have a conversation. And all of that felt really generative.

Alicia: And so, how did the pandemic kind of change the way you ran the restaurant and the business model? I know that a lot of restaurants that didn't have a tipping model, that had a kind of hospitality-included model and were more transparent around the business side of the restaurant and those tiny profit margins kind of weathered this switch a little bit better simply by the nature of their-how they ran their businesses and by how they—how much money was in the bank, because they knew they had a big payroll anyway.

But how did the pandemic kind of come hit your restaurant, and how has it been in the over a year since?

Irene: So initially, I will say going back to having two parents who are doctors, we were very conservative about closing down and not asking anyone to come into work. We really did our best to keep people employed as long as we could. So there were some restaurants that laid everyone off in March, and we kept almost all of the team employed through June. And then, we laid off about two thirds of the team at that time. And that is probably one of the worst things I've ever had to do in my life. 

And at that point, we were kind of looking around and saying, ‘Oh, ok. The pandemic’s not getting better. It's been a couple months. And it's actually getting worse,’ because we're seeing what's happening in other parts of the country that maybe we thought no one would be as hard hit as New York City, for instance. But things looked really bad. And so at that point, we made the decision—I guess I made the decision with the help of my partners and my team—that we weren't going to reopen Mei Mei as a restaurant. 

And that had to do with a lot of different things, including the timing of our lease, which we felt didn't really allow us the time that we would need to rebuild. And so that, in addition to the fact that there was just so much uncertainty, we decided we were going to take things in a different direction. And so now, we are evolving Mei Mei into a packaged dumpling company. It is a really exciting project. And I have partners now who are going to sort of carry that forward, which has been amazing for me because it's opened up the opportunity for me to work more on supporting other restaurants. 

So I joined CommonWealth Kitchen, which is a food business incubator here in Boston, as a program manager for an initiative called the Restaurant Resiliency Program. And I work with eight Black and Latinx business owners to strengthen and improve their restaurant businesses. Honestly, it's just my dream job. So much of it is about not teaching them basics or mechanics, but really being there with them and making sure they have the confidence to do what they need to get done. So I just ordered eight kitchen scales. And I'm so excited to visit the restaurant and do some costing and really kind of get up to my elbows with them. 

And so for me, that really feels like trying to take what I learned from Mei Mei and the mistakes that I made, the mistakes that I could afford to make as someone from a privileged background coming into the restaurant industry, and really trying to pay that forward to support an industry that I hope will be made up of really diverse restaurants run by really interesting people with a lot of different stories. 

It's funny. At the event last March, I said, ‘If Mei Mei doesn't exist in ten years, that's too bad for me. But if there aren’t any cool independent restaurants to eat at in tneen years, then I'm going to be really pissed.’ And so for me, it's always been more about the industry at large and the restaurants that I want to be able to eat at than my business specifically.

Alicia: I mean, we've talked a lot about the government inaction during the pandemic in order to help independent restaurants. What do you think in the future, either from what you've learned, running Mei Mei or now in your new position, to-what could be useful to small business owners in the food industry, from a governmental-from a policy standpoint, really?

Irene: Man, where to start? [Laughter.] There's so many different things that could be done. 

I guess, for me, having access to federal aid and even state aid. Getting assistance to fill out the Payroll Protection Program application. I am college educated, and I could barely get myself through that. So I can't imagine not speaking English as a first language, for example, and trying to wade through all of that. So I think offering the technical support is really key. 

I think the government, the federal government, learned a big lesson with the Payroll Protection Program in that there are going to be large companies that take advantage of opportunities because they are qualified on paper. So, if you're really looking to help small businesses, then you have to be targeting companies that are posting revenue below a million annually, for example. 

I have been so moved to be involved in different mutual aid efforts, whether it is a community fridge or a grocery program or just neighbors helping each other navigate government paperwork. And so honestly, it's hard for me to imagine what better government support looks like because this funnel of people just saying, ‘F**k it. We have to figure this out ourselves.’ That has been really exciting to me. 

I will say, I am really optimistic about the American Rescue Plan. I like the opportunities that are built in there for restaurants. I am very hopeful, cautiously optimistic, that that money will go to the restaurants who really need it. And I think what is exciting about the way that bill is formed is that if you didn't get any PPP money, you can get more money from this plan. So hopefully, that will address some of the barriers that especially immigrant restaurant owners and Black and Latinx restaurant owners are facing.

Alicia: And as you're kind of getting into this mode of helping other small business owners not make mistakes, do you have—what are the top three mistakes that people make when they're getting into the restaurant business and making all these decisions?

Irene: I think all of it ultimately comes down to how often they're looking at the numbers, and how the numbers are organized. 

So I mean, I've observed over the years that a lot of small businesses early on, they're not paying attention to the bills necessarily, or they're paying the bills but they're not organizing them. And maybe, every invoice just goes into a shoe box and then at the end of the year you give the shoe box to your accountant and say, ‘Here you go!’

But having a profit and loss statement that is organized in a way that actually helps you make decisions, that is a luxury that not all businesses have invested in or have the resources for. Because there's a version of your financials that's just for taxes, and everybody has to have those every year. But there's also a version that provides a readout on how your business is doing that is so valuable. 

I think restaurant owners are incredibly smart. And their instincts are usually pretty dead-on. But there are a lot of little kind of details and finer points like, ‘Should we close an hour earlier? Should we open on Mondays? Should I take this dish off the menu?’ Those are questions that they can rely on their gut to some extent, but it's not going to get them necessarily to the point where they're really thinking about growing the business if they don't have the data to rely on. 

And so, I'm so lucky that I had a team that was really invested in getting the financials to the point where they would be useful. We also had a grant from the state of Massachusetts to work with a consulting firm that helped us implement open book management. And I am now at the point where I am so excited to see the profit and loss statement every month, because it's like, ‘Yeah, I want to know how I did.’ I hope that every restaurant owner can experience that excitement, and not just sort of the stress around putting financials together and then trying to read them.

Alicia: Yeah, I think that that's probably a problem for a lot of independent workers, speaking for myself as well, is that you don't like to look at the money because you're afraid of looking at it. I've learned so much better to just be aware and kind of go full-on and try and really understand what you're doing. But it's easier said than done. [Laughter.]

Irene: One of the other challenges in there that I'm sure applies to a lot of people in different lines of work is that as a business owner, for a long time, I didn't really know what accountants and bookkeepers did. Right? 

Alicia: Right. 

Irene: So I didn't really have a way of telling like, ‘Are you doing a good job or not?’ It's kind of when I take my car to the mechanic, right? And I don't know anything about cars, and so I kind of just shrug my shoulders and say like, ‘Ok, yeah, sounds good.’

And so, I think some of what we're doing through this program is kind of teaching the restaurant owners how to speak accountant or how to speak bookkeeper and to give them confidence in those relationships. And I think for some of these folks, they do not have the confidence working with professional services to really say like, ‘Hey, this is what I need. This is how I want you to do it.’ And so, they're going with the flow but it's maybe not as useful as it could be.

Alicia: Before I ask specifically about a couple of the pieces you've recently published, I wanted to ask what inspired you to start writing about certain issues in the restaurant industry? Do you like writing, or is it more about something that you just feel there are things that need to be said? 

Irene: Yeah.

I will say, I love writing. I am so in awe of anyone who can do it on a schedule, ‘cause I really have to be in the right place with the right idea to produce anything. I did write for the local public radio station WBUR for a few months, and that was great experience just in terms of working with an editor and on deadline and all of that. And I think I figured out that it wasn't for me. 

But in this case, I usually write when I feel moved to. And usually that is when I feel there's a story that's not being told or a perspective that's not getting shared. So often, it comes from a place of wanting to tip the scales of a conversation, or make sure that things don't get left unsaid. 

Alicia: And one of those pieces that you wrote is the-a bit of satire called ‘8 Totally Achievable Ways to Show Up for Racial Justice… When You’re White and Own an Asian Restaurant!’ And I wanted to know, how did you arrive and feel inspired to tackle that subject from a satirical angle? I mean, this is a subject that's been written on. This is a subject that is just shockingly persistent in the white dudes owning Asian restaurants. That's very persistent. And so, I mean, I guess the reason you maybe wanted to approach it that way is because it is at this point such a joke and a trope, a cliché.

But yeah, what inspired you to go about it that way?

Irene: Yeah.

Well, one of the things I've said as I've talked a little bit more about the piece is, I've been writing this piece in my head for years. So it didn't come out of nowhere. But I guess it came out of my desire to engage on this topic that typically is not really engaged on. It's more an unstoppable force hits an immovable object, and where he says, ‘Hey, you can't cook that!’ And then that person says, ‘Yes, I can! I can cook whatever I want.’ And then the conversation goes nowhere. And actually, everyone leaves that discussion feeling angry or resentful. And then, I don't think we get anywhere productive out of that. 

And so, especially in getting involved in the restaurant industry myself, I felt these chefs are—they're not bad people. It's not about whether they're good or bad. And there's actually maybe some really important conversation and exploration that we can do here. 

And so my goal in writing the piece was, in part, to share my views without alienating anyone. And I don't think that's always necessarily the purpose of writing, but it felt like something that I could do pretty effectively. I went to prep school. And so, I feel I have been educated all my life in how to talk to well-meaning white people about how to be better. [Laughs.] 

And so I think that, I wanted to write a piece where by the end of it you couldn't really disagree with me. I mean, of course, a lot of people did, which is fine. But I wanted to sort of take the reader by the hand and be like, ‘Ok, let's go look at this thing together.’ 

And so, I didn't use the phrase cultural appropriation, which I didn’t notice until after I had written it. But I think that I wanted to accept that there is both something very complicated and uncomfortable about this topic. And at the same time, there's a lot of stuff that most of us just agree on, like, ‘Racism is bad, and taking credit for other people's stuff is bad.’ And so, how do you kind of weave those very simple truths in with this very complicated, scary territory? And so my hope was to kind of lead the reader through that space, so that they could come out on the other side feeling not like, ‘Oh, I am now bereft of my purpose. And everything I've created is for not.’ But to make them feel like, ‘Oh, there are some next steps I can take. And I can keep showing up to this conversation and be part of it.’

All of that being said, I did get a lot of calls from people who were like, ‘I read your article. It made me think so much. And I'm just wondering, what do you think I should do?’ And, well, I did write a list. So let's start there. And I think that that kind of response is about what I expected, and I think it's totally appropriate for someone who has never really engaged with these ideas to come right to me and say, ‘Help.’ And so, I welcome that. And I am glad that they wanted to call me and talk to me. 

But it's just so new to some people that even after reading a list of eight things that you can do, the question is like, ‘Wait, what? Sorry, now?’ How? Where do I—’ It's fascinating to watch.

Alicia: And as you mentioned, you did not mention, use the phrase cultural appropriation, which I think actually did serve the piece to make it a bit more powerful because you didn't-It was so straightforward. 

And cultural appropriation, as a phrase and as a concept, I think, has been—it's screwed over as an idea because of the right and the way that the right has taken it and suggested that its meaning is something that it's not. 

Irene: For sure.

Alicia: And that's just ruined it, because no one can say it anymore without being called—I don't know how the right talks. I just know that they like to take phrases and just be like, ‘Look at what they're saying. They're saying you can't cook a—if you're white, you can't make a burrito in your house.’ And it's like, ‘Dude, how dare you? That's not it.’

And so, how does that phrase play into your life right now or thinking at all about food?

Irene: I guess to me, the phrase invites a lot of argument because it is—it invites opinion and asks for nuance. And sometimes, those two things don't go hand in hand. And so, while part of me wanted to write ‘8 ways for cultural appropriators,’ I felt like, ‘Ok, if I really want to get the attention of the people I'm talking to, let me use phrases and facts that they can't argue with. Are you white, yes or no? Do you own an Asian restaurant, yes or no?’

And so yeah, my hope was to kind of get my foot in the door with that, and to not, to try not to make kind of value or moral judgments about them. And to just say, like, ‘Hey, you meet these qualifications so maybe we should talk about this thing.’ And I've had some really great conversations with white folks who own Asian restaurants. And I am hopeful that this conversation goes somewhere. 

My incredible friend, Tracy Chang, who is a restaurant owner in Cambridge, she said to me, ‘Just make sure they know it's not Monopoly, where you land on Community Chest and the card says like, ‘Ooh, mass shooting! Pay an Asian American organization $500, and then go on your way.’ And so, I think the longer term accountability is another really interesting piece of this that I'm hoping to be able to sort of keep up with.

Alicia: You also wrote about Raise The Wage. What is your involvement in that, and why did you decide to get into that?

Irene: Yeah.

Well, I've been working with the Restaurant Opportunity Center and high-road restaurants, which is their sort of employer-side organization, on the campaign around One Fair Wage. So in both wanting to raise the minimum wage, and abolish the sub-minimum wage, which is what servers are paid if they receive tips. So federally, the sub-minimum wage is $2.13 an hour. And locally in Massachusetts, I believe it's $5.55 an hour. 

And the piece that we wrote on Medium was from a group of Asian American women, talking about how these laws disproportionately affect women and people of color. And so in a way, there's kind of a similar message, which is like, ‘Do you like racial equity? And do you think that the way people are paid should support racial equity?’ And then, ‘If you do, which I'm sure you do, the only logical conclusion is that we have to change tipping policy in this country.’

Of course, it's not that simple. But I think that to me, the motivation for changing the way we do things is so clear. And so, I'm hoping to get more involved in that conversation. Even though I'm not a restaurant employer anymore, I actually feel like maybe I can play a different role in that community and in highlighting this issue.

Alicia: Right. 

And for you, is cooking a political act?

Irene: Oh, yeah. 

I mean, I think cooking is partially political. What really feels political is when I feed other people. So to kind of wrap that in, then I would say definitely. I think that we so undervalue food and everything that goes into it. I think that is deeply tied to the history of slavery in this country, and you know, the way that, that capitalism works now. 

But I think that, for me, cooking is a way to imbue food with the value of my time of my love and energy. And that you can literally bring people to the table and make them, or ask them to listen, or to experience your perspective. I think that, that's what the magic of food is for me. And working with a lot of immigrant restaurant owners in particular, I think that the storytelling that happens through food is 100 percent political.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much.

Irene: Thank you.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe

I talked to Ivy Mix for today’s conversation before there was a controversy around her being used to kick of National Latinx Heritage Month on Liquor.com’s Instagram. As the author of a book called The Spirits of Latin America and owner of pan-Latin bar Leyenda, they invited her to promote the book and the spirits, bartenders, and recipes contained therein. Of course, no one thought this through enough: Mix isn’t Latinx. A bad apology was issued by the company, but I didn’t have a real understanding of what happened, as Liquor had removed her original posts, leaving no context for what had ensued. I called her up to understand exactly what went down.

“Hindsight is 20/20,” she says. As she explained how she came to kick off this month for the website without being Latina, she doesn’t want to edit her actions. When they asked, she said yes, and didn’t think about asking who else they were going to feature, why she was going to be the first person to do a takeover, and all the other questions she now realizes she should have asked. But she posted a picture of herself with the book, highlighted bartenders and spirits that are featured within it, and signed off by saying she isn’t Latina.

“It was just stupid and selfish and haphazard,” she says. “I don't want any f*****g pity from anyone, because I really think I'm in the wrong here.”In discussing her career and what she’s wanted to be an advocate for, she now realizes that in doing so, she was also promoting herself, and that complicates her efforts. ”At first, it was like, ‘okay promote and support women in Speed Rack.’ That's what I really wanted to create a platform for supporting and promoting women in Speed Rack, and through that effort, I made my career, so I was also supporting and promoting myself as a woman,” she says. “Then I was like, ‘okay, well I wanna support and promote all these amazing Latin American distillates from these amazing cultures that I have lived and experienced, but I am not Latina, and I've received opportunities that maybe other people should have should have had.’” She has received messages telling her that she takes up a lot of space in a crowded arena as someone who’s not Latina, and that’s what she’ll be reckoning with now. This is a moment when we’re collectively working to better understand appreciation versus appropriation, as well as how we can seek transformative accountability rather than shunning when someone makes mistakes. What do we do with the work of someone who’s profited from her take on a culture to which she doesn’t belong? Is that work useless? I don’t think so, but I do think we need to have these discussions and allow for nuance.I wanted to talk to her originally because I too am a nerd about Latin American spirits, and I wanted to understand her perspective on them, as someone who works with them, has traveled a lot, and works to make the agricultural side of spirits production visible. We had a pretty bad connection, but above is our brief conversation, which got cut off right at the end. Read below.

Alicia: Hi, Ivy, thank you so much for agreeing to do this.

Ivy: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Ivy: Yeah, so I grew up in a tiny town called Tunbridge in central Vermont. Less than 1,000 people, kind of like 750 people. Both my parents moved to New York—to Vermont from different places. My dad with his parents when he was like a teenager, and my mom in her thirties when she was kind of a hippie moving around. 

So, I was lucky to kind of grow up in an era of and in a place where TV dinners and Hot Pockets were not in my family. My mom was kind of on the farm-to-table movement long before it was a thing. We weren't allowed to have sugary cereal. We had fruit leather rather than Fruit by the Foot. 

And my mom is an excellent cook and has always really cared about the culinary arts. So, I grew up eating food from my garden, and stuff from the farmers’ market, and fresh maple syrup. And I knew the places that the meat that I ate was raised, and I knew who made my butter. [Laughs.] I mean, not all the time, but you know, but it was really like that. 

So, I grew up eating lots of really kind of classic dishes from my mom. She's the oldest of five, born in 1945, kind of in the suburbs of Chicago. So, she's kind of the classic roast type of lady, but party—really delicious meals that were made from really delicious ingredients.

Alicia: Awesome. And what was it that drew you to bartending, and what keeps it exciting as you're in the industry longer?

Ivy: I just started bartending when I moved to Guatemala. As I said, I grew up in Vermont, Vermont. Everyone's kind of a different variation of myself, six degrees of WASP, basically. And I was like, ‘Ok, I kind of want to get out of here. I kind of want to go see something new.’ I really want to learn a foreign language. I really want to learn Spanish, but I was kind of—I was like, ‘I'll take anything. I just want go somewhere else.’ 

End up going to Guatemala, ended up hanging out in Guatemala, ended up hanging out in bars in Guatemala, then ended up working in bars in Guatemala. 

And what drew me to it originally was this—what drew it to me originally was this opportunity to do this job anywhere. It was more of a utilitarian thing. And I was very interested in traveling and seeing new cultures, new places. And originally, I was like, ‘Well, I can do this job anywhere.’ And I really liked that aspect of it. Like, ‘Ok, if everything goes to hell tomorrow, and I would need to move to Japan, I can probably get a job bartending, ‘cause people need our bartenders.’

And that was when I worked in kind of beer-and-shots type of places, and my cocktail knowledge didn't really expand past mojito. And then I discovered cocktails, and I realized I could be creative and make these really beautiful things with—and bartend, and be this in the social environment that I could do kind of anywhere. 

And that's really what draw me—drew me to it, and kept on drawing me to it. 

Alicia: Yeah, how do you keep it interesting?

Ivy: Well, it's funny. Now, I've been bartending for more of my life. In two years, I will be—I will have bartended for half my life. Which is insane, right? ’Cause I started when I was 19.

And what keeps it interesting to me now-it's kind of always what did keep it interesting, but now in a different way, I still have this wanderlust. I still have this desire to explore other places, and different cultures and different things. Cocktails, in particular-let’s just talk about making cocktails-are really a way that I can dive into different places and different cultures and different things, because the way we eat and we drink is so intertwined with the cultures that we come from, or that we go and visit. So, that's really what's kept it interesting to me throughout the years. 

And I'm a geek. I'm a total nerd. Yeah, I was a philosophy major in college, and there's just an infinite amount to know about spirits. And then about flavors. I can just dig, and dig, and dig, and get nerded out into one topic. And that can last a year.

So, that's how I keep it spicy. [Laughs.]

Alicia: [Laughs.] Yeah, I know.

I mean, I ask because it's—I mean, obviously, you've been doing so many different things. Running Speed Rack, and running a bar, Leyenda, and also writing a book. Obviously, you haven't just been behind the bar, but at the same time, the kind of nitty-gritty of what you do is still—

Ivy: Yeah.

Alicia: Yeah, it's still behind the bar, and still doing that sort of work. And—

Ivy: Well, I'm definitely a project-oriented person. I'm the type of person that my whole life has been like, ‘Ok, I'm gonna do this thing for two or three years. And now I need another thing.’ [Laughter.] 

Alicia: Yeah, absolutely. 

But how has the experience of running Leyenda right now been, during the pandemic? Have you guys been doing outdoor seating? What was your reaction when the shutdown first went into place, and how have you kind of endured through this time?

Ivy: Totally. 

Usually, I travel a lot. I travel because Speed Rack, and I consult in a lot of stuff. And I fly a lot. 

So, when COVID first started to rear its head, I was actually on vacation. And I remember being like, ‘Oh, there’s this thing going on in China. Weird.’ Got back, was home for a week, and I start traveling in the States. I had to do Speed Rack competitions, and I had to go judge at the San Francisco Spirits Challenge. 

And I was in denial, I think, about the realities of what was happening. I mean, for sure, I was in denial. I was traveling up until the 17th of March. So, I was really traveling quite a bit, after most people I know, for work traveling. And I went from San Francisco, and the day I left San Francisco they shut down. And then from there, I went to New Orleans, and then they shut down. And I remember, I was in TK, and we shut down. [Laughter.] 

And I was in San Francisco, and I got a call from my business partners being like, ‘We are going to close. It's really weird here. It's like the apocalypse. For the safety of everyone, our staff is concerned. We're gonna shut down.’ I was like, ‘Ok.’ And then the next day Cuomo was like, ‘It's just gonna be shut down.’ 

I served cocktails to go that weekend, and then decided to stop doing that. It wasn't safe. And then I decided that I was going to go home to Vermont, where I'm from, for two weeks. I packed a bag for two weeks. Like, ‘Then I'll be back. I'll open everything back up.’ I stayed there for two months, almost two and a half months. 

And then we slowly started to open up again. Life still happens, right? Bills have to be paid, rent has to get paid, our water bill, which only comes every quarter, but we had to pay that. And we had to really start working. So, we did. And we brought back our kitchen staff, and we started doing cocktails to go and delivery, and then we got to do outside when Cuomo allowed for that. 

And, you know, it's just—it's weird. We've been okay. I keep on saying like, ‘Winter is coming, everybody. Winter is coming.’ I live in New York City, no one—New Yorkers have a funny fear of eating and drinking outside. I feel like anywhere else in the world, people sit outside well into winter. In New York, everyone's like, ‘Ugh, no!’

So, I don't know what's going to happen. Cuomo just said that we can open up to 25 percent inside, and I really feel like that's the equivalent of being thrown a deflated life jacket. It's just the appearance of helping is there, the appearance of aid is there, but the reality is that for Leyenda, 25 percent operational, we won’t be able to break even at that if we don't have outdoor too. So, we're playing it by ear.

The only answer, I think, is a vaccine. Do I want 100 percent indoor dining? No, no, no. I don't want to work that way. I don't want my staff to work that way. I don't want customers to come in like that, ’cause it's just uncomfortable. But it's really difficult, for sure.

Alicia: I mean, everyone is kind of talking about, what should the government be doing to help independent restaurants and bars, especially in New York City, and then the other layer of New York State. Is there anything in particular you wish to see that would actually be helpful?

Ivy: Yeah. Because of Gia actually, I ended up on the Independent Restaurant Coalition, so—which is called the IRC. And we're basically a newly formed group that formed during COVID, to try to get bars and restaurants together with the government to create a relief package, specifically for independent bars and restaurants. Meaning not Shake Shack, not McDonald's, not franchises, not publicly traded. 

So, we've been working on something called the Restaurants Act, which is now a bill that's in Congress and in the Senate, which is $120 billion bill that will be a relief package to bars and restaurants. We just need money, right? Fact of the matter is, we're all running—I think you're lucky if you're breaking even right now. I know a few people who are doing better than ever, which is good for them. But they're so rare, right? 

But restaurants need a relief package, particularly restaurants in the northeast. Winter is coming, and it's scary. Or just the north in general, forget the northeast. So, I think that the Restaurants Act is something that when I'm feeling even the most bleak, I’m like, ‘if we can just get that, and we can get a grant, not a loan, but a grant in our pockets of a couple hundred thousand dollars, then we'll be able to survive right now.’

When I’m feeling all is lost. I'm like, ‘Well, we're almost at 200 co-sponsors in the Senate and the Congress.’ [Laughs.] And that at least gives me a little bit of something to look to.

Alicia: Right, right, right.

I mean, did you ever expect that would be something you'd be doing, is—? No? [Laughs.]

Ivy: No. No, never in a million years. And what's funny is that I'm actually kind of good at it. People are like, ‘Wow, you got so many people to co-sponsor.’ I just call up and make an appointment.

It's a different type of feeling power. And I hope that something happens with it, because, me—I wrote a book. My bar has won lots of accolades. I'm one of the people that has at least the press coverage or whatever that, hopefully my place will get attention. 

But I really like the Indian place on my block, and they probably don't know anything about—they're not going to get the New York Times article or whatever the hell it is. And if they can get some of this grant money to alleviate the financial burden, then I think it's a win for everybody. Because, imagine a life, we don't get to eat and drink what we want to. It's just so dismal.

Alicia: Especially in New York. Yeah. 

Ivy: Right. Exactly. It’s why I live there. [Laughter.]

Alicia: So, about your book, yeah, which just came out in a pandemic, which is not fun for anybody. 

Why did you want to write this particular book, The Spirits of Latin America, and what was your process for researching and producing such-a book about such a diverse array of spirits?

Ivy: Yeah. 

When I first had the opportunity, I was approached about writing a book. And I was like, ‘Ok.’ And they're like, ‘What do you want to write a book about?’ And I was like, ‘Well, I can say what I don't want to write the book about. I don't want to write the book about what it's like to be a woman in the industry, which is what everyone always wanted me to write about.’ 

I've got a few facets of my career. One of them is certainly Speed Rack, and I definitely have a feminist tilt to what I do, but I was like, ‘I don't want to write about that.’ I opened this bar about these spirits that I really loved. I opened up Leyenda because I couldn't go to a bar and drink all the things I wanted to. I couldn't go to a bar and be—tequila and mezcal bars exist everywhere, and most of them suck. And most of them serve bad tequila and bad mezcal. But then when I go, I can't get like Pisco, you know? So, that's why I wanted to go eat, or go—eat and drink that food and drink. 

So, that's why I opened up Leyenda, and then when it came time to write a book, I was like, ‘Well, I'm interested in this—in spirits from around this area. Why? Why is it that I'm interested in spirits from the ‘New World,’ right?’ The Latin New World. I say that loosely. Dramatic air quotes. 

And, I ended up being like, ‘Ok, so, here is this category of spirits. And they have this really interesting history behind them.’ And everything is in its essence an agricultural product. And grapes came because—literally, because people want to make the blood of Christ and turn all the Indigenous people into goddamn Christians. Agaves were already here, but—and then depending on who you talk to you—but distillation is a, of—well, it depends. But most people believe it's from Spanish descent, that—well, from the Moors, [then] came the Spanish over to the Americas. 

And all that is kind of the embodiment of this real mestizo culture. Of endemic, and original, and conquistador, and European. So, I really wanted to explore that. 

If you look at music from that part of the world, it's—you've got reggae. You’ve got reggatón. You’ve got bachata, you've got salsa, you've got all these different—it's not like we're listening to bluegrass there. And then the spirits themselves also have this vibrance, and this viciousness. And if you look at the textiles in this part of the world, everything's a little bit brighter, a little bit more alive. And I was like, ‘Well, why is that?’ So, that's why I want to read the book.

And that's what the book is about. It's really about the cultural aspects of terroir.

Alicia: Right.

So, were you doing a lot of on the ground research for this? Traveling around Latin America?

Ivy: I was, yeah. 

I was traveling a lot before I even started writing the book, learning about spirits. I lived in my college years in Guatemala. I’ve lived in Peru, I’ve lived in Argentina. And I traveled all over the place when I was in college. Then, when I got into the booze biz, I started traveling a lot and learned about booze, in general. Not in America. 

And then, I took a four-month trip, off and on, to go and write the book, and take the photos, and do on-the-ground work. I mean, when I was doing it was really difficult and hard. And it's not great for running any of my other businesses or my relationship, that's for sure. 

But then, the result was the photographs that were taken by Shannon Sturgis were just beautiful. And a lot of really great interview opportunities for me. 

Alicia: Of course, yeah. 

So, I think in the spirits of Latin America broadly, it's even more important to talk about ideas about sustainability and exactly how alcohol is an agricultural product. So, how do you define sustainability in terms of spirits as well as in cocktails? And how do you pursue that standard?

Ivy: Yeah, so, I mean, it's so multi-tiered, multi-faceted. I mean, as you said, spirits are in their essence—they come from something, some sort of plant. And so that's an agricultural product. So, what we have to think about is how are things being grown? Are pesticides being used? Are we replanting in a way that's good? Are we paying our people who are making these products well?

Unfortunately, agricultural people who work in farming, for lack of a better term campesinos, are usually the bottom of the totem pole socio-economically, and there's not—that’s the same in spirits production. The people who are picking your grapes, or chopping down your sugarcane, or harvesting your agave, are generally not with the college degrees and probably without the options to go elsewhere and get a job in an office or something. So, it's important to pay those people well, and to ensure that they're in conditions that are environmentally sound for them in their health. 

In the history of some of the stuff that's happened with rum production and people having horrible kidney failure because of burning the fields, that's a problem for our environment and it’s a problem for the people who are making these spirits. 

So, that's one sustainability I am very concerned and wondering about—I mean, I can go on and on about it. 

There's so many problems with greed, and with—in agave production, people have decided not to let agaves reproduce naturally, i.e. sexually. And the problem with that is that now we just have a bunch of clones of agaves, and if a phylloxera of agave comes out, then we have no more agaves. Because we haven't been sustainably protecting them. That's what happened with grapes, with phylloxera, and then the same thing is happening in Pisco production, and then the sugarcane, the same. 

So, that's not the problem, just as far as the plant itself. As far as cocktails are concerned, there's been this fab about sustainability and cocktails, and I think that that's awesome. But I don't know if people reusing their lime shells is as important as what's happening from the spirits production of big national company. 

When I go to places, different distilleries, and I see that—I go to Mexico, where there's a lot of glass production, lots of people make glass bottles in Mexico. And I go to some fancy tequila production, and they have pallets and pallets of glasses of bottles from Germany and Austria. And I'm like, ‘So, you're going to ship these things all the way from there over to here?’ And that doesn't make any sense. 

The whole thing about shop local, shop local, buy local, etc., makes sense. It’s also antithetical, ’cause I like Latin spirits, and they have to be shipped from South America. It is complicated, and it is—I think that we need to demand more, and know more about how people are doing it from a corporate level. 

And then realize that sustainability in cocktails is good, but I am a little dubious about the fad of using avocado pits, and I don't really know if that's where we should be focusing when people are taking their highly lethal runoff from their distillates and dumping them in the river next to their house. That's the thing.

Alicia: Yeah, no. Food waste, of course, is an important issue, but at the same time it doesn't really matter if you're bringing all these things in from God knows where, and you're also not concerned with the ecological conditions of the source and labor conditions, of course. 

And so, I usually ask people for the last question if, for them, cooking is a political act. But I figured for you, the question should be, is bartending a political act?[Note: The audio cuts out before this, so I had Mix answer via email.]Ivy: I do believe that bartending is a political act. I have always thought that the every action has its political ramifications, whether you realize it or not, and drinking and eating are no different. Limes and avocados from Mexico are more likely than not tied to the cartel, thus, every margarita you drink with that guacamole is a political act, whether you like it or not. So? We can make more intentful decisions when drinking and as a bar owner, I can be more purposeful in my selection of the things I put on my menus that my clientele will consume. Consumerism is money which is politics and I am in the business (hopefully!) of having folks consume my cocktails so yeah: my job is political.

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Aja Barber and I have been following each other online for years, while we were both working various jobs and trying to get anyone to pay attention to our work. Contrary to how most people are taught these things work, we only got anyone to pay attention when we started our own independent ventures: for me, this newsletter; for Aja, her incredible Patreon. She also has a book coming out, called Consumed: On Colonialism, Climate Change, Consumerism & the Need for Collective Change.

Her work on the subject of mindless fashion consumption and waste has many parallels to mine on food, which is why I was so excited to discuss it with her: In both discussions, classism is used to defend cheap goods that rely on extraction from the Global South. In both discussions, personal feeling is made to be more significant than political and economic reality. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Aja. Thank you so much for taking the time out today.

Aja: Thank you for having me. It's nice to finally chat. We've been Twitter friends for close to a decade. But this is the first time we're talking.

Alicia: It's amazing, and I love it. 

How are things over there in the UK right now?

Aja: Well, you know what, everything's better when spring comes. That's the reality, is that the—there's more sunshine. It gets really dark here during the winter, and when you're already in a pandemic and you can't see friends and you don't really feel like going out, it just—it was a hard winter. 

So, things are feeling way more positive just because there's more sunshine. And  things tend to be sort of loosening up here. Of course, still being precautious. But it feels more hopeful. So you've caught me on one of my better days.

Alicia: [Laughs.] I'm so glad.

This week, I think we're switching from—to summer, basically. If you came to Puerto Rico from a temperate climate, you wouldn't notice the seasons. But since living here, I noticed the changes. And I think we got two weeks of winter, where I could sit and work and not be sweating all day. But we're back to that. From 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., it is definitely hot all day. [Laughs.]

Aja: My family's in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. So, I totally get-

Both: Yes. [Laughter.]

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Aja: So I'm from Northern Virginia, right outside of D.C. I’d say it's like zone 6 on the tube, basically. So Northern Virginia, DC Metropolitan. And I grew up eating a lot of plants and fish, because my parents are actually pretty healthy and pretty progressive as far as food goes. And I was definitely the kid that got made fun of for having whole-wheat sandwiches, stuff like that. 

And we see all of these ideas that are popping up, and everybody's sort of talking about it like it's new, but my parents belonged to a food co-op when I was a kid. And it made them weird. [Laughter.] We would get really great, fresh vegetables. And my dad would buy things from the local farmers’ market. So the way I hear people talking about how we should be eating now, it's actually how I grew up, which in some ways is really privileged. And I totally recognize that, but as a kid, it made you a weirdo.

Alicia: [Laughs.] Well, and you have a book coming out called Consumed: On Colonialism, Climate Change, Consumerism and the need for Collective Change. I love the alliteration here. 

Aja: That was my editor. [Laughter.]

Alicia: And we're gonna get a little deeper into this, but hearing about that kind of upbringing in terms of food, what was your journey to understanding sustainable fashion?

Aja: So that's the entirety of the book basically, was talking about fashion and consumption, but also the fashion industry as a whole and how it really uplifts white and privileged voices and doesn't leave a lot of space for anyone else. But then when you look at the cycle of how things are produced, it makes sense because from start to finish, marginalized people are pretty heavily crapped upon by the system.

When we think about where the resources that go into our fashion comes from, it’s countries in the Global South. So we have these countries in the Global South that are resource rich, labor rich, but for some reason not incredibly economically wealthy. And the fact that we're not questioning that: We should be. You can look around my living room, and you probably can find a few things that are actually made in England. I live in London, even though I'm American. And I don't think that that's a—I don't think that that is an outrageous reality. I think that's the reality of the system, but nobody's really actually questioning that like we should. 

And so, with the fashion industry, your clothing is produced in the Global South. The cotton is grown in the Global South; the fabrics are made in the Global South. And it’s shipped to the Global North where it's consumed really rapidly, because we know that the multinational brands have really sped up the seasons and made us think that it's normal to buy 20 pieces every season, when in actuality, that's not normal at all. 

And then we go through our clothing so quickly that the resale market is booming, but charity shops are chock-a-block of fast fashion. And then, because we can't just recycle our way out of this, it gets dumped on the Global South, where, in our heads, we think that we're doing something charitable, but in actuality, we've created an ecological problem. And it's being left on countries like Kenya, Ghana, Rwanda to basically mitigate. 

And we've had this idea in our head because of colonialism, white saviorism, that sort of stuff that like, ‘Oh, if you donate it to a charity, somebody in a poor country will really want it.’ When in actuality, No, nobody wants crap clothing. If you bought something that didn't last five wears, there's a very good chance that that person in Ghana doesn't want it either. 

And it ends up being this disaster system where the government of Ghana, the municipal branch, has to really deal with all of these imports. And I, as an American, there's one thing that Americans hate the most, it's having to pay their tax dollars to sort out someone else's mess. But that's essentially what the clothing problem is doing to countries in the Global South. 

So I talk about my personal experience, as someone who's always sort of been on the outside of the fashion industry looking in. I use the analogy, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with all the little rich kids are singing and dancing with the Candy Man? That was me with the fashion industry. But sometimes not being invited in means that you take a really critical and shrewd eye to these systems. And as someone who felt I was always trying to be in the room, but never really let in the room, what I realized was that I don't actually want to be in that room because this is a problem and it needs to be sorted out.

Alicia: I mean, what did you like about fashion? What really attracted you to the fashion world, to begin with? 

Aja: So, the thing that attracted me most to the fashion world from the beginning was the need to fit in through material items. So I said my parents were sort of hippie-dippie for their time, but my mom has always been someone who did not understand the need to fit in through material items. She's always been a secondhand shopper, which I grew up in the ’80s, ’90s, that was not that cool. It was cool in the late ’90s. Kurt Cobain, God bless him, really sort of made the whole thrifting thing, grunge, that sort of thing. 

And even then, people still didn't get it. I remember in the eighth grade telling this guy that I had been friends with that I had bought something from a charity shop. And he said, ‘Oh, gross. You're wearing dead people's clothing.’ That was the response. So after that, I was like, ‘Ok, keep that s**t to yourself, Aja.’

And so in general, thrifting, secondhand shopping, wearing hand-me-downs has always been something where I didn't want people to look too closely at me because there were plenty of other reasons why I was socially ostracized. I didn't need it to be my clothes. But because I didn't have the right clothes, which when I was growing up, that was the Gap and the Limited, before the Limited Too started looking like a rainbow barfed inside of it. But at one point in time, the Limited Too was the s**t. 

And I didn't have that stuff. And so I became really obsessed with labels and wanting to have the right clothing. But then from that obsession for being socially ostracized came a genuine interest in the fashion industry. It became, ‘Oh, wait a minute, this is actually really cool. And I want to learn as much as possible about this.’ 

But I knew that I couldn't tell my parents, ‘I’m gonna go to fashion school!’ because they're Black. And they're going to be like, ‘No, you're going to get a degree where you can get a job.’ Because we know that there are certain industries that just were not welcoming to marginalized people. 

I mean, I feel like the time period where you and I met on Twitter, that was when I started to see a lot of my other Twitter friends who happen to be Black and brown women finally get booked deals and their books sold. I believe you and I met through a tweet that had mentioned Roxane Gay as someone you should pay attention to. Do you remember that? 

Alicia: I do. [Laughs.]

Aja: It was a friend who had said, ‘These are the people that I follow. These are the people you should pay attention to.’ This was before Roxane Gay’s groundbreaking success. She was also a person where people just really weren't paying attention, and that it just seemed like at some point the doors opened. And Ijeoma Oluo was publishing a book that would become a New York Times best-seller. My friend, Sam Irby was publishing her essays. And they're hilarious, they become best-sellers. So it just seemed like there was a moment where the world was like, ‘Oh, wait, maybe we should actually listen to Black and brown women.’

And, for me, I sort of had to take a roundabout path to getting to where I am. Because one, my parents were not going to encourage me to go to school to study fashion or to study writing. And two, I didn't feel like there was space for me in these worlds at all. So I threw stuff at the wall until it stuck. 

And eventually, I began to realize the fashion industry in its current iteration is actually a disaster, and all the things that we talk about whether it's racism, intersectional feminism—I was writing about these issues really separate from the fashion industry, ’cause they were important issues. For a lot of people, people saw, people like me saw the rise of Donald Trump. And I began to actually talk about race really honestly in a way I never had before, because I could tell what was happening. But I was talking about these issues very separate, in a silo. And what I began to realize was that actually all these issues apply to the fashion industry. So then, I began to talk about them together. And that's where my platform sort of came about from.

Alicia: And so much of what you say about fashion relates to food. And so it's sometimes, just this really mind-melding kind of thing to read. ‘Wait, this is also food.’ 

And we need to talk about these connections, too, because, I don't know, I feel these are both issues where people—it's feminized. People don't want to think about them very much. These are just things people have to do. They have to get up and dress themselves. They have to get up and eat something. And we're kind of taught not to make a big fuss necessarily about these things, because we're taught that they're frivolous.

Aja: Yeah. Frivolous, silly, you know? 

Alicia: Yes, exactly. 

And so it's such an uphill battle to get people to care about these things, and to talk about them in a serious manner. And one of the things that kind of really drives me nuts, and that you also talk about, is how people defend cheap prices out of class concerns without thinking about the exploitation of the worker at the beginning of the chain, as you discussed. We're exploiting the Global South for fashion. We're exploiting the Global South for food, too. 

And people defend cheap clothes and cheap food, and dismiss the relevance of individual choice. And I wanted to get your take on how do you see individual action as meaningful even as we seek systemic change?

Aja: So I think that there's a few myths that people love to peddle about fashion. And that's one of the things that I debunk, because it actually really annoys me. 

There's this idea that only poor people buy fast fashion. That is not true. Everybody buys fast fashion. One of the things that I did within my book was I talked about class. And the Resource Generation really helped me out big time with this, because they have some really great breakdowns of what class and wealth looks like. 

So one thing I learned in my book was in America, poor and working poor people account for —1% of America's wealth. And then the next class group is working class. And that group accounts for 3% of America's wealth. And then you start getting into middle class, managerial class, and then ruling class. 

We’ve just come out of this pandemic, and there were people lined around the block to buy from Primark, which is not an ethical or sustainable store. But when you critique it, people accuse you of classism. Here's the thing: The vast majority of people in that line probably are not the people that are within that 4% of net wealth. So if you look at the fact that all these major multinational companies that people claim are where poor people shop are actually billion-dollar companies, then it is not just poor people shopping from those places. It's literally everyone. 

And I find in our society, nobody wants to be poor and everybody wants to be poor when it comes to the system that they want to participate in. Does anyone actually want to be poor? No. Being poor f*****g blows, and it's systemic, and it's hard to climb out of. And we love a rags to riches story in America, where we talk about, ‘Oh, well, this person was poor and now they're not.’ Where the actual reality is, a person that comes from generations of poverty is really unlikely to be able to find their way out of it, because you—being poor is actually very expensive and very hard. 

And so, we have this system of fast fashion where literally everyone participates because our entire mind-set is that of a consumerist identity. And that is beat into our heads, that you're gonna become a consumer. And it's subtle. It's pernicious. It's in films. You name a film that we love that's a cult classic, that doesn't have a really great makeover scene, right? Where the main character gets this amazing makeover that involves buying loads of clothing, and all of a sudden they're a new person. Everyone treats them differently. That's a pernicious message that's really pushed pretty hard in media. 

And so we have a real consumer mind-set as a culture. And I want to unpick that basically, and get people to think about that mind-set. Because once you do, you begin to see the ways in which all of this consumption is sort of pushed on you whether or not you need to consume.

Alicia: I think that's where fashion and food diverge, because food is absolutely 100%, you need to consume it. So there's different levels of complication there. 

And I wanted to know how you feel about the way the fashion media covers sustainability and inclusivity? [Laughter.] I think I know the answer to this question. But how are these issues being addressed, if at all?

Aja: You're never going to get the honest truth about the scale and scope of the fashion industry's problem from magazines and publications that depend on those same multinational polluters in order to fill their pages with advertisements. If you say something bad about a brand, and you're a fashion editor, you'll get barred from things. 

And so, everybody's very much afraid of these brands. So why would someone who's dependent on a paycheck from that group of people who's polluting and harming the earth actually tell the honest truth about the reality? Why would they do that? There's no incentive there. And so, I think if people are looking for traditional media to be the one who stands up to the ills of the fashion industry, they're going to be looking for a very long amount of time. That's never going to happen.

I mean, one of the things I cover in my book, one of my favorite stylists, Lucinda Chambers did this interview after she was ousted from Vogue where she basically just lets it all out. And Vogue apparently tried to get the interview removed from the internet, British Vogue. But she talks about things. She remembers having to do a cover where she put Alexa Chung in this cheesy Michael Kors T-shirt. And she was like, ‘I didn't want to do it. It was a cheesy cover. But Michael Kors was a major advertiser.’

So, so much of what you see in the magazine is very much manipulated by the magazine's relationship to the brands. And so, you're never actually going to get accuracy with the scale and scope of the problem from traditional media. If there's any skin in the game, if there's any connection to the money. 

And I also say even for people that claim to be ethical rating scales, right? There's a few ethical rating scales that people keep trying to tag on my page saying, ‘Oh, yeah, I use this.’ Ok, so they rate brands, but they also email spam you every day with affiliate links from ethical and sustainable brands. So if consumption and scale is the problem, which it is, if someone is making their money and it's reliant off of you buying things, how trustworthy of a source can they be in the accuracy in which they’re reporting?

Alicia: And both of us are independent people, culture workers. And you use Patreon. Why did you decide to go that independent route?

Aja: Because my Instagram was growing really quickly, and I knew that the vast majority of funding that's available for people on Instagram is through selling people s**t they don't need. 

There's other things out there. But in general, I don't want to be an Instagram that's pushing you to buy stuff. I've done one advertisement on my Instagram, and it's literally with a sustana—with a resale platform, Vestiaire Collective, because we have so much clothing that I feel you can't go wrong by buying secondhand. The enormity of the clothing that's circulating our planet right now, we're all gonna have to start shopping secondhand. There's no way around it. If there's anything that I can push and not feel like I’m really, really cheapening out, it's definitely secondhand. 

But in general, you really can't be the person who's telling everyone why the industry’s s**t stinks, and then turn around and go, ‘Oh, by the way, buy this thing.’ It doesn't work. 

And also, I also know that brands love to hop on a social justice movement when it's the moment, but they do not like people talking about things like race before it's of the moment. And so five years ago, if you used the phrase white supremacy, the hysterics and the fragility you’d have to endure. When in actuality, today, people are kind of like, ‘Ok, I get what white supremacy means.’ But if the majority of white people are not comfortable with the things that you're saying, a brand's not going to want to sponsor your page.

Now that I have a six-figure following, now, everybody wants to throw stuff at me. But before that happened, nobody wanted to throw anything at me. And I had to do Patreon, because it wasn't one of those things where I could really monetize my Instagram in any way that felt good to me. And I wanted to create a space where you weren't having things pushed on you constantly, because so much of Instagram, now, it's advertisement. 

So I want it to be that account where you're scrolling and you see a dress on another account that you probably don't need. And then the next thing that you see is my post, which tells you that 60% of materials on this planet are petrochemicals, so polyester, which is essentially oil. And then I talk about the fashion industry’s links to oil. We all talk about how fossil fuels are ruining everything. Well, that's another way they're ruining things for people. People don't make that connection. 

And so, I basically want to be a counter argument to all the consuming that goes on through Instagram.

Alicia: I mean, that's amazing to me. 

I think this is maybe a selfish question. I don't use Instagram the way you use Instagram. How do you balance what you post on Patreon and what you post on Instagram?

Aja: The thing is the sustainable fashion conversation and basically the fashion industry getting its s**t together is moving so quickly that people can't keep up with it all. 

So I sort of run my Patreon as a sustainable and ethical fashion newswire. So one of the things I noticed is that I do get a lot of people who are journalists, are people within the industry, who follow me because they know first thing in the morning, I will have gone through the news stories that I see and pick something that's interesting and relevant to discuss on my Patreon. 

So I managed to basically become a newswire for this topic that I'm really interested in, but a topic that a lot of people don't know how to mitigate because once again, the fashion industry is also very closed off from people that might not know. It's one of those things where the fashion industry has always had an air of mystery. And I break things down in layman’s terms for people so that they can have a conversation about these topics with their friends.

Alicia: And as you use Instagram so much, you use your face, your body, yourself to promote your work. And I think I'm struggling with that a little bit. 

But how is your personal visibility a significant aspect of your work?

Aja: I feel really exposed now, to be honest. I didn't used to feel that way, but now it's when I'm out and about in London, I will bump into people that follow my work. And that's a really weird feeling. But everyone's really cool, but I do—I feel more exposed now than I felt before. 

And it's not bumping into people, I don't mind that. It's when you just tweet something benign and then it ends up in a major newspaper. That happens to me a lot now, and that's a bit like, ‘Mmaww.’ [Laughs.] You know what I mean?

So there's a part of me that sometimes just wants to just pull back from that space, because I don't think that there should be any one face of the movement. And I also feel this space still isn't diverse enough. I don't want to be the face of like, ‘We need a Black person to talk about the fashion industry and sustainability. Someone call Aja Barber.’ No, there's a lot of people you can call. It's not about there just being one of us, which sometimes I do worry that is the direction that sometimes things go in. I think there's room for many voices. 

But yeah, I think I worry about being overexposed. And sometimes, I'm sick of looking at my own face. And I think about boundaries as well. If I have a kid, for instance, I am never going to be the person that talks about my pregnancy on Instagram, because, one, I don't want to. It doesn't interest me. Two, social media can trigger people. You don't know who's experiencing infertility or having issues with that sort of stuff. And three, I don't want my Instagram to become parenting, ’cause there's plenty of good parenting Instagrams and I don't need to be one of them. So, I do think sometimes about just pulling back and doing more infographics and less style and less-

But at the same time, I also think my visibility as a Black plus-size body is also really important, because that has been so crucially missing from the conversation for so many years. So I go back and forth. 

Alicia: [Laughs.] No, it's very difficult, because to balance that and the ways in which people respond when you have a platform is just—it's horrible. I really struggle now with posting anything saying anything, because it is—

Aja: You get targeted.

I have an account that's like, ‘I am so sick of your b******t.’ And it's all about how the person hates me. And I'm just like, ‘Wow? What did I do?’ 

And they're mad because I called in a brand that they really liked who had been very disingenuous in the plus-size conversation, and then were trying to sort of present themselves like they were gonna lead the moment. When in actuality, myself and other plus-size people have been asking them for years to be inclusive with sizing.

’Cause this is a brand that makes one particular item. So it's not even that they roll out a new 16-piece collection every year. No, it's pretty much the same thing. And if you're only making one item, then you should be the first person to scale that item up in different sizes. But they just flat-out refused. And I'm just kind of like, ‘Just say you don't like fat people and go, but don't pretend it's rocket scientists or rocket science sacred geometry to scale up a pattern. It's hard, but it can be done because small brands do it every single day.’

So this brand had been very avoidant, ignorant, and negligent in the conversation. Particularly in private conversations they'd had with me, to the point where I stopped wearing their product on my grid, took down all of their photos. I still wear the clothing, ’cause you should wear the clothing that you buy regardless of whether it's fast fashion or a brand that leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Give it a good life. But I don't wear it on the grid and I don't promote it. 

So when they came out with, ‘We're going to do a podcast about plus-size inclusivity,’ I was just like, ‘Oh, go f**k yourself.’ So I said publicly, I talked about everything that happened and how for two years plus-size people had been asking them to be inclusive. And we'd have more respect for them if they just said, ‘Yeah, we really weren't doing a good job with this. And now we really want to do it, and we're really committed. And thank you everyone who pretty much tried to open our eyes and ears, and we didn't listen.’

Yeah, but instead they tried to present it like, ‘Oh, we're gonna do a podcast and we're so great.’ And I was just like, ‘No, we need an accountability moment here.’ And what I found was that that brand had some cult-like fans who raged against me for weeks. One of them is still holding a grudge. Why? Because I asked a brand to do better. Which, by the way, you are defending a corporation, not a person. Get your f*****g life. That's weird. I’d rather kick my own ass before I’d defend a corporation the way some of the fans of this brand have defended them. It's bizarre. 

Alicia: That's really ridiculous behavior. 

And it happens in food media as well, being someone who has been writing about vegan stuff, plant-based stuff, whatever you want to call it, for years. And then all of a sudden, everyone jumps on the bandwagon. And it's I get called to do an interview with someone who doesn't know anything about anything, but got assigned to write about it. This is really frustrating.

Aja: Yeah, yeah.

It's annoying when people really try and commodify stuff in really disingenuous ways. But one of the things that I just think is so bizarre about our society, and I think social media is a real impactful part of this, is the ways in which people try to humanize corporations. 

One of the assignments that I always give my readership is to watch the film, The Corporation. I watched that in the early 2000s when it came out, and it was life-changing for me because social media is one of these things where corporations are—they try to be in on the Twitter jokes. They try to use the lingo. And when they f**k up, they try to make it seem like they're an individual instead of a multinational company. 

And that's really dangerous, because what we know is that a corporation can only act in its own best interest. That's the only thing that can do, because it's not a human with emotions. And if a corporation were a person, it would be a psychopath. So when people get really overly invested in defending companies, I'm just like, ‘Nah, get your life.’

Alicia: Yeah, no, for sure. 

And how do your perspectives on fashion, if they do, influence how you consume in other kinds of arenas? Food, media, etc. 

I think I gave a quote recently. Someone was asking me for recommendations for a newsletter. And I was like, ‘Well, the thing I'm obsessed with now is making sure my—what I wear expresses my ethics that I talk about in terms of what I eat.’ I mean, obviously, I like clothes. [Laughs.] But also at the same time, it's really important for me that if I am visible in this space, talking about these things, that I'm not also promoting similarly exploitative chains in other industries.

And so, how does it—Yeah. [Laughs.]

Aja: Yeah, for me, totally. I think about it in everything. I don't have a Spotify account, because artists that I really like who happened to be musicians talk about how they don't make any money from Spotify. So even though everybody has Spotify, I'm just the person who’s buying all the music on Bandcamp because most of my music is locked away on several different computers. Thank you very much for that, Apple. That's so cool of you. And so I'm just basically rebuying music. 

And, yeah, I think about it a lot. I think about the food. Now, I also know that as a person who lives in London, I am so lucky we have access to so many different types of food. We have different markets nearby. We can buy from all sorts of different cultures. And so I know that I have a lot of access and privilege in that way. And that's part of why I can only stick to really fashion, because food is more complicated in that way. 

But yeah, I think about it in all areas of my life. But in general, I truly believe that most of us with significant privilege just need to do less. Do less. The excess that comes when you have a significant amount of privilege in our culture isn't normal to the rest of humans on this planet. 

One of the things that was crucial to everything was moving to London. When I moved over here, my partner and I had been dating long distance for three years. I had to get rid of so much stuff. I was in my 30s. So I had 30 years of a life in the States, and I'm still mitigating that stuff. Because as someone who does the work that I do, I know that just dumping it on a charity shop’s doorstep is actually really bad. That actually doesn't help anyone. 

And so from the time I knew that we were going to get engaged and I was going to move over here, I basically tasked myself to thoughtfully get rid of all of my items that I wasn't planning on taking with me. Some of it was clothing that had grown too small, because we have this weird thing in our society where we pretend it's natural that every person should stay the same shape, no matter what. That is not natural. I mean, some people do, and it's natural to some people. But it's not natural to every person. 

And so a lot of the clothing from my early 20s was too small, basically. I'm someone who has uterine fibroids, so things around the waist, it just—some of that stuff was, I wasn't going to get into it again. And so I basically tasked myself with shedding myself of the stuff that wasn't going with me in a thoughtful way. Which meant for clothing, picking up the things that can be resold, reselling the stuff that can be resold, putting up stuff in Facebook galleries for all of my friends and saying, ‘If you want it, just get the shipping and I'll send it to you.’ But really, really trying to be very thoughtful about how I was going to pare down essentially. 

And that is still a work in progress. Every time I go home to my parents’ house, I task myself with going through stuff and trying to rehome it in a way that's thoughtful and helpful. And I feel that will be my life chore. 

And then also, moving over stuff slowly. So I've got a bunch of really great coffee table books that I love, and I just have to bring them over one at a time because they're all so heavy. 

[Laughter.] 

If you have to do a big move and you do it in a way where you really, really shed stuff in a way that's impactful and thoughtful, and keeping as much stuff out of the landfill, that what you'll find is now that I'm here, I think about everything I bring into this flat. One, London doesn't have closets like the U.S., so that's something you got to grapple with. 

But before it comes home, I genuinely think, ‘Where is it gonna go?’ We're very limited in space. And that really helps me in how I consume stuff. 

But then also when you talk about the fashion industry every single day and read about what's happening and how it's impacting the environment, if you have to do that for a living, you're just like, ‘I don't want anything.’

Alicia: [Laughs.] No, it's real. It's real. 

And for you, is cooking a political act?

Aja: Mm-hmm.

Sorry, I just took a sip of my tea. 

Alicia: No, it's ok. [Laughs.] 

Aja: Clothing will always be political. You cannot separate politics from clothing. You can't separate labor practices from clothing. You can't separate exploitation from clothing. You can't separate outsourcing and things like NAFTA from clothing. 

You can't separate what clothing means to certain people. How it can be religious, how it can be political, how it can be cultural. People know the uniform of the Black Panthers, right? There's certain clothing items that are evocative of social movement eras. But where you tend to shop and buy is political as well. Absolutely. 

And one thing that people need to really step, take it a step farther, pull back the curtain of your favorite brand and see what politicians and what policies they're supporting. Because one thing that people really—I think some people know about it, but they ignore it. But Richard Hayne of Urban Outfitters used to give a lot of money to the right-wing. Yeah, and he owns Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, and Free People. So free, so hippie. Yay.

So it's about all of these things. It's about our world. And when you think about how many jobs the fashion industry provides for on the planet, it's political. When you think about the fact that 80% of garment workers are women, hence, intersectional feminism, it's political. It's all very political.

Alicia: My question is, is cooking a political act? But I think you answered it anyway. [Laughter.]

Aja: I thought you said clothing. I totally thought you said clothing. Sorry.

Alicia: You answered in the same way, I think.

Aja: Cooking is absolutely political. Too. Who grows your food, where it comes from. Cooking is cultural. Cooking is—yes.

And when you also think about appropriation in cooking, that's a whole ’nother kettle of fish. Which you see it all the time, where a restaurant run by people from a certain ethnicity doesn't survive. And then all of a sudden another shiny and new restaurant opens up, which is run by white people who are selling a watered-down version of the dish. And they're doing great and they're getting write-ups and everyone's saying, ‘This is delicious and amazing’ when in actuality, that's somebody else's culture and somebody is profiting and not even doing it in the right way. 

So yeah, it's all political.

Alicia: [Laughs.] Well, thank you, Aja, again for taking the time. And it was so wonderful to finally talk to you.

Aja: Oh, my goodness, we're done already? That went really quickly.

Alicia: Yeah. [Laughter.]

Aja: Thank you.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe

Do I need to introduce Julia Turshen to a food crowd? Her cookbooks are best sellers and she’s written for everyone. Before I made my foray into food writing, I envied her quite a bit for seemingly having achieved all my dreams far before I was ready or able to do so, despite the fact that we’re the same age.

In this conversation, I wanted to understand her approach to creating “healthy” recipes and what inspired the one vegan chapter in her new book, Simply Julia, but I also wanted to discuss how privilege has manifested in her career and why she’s stepped away from the spotlight to work on a farm. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Julia. Thank you so much for coming on today.

Julia: Thank you so much for having me. This is very exciting, and I appreciate it so much. Yeah, thank you.

Alicia: Of course.

Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Julia: Sure. I've listened to, I think, all of the interviews you've done. And I love this question so much. I love hearing everyone's response, so this is just very surreal and exciting for me to answer. 

So I grew up in Manhattan until I was about eight. And then my family moved to the suburbs, about half an hour outside of New York City. And I was raised by my parents, my mom and my dad, who both worked full-time since way before I was born. So I was also very much raised by my babysitter, Jenny.

And I would say the food I ate growing up, I ate a lot of food outside of our house. We depended on Chinese takeout a lot. We ate a lot of pizza. We ate a lot of Jewish delicatessen food, Ashkenazi, all different, chicken soup and knish and that kind of stuff. My family loves a diner. [Laughter.] Lots of bagels, and occasionally McDonald's. I was a chicken nugget kid. 

And I would say the food in my family's home—I was thinking about this, and I feel like it was divided between three basic food groups. Or not food groups, but items or themes. So there was a lot of packaged diet food. There was a lot of SnackWell cookies, Boca Burgers, stuff like that. In our house, there was a lot of food purchased from prepared food stores, so containers of pesto pasta, stuff like that. 

And then there was also Jenny's cooking. And this was the food that I loved the most when I was a kid. Jenny's food that she would mostly prepare for herself and share with me is the food that I feel, I guess, one of the foods I feel most deeply connected to. 

And it feels, I don't know, especially important to talk about right now because Jenny is from St. Vincent, which I'm sure you're aware of because of where you live. But there was just, or there continues to be, this really crazy volcano erupting in St. Vincent, looks like devastating the country. So thinking about Jenny and her family and St. Vincent right now is kind of top of mind for me. And if it's ok, can I just shout out a website? 

Alicia: Of course! Yeah. [Laughs.]

Julia: Ok, so there's a website called https://www.feedstvincent.org/. So it's S-T-Vincent, https://www.feedstvincent.org/. And the chef from Food Sermon in Brooklyn, who is also a Vincentian, he's started this kind of meal response thing, ’cause a lot of people are in need there. So I'm really grateful that he set that up. And it’s just a very tangible, easy place for people to go to support just a country that is going through a very rough time right now. 

That was a long answer. [Laughter.] 

Alicia: I love the Food Sermon. Yeah, it's a great restaurant. 

Where outside of New York did you grow up?

Julia: I'm sorry, I didn't hear what you just said.

Alicia: Where outside of New York did you grow up?

Julia: Oh, in Westchester County. My family moved to Harrison.

Alicia: I'm from Long Island, and so I always want to know. [Laughs.]

Julia: Yeah, totally. The bridge and tunnel connection, I’m with you.

Alicia: [Laughs.]

And also, what you grew up eating was so very similar to what I grew up eating, which is pizza, Chinese takeout, that sort of thing. It's very, very similar. And it's also funny, because I didn't realize that we were born in the same year until I was googling you because for the entire time I've been writing about food, you've been the—a presence in the food world and in food media. And so, what made you work in food and how did you kind of become focused on home cooking?

Julia: I have been interested in food my whole life. I have been cooking since before I can remember, since I was a little, little kid. And I've always wanted to be in the kitchen, and I think some of that is because I didn't grow up in a family where my parents were cooking. I didn't learn to cook at my grandmother's knee or anything like that. I think I was seeking that kind of, I don't know, sort of domestic life maybe in some way without even realizing it. But these are thoughts I've had as an adult. As a kid, I just wanted to be in the kitchen. I thought it was just the greatest place. And I continue to think that.

But the thing that is, I think, most significant for me in terms of working in food media as opposed to just food in general—‘cause as you know, the food industry is one million industries under one big umbrella. But my parents worked in publishing. So my whole life, I have been exposed to print media, to books and magazines. 

And I've had that early exposure. I've also had access to the publishing world since before I can remember. After school, when I would go to my parent’s office, I was walking into office buildings that I continue to go into now. I mean, I guess virtually [laughter] if I'm meeting with someone. But that definitely has informed my career. It's paved the way a lot of, for a lot of my work and everything. 

So I think that's super important to mention, because I think when we talk about opportunity, especially within publishing, which is the most opaque industry and is allergic to transparency, I just feel it's super important to just talk about how we got into it, which I appreciate how much you do that. 

And the second part of your question about home cooking, I have always been a home cook and I proudly identify as one. If someone calls me a chef, I feel like I'm always looking over my shoulder, like, ‘Who are you talking to?’ [Laughter.] 

And for me, home cooks and chefs are just different things. And I'm really happy to be a home cook. I think they're both worthy. They're both valuable. They're just different. And I try not to confuse them, because I'm really proud of what I accomplish in my home kitchen and I'm proud of what other people accomplish on a daily basis in theirs. And I'm so happy to be a home cook who writes for other home cooks. I try to share all my recipes and stories from that sort of shared place, I would say. 

And I guess the only sort of professional cooking experience I've had, in addition to recipe writing, is I did work for many years as a private chef. But that was always me cooking in other people's home kitchens. I still think of that—even though it's not just sort of the daily relentless grind of home cooking within your own home, and it is paid. And yeah, I guess you could call me a chef for that. Whatever, I don't care what you call me. 

But that, to me, just continued to inform my life as a home cook. And I just had access to many home kitchens and access to many families who had the ability to hire someone to cook for them in their home, which is a really interesting, fascinating experience. And at the end of the day, I think everyone just wants to feel very taken care of. I think that was a big takeaway for me. I mean, I have other takeaways from that time, but I won’t bore you. [Laughter.]

Alicia: Well, you mention kind of the relentless grind of home cooking. How are you feeling in the home, cooking, after working on cookbooks—we're in a pandemic. How have you been relating to food over the last year?

Julia: I mean, it's made me appreciate the fact that I love to cook so much. I'm so grateful for that. 

I don't know. I feel like I'm always kind of ruminating about home cooking and home cooks, and always thinking about the labor that is home cooking. The undervalued, unacknowledged, just—I think, really—not very well-understood labor. And I'm someone who gets acknowledged and credited for that labor. I get to put my work out there. I get to make a business, a career out of it. But I'm doing what many people are doing everyday without any credit or acknowledgement.

And when we cook at home—again, you know, this—but we're not just making dinner. We are planning for it. We're maybe keeping a budget. We are keeping endless mental inventory of what's in our kitchens. We're trying to use things up. We're probably taking other people's needs and desires into consideration. We're shopping. We're also cleaning up. We do so much cleaning up. 

That's part of why I don't put—this is a sidebar in a tangent. But I don't put times in my recipes, ‘active time’ or ‘prep time’ or whatever, because I just feel like it's endless. Are we including washing the dishes and cleaning the counter and the grocery shopping? That's all part of making the recipe. So I just don't put that, because then I feel like I'm measuring myself against it or something. I don't know, it just makes my head spin. And am I asking other people to measure themselves against it? I just don't like that kind of vibe. 

Anyway, so yes, home cooks are just incredibly valuable. We sustain households, communities, and this is really important work that often just doesn't get the credit that I think it so deserves. So, yeah, I definitely am so happy and proud to be a home cook, especially over the last year. And I'm also really happy and proud to have the opportunity to celebrate my fellow home cooks who don't often get that—I don't know—cheer or celebration.

Alicia: Yeah, no. 

It's funny, because I think over the last year, it's the first time I've really thought of all that labor that you just mentioned that goes into it. I think it's been so apparent to me in a way that it wasn't before, where before, when I would cook dinner, it would be part of, more of a—what felt like a full day. And now it feels more just the only point of my day. 

I just see it also clearly. That mental inventory, I have felt the weight of that mental inventory of what's in the kitchen over the last year in a way that I never have before, which is interesting. And actually, maybe I want to explore that deeper because it really is such a—it’s so much pressure, I feel.

Julia: Yeah, for sure. I'm nodding out loud. [Laughter.]

Alicia: No, but it's funny. And, it's a lot of different complications there of trying to keep life afloat and also make sure if there's food in the kitchen, etc, etc. 

And, it's been better to get inspiration from cookbooks like your new book, Simply Julia. And I wanted to—it's hard for me, and I don't really talk about it. The only time I've written about kind of ‘health’ in my newsletter, it was—I literally put it in quotes, so that I wouldn't be kind of making a judgement because I do feel it's so difficult to talk about. People are so connected. You don't want to tell anyone a food is bad or a food is good. And health necessarily kind of says, ‘This is good.’

And so I wanted to ask how you kind of decided to approach that idea, as well as the issues of fatphobia, which are so deeply connected to ideas of health and how we talk about them.

Julia: I so appreciate you asking this, and kind of giving the context for how you've gone about it in your work or, or not gone towards it, because it's super sticky. I'll just back up for a second, because something I just heard you say that I feel is tied to this is just that feeling of pressure within home cooking. 

Having nothing to do with health, but that's something I just think about a lot. I think in the age of social media and cookbooks and stuff, I think, in general, I see and feel and observe the sense of pressure that home cooks feel, that I think a lot of people feel. I think this measuring of ourselves against each other and ourselves. And that's something I try to push against as much as I can in my work.

I basically feel like the kitchen is the one place where I don't feel anxious in my life. [Laughter.] Everywhere else, I am so anxious. And that's why I take medication and see a therapist and have supportive friends and boundaries in my friendships and all these things. Anxiety is a big part of my life. And it's really interesting to me that it's not a part of my cooking life. And I feel that's a place that causes stress and pressure for most people. So I feel like that is this big knot I am constantly trying to untie and understand and just be aware of.

And I'm saying all this, because what you mentioned just really resonated, but also because everything I just described to me, for me personally—I can only speak from my own personal experience—but that's all rooted in diet culture. In the sense of perfectionism, this sense of trying to attain the unattainable. And I'm talking about thinness. [Laughs.] 

And the more I understand about diet culture and the role it's played in my life—I mentioned I grew up in a SnackWell’s Cookie home. The more I understand the roots of diet culture being the roots of everything that's problematic in our world, which is racism and white supremacy and these things that, I don't know, you do such a great job of tackling in your work. 

And I've been the beneficiary of reading work like yours, reading work like, I don't know, Sabrina Strings’ book Fearing the Black Body, really understanding this—The Body is Not An Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor. 

Work like this has really changed my life, because, as I told you, I've loved to cook forever. It's where I have found so much joy, so much curiosity, so much connection to other people. So much confidence. I feel my most confident in the kitchen, not because I think everything I cook is great. I just think that I can figure it out. And that feels really good. But I have not felt the same competence, or joy, or positivity when it comes to eating. Cooking and eating have been kind of separate things for me. 

And my whole life, I felt so drawn to food in ways that have sometimes felt obsessive. Which I think is true for honestly a lot of people in food. I've talked to a lot of people about this. I think that issues around eating, whether it's living with an eating disorder, or disordered eating, or just any sort of obsessive feeling about food, I think it's incredibly common. It's part of what brings us to it. I don't know, what you're asking and this whole topic is such a huge topic. And I think I need to just slow myself down while I'm talking about it, because I think I'm trying to talk about so many things. 

But basically, yeah, the subtitle of my new book is ‘healthy comfort food.’ And I know that those words bring up a lot for a lot of people, including myself. And I guess the reason I wanted to go in that direction and go for it is because these issues have been a big part of my life. I have loved cooking, but I have had intense issues with body image and disordered eating and restrictive eating. 

These are things I've been working through personally, and my work is really personal. So I chose to share with us more publicly, and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to write a healthy cookbook that is not about weight loss. This is a healthy cookbook that doesn't equate the word ‘healthy’ with skinny. 

And I guess in terms of thinking about your question about why I've chosen to address this publicly, I'm not the first person to do so by any means. Some of those books I just mentioned, there's many more like them. I just do think fatphobia is everywhere. It's everywhere. Diet culture is everywhere. And so, I think it needs to be confronted from everywhere. 

And for me, that definitely includes mainstream cookbooks, because mainstream cookbooks, ones I've been lucky to produce and be a part of, they go a long way to influencing how we understand terms like healthy. And they have definitely informed how I've thought about healthy, and I used to think it just meant skinny. And coming to understand that it doesn't—it's just something I feel really strongly about sharing. 

And I guess in some ways, I think I wrote this book to kind of change my own definition of it just for myself and therefore kind of hold myself accountable. And hold myself accountable in a really positive way for myself to just, continue to treat myself with compassion, and to try and do that for other people. I don't know, I feel like everything I'm saying is a little bit vague. [Laughs.] But it's a big, it's—no pun intended—a very weighty topic. 

And I just think health is a really—it reminds me of the word ‘natural’ on food packaging. It's overused, so much to the point where it both means nothing and it also means something that it doesn't mean. It's come to mean that. And I just think that's honestly really dangerous. And I don't know, I feel I just want cooking and eating and food to be as safe of a thing as possible. 

So, I think this is an attempt to be part of that kind of conversation. I don't know. Those are some rambly, separate thoughts, but I'm happy to talk about all of this or more. But yeah, it's definitely—ok, I’ll stop. 

Alicia: No, it's so loaded. It's so loaded.

And I feel it, because I write about, not about veganism or vegetarianism. And people tie these things to restrictive eating. There's a big strain of vegans who are recovering from an eating disorder and veganism is a safe way to still be mindful, I guess, of what one is eating. 

But I've become really, really intense, like you were saying, about talking about the way that fatphobia is an expression of anti-Blackness. And the ways in which we have to talk about it as a European beauty ideal is the same as blonde hair and that sort of thing. We have to make it as though it's as neutral as that. Its meaning is as neutral as that, and we have to talk about the reason that we are kind of obsessed with it. [Laughs.] 

And so I really think it's important to address in the way that you have, because people are very weird about food. And because our culture has made us weird about food. And I don't mean weird about food in a negative way. We don't, especially as women, etc., etc., we don't feel very free to eat in a way that maybe our bodies are telling us to. We just don't. 

Julia: Yeah. I, again, am just nodding my head really vigorously over here. You can't see me, but just please know that that's happening. 

I could not agree more. And something that I write a little bit about in the introduction to the book, when I'm sort of talking about the word healthy and something I think about all the time, is the fact that I think it's a word and a feeling that I think is up for all of us to define for ourselves. And I think having the agency to define it individually is incredibly important, because we live in different bodies. [Laughs.] That is obvious, but I think that maybe isn't always obvious by the way these things are written about. 

And, for me, I definitely define healthy using that word you just used, which is free. It's feeling freedom. It's feeling freedom from these imposed sort of pressures and restrictions and everything you said, beauty ideals, and all these things. And it's feeling free from judgment, and it's feeling free to make choices. 

Freedom to me is an incredibly important part of what it means to feel healthy. And I also know that the word freedom is incredibly loaded as well. And I don't know, I just appreciate the opportunity to just talk about these things with people like yourself, and many other people. Because I think that's how these things can change is through these types of conversations, right?

Alicia: And to also talk about vegan stuff, you have a chapter on vegan meals in the book. Which I think is great, because I do think people think of eating a vegan meal as something daunting. I mean, it's funny to me, of course, because I'm like, ‘I don't even know where I would put cheese in a meal. I don't know where you put the meat. I don't know.’ [Laughter.] 

But I'm always kind of talking about people in food media having sort of a responsibility to talk about the ways in which meat is a destructive force in our planet, in the way that it is industrialized, etc., etc. And so, how do you approach that idea that the food system is a huge part of global greenhouse gas emissions? Meat is also the biggest culprit in that. How do you approach that personally, and also in your work in a way that isn't alienating?

Julia: Yeah, great question. 

I don't know that I have the answer here. But I can just tell you some thoughts I have on this. And I guess my disclaimer is that my thoughts on this are constantly evolving based on information that I am finding. Information that's new to me, that's not new information. 

And, yeah, not to keep saying this, but a lot of that information for me on this topic comes from you and your newsletter. It comes from other people I read and talk to who either identify as vegan or work in farming or work in policy work, or cook for their community or feed their community in other ways. People who are attached to the food system in very conscious ways. I would say people I've learned a lot from who I know you've talked about a lot in your work are people like Karen Washington, people like Leah Penniman. I don't know. The more I learn, the more I learn, which is true for all of us. [Laughter.] 

So I don't know. In thinking about this, I was thinking about ‘How do I decide what I put in my books, or what I put on my table?’ Which are very similar things. And most of these decisions come from the people I am feeding, the people I am cooking for. The person who I do that for the most—if that's a sentence, I'm not sure—is my wife, Grace. 

My home kitchen is me and my wife and our two dogs. I would say our dogs are the ones who consume the most meat in our household. So I don't know, that's maybe a sidebar thing, but would be interesting to talk to you about ‘cause you have a dog, right? 

Alicia: Yeah. 

Julia: Yeah. ’Cause veganism and dog ownership, I think, is a very interesting topic. Yeah, I could talk to you about so many things. But I'm going to try and answer your question. 

I think a lot about who I'm cooking for and what their needs are. And so in our household, I mean, I basically, I'll eat anything. I'm very lucky to not have any allergies or anything like celiac disease, like my body can handle most foods. I'm grateful for that. I try to be selective about what I eat based on what I like and what supports my local farmers and all that kind of stuff. 

But in terms of meat consumption in our household separate from our dogs, we—my wife, Grace, doesn't like red meat. She used to eat a lot of pork. She's Southern. But she just no longer really likes it. So we eat a lot of vegan and vegetarian meals, and we also eat chicken and fish. We have the privilege to be very selective about where we buy, those items or all these items. 

And something that's been on my mind, which was interesting to hear you talk about a lot of people who are recovering from eating disorders or disordered eating turning to veganism, the way I have continued to, I guess, just heal my disordered eating has been through the framework of intuitive eating. And this is something I would say I'm probably, I don't know, I don't think I'm at the very beginning stages of but I'm not out of the dark space altogether. This is something I'm just continuing to figure out for myself. 

And within the framework of intuitive eating, it's really important to me to not impose restrictions on myself and to just listen to my body and to get to know my body more. And the minute I imposed any restriction, I'm going to cut out whatever it is: sugar or dairy or vegetables. I mean, I'm not cutting out vegetables. But whatever the restriction is, it doesn't matter. But the minute I hear, ‘I'm cutting this out,’ that brings up a lot of not great stuff for me. So I try to not do that.What I tried to do, which causes no triggering things for me, is to just be really conscious of where I'm getting my ingredients. Which is a privilege to have that just time to think about, to have the money to choose where I spend it and all that kind of stuff. 

So these are things I think about. But in terms of the book itself, yeah, there's a chapter of—it's vegan one pot meals for the reason you kind of suggested. I think a lot of people think of a meal without meat in it as something like, ‘Well, what's it going to be? What's the centerpiece of this or something?’ I talk to home cooks all the time. I talk to home cooks on social media all the time, like, I am in this ongoing conversation with people who are cooking at home. And I know this comes up for a lot of people. So that's why I wanted to make it one pot meals. Make this feel really simple, because it can be simple, but also make it feel cozy and familiar. And I don't want to other it. 

But yeah, that chapter is in a book that also has a chapter of chicken recipes. And I don't know, in terms of being conscious of the food system and climate change or climate crisis and how it infects all this, I don't know. If I were to write this book today versus when I started working on it, that's something I've thought about. Would it still have the chicken chapter? I'm not sure. I don't know I'm continuing to learn and I'm just grateful to learn. 

I feel like I would like to share this with you if it's ok. And maybe we'll get into this with some of the questions that are coming up. I've taken a big pivot, and I, a couple weeks ago, started working and I'll continue to be in this job for the rest of the year. I have a new full-time job. And I'm actually working at my favorite local vegetable farm. And I have taken a step back from cookbook world and food media and stuff. Everyone I work with is vegan. We're talking about this stuff all day every day while we're farming. And I feel my mind and body just absorbing a lot of new information. 

So I don't know, maybe we can talk in a few minutes and see—I don't know. It's super interesting. 

Alicia: And I love that you're working in a local farm with people who are vegan, because a lot of the narrative around veganism that we get online, I'm gonna say. [Laughs.] And it's terrible, because in the pandemic, I've just been online. Twitter is the only way I know what people are doing or thinking about. It's affecting my book that I'm writing, obviously, because I'm writing it in a pandemic. I'm not out in the world talking to people. 

And so, I'm just hearing what these people online have to say. And I identify as vegetarian now, because I do eat local eggs and local goat cheese. And sometimes I'll eat pizza with—just out of just a sense of communal joy, I would say. [Laughs.] 

Julia: Yeah, pizza has a lot of communal joy. I agree. [Laughs.]

Alicia: People are really upset with me about this. Even though I am, all I promote is the idea of centralizing vegetables in your diet and stepping away from meat as the centerpiece of your eating. But the vegans are very angry with me all the time. 

And I think it's because they're not really understanding how ecological systems work. And I'm probably gonna upset any vegan who's listening to this, but sometimes there's just a real disconnect in terms of actual farming and how an actual agro-ecological system would function. And how localized food systems would work. I mean, obviously, you would eat very little animal product. That's just it.

Julia: Yeah.

I live in New York State. I live a couple hours north of New York City. And if I were 1,000% vegan who ate no animal products and was also very aware of all the things you just said, I would also never eat a banana, or a lime, or an avocado, or these things that I think are very prevalent in a lot of vegan recipes and stuff. And I don't know. It’s all fascinating. 

And it's just interesting about the sort of the conversations happening on Twitter, too, because this idea of upsetting the vegan stuff, which I'm sure we're both doing in many ways. But it's also like, yeah, upsetting the vegans who are active on Twitter, which I think is one group. Again, I just keep using the word interesting. 

And I don't know. I think, again, there isn't a one-size fits all for everyone. I think that's why we have to define healthy for ourselves. I care about you as a person in the world, but I don't care what you eat. That doesn't matter to me. But I am interested in it. I'm curious about how you make these decisions, but what you eat has zero impact on my life. 

I mean, maybe the decisions about who you're supporting and stuff, maybe it does have an impact. I don't know. This is complicated. But I think the judgment and the measuring against each other, which I think, again, rooted in white supremacy and racism and diet culture. Everything we're talking about is connected, even if it doesn't maybe seem that way. I don't know, I think that's something I'm very passionate about, is just trying to remove judgment.

Alicia: Yeah, no. 

And I mean, it's hard because there is—the collective impact of what we eat is real. And I mean, that's why we need systemic change, to make it easier for everyone to make choices that are healthy for the earth, healthy for us as human beings, because we do feel—and I mean, this is a bit woo-woo. But we do feel the impact energetically of how healthy and how good other people feel. That has an impact on all our lives. 

Julia: I mean, I am a gay woman who's working at a vegetable farm in the Hudson Valley. I'm all for the woo-woo. That's fine. I'm with you. You don't have to explain that to me. [Laughter.] 

Alicia: But it's real. And I think it's important to talk about. Yeah.

It's hard, because I want to talk to vegans about my own choices and my own kind of—but then I'm kind of considered an ex-vegan. And that's a really bad thing. [Laughs.]

Julia: It's really interesting, ’cause it almost—there's a parallel here to me about conversations I have with people in the queer community, where what does it mean if you, I don't know, have always been a lesbian and then you date a cisgendered man or something? 

I think these communities and cultures where labels take on a lot of, I don't know, weight and import and stuff, I think the world isn't black and white. [Laughs.] And there's a lot of nuance. And it's hard to figure out where you sit in the community that relies on labels to define yourself. And I think that gets really amplified when you enter spaces like Twitter, where there's very little room for nuance, which is why I don't spend much time-

Alicia: I need to stop. [Laughs.] And it's hard to get off when you're a writer, and when my work really depends on—I can look at the hits to my newsletter, and they're mostly coming from Twitter. I have to engage somewhat, but I am trying to engage in a more healthy way. Which, obviously, this is not what we're talking about, but I am engaged in a more healthy way. I don't see any one's responses to me unless I follow them, and so that's changed my whole life. 

Julia: That's cool. That’s smart. Good for you. That's great. 

I mean, I know, this isn't what we're talking about. But it's also-

Alicia: Social media is such a big part of our lives. I love to ask about people's relationships with social media, because I think it's useful also for the readers or the listeners to know what it's like for people who are kind of, I hate this phrase, but creating content and having to be on social media on this professional level. But it is work. It is labor.

Julia: Yeah, no. 

And it definitely feeds into our income. If you're getting hits on your newsletter that you're getting—there's paid subscribers, including myself. Highly recommend it. Very good investment. I get it.

I'm trying to get people to buy my book. Because, yes, I believe in my book, but I also have a mortgage I'm paying. These are actual things. And I think we don't talk about a lot of stuff like money and all that. I mean, you talk about it, but that's rare. And I don't know, the way social media plays into this, I think it's tied to everything we're talking about. This kind of sense of pressure, or exceptionalism. 

For me, when I used to check things like likes, or comments, or my ranking on something like Amazon or something, which is just not something I recommend anyone do. When we're checking these numbers, to me, it always just felt like how I used to feel when I would step on a scale and check my weight, which I haven't done in a long time. I threw out my scale a while ago, because it didn't make me feel good. 

And this kind of constant measuring. I feel like you kind of spoke to this earlier. I just feel it's worth mentioning now because I think there's a connection between these things. And something that's been really helpful for me is like, ‘Who provided these numbers? What are they getting out of it, because they're probably the person getting, or the institution getting, something out of it?’

This constant checking, we're doing it because someone provided these things. These rankings, these numbers. It's a big part of why I joined the farm crew, because it means I'm spending at least eight hours a day not on my phone or computer. And that feels revolutionary for me personally. And even in just a few weeks, I've noticed the difference in just how I feel. And honestly, to go back to this word, I feel healthier. I feel more free. I feel less judged, I'm judging myself less. I just don't care about these things, these numbers. And that feels honestly a relief.

Alicia: No, it's real.

Julia: Sorry, we can continue.

Alicia: Yeah, I mean I love the—any tangent is good. [Laughter.]

And I wanted to talk about your past cookbook Feed the Resistance. The website Equity at the Table, which is a database of food professionals who ID as queer, Black, Indigenous, person of color, women, non-binary. As a white food writer with a big platform, why have you taken on these political projects in food?

Julia: Excellent question. 

I have taken on these projects because I feel like I have the time, the money, and the access to do so. And it feels like a responsibility to do so. I don't consider myself a leader in these projects. And when I say that I'm not trying to abdicate responsibility, I just want to be very clear, again, about how I see myself. Sort of the home cook versus the chef thing. I think that leaders in the space know a lot more than I do. I am someone who's trying to actively learn more all the time, and trying actively, to connect with more people all the time. Because that makes my life more interesting and richer. There's a lot of really wonderful things that come with that. 

And I don't know, I've been thinking about this in anticipation of talking to you because you were kind to share some of these questions ahead of time. And because of these relationships, I have had the tremendous opportunity to have people be generous with me and call me in. That is incredibly valuable. I try to surround myself with people who hold me accountable. And I try to hold myself accountable, as a white woman with a lot of privilege in the community. And the space I work in.

I mentioned to you, I grew up in publishing with white parents. It wasn't like I had to figure out how to get in the door. I was on the other side of it. And so I just think, I don't know, I think my thoughts on this position and these projects and stuff are again constantly evolving. 

And that evolution is, it happens in conversations like this one and ones I've had with many people. I try to talk to people who have had different experiences than I do, different perspectives, who have different levels of access than I do—both less and more. And I know what it's like to have the kind of access and agency I have. So I just basically feel I just try to do whatever I can to create more of that for more people. I feel really grateful for the moments and people who have talked to me along the way. 

You mentioned Feed the Resistance, which came out in 2017. I was thinking about, because you have interviewed Tunde Wey. 

Alicia: No, I haven’t, actually. I love Tunde Wey. I've never actually spoken to him. Which is funny, because I think we're fans of each other's work. But I haven't invited him for an interview yet, because I feel like I'm not ready. [Laughs.]

Julia: Yeah, no, I get that. I mean, I think you are, but I mean whatever. You’re a person, he’s a person. That's so funny. I really am totally a very regular reader and listener. Maybe I've just heard the two of you talking about such similar things, I imagined I've heard a conversation. Whatever. Anyway, you can cut this out. 

But Tunde was someone who—he wrote an essay for Feed the Resistance. He was part of it. I had reached out to him. And I was thinking about a conversation I had with him where he called me, basically—I don't know, I haven't talked to him about sharing the story, but I hope it's ok. 

He was like, ‘Are you the right person to be doing this book?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know. I don't know if there's a right person. I don't know that I am the right person. Here I am, the person doing it.’ And I don't know, it's just a really interesting conversation that I just really appreciate. But he took the time to have this conversation with me and not just about me. 

That's something I try to do in my life, personal and professional. I try to talk to people rather than about them as much as I can, ‘cause I have definitely benefited from that. I'd rather throw a lot of darts against the board and see what sticks and learn from the mistakes I make along the way, and just try and create safe spaces within my own life personally and professionally for the people I care about to have the same kind of space to get it right. And also get it wrong, ’cause we're not always going to get it right. So yeah, those are some thoughts.

Alicia: No, for sure. 

And I wanted to ask you about kind of—and I ask a lot of people about it. Do we think that the big moment of Adam Rapoport stepping down from Bon Appétit, has it—is it really going to change anything. And I've always said, I'm a mixed race white woman. And I've always been kind of conscious about how much easier it is for editors to give me an assignment or put me in a position than it would be for a Black or visibly Latinx writer. And what has kind of been going through your head during these moments, and how have you kind of decided to respond to it using your work?

Julia: Sure. Again, really appreciate this question, and all you do to ask other people the same question. And yourself.

I guess what's been going through my head right now, is what's been going through my head for a while. I know it's been going through yours as well based on things you've written about, and the Food Writers’ Workshop. I remember the first one, I went. And it was right after Equity at the Table started, within days, I think. It just felt really great to be there.

It was awesome to see what you and your fellow—I don't know what you would call them, colleagues, organizers, or whatever—put together just a conference that cost exactly what it costs to put on. Wow. That felt novel.And just with this tangible information, and I think all of that is very true to Equity at the Table, which was free to use, always will be. Free to join. This is not something that's scaling. And, anyway. 

So yes, I think that this ‘reckoning’—I put it in air quotes, because I'm not sure it is actually a reckoning. I'm not sure. But I feel like it's—I know it's overdue. 

And in terms of what I'm thinking about now, I'm actually working on something that I'm really, really excited about that has not been a very—it's not been a public thing at all, because I don't think it needs to be. But I think it's worth just kind of talking about here, because I think it answers your question. 

So I have been working with a really wonderful literary agent, which is not a unicorn. That is a thing that exists. There are few and far between. But this wonderful literary agent, Cindy Uh, who is an agent at CAA, which is a huge agency. I know Cindy, because she's a member of Equity at the Table. 

And she reached out to me, it was a few months ago, about working on a book with a client of hers, working as a co-author, which is something I've done a lot of. And I just didn't think I was the right person for the job, and I also wasn't looking for that job. I was approaching the burnout that has led me to work on the farm, which is maybe funny. I don’t know. [Laughter.] 

But I got to talking to Cindy about how did my name become one of the very small number of names on the post—it that someone like her or a cookbook editor reaches out to when an author is looking for a collaborator? ‘Cause it's not a very long list of names. And we got to talking about this. 

So we have, over the past few months, been working on this—I don't know what to call it. Workshop, I guess, that we started. We’re in the middle of it now. And basically, we are working with five writers who are all either women of color, or queer, and or queer. Basically all the same people who are part of Equity at the Table. 

But five people. And we are doing this workshop where we're meeting every Sunday afternoon on Zoom, and we're basically giving all the information of what it is to make a cookbook, what it is to be a collaborator. And we've broken it down. We've made this whole syllabus. Cindy has really taken charge on that. That's awesome. 

And what I think sets us apart from other things is it's not just the information. We're also trying to create a lot of connection and access. So, we are not the ones giving this information. We have brought on agents and editors,  high powered cookbook agents and editors who are sharing the information and getting to know these writers. 

And I think the combination of those two things, the information but also the access and the relationships and the connection, that feels incredibly important. Because, as you know, because you've done this, you can provide information. Someone can Google how to write a book proposal. I can give you ones I've done before. I can tell you exactly how I make them. I'm happy to do that. I do that all the time. But that's not the same as helping create a connection between the gatekeepers who get to make the decisions about who gets to be hired. And working on this is something that has just fueled me, and it's honestly left me feeling much more positive about the industry that I am taking a pause from because I have not felt so positive about it for a long time. 

And I guess what's going through my mind right now, to answer your question, is the difference between working on a large scale, working on something like Equity at the Table, which has a lot of members, that reaches a lot of people. That's very big, right? Working on something like Feed the Resistance, which, again, had a lot of contributors, got a lot of press, tried to reach a lot of people. These large scale things. 

What I am really interested in now is something on a slightly smaller scale but that has a lot of impact. These five writers, that will make a very big impact, ‘cause that is literally doubling the number of go-to collaborators. And that feels important. 

And it's not that the other stuff doesn't feel important. I guess in general, I've tried to reach a lot of people with my work, whether it's in cookbooks or in other work I do. And I think I'm just at a point in my life right now when I'm just much more interested in much more personal connections, including stepping away from cookbooks to work on the farm and work with a small group of people in person every day, and not try and reach thousands of people online. 

I want to know the people who are buying the vegetables we're growing, and I want to know the people that I'm working with. And that feels just really—it's nice to have both these things in my life. And I guess that's what's on my mind, right now. I don't know, this is incredibly cheesy what I'm about to say. 

But something that has helped me just—it's given me a really helpful framework for everything we're talking about as to just try and think about food media, making it and consuming it, in the same way I think about making and consuming food. And I just try to think about, ‘Where does it come from? Who is making it? How are those people treated? What is the level of access and agency?’

I don't know, I think all these things apply for both. And that just helps me organize the stuff in my head because otherwise, it feels really overwhelming.

Alicia: No, it is overwhelming. And we do need our own little methodologies for dealing with. Because it's overwhelming. The world is overwhelming. It's so hard to do any right thing ever.

I was having this conversation with friends yesterday about whether it's okay for us to go to Costco in Puerto Rico, because—and it's like, I cook all the time. I bake all the time. I make recipes for other people to make, to influence other people to do vegan baking. And I need a lot of stuff, unfortunately, to do that. And the way to do that is in an affordable manner is to go to Costco. 

And I don't know, we don't have a car. You take kind of the climate impact of being people who don't drive every day, who don't put a car on the road. so what is it to kind of have some imported food in that— Anyway. 

So the whole thing is this whole kind of arithmetic around what choices can you make that are good for the planet and your local economy? And what choices are good for you as a human being who has to also work? [Laughs.]

Julia: Totally.

Yeah, I mean, I'm so with you. And these are things I think about often as both, to use this dreaded phrase that I think we both don't like, but as a creator of content. But also just as a person who feeds myself and my loved ones, and exist in this world. 

And I just think, I don't know, hearing what you just said, trying to figure out the right thing? I'm trying to understand that. I think with the options that exist and the systems that exist, I don't know that the right thing is available to us. So I think we are just, all, just, I don't know, doing the best we can with what we have. And we have different things. I just feel calmer about it when I'm like, ‘Oh, there isn't a right answer, because these things aren't built to support the right answer.’

So I think we're figuring, I think we're building the plane while we're flying it, whatever other analogies work here. And I don't know, I feel like I get things wrong all the time. But I'm trying to understand that that just is what it is. And part of why I get things wrong is because we're not set up to get things right. And that is the issue. Not so much my personal choices, though those are important.

Alicia: No, they are important. And I mean, to get now to this question, why for you is cooking a political act?

Julia: Again, hear you ask everyone this. I'm always like, ‘How would I answer this?’ And now? Oh, my gosh, we have reached the moment. 

Is cooking a political act? Absolutely. It's a political act. 100%. I don't think it's always a conscious political act. I don't think every single time I, I don't know, make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich am I like, ‘This is political.’ 

But I think that every time we spend money on anything, including food, we make decisions that have a political impact and make decisions that give feedback to systems that we are very attached to, whether we want to be or not. 

I think also another sort of part of this is that I think every time I share something I cook, whether it's a cookbook or an Instagram post, I think that sharing, that amplification, that attempt to communicate something, I think that is inherently political. So that's something I think about a lot. 

I love that you ask this question, because I think it reminds us that, or at least it reminds me, that I think we often think about political as something like capital P, right? ‘This moment, I'm voting. I'm advocating for this politician or something.’ These things that are incredibly important. But I think our lives are political. We exist in political systems. So everything we do is attached to that. And I think that it's kind of designed to make us not realize that. 

So yeah, I think my everyday cooking at home is totally political, as are so many other parts of my life. And the fact that I don't realize that often is, I think, part of both the problem and maybe the solution, or a solution. 

Oh, my gosh. I have so many other thoughts based on everything you ask, and that is just, I think, a testament to the work you show. So thank you.

Alicia: Thank you. 

No, you're too kind to me through this. I keep saying I need to get some people on who are going to be contentious. [Laughs.] I don’t have to do that. ‘Oh, are people bored? Are these too kind? Am I not challenging myself enough by not sparring in any way?’

Julia: I think that's the Long Island in you. [Laughter.]

Alicia: Well, again, I appreciate so much you taking the time out today to talk about all this. I'm so excited to hear and see more about your work on the farm and to continue to get inspiration from your cookbooks.

Julia: Well, thank you so much. And I really appreciate your time. I appreciate the time you make for all the amazing people you have on this. I'm really grateful to be one of them. And I just continue to look forward to learning from your work too. So I guess this is some mutual appreciation. And I think that is A-ok. I don't think you have to get the haters. That’s fine.

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Karla Vasquez is a writer and keeper of culture documenting the women who are keeping Salvadoran food tradition alive in the United States. Her project SalviSoul is putting oral tradition down on paper so that it can’t be lost, and it also points to the significance of specificity when discussing Latin American traditions: The U.S. considers the Latinx community a monolith, when it is actually wildly diverse.

I wanted to discuss with her the inspiration behind this, her experience so far working on a cookbook proposal, and how she expresses her voice authentically on social media. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Karla. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat today.

Karla: Of course! I'm so happy to chat with you today.

Alicia: [Laughs.] Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Karla: Yes. 

So I grew up in L.A. It's where I am right now. And I grew up in a very Salvadoran home. So, that meant a lot of—yeah, a lot of the Salvadoran staples. A lot of polea, a lot of rice, a lot of tortillas. The occasional carne asada over the weekend. Because we were new immigrants in this country, the food was really what told me we were from El Salvador because we didn't have things that I saw other Latino families had around in L.A. There wasn't tacos at the party. It was pupusas. It was tamal de pollo. Yeah, it was a very Salvi-saturated food upbringing.

Alicia: And so, what led you to working in food and founding SalviSoul?

Karla: [Laughs.] There were a few things that led me to this work that I'm doing now. And I guess I can summarize them by pointing to three reasons.

I mean, the fact that my family are just storytellers, and this was—we carried our histories through storytime. So I think wanting to do good storytelling just became a part of just legacy that my family has. When we would sit at the table, when we would have dinner time, it was automatic—we were going to know, we were going to find out more about where we came from and our histories. 

So apart from that, a huge reason that led me to SalviSoul and to starting this work was because I had a very personal experience with my health. I became a person who had to deal with a chronic illness. I am a Type 1 diabetic. And in my early 20s, when I was diagnosed, there were a lot of doctors who had good intentions. And a lot of what they said to me were, ‘Diabetes has everything to do with food. And you're Latina, and Latinos eat very poorly. So we would advise you not to eat XYZ.’

And as I mentioned, my upbringing, food was what told me we were from somewhere else. So when I got to experience my culture, it was at the table. And so hearing this kind of recommendation from several doctors and nurses, and it just broke my heart. And I felt like I had to make a decision of, ‘Do I cater my diet to my health, or do I try to figure out if they're—if they maybe don't know the whole truth?’

And that's really what got me into food justice advocacy. And before I did food writing, I was managing farmer’s markets. I was working in low—income areas here in L.A, doing cooking classes, free cooking classes, where we would talk about all the things you can do with all the harvest from the farmers. And so that definitely informed my work. 

And as I started to research different cookbooks and really just getting obsessed with the food world and becoming familiar with all the work farmers do to give us options at the farmer’s market, I started to look for Salvadoran cookbooks. And by this point I had been going to cooking school doing a cooking program here in L.A. 

And the results that I found when I started researching Salvi cookbooks, I found two. I found two books, and I just thought, like, ‘There's millions of us here, internationally.’ We have had to adapt a transnational identity because so many of us have had to leave El Salvador. And it just felt completely absurd that there wasn't a library, or that the library we had of cookbooks were so limited. 

And also that the two books available were not—they weren't things like books from 50 years ago or anything. They were recent, within 10 years—yeah, I think when I found the first English cookbook, it was 2015. And that book had been published in 2013. So, it was relatively new. And I longed to know more. I longed just to understand where—what foods did my family have for fest—for the days of festivals? What foods they have for lazy Sundays? Food was really a way for me to understand where I came from. 

And it was a way for me to know, in that passports were not there—I, for a moment in my life here in the U.S., I was undocumented. So when documentation can’t tell you where you're from, when the language on both ends is a struggle, food was the thing that didn't ask me to be any way. I just knew we were from El Salvador because we eat plátanos, polea, queso duro, pan francés. 

Those were the, yeah, I guess the veins of the work that eventually led me to say, ‘What if I started a project, and I interviewed my grandmother and ask her for my favorite dish?’ And there was a really incredible moment in working with my grandmother. And she's definitely the co-creator of SalviSoul, because without me saying too much about it, I didn't have a name. I didn't have much, but just a question of curiosity. And I pitched it to her. And she said, ‘Oh, sí, Karla. Esto se trata del legado de la mujer salvadoreña.’ Like, ‘Karla, this is about the legacy of El Salvadoran women. You're going to interview women, they're going to tell you stories. And we're going to get these recipes documented that no one has really bothered to look there.’ 

And that was it. That was the moment that really—yeah, it was the beginning of so many things.

Alicia: And when Patricia Escárcega wrote about you for the L.A. Times last year, she wrote about your desire to write a Salvadoran cookbook. And she specifically mentioned that what you were just saying, that the cuisine of El Salvador is kept alive by women. Can you tell me more about the significance of women in Salvadoran cooking?

Karla: Absolutely. My goodness.

So much of what we know, as a diaspora is because of women in the kitchen, and women feeding their families. There’s that entrepreneurial spirit in, with immigrants, where I can't be hired. I don't have documentation. I don't know anyone here. But I know how to make some bomb tamales. I can make 150 of them and sell them on a corner, and people who are hungry will come and try it. 

When I started this project, there was a lot of wanting to give credit where credit has been past due. We have so many enclaves of Salvadorans in this country, and a lot of these enclaves really surround little mercaditos, little restaurants who have been serving these foods. And it's because of their diligence. And I think cooking, especially within a Latino, Latinx context, for women, I think it's a very complex issue because of course, we have been forced in the kitchen. I definitely had a lot of that push and pull feeling of like, ‘I don't want to work in the kitchen, because that's what has been-’ A good girl will want to work in the kitchen. And I didn't want that.

This work taught me a lot of nuance that we haven't been able to really sit with as a community. And I speak for Salvadoran community that I've interacted with. I definitely don't speak for the whole of our community. But with the experiences I've had, so many folks will say to me, ‘Karla, I don't know where else I can feel I belong to El Salvador or that I belong to this culture if it weren't for the home-cooked meals that my mom makes me or that my grandmother makes me.’

And the tension I have with that is that it then becomes this granny practice, right? And I've had moments where people say, ‘I don't need to bother to learn a recipe because I can just go home and eat it there.’ And I always have to stop myself from reacting honestly, because I want to say, ‘It's up to us. It's up to us to practice. Any culture that’s alive is practiced. It’s participated in. And you can’t lament not being able to have access to it, or for it to be a part of your life when you’re kind of assigning it to a generation that’s the older generation. It's an unfair ask to then put the whole weight of preserving culture on a generation that's done the work.’

So absolutely, there's huge significance. And especially because a lot of the history in El Salvador, there's been a lot of violence towards women. And my project is a place to highlight Salvadoran women. And yes, to highlight their sazón, to highlight the vibrancy they have for life. But also to say, ‘This is their place. This is a place that's dedicated to them. They are amazing individuals. They have incredible stories, I will introduce you to them and give you a snippet of who they are.’

SalviSoul is very much Salvi woman-obsessed. [Laughs.]

Alicia: Right. [Laughter.] 

And you mentioned before knowing you were Salvadoran by virtue of what you were eating, and that you weren't eating tacos the way everyone else was. And I feel I haven't been to L.A. in a—I was there once, I think, maybe in 2008. 

But I know that L.A. is such an amazing food city. And reading Jonathan Gold and all that stuff, it really—it gives you a sense of what L.A. is about and how significant food is for L.A. How do you think your city influences your kind of culinary vision, or your kind of culinary understanding?

Karla: Hmm.

Alicia: If at all? [Laughs.]

Karla: No, it absolutely does. I feel like there's a few ways in which it will influence. 

And I mean, I can speak on it from my point of view as a writer. Being able to meet so many different food writers here. I mean, just last week, I was talking to someone who is a food writer. And she's working on a Hungarian cookbook. And her cookbook is very similar where highlighting a lot of the women in her life, who are these cultural hubs for a lot—for the community here in L.A. 

And I think when you see a place like this city like Los Angeles, and you see people who come from the same place as you or similar places, and you see them not having to make compromises of who they are, it's a very—I remember the first time kind of seeing El Salvadorania and kind of being it. There weren't many out there. 

But I was just like, ‘Holy s**t. This is really f*****g bad. I didn't know this was possible.’ Because I think being an immigrant and growing up here, you really are trying to check all the boxes so you can stay here, so you're not separated from your family. So you can flourish the way you believe you can. And sometimes in that thought process, you realize that there will be compromises or that you will have to stop being a certain way or that your Spanish will have to disappear or any of those kinds of things. 

But living in a place like L.A., you start to see beautiful food concepts for restaurants that are led by the people that they are representing. And they are beautiful. They're a breath of fresh air. There's a huge spirit of pushing back and punk attitude. And I definitely feed off of that, because the publishing worlds, when I pitched this to them, were very much like, ‘People won't know what this is. People won't know what to do with it.’ I had an agent who I was pitching to say to me, ‘The American public won’t know what this is.’ And because I am in a place where there's—thankfully, I have a lot of examples of pushback where I can say, ‘I am the American public. And I want this, and plenty of other people want this.’ 

So yeah, I'm so grateful. It would be interesting to know what SalviSoul would look like in a place that wasn't this kind of presence of thriving and not compromising.

Alicia: Right.

And I mean, to speak to that, too, you post your Instagram captions in a mix of English and Spanish. And so I wanted to ask how you came to your voice as a writer, and if anyone was an influence on the way you approach your voice?

Karla: Well, the one piece of—I have one quote that I always lean on, by James Baldwin. And it's, ‘The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.’ Of course, I always say her, ‘who produced her.’ 

That's kind of been a piece of advice that's been a North Star for me. This whole question of figuring out what your voice is, it's so vague. And it's scary. And you want to make sure, or at least I want to make sure, that I'm speaking to the people who are looking for me. And so I do think about who are the people who produced me and produced these kinds of questions inside of me. 

I think about my grandmother, and—she was a phenomenal storyteller. And I think about how she never, ever had writer's block. And she didn’t necessarily type out stories or anything, but she did share lots of stories. 

And I think sometimes, the fact that we're writing kind of gives us this, makes us neurotic people. Because we’re not just sharing it, where there's so much that comes with the actual action of writing. And she never had writer's block. She never doubted herself when she would share a story. She would walk into the kitchen, and she'd be like, ‘[Snaps fingers.] Karla, ¿Qué esto pasó?’ And she had the feeling in her body. And she knew how to capture her audience. 

And so, I think of her whenever I start to get too much in my head. And I think a lot of what I've learned is—it's not about my feelings of me as a writer. It's just the story, this emotion. Something I've been realizing a lot recently is that writing is really catching feelings. You're trying to catch as many as you can.

I mean, I've read a lot of people who have shaken something inside me, and yeah, those are there. I don't know that any of those folks I've read, like Jonathan Gold, any food people you read have helped me become the writer that I want to be as much as the quote from James Baldwin and the attitude of my grandmother and how she was a storyteller. But, yeah, I think there's been so many little pieces of guidance and wisdom that have found me 

I'm not sure if I’m answering the question, but-

Alicia: You are. [Laughter.]

Since that L.A. Times profile of you last year by Escárcega, have you found an agent for the project of your cookbook?

Karla: I have, and honestly I can’t believe it. I shouldn't say that. I really didn't think I was gonna find one. I was pitching and sending out my proposal. And people would say, ‘This project sounds wonderful, Karla, but we've learned that compilation books really don't do well.’ Or, ‘Karla, this sounds great. But there's too many voices here.’ I'm sharing stories of 25 different women, plus myself. And then, of course, getting comments about ‘Well, what is Salvadoran food? People are not really interested in it.’

So yeah, I finally found my agent. After having all these different experiences with these folks, I did have a few kind of rules. Like I said, ‘I'm not going to work with anyone if they're making me feel like they're doing me a favor.’ No, I am doing them a favor. There has not been a Salvadoran cookbook published in this country by a traditional publisher. They should be happy that I am giving them an audience, because this will only help them in the trajectory of their business. 

I have had to kind of have this attitude, because—yeah, it's just unbelievable the way some folks have treated me. And it's ridiculous that it's taken this long. But my agent gets so many things. From the beginning, just said, ‘Put me in. I'm ready to work. I'm ready for this to be on bookshelves. Let's get to work.’

So yeah, I am so close to finishing my proposal right now. We had to kind of fine tune a lot of it. And I'm sure you know all about the proposal business here. It's been hard. 

Alicia: It's hard. It's so much work. Before you even get to the book, it's so much work. And then when you get to the book, it's so much more work. [Laughs.]

Karla: Yeah.

Alicia: Yeah.

Karla: The publishing industry is cruel. 

Alicia: Yeah. [Laughs.] But that's so exciting. 

You’ve been working with traditional kind of food media. Have you found a lot of pushback there? Have you found yourself feeling good working in food media?

Karla: Yeah.

I mean I will say, I think everything that's been happening in food media for the last year since last summer with the whole BA episode, I think the environment is different than when I started in food media in—beginning in 2016, I believe that’s when I started. 

Yeah, I would send out pitches back then saying like, ‘Hey, I want to highlight this restaurant. They are innovating Salvi food, and no one's really talking about this.’ And people were not interested, or—if they did, if I did hear back from them, they would say, ‘Oh, well, so-and-so already wrote about this.’ And I would say well, ‘That so-and-so is a Chicano writer who has no nuance. Can we at least consider a different angle perhaps?’

And now, it's different. I mean, I've had a few food opportunities knock on my door and say, ‘We want to feature you. There's a few things coming down the pipeline.’ So I can't say all the details, but I would have never imagined them knocking on my door and saying, ‘Hey, we would love if you could write a recipe or, and write an article. And we want to feature you.’ So I think it's a different world now for food writers like myself. We can start to see some changes. 

I do think that I'm also at a place where I have maybe a little bit of— all of the rejection you get kind of get to you. I don't care if they knock on my door now. I care less. Some of the places who have featured me—L.A. Times did feature me. But there have been some other ones who, they say they're really prestigious and nothing happens. Nothing happens, except that they end up looking maybe a little bit more inclusive or diverse, highlighted someone from a small country? Sure. 

I can’t honestly take you seriously as a food media when you haven't bothered to cater to this expanse, food media cultures that you haven't really bothered to look into. So, I take myself seriously. So, I will work with folks have demonstrated that they have been invested. It's a very small group of people. It's interesting how that happens, right? When they finally start calling you, you're just like, ‘I'm not interested in you. I am shocked that I ever thought you were that important, that I had angst about whether or not I'd ever be on your radar, you know?’

Alicia: Yeah. No, it's interesting. 

And I mean, you mentioned having the lack of nuance when a Chicano writer writes about a Salvadoran restaurant. And the U.S. media really has an idea of Latinx culture that is very one note. And you can kind of interchange one Latino for another. 

And how have you seen that get better, maybe, in the last couple of years if you have? I feel it watching coverage of Puerto Rico. Obviously, there's a huge Puerto Rican diaspora in the U.S., but it's very interesting to see the diaspora prospective versus someone who lives here and that sort of thing. It's considered the same thing, though, from the U.S. perspective.

Karla: I mean, my gosh. 

I think that several things can be true at the same time. Things have gotten better; things have stayed the same. How do I say this? How do I express all the feelings? If there has been an opportunity for me to write something, I think that there are—because of Twitter, I'll be tagged in something that said, ‘They should have hired Karla to write this. She is one of the few Salvadoran food writers, but they decided to go with a Chicano.’ Those kinds of things are happening. Before, those things didn't happen. 

So it's not to say that they’re hiring me for the—that would be awesome. But they’re acknowledging—or the people are acknowledging, and that's how we accomplish anything. Enough people who have the platform's hopefully strong enough, big enough, that you start to see something change. That's what I'm seeing. Before if I wasn't really putting myself out there, pitching, kind of being in front of folks, it's not—it wasn't going to come my way, or it's not going to. 

But I mean, we'll see. I think this is why I want to do this cookbook, right? And why I decided not to self publish, but to pursue traditional publishing, because I do believe that having that kind of—it's almost like having that rite of passage for the community will create an environment where, ‘Hey, are we doing our due diligence if we aren't asking Salvadoran writers to write Salvadoran content?’ Or, as a bare minimum, asking Central American folks. 

So I think that there is a path that has been made. It's not a path that is very populated, but there—we're getting there. Yeah, I think that's the best I can say as far as—if I were to give a grade, I would add in the comments, ‘Shows huge improvements. Keep it there, but we’re not there yet, honey.’

So yeah, I don't think I'll ever be satisfied with food media because historically, they've taken too much from everyone. I don't know that they deserve my satisfaction. So, I do think what I want is for the people, the powers that be, just to get out of the effing way. If you can't support, if you can't give up the jobs, get out of the way. Stop sabotaging. 

But anyway, I digress.

Alicia: [Laughs.]

No, but it’s real. And I know in that L.A. Times piece, again, you were talking about how Instagram following is kind of considered super important for selling a cookbook. But I have seen lots of cookbooks be published by people with 2000 followers on Instagram and 2000 followers on Twitter. And I think it's something I've seen be told to a lot to women of color, who are trying to push a cuisine that has—that the publishing forces-that-be don't think has a big audience.

But meanwhile, I have a Romanian cookbook. And it's great. And, of course, but that's a similar kind of a small country as well. But it has a cookbook, and I don't want to say that that writer didn't put in a lot of work. But it's, how many people in the U.S. have eaten Romanian food versus a pupusa? 

So how do you see social media? To me, it's this kind of necessary kind of evil of promoting your work. But what is your kind of relationship with that? 

Karla: Let's see. Gosh, heavy hitters.

Alicia: I'm sorry. [Laughter.]

Karla: No, I love it. I love them. Absolutely here for it. 

My relationship with social media has had to evolve. At the very beginning, at the onset of SalviSoul, bringing it into the social media scape, it was just such a nurturing place. All the folks who have kind of been that person and had that experience like I had, where I was really excited to look for Salvi cookbooks and then came up on two, and then the two were sold out. We were all finding each other. And it was just so beautiful. I kept having these feelings, again, and again, of like, ‘Oh, you too! You have this thing? Oh my gosh.’ So, it was a really beautiful thing. 

And knowing that the numbers kept going up, and I had—I remember when I just had a few hundred followers. And I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh. I have 400 people who are with me on this, who think that this should be a thing. Oh my gosh, this is so f*****g cool.’ 

And then when I had made the decision to not self publish, but to pursue this journey of traditional publishing, I met a great agent. And she said, ‘This is an incredible project. There is an audience for this. We definitely can find you a publisher who will do right by you. However, you need more followers.’ And I think at this point in time, I maybe had like 4,000. She said, ‘I need you to have at least 10.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my gosh. That's a lot.’

And for me at the time, I think I also interpreted it as I can't connect to that many people. Because it was just like, ‘Connecting, connecting, connecting with—it was just I was finding family. And you do the catch of you go with friends. You go, ‘How you’ve been?’ And it was just organic, too. It wasn't a strategy of how to gain a bigger following. It was just like, ‘I want to know, where the rest of the diaspora is.’ Because people from Canada, from Abu Dhabi, from Tokyo, Savis all over the world, they're like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I've been waiting for something like this. And I'm so happy I found you.’

So then hearing, ‘We need 10,000,’ I was like, ‘There's no way I can get these by myself. I need to find people to promote my work. I need to get in front of more people.’ It's just this compounded stress of ‘I need to keep having these emotional connections people that I don't think I have capacity for.’ That had been the way that the community grew. 

And a lot of this too, I have to be very careful. Because I see this happen a lot, where you have projects or books that are about tough things that we've had to survive. It becomes the gimmick. You show all your pain and suffering, and then they say, ‘Oh, yeah, that's enough for us to humanize you. We feel something now, so we're gonna care now.’ 

I almost felt when this person said, ‘I need you to have 10,000,’ I felt like this person wanted me to do that, because that's the fastest way you can get attention or make a meaningful connection. And those were a lot of things to process. No one's in my family has ever been published. There's never been a freelancer in my family. I became one so that I could be available for this. I was Frankensteining income with whatever came my way. 

And now I just felt like I had this huge task of, ‘Go find another 5,000+ people that you need to connect with and that they need to find value in the work you do, when you have receipts to show that the general public has cared less about the Salvadoran community.’

So yeah, it was fucked up. I was like, ‘I don't know how to-’ I didn't know how to deal. But I just kept doing what I was doing. I kept posting, posting not really with a strategy in mind but just, ‘Hey, this is what I'm learning. I'm sharing it with you all, because this is what the page is.’ And then eventually, a few folks with—who are also Salvis and had larger, much larger followings, who were Salvis in fashion, Salvis in makeup sharing, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s a food account and she's doing cooking classes. You guys have to follow.’

And then, we eventually got to 10,000 especially after the L.A. Times piece. That helped a lot. And I went back to that agent and I said, ‘Hey, guess what! I have the 10,000. It was amazing.’ And then unfortunately, they ghosted me. So, I don't know. Was she really serious, or was she maybe just giving me a number that felt difficult and she maybe thought, ‘It'll take her a really long time.’ Or maybe she really was—It was last year that I got back to her, so 2020. Have to have a bit of patience with folks, because we're all still going through it. 

So yeah, I think social media—it's hard, ‘cause that was the same year that American Dirt came out. And we were all talking about how does someone with 3000 followers. Three books, I think. She'd already published three books, get a six figure book deal. And she only has less than 5,000 followers on any accounts. How did that happen? How? So, we know how. 

So yeah, I think that I, as far as my strategy now with social media, I'm wanting to still connect with people. I'm choosing to create from a place that is of service to Salvi folks. creating beautiful things, creating informative things. 

The end of last year was really hard, because I had family who was hospitalized due to COVID. And thankfully, they're fine now, thank and goodness. Everything was just really difficult. And I think I didn’t post for like three months, which I think is—yeah, exactly. It's criminal when you think about it and everything you have to do. I stopped doing my cooking classes that I was doing weekly. I stopped posting. I didn't have it in me. 

Yeah, I’ve have had time to rest. I have help now, too. I have someone who helps me with social media. So yeah, I think it's always a habit of resetting what social media is there to do for you. And publishers, I'm sure, will want me to have hundreds of thousands. But if that's not what I have, then that's not what I have. And I'm not gonna buy followers. I'm not going to do anything that doesn't feel honest. And that's just what they have to deal with, ‘cause I have to deal with a lot more than just worry, worrying about how many followers I have. 

Alicia: Well, for you is cooking a political act?

Karla: I think so, yes. Yes. It doesn't always have to be. I think cooking, the intention behind it can be very much like eating. But sometimes we eat for health, sometimes we eat for enjoyment. Sometimes we eat because otherwise we're gonna die. 

Being a diabetic, my relationship to food almost feels like it's on this whole other level. Because there have been moments where—yeah, I'm not sure how familiar you are with diabetes, but you can—I have Type 1, so my pancreas, which produces the insulin that helps me break down all the carbohydrates that become sugar that become energy, my body doesn't make any. So I have to give myself between five to six injections a day of insulin. And everything I eat is a very conscious choice. 

And so naturally, anytime I cook is also very conscious. And when you add that layer of cooking Salvadoran food when there are so many policies that have meant to harm my community, cooking is definitely a very political act. To say that I'm going to learn and practice these ways in this country, and that I'm going to teach others to thrive at it as well, I think is the most radical thing I can do for my community and for us to feel strong. So absolutely. I think it's a political act.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much for taking the time again.

Karla: Oh my gosh, thank you so much. This has been wonderful.

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Dianne Jacob has been writing since the 1970s, and she brings the perspective of someone well-versed in the industry to her book Will Write for Food, the fourth edition of which just came out this week. In the text and her online writing, she demystifies what is often thought of as the romantic world of food writing for anyone who might want to break into it. That’s required paying attention to how the industry has evolved in the last twenty years, especially, as people have moved away from restaurant reviewing and toward online work.

We discussed what drew her to food writing, how she’s adapted to a digital world as a self-described “print snob,” and how she defines diversity. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Dianne. Thank you so much for coming on today and taking the time out.

Dianne: Thank you. It's my pleasure.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Dianne: Sure. 

I grew up in Vancouver, Canada. And my parents were refugees. They came there in 1949 to escape Mao. They were from China, born and raised. So we grew up there, because my mother was British, and she could get into Canada, it being part of the Commonwealth. 

I think, in the beginning, my parents did not know anything about cooking because they had servants in China. But eventually, they missed their food and they had to figure out how to make it. There were a lot of phone calls with family. And I grew up eating three, maybe four or five kinds of food. Iraqi Jewish food, Bombay, Baghdadi Jewish dishes. Chinese dishes. My mother loved to make Japanese food as well. And every once in a while, she would attempt Western food, which she put her own spin on. Sometimes that went well, and sometimes it didn't. [Laughter.] 

Alicia: And what got you interested in food as something to spend your life focused on?

Dianne: It took a while to figure out why. But I think what it came down to is that, is because of my parents. They had a very weird background, and they didn't fit in anywhere. They didn't fit in with the Jewish community. And they didn't fit in with the Chinese community, because they weren't Chinese. They still wanted to express their identity, and they expressed it through food. 

And it was really, really important to them. My mother cooked every day. My father was in charge of pickling things and making leben, which is the Arab yogurt. So, they had a garden. And it was a major focus of their life. So I think I just took that for granted for a long time. And I didn't really understand that it was also a major focus of mine.

Alicia: How did you learn that it was?

Dianne: It was when I became self-employed. Before, I had a lot of different kinds of jobs as an editor and reporter and feature writer, and I just worked at different kinds of magazines and newspapers. And even a book publishing house, on whatever topic there was, ’cause I was an editor. 

And then when I became self-employed, I realized that I had to become an individual contributor. And before, I had always been a manager. And so I had to figure out what I wanted to write about. And what I wanted to write about was food.

Alicia: What has made you focus on food for so long? I mean, I'm sure we'll discuss this, but food media is not a really easy or welcoming place. And so, what has kept you writing about food all this time?

Dianne: Actually, I haven't been writing about food that much. Early in my career, I wrote restaurant reviews. I wrote a lot of service pieces. I wrote a column, a recipe column. 

But then, because I had such a long career as an editor and I missed working with writers, I got more interested in working with writers. So most of what I write about is how to be a food writer in all its glorious guidance, and how there are so many parts to it. There are endless subjects to keep me interested: food and politics, food and identity, ethics, how to write a good recipe, how to get a book deal, how to make a living, how to grow your blog. It's endless. And so, I've never been bored. [Laughs.]

Alicia: [Laughs.] Yeah.

And you've just come out with the fourth edition of your book, Will Write for Food. What has kind of changed in your motivation and your approach to this book since the first edition in 2005?

Dianne: Well, I started teaching food writing at Book Passage, which is a big bookstore here in the San Francisco Bay Area. And I couldn't find a book on food writing. So I thought, ‘Well, maybe I should write one.’ I figured if I was going to teach on the subject, it would be useful to have this book. 

So the first edition came out in 2005. And at that time, restaurant reviewing was really big. So there was a huge chapter on restaurant reviewing, and it was all focused on fine dining. And there's a chapter on fiction writing, which are—Mostly, the most popular genre in food fiction writing is murder mysteries with recipes, with great titles like, ‘The butter did it!’ 

And food blogs were just starting out. But I was still a print snob, then. And I thought, ‘Well, I don't really know what this is,’ and ‘Where are the gatekeepers?’ So I just ignored it. [Laughter.] And that turns out to be a big mistake. 

So in the second edition, I had to write a huge chapter on food blogging, which was in full swing. That was in 2010. And the Pioneer Woman was a big celebrity blogger then. And she wrote a blurb for my book. 

And then the third edition came out in 2015. And by then, people were more interested in how to make a living as a food writer—and mostly, especially online. They wanted to know how to make money online with recipes, or as content creators. I had to write about transitioning from a hobby to a business, more about photography, social media. A lot less on restaurant reviewing, because with the advance of Yelp, it just—restaurant reviewing has become a job that ten people have. [Laughs.]

And then for the fourth edition, which comes out on May 25, I got rid of the Eurocentric focus on food and writers. And I brought in more diverse voices, younger voices. There's a much smaller chapter on restaurant writing, more on making money. 

And I wrote a new chapter on voice, because the field has become very crowded these days, and a lot of people are writing the same kind of content. And so, how do you stand out in a crowded field if you're writing the same kind of content as other people? For me, it comes down to voice. 

Alicia: Right.

No, that's so important. And you also have your blog. You also send out a newsletter. Why have you gone sort of an independent route with your work?

Dianne: Well, I started the blog in 2009 because I knew I was going to have to write about food blogging. And I felt if I didn't jump in, I was never going to understand it. 

So I mean, I did jump in. But I didn't start a food blog. I started a blog about writing, particularly food writing. And at first I did twice a week, short posts about whether blogging is journalism, how adapting a recipe doesn't make it yours. It was really fun because in those days, people weren't on social media as much. I would regularly have like 50 or 80 responses. And I would get in theoretical arguments with people. 

I remember having a big argument with Shauna Ahern about whether blogging was journalism, all in the comments, going back and forth. And Paula Wolfert was one of my first commenters. It was a really heavy time. 

And then for the newsletter, I started that probably ten years ago. But then, it was just for anyone who had been a student of mine or a client. But now it has a bigger audience than my blog. And both of them together have me—they kept me on a regular writing schedule, and—which is really important. Because I don't want to just be an editor and coach for people. I want to keep my writing practice. 

And so I've been writing mostly service, what's called service writing, how-to pieces. Opinion pieces. And I bring in a lot of guest posters when they have wisdom to share.

Alicia: Right.

And how do you find it now? It's been over a decade that you've been kind of writing for yourself, writing directly to readers. What have you gleaned in that time from that kind of writing versus writing for publications?

Dianne: Well, the joy of not having a gatekeeper, and writing whatever you want, just can't be underestimated. But you still have to be relevant for people. 

This is something I learned as a writer early on, I think, when I was doing restaurant reviewing. What I learned was that people may never go to the restaurant, but they still want to read my review. And they wanted to be entertained. And I think I'm still learning about entertaining people. I tend to be very serious. [Laughter.] You are too, right? 

But entertainment is a huge part of writing for people. And so, it always has to be an element. I'm still figuring that out. I'm still figuring out how to be personal, and not just talk about what's going on in the industry. How much of myself to reveal. And of course, social media only amplifies that issue.

Alicia: Yeah. 

I don't know. I hope I'm not serious. I hope I don't come off serious. 

Dianne: Really?

Alicia: Yeah, the funny thing is that I'm not a serious person as a human being. So it's interesting that my writing that is popular is very serious. 

And it's a little bit frustrating to me, because I think I am trying to balance within one audience a few different ideas of what people want for me. And so some people like the personal writing and some people like the polemical, political writing. And some people like some more specific food writing about specific ingredients, or that sort of thing. 

And it's really hard to make all of those people happy all of the time. Which I guess the answer is—it's impossible.

Dianne: Yeah, it is.

Alicia: I find having direct contact with an audience that wants things from me pretty challenging most of the time. I don't know if I have the ability or the stamina to go on with it for over a decade, like you have. [Laughs.]

Dianne: A lot of what I write is not personal. I think that’s how I've been able to handle it, it's—just a while ago, I wrote a blog on how I noticed that I had a half-tablespoon measure in my drawer, but I never see half-tablespoon measuring recipes. And when I do, I usually edit it out and put one and a half teaspoons. Sometimes, you just never know if people are gonna respond to that or not. 

And people were all over it. And they were telling me, oh no, they've had this tablespoon for years. And they always use it in recipes. And it was the most minor subject.

Alicia: Right. It got people going.

Dianne: Yeah, it got people going. [Laughter.]

Alicia: Well, I think it's interesting to talk to you today, because while this is coming out in late May, we're talking in late April. And the people who are in the essays that are being included in Best American Food Writing 2021 have been announced in some form.

Dianne: Oh. I haven’t seen that yet. 

Alicia: [Laughs.] 

And I wanted to ask you, because you wrote about—you wrote a gorgeous and award-winning essay about mangoes for Lucky Peach in 2016. And then you wrote a blog post that just broke down the process. And I feel that was such a na—genius, kind of ahead of its time move to do that because I think it's only in recent times that we've really been having this conversation about what makes things successful in food media, and what makes a piece end up in an anthology or winning awards and that sort of thing. 

And so, I wanted to ask you why you wanted to matter-of-factly break that down for people.

Dianne: Well, thank you for calling it gorgeous. I appreciate that. And also, thank you for finding that post, because I've got thousands of posts now going back to 2009. So, I didn't even remember that one. So, I went back and read it. 

But I think what I wanted to get across is that people tend to think that writing is some kind of magic that people can just pour things forth, and it will be beautiful and fully formed. And that was not my experience writing that piece. That piece took a long time. And it appeared in various guises. And I just want people to know that it's work. It's work to get there. 

And also that if you do want to be recognized for your work a lot of the time, you have to—most, almost all the time, you have to apply. And I was so freaked out by the James Beard awards that I didn't even apply. I didn't even for that piece. I just couldn't get up the nerve. It was just ridiculous. The things you tell yourself are insane sometimes. [Laughter.]

Alicia: No, it's true. 

Has how you perceive awards changed since that time?

Dianne: Not really. You have to believe in your work enough to submit awards. And I'm always telling people on social media and in my newsletter, ‘Ok, the award deadline is coming up. You can’t wait anymore unless you apply. You've got to pay some money. You've got to believe in your work.’ And that hasn't changed. 

I think there are very few awards where you don't apply. Maybe the Art of Eating award, you don't apply for that. Even Best Food Writing, you can submit your work to it.

Alicia: No. Yeah. 

And I mean, it's interesting. The James Beard awards are, I think, the most expensive award to submit yourself for. And I don't know if you've ever judged the writing awards for them. But—

Dianne: I have judged them, but not journalism. I've judged books for the Beard Award. 

Alicia: Oh, ok. Right. 

Well, it's interesting to me that it's—people pay so much money to be considered, and then the people doing the reading aren't paid for that time, either. So, it's interesting. I mean, I've written before about how much I loathe the James Beard awards. [Laughs.] 

Yeah, it's a difficult thing. And that's why I appreciated that blog post, because I think that people often do think, like you said, that it's this magical process toward writing the great essay that will get attention. And it's not. It just is plodding to get there. 

Dianne: Yes, with a lot of self-doubt and putting it away and bring it back out. And yeah, just how it is. I’ve been a published writer since 1974, and I still go through that.

Alicia: And I didn't give you this question, ’cause I'm only really—I'm considering this right now this week, that the idea of being creative and working in a creative field is, I think, something that we're supposed to always talk about in a very lofty manner. And your whole work that you're doing now is about, and have been doing, is about breaking that down for people and making it about success and not shying away from the business end of it. 

And I wanted to ask how you kind of balance or decided to balance those things, and how creativity and business—how in your mind do they kind of fit together?

Dianne: That's a really good question. 

What I've decided is that there are some people who are entrepreneurs, and they’re business people first. And they apply their creativity to their business. Whereas food writing, I think, for so long has been a hobby and not taken seriously and things that people do on the side or they just do it for fun, or they do it because they're privileged enough to not worry about whether they're going to get paid for it or how much. That's a whole other kind of thinking. 

And so you can produce the same work. I mean, you can write a recipe and have either point of view. But the people who are making a business from it are focused on that. They're focused on financial success, however they define that. I've had people as clients who have made six, high six figure incomes. I've interviewed people who have made high, mid-six figure incomes. And they're just as good as writing a recipe as the people who get paid nothing. But they’re entrepreneurial about it. 

Alicia: Right, right.

That's an interesting way of looking at it, I think. ’Cause I think I have a lot of guilt about money in being a creative person. Guilt about thinking of my work as labor and guilt about thinking of my work in business terms, in a way that I never did if I was selling people cakes or cookies. I would never feel this way, but because I'm just writing—And as I say it, I say, ‘just writing.’ 

Dianne: Just writing, yup.

Alicia: Yeah. [Laughs.]

I'm like, ‘Is this real work? Am I supposed to be caring about money? Is it gauche of me to need money to live?’ [Laughs.] 

Dianne: Exactly.

Alicia: Yeah. 

And so trying to kind of be honest about these things, and how it all really works, which is a lot—it's very complicated.

Dianne: It is, because money is fraught, especially in American society. Fraught with so many issues. 

I have the privilege sometimes of writing a piece for my own pleasure and getting paid very little for it. And I think, ‘Is something wrong with me that I do this, because at the end of the day, it's not—my labor isn't being paid for. So, is that wrong? Or do I just decide that I'm a privileged person?’ and then I have guilt about that. [Laughter.] You can make yourself crazy with this stuff.

Alicia: Right, right. 

No, and in this new edition, in the introduction, you talk about the diversity of voices that have emerged in food writing in the last decade and the major writers of color, or Black writers who've emerged in this time. And you yourself could be said to have a ‘diverse’ background. So, I wanted to ask you how you define diversity.

Dianne: Thank you. 

So first, I'll define it for the book. So my editor and I spent a lot of time on how we were going to define it. And she was very helpful. So of course, there's BIPOC, which means Black, Indigenous and people of color. But that's not everybody. 

I just looked up the new abbreviation LGBTQQIAP. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, ally, pansexual. Got all that? [Laughs.]

Alicia: Yes. [Laughter.]

Dianne: We're leaving out people who are disabled. I know, it's not everyone. But at least we're enlarging who can write about food and how they write about it. 

And so I tried to describe the intersection of food writing and more diversity in the first chapter. And I don't fit into one category. I mean, I present as a white person, and I have the privilege of a white person. But my parents were Chinese refugees from—who were Iraqi. So it's kind of complicated. Identity for me is a huge topic, and I'm endlessly fascinated by it.

Alicia: And I wanted to ask if you've faced—I mean, you just said you, you're a white person with the privileges of a white person. How do you view the kind of gatekeeping that occurs in food media and the fact that we have taken so long to start seeing food media more accurately reflect the world at large? 

Dianne: Oh, yeah, it's taken a long time. I mean, I graduated from journalism school in 1974. And it was almost entirely white. And every job I had, the whole staff was almost entirely white and the writers I hired were almost entirely white. 

I never questioned it in the beginning. We weren't having those kinds of conversations. And it's taken a long time to start—for the publishing industry—to start having the conversation, and to own it that publishing is, what, 85, 86 percent white. Depending on which publishing you're talking about, but I think, for us, it is. It's just taken a really long time because the gatekeepers were not really aware of how, of choosing their own and how their own were always available. 

I mean, white writers came to me and want to be published. And I didn't think about seeking out other kinds of people for the longest time.

Alicia: Right, right. [Laughs.]

And how did that moment of clarity kind of emerge?

Dianne: Well, just in the last few years, it's become a lot more obvious that this system has to change. And I've had my own understanding about it also, and questioning what I could do about it. 

Last year, in honor of Black Lives Matter, I had—I said I would take on five new clients who were interested in food writing, who are all Black, for $100 instead of $800, because I know there's this disparity in the income of white people versus Black people. And so that was something new, for me to do that. And it went really well. I had really terrific people to work with, who were—or I could just suggest to them, they work very hard. And it was good. It was a good experience. And now I'm trying to figure out what else I can do. 

Alicia: Right.

How far in advance do you start planning your next edition of the book?

Dianne: Well, they've come out every five years. I guess, technically, it was supposed to come out last year, but because of the pandemic they pushed it. So this one is out every—on the sixth year. So I can keep a file of all the stuff I’ve forgotten to write about, and how to rethink what I wrote about.

When I first got into food writing, I was absolutely bewildered by the Eurocentric nature of it. And it was so foreign to me, because I didn't know about European food. I didn't have the income to go to fine-dining restaurants and eat continental food, as it was called at the time. And I just didn't understand why everyone was so excited about it. [Laughter.] So we've come a long way from that point.

Alicia: Right. 

And for you, is cooking a political act?

Dianne: Certainly. 

Yeah. Because you make decisions, you make decisions. Are you going to buy organic, and is that just for your own health or is it for the health of the people who work in the fields and for the health of the planet? Can you look beyond yourself and see why that would be a good idea? Are you eating a plant based diet to—for environmental reasons or for your own health? 

Are you claiming your food as being from one country or another? I just had a guest post about—that Nandita Godbole, I don't know if I'm pronouncing her name right, wrote about cultural appropriation. And I realized that I had written a recipe for some—a Chinese dish that my mother made. And I was very wrapped up in the memory of how she made it and how delicious it was and what my memories were as a child eating it. 

And then I realized after reading her posts that I hadn't thought about, ‘Was this a dish that existed in Shanghai? And did my mother eat it? And is that how she found out about it? And what do I know about the Chinese version of this dish?’ I hadn't thought about it at all. So, it just enlarged my thinking about how to write about food in a way that's more inclusive. 

Alicia: Well, thank you so much for taking the time out today.

Dianne: It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

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Listen now | Talking with the interdisciplinary artist and 'Palate Palette' editor about hyper-specificity and locality in her work on Black foodways in Baltimore.

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I knew I wanted to talk to writer Hannah Selinger when she was openly angry that her Eater essay “Life Was Not a Peach,” about her experience working for David Chang, wasn’t included in Best American Food Writing 2021. The rule is that we writers aren’t supposed to comment on whether we’ve been snubbed for an anthology or an award, even when it’s a clearly egregious way to keep a highly critical essay out of the canon, in an anthology edited by a fellow chef.

So we talked, not just about the anthology, but about her culinary and wine studies, her generalist approach, and being a year-round Hamptons resident. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Hannah. Thank you so much for taking the time out to talk today.

Hannah: Thank you for having me, Alicia.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Hannah: Yeah, I had sort of a weird upbringing. 

I was born in New York City. And when I was seven, my mom moved to Massachusetts. So I actually came back and forth every other weekend between New York and Mass until I was 17. So, I grew up—

Alicia: Wow.

Hannah: Yeah. 

I grew up in a small town called Newburyport. It used to be Massachusetts’ smallest actual city. It's right on the New Hampshire border. 

What did I eat? My mother was a very, I would say, not inventive cook. So we had this cookbook called365 Ways to Cook Chicken. That was something she was really dedicated to. Bottled salad dressing and a lot of steamed vegetables, because that was very in vogue in the ’80s. 

My father, who lived in New York, was a little bit more adventurous. And he was more into cooking different kinds of meat and vegetables. But I would say that we were a pretty prototypical ’80s family. Nothing very interesting going on.

Alicia: Right.

Well, growing up between Massachusetts and New York is interesting in terms of the rivalry there. Do you have more of an affinity for one over the other?

Hannah: I have some pretty good stories. My father passed away, but he was a diehard Yankees fan. And my mother is from Massachusetts, and has always been a Red Sox fan. And I used to wear a Yankees Starter jacket to school in Massachusetts and was teased, I mean, just beyond all get out. 

Alicia: Right? Of course. 

I remember that moment when Etarter jackets were so popular, and my mom wouldn't let me get one. 

Hannah: They were very cool. 

Alicia: Yeah. [Laughter.] 

But you write about such a wide range of topics. Not just food and wine and travel, which kind of go together, but also parenting, real estate. How did you come to writing and built this career as a generalist?

Hannah: I definitely started in food and wine, which was where I was most comfortable. I had come out of working as a sommelier for some time, so that was kind of a natural segue for me. 

And more recently, as I've expanded my repertoire, I kind of follow things that are interesting to me. My husband is chief of staff for what we call out here a high net-worth individual. And so, he has a lot of experience in homes. We kind of GC’d our own renovation, and I got familiar with the real estate market, which granted me kind of some intellectual access, I would say. 

But I think I now view it as if something is interesting to me, and I feel like I have a base knowledge that's—if I'm, if I have enough understanding of the topic to be able to report it out, then it's something that I'll write.

Alicia: Right, right, right. 

And you are best known as a food writer, and were a sommelier and graduated from the International Culinary Center. And you have these huge credentials in this kind of field. So how have your experiences in restaurants and training for those careers influenced your work when  most writers about food and wine don't have that experience or background expertise?

Hannah: Well, first of all, it's granted me a lot of access, because I think that even at the very beginning when I was green in writing, I could always say, ‘Look, I'm clearly an expert in this field, because I've worked the floor. And I can tell you about X, Y, and Z,’ especially with wine writing where there are very few women in particular who write about wine just compared to the overall field. 

I would say that I have more empathy for what goes on in a restaurant and more understanding, and I would never—I think I would never find myself in the position of being a dining critic for that purpose, because I have too much kind of relationship to what's going on in the—both front and back of the house. 

Alicia: Right.

And what drew you to getting into that work?

Hannah: [Laughs.] It was born of necessity, I think.

I got a Master of Fine Arts in fiction writing when I was like, 24. And I thought ‘Oh, I'm just gonna go to New York and write the great American novel, and I'll be cool.’ So I got a job waiting tables.

Alicia: But what got you deep into it into making it more of your career?

Hannah: It was sort of a series of accidental situations. I was working in restaurants. Bobby Flay was the first major restaurant I worked at in the city, and then was working for Laurent Tourondel at BLT Prime on 22nd Street in the city. And I felt when I would go up to a table, I could talk to them about food, which was something with which I was pretty familiar because everybody eats. But wine felt kind of intellectually inaccessible to me. 

And so, I started meeting with a sommelier after work and coming in and doing inventory, which just sort of set me up for this career as a sommelier. When I was working as a sommelier, there were kind of a couple of things about it that felt compelling to me. One, the mood of a restaurant, the frenetic energy, and the fact that you're kind of always doing something. It wasn't an office job. I was in my 20s. 

There's sort of like a vigor to it. I mean, there's a lot to know about wine. And it does cross into kind of the literary study that I had been accustomed to and that I based my academic career on. And that part of it felt like it wasn't just serving people things. There was an element of knowledge and understanding that went with it. And that, to me, was intriguing.

Alicia: Well, how does your MFA in fiction do you think influence your work now, if it does still?

Hannah: If I could go back in time, I think I would have done that differently. I think I knew that I wanted to write, but I didn't know what kind of writer I was. And so I picked fiction, but I think I was always a nonfiction writer. I'm not sure if that set me up and then I exercised the muscle of writing more regularly. And I saw it as something that you kind of had to produce within a set period of time, which is useful if you're a career writer. But beyond that, I'm not sure that I got too much strategy out of it. It took me a while to kind of get to this place.

Alicia: Right, right. 

Well, you did write a book review last year that made a big splash, I think in some circles. For Eater, you reviewed David Chang's memoir, Eat a Peach, which was also your memoir of working for him. And it was one of the best I and many have read on the reality of working for one of—a big chef whose behavior is lauded and excused. And it was really just such an eye opening kind of look into that world. And I just the other day opened the Goldbelly website, and the first main page is David Chang's face. And I was like, ‘Are we still doing this? Really?’ 

And I wanted to know why you wanted to open up in that piece in the way you did, and how the reception was to it. Because I talk a lot with friends about the cost of exposing our trauma and whether we gain anything from it, really. Why did you decide to do that piece in the way you did it, and how have you felt in the aftermath?

Hannah: So when I decided to write the piece at first, I was—I felt like I had to write it. It was sort of—I didn't have a choice. The whole process began when Peter Meehan stepped down from the L.A. Times last summer, it was like right around the Fourth of July. At that moment, I kind of had this feeling in the pit of my stomach. All of these people are suffering—accountability, if you want to call it that—in some small way, but Chang never really did. And why doesn't anyone talk about it?

So I actually just sat down and wrote a draft of what was, at that point, a completely personal essay. It had nothing to do with the book. And after kind of speaking with a bunch of different editors who were interested in it, and then ultimately landing with Matt and Aaron over at Eater, we decided that the best way to frame it was through the lens of his book because his book had just dropped at the point that I was still shopping the piece.

So when you're a public writer and you write about yourself, which I do sometimes, there's always an element of vulnerability and there's an element of blowback that can accompany that. I think that's sort of just par for the course with my job. And I talk to other relatively high-profile writers about this, is people feel like they know you and they feel like they have access to you. They feel like they have, they're entitled to tell you how they feel about your work and your life because your life is suddenly public. And that's always challenging no matter what the piece is.

I actually was surprised by the reaction that I got from this piece, because I was expecting blowback. Whenever something goes viral, you do. But most of what I got privately was actually deep empathy. And a lot of people who had worked for Dave during different periods and at different restaurants reached out to kind of sus through their own trauma, which was an unexpected consequence. I think I didn't necessarily know what people who were in it were going to feel. And they felt largely the same way that I did. And that was a very surprising, surprisingly rewarding part of all this. 

I've been disappointed that it kind of disappeared in the national narrative, and people just kind of let it go away. And they let his behavior kind of just continue to be what it is.

Alicia: Right? It's really shocking to me. 

And I don't know, I've always been curious how you feel in the last few months when I've seen his name just kind of pop up in a really neutral manner. What has been your response to that?

Hannah: That's hard. And of course, I got that PR email that was advertising a project that he was working on. And I was like, ‘I actually can't believe that someone wouldn't even put my name into Google before sending this PR thing out to me.’ What?

It's not that I think that he's all one thing. It's not that I think he's a terrible person, or even bad at what he does; I think he created something that was really cool. I was certainly driven to work there and eat there. Even after I left, I wanted to eat at the restaurant, or the restaurants. 

But I do think that I had sort of this moment at the end of my piece where I called for him to say something and step down, or pass the reins of his business on to somebody else. And that has really been met with silence. People like to say that we've come so far in this industry, and I don't know how far we've come at the end of the day. Powerful men are still the ones who run things in the restaurant industry.

Alicia: Right.

I've been thinking a lot about this. I think that writers are punished for it—for speaking out about chef behavior and for writing about it, even though we think that that's our job. But we are really expected to maintain the status quo when it comes to these chefs. We are expected to be nice, be accepting that it is hard to work in a kitchen, hard to run a kitchen. And so even though these people, usually men, are getting rich off the backs of other people's labor that perhaps they've been toxic to, we are supposed to not necessarily criticize that. 

And that came up for me this year because the person who was chosen to be the series editor, the editor for Best American Food Writing 2020 or 2021, was Gabrielle Hamilton, who—I saw my job, when I was writing for The Village Voice, to—as a food writer to be someone who kind of held powerful people to account for their decisions. 

But I wrote a piece about how when she was thinking of going into business with Ken Friedman to—yeah, to restore The Spotted Pig, and somehow related it to a natural disaster and that sort of thing. It was just really horrifying to watch in the midst of this big movement for accountability to see a female chef thinking that she could kind of fix a rapist and a restaurant with a rape room that anyone in the industry had heard the whispers about. I was told people knew not to work there if you were a woman. It was just really bizarre. 

And so I wrote about that—when it happened in 2018. And then when she was the—named the editor this year, I was like, ‘Oh, I guess I'm certainly not going to be in it.’ And that has consequences for us financially, of course. And that's why I was like, ‘How is it ok to put a chef in charge of deciding the best food writing when this is, of course, someone who's going to protect other chefs as well?’ 

And when your essay on Eat a Peach wasn't included in the anthology, you were very vocal on social media about your feelings about it. And I was really impressed by that because I feel most of us are—We're going to be Charlie Brown going home or whatever sad, being like, ‘Ok, whatever. I guess I'm just not good enough.’ But when we know that's not the case. We know that these things are not judged on a real meritocracy—meritocratic level. 

And so I wanted to ask you why it was important for—to speak out about that. I don't think we can really have hope that awards or anthologies are going to reward work that's critical of chefs, because they are bound to protect each other. And I mean, there was something included about  just being the girlfriend of a Michelin-starred chef. 

Hannah: I saw it. 

Alicia: And it's like, ‘Wow, this is just really collected work this year, when we had—we're talking so much about restaurants and the role of restaurants. But we're gonna have an anthology that just pretends that none of that actually happened.’

But yeah, so for you, why was it so important to speak out? And how did you feel about this person being the editor?

Hannah: I mean, I'm pissed about the whole thing. 

And actually that essay that you're talking about, that was in Grub Street. I very much like Alan, but the winner of that award tweeted out how honored she was to be working with one of her idols, Gabrielle Hamilton. And I wanted to scream into the void. 

Look, anyone who has read my essay who is, who’s tangential to the food world knows that that essay belonged in the anthology if for no other reason than it memorialized a certain period of time that we were living in. And that is what is supposed to be the point of an anthology that comes out annually.

And I'm not afraid to say that it was an excellent piece of writing. It's probably the best piece of writing I have ever executed, with great gratitude and debt to my editors who reigned me in. And this is my bad. I really just thought it was a sure thing. I was like, ‘I'm 100% going to be in the anthology. Why wouldn't I?’ And even Pete Wells was like, ‘You're definitely going to be in the anthology or whatever.’ When I didn't receive word from them, I was like, ‘This is shocking.’ And then I was like, ‘I guess it's not shocking. It's not shocking for Gabrielle Hamilton to be exactly who I thought she was going to be.’

And in addition to the Ken Friedman thing, there was the 10,000-word essay that she had in the New York Times Magazine last year, which people blindly praised when it had a lot of really questionable things in it, like, ‘Oh hey, I'm not going to take a GoFundMe for my staff because it bruises my ego.’ And then a recipe a few pages later for using $60 crab and an appetizer. 

I don't have a personal grievance. I just think that how—who made the decision to put her—it's mystifying. The whole thing is mystifying. I think it's widely understood in the food community that changes need to be made. And yet, here we are, after all of this, repeating the same narrative over and over again. Let's take the people who were abusive and put them in positions where they get to choose what is good and what is not good. Let's ignore the fact that this was the biggest year in terms of racial injustice that we've had to actually face head on as Americans in my lifetime, and put a white female writer, restaurateur of all things in the position of editing the collection. 

The food world continues to be tone deaf. Of course. I mean, we can talk about James Beard a different time. But this is just sort of another example. And I don't know if there's a correction on that. I tried to call it out so that more people would amplify the understanding of it. And privately, a lot of high-profile people reached out to me. Probably not so much.

Alicia: Yeah. 

And that's disappointing, because we really do. And I said this, I think I wrote about the James Beard awards and how basically I think writers, if they bring back the media awards, writers, especially freelance writers, should boycott putting their work in. Because something has to give in terms of the way these things work, in terms of how much energy we put out, and then are expected to also spend money to be—have our work considered for these awards, I mean, while we get paid garbage and are taxed to the hilt for that work. 

The expectations really need to change, and I think—the reason it was so disappointing that Gabrielle Hamilton was chosen this year is that this was the year that we were hoping to see changes. And I think that her decision, the decision to put her as editor this year, showed we're not actually going to change anything. We want to consolidate power at where it is, and keep it where it is. 

Hannah: 100%.

Alicia: Yeah.

And I think it is important for people to talk publicly about that kind of thing. But the thing is, it looks like sour grapes to some people. It looks like you're being rude to your colleagues whose work was chosen. But it's not that. It has to give that we reject the status quo and this concentration of power with chefs. And it's just high time. [Laughs.] 

Hannah: Right. 

And I think also the public may not know, for instance, that when it comes to these compilations and awards—I mean, Best American you don't have to pay, but you have to be the one to actively send her your material and be like, ‘Please consider me.’ It's not like it's just a bunch of people sitting in a room going through every piece of food writing from the year. 

And with ICP and James Beard, you have to send them money, and then you have to send them your links, and you pay for every single submission. Obviously, there's an access issue based on the financial part of it. But in addition to that, you have to have the wherewithal to even know when to do this stuff and who to send it to. The system is completely messed up, even apart from the person making the choices about what gets included.

Alicia: Right.

No, it's just really upsetting. And I think I'm glad that you were vocal about this, because it's such a conversation, it's a conversation that's wildly overdue to just really point out that what is called Best American Food Writing is simply one person's kind of idea of what that means, and not a real expression of what that year meant in food writing. I mean, if it was, we would have seen a lot more independent outlets, I think, included there. It was really a year of independent media. But yeah, no. [Laughs.] 

And yeah, it's really sad that more people aren't willing to kind of reject these things that we know are harmful. But that's the world we live in. That's capitalism, I guess, right? [Laughs.]

Hannah: Yeah. 

I mean, I think my feeling is also—a, I mean, you mentioned sort of the collateral damage that writers can suffer by vocalizing this kind of stuff. I mean, I continue to be unafraid of anything except cockroaches. So, don't put me in a room with roaches. If I want to write a piece about David Chang, I'm gonna write about a piece about David Chang. If I want to post about Gabrielle Hamilton, I’ll suffer the consequences. 

I don't believe for myself, because of where I'm positioned, that these people are going to come for me. I recognize that they are very much capable of coming for people who are less established. And in some ways I see it as an obligation, because I have a platform and because I have enough of a reputation of being kind of an iconoclast and just saying whatever I want, that I'm not sure it's harmful to me. And so I feel like it's my obligation to use that lack of harm to everyone's advantage. 

Alicia: Right. 

And I would hope it changes things, but I think people are a bit too comfortable with the way things work, even if it is to their detriment. Yeah. 

Well, to shift a bit, I wanted to ask about living in the Hamptons because I know you're living in East Hampton. I grew up in Patchogue on the south shore. So I know the Hamptons. Well, because I used to work at Hildreth’s Department Store in Southampton. I designed the website for a couple of years when I was in college. 

And I wanted to know, how is it out there? Where do you eat? How has it influenced your work? It really is, I think, more interesting a place than people give it credit for because of that kind of merging of the townies and the working class and the wildly rich. And I think it is more interesting than people give it credit for, though I do think it's weird how much the summer, places from the city kind of open summer residency is out there now. I think that's weird. 

But for you, how is it? How is the experience?

Hannah: Well, what's changed in the last year because of the pandemic really—there's this sort of beautiful off-season that we enjoy as members of a resort community and it's like until late March, early April. And there's nobody here from September on, and it's our own private Idaho or whatever. These past two years, everyone's been out here. So we haven't really gotten a respite in that sense. 

It has its pluses and minuses. Where I grew up in Massachusetts was a seasonal beach community also, although certainly not to this degree. And wealth was not part of the equation. So I'm used to the pop in the summer, and I always gravitate toward the beach. That's something that's very important to me. 

But actually, the townie element of it for me is maybe the most interesting thing. I really did not know moving up to the Hamptons six years ago that it's very conservative out here. There's a lot of conservative politics, which are a tough pill for me to swallow as a former Brooklyn resident. 

In terms of restaurants, more and more, we're seeing things that are opening year round, which is exciting. I love the Nick & Toni's group. Rowdy Hall is actually one of my favorite just sort of go-to places. 

It's actually exciting for all of us, even those of us who live here year-round, when the stuff starts opening for the season because it's something new is happening. And I get to go to a different place to eat. So that's starting now. I like to go to Montauk a lot, because I'm close by and I lived there for a few years. 

But I would say that the experience is—it's hard to explain to people who don't spend a lot of time here. The blend between the high and low and the absolute—the wealth is so unimaginable. But then there are just ordinary people who live here, too, and there's a huge undocumented community who lives here, which is something I really value about the community.

Alicia: Yeah. 

No, it's interesting. I used to work out there. And then also my dad used to drive Martha Stewart around. [Laughter.] So I have this very weird understanding of the Hamptons. ’Cause yeah, when I worked at Hildreth’s, it was all people who lived out there. And you have a different sense of what it's like from that versus—when I've been home in the pandemic and I went out to Carissa’s, which is so beautiful. But it's such a different vibe. And they had the Forthave Amaro, and I was like, ‘Oh my god.’ It's just a taste of city stuff, which is good. And I can't wait to go back, honestly. 

Hannah: I mean, I can't wait to get to the beach. Everyone's predicting kind of a banner year out here, which is not necessarily what you want when you have to drive on one lane of traffic.

Alicia: Yeah, that moment when Sunrise Highway becomes one lane is killer. [Laughs.]

But for you, is cooking a political act?

Hannah: Yes. 

I mean, I think I make choices in terms of what I purchase, and who I do business with, both cooking and dining. And that is sort of informed by my politics of what I choose to eat, what I choose to feed my kids. 

I've had a farm share out here for the entire time that I've been living out here, because I really feel like I need to be part of the local farm system. And I feel it's important for people to buy into their community in that way. There are places that I absolutely stay away from. I'm not saying Blue Duck, but maybe Blue Duck. [Laughter.] Very big Trump supporters. 

Alicia: Oh! I didn’t know that.

Hannah: Yeah. [Laughs.] Although it's tough to navigate that out here, because if you were really to go by that you would never buy fish. 

But yeah, I think there's political—everything is political. People like to say, ‘Oh, don't get politics involved.’ But politics absolutely governs everything you do, especially in a small community.

Alicia: Right. 

Well, thank you so much for taking the time today.

Hannah: Thank you for having me. This is really exciting.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe

I’ve been following the chef and writer Taffy Elrod on Twitter for years, and right now she’s having a moment. From teaching virtual classes while the restaurant she owns in the Hudson Valley with her husband has been closed to working with Rancho Gordo on a bean recipe booklet, she’s been making the most of a weird moment for a chef accustomed to working with the public.

We discussed her mostly vegetarian upbringing, studying at the Natural Gourmet Institute, and the thin line between hospitality and hostility. Listen above, read below.

Alicia: Hi, Taffy. Thank you so much for coming on today.

Taffy: Hi, Alicia. Thank you for having me.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Taffy: Yeah, sure. 

I grew up in southeastern Michigan, in Ann Arbor. My folks were from the Detroit area. And what I ate is [laughs]—mainly, the main story of what I ate is that I grew up in that healthy, whole food hippie home. [Laughs.] Whole food, meaning the foods, not the store, because that didn't exist in our area yet. 

So I grew up eating a lot of brown food. Brown rice and millet. And gosh, lots and lots of beans and tofu. And then sort of these re-engineered foods that—my grandmother was the head of the household and the vegetarian. So, she would make things like stuffed cabbage without the meat, and all kinds of things like that. And then, that was our mainstay. 

And then there were a few other things. My dad, his family's from down South. My dad's African American, his family's from down South. So sometimes with him, then my brother and I would eat completely different foods, because we would suddenly be having, gosh, be at McDonald's or having pizza or something. But for the most part, it was that sort of healthy hippie dippie, earthy, Earth mama food.

Alicia: What made your grandmother be vegetarian?

Taffy: I mean, she was way ahead of her time. She would probably be an amazing influencer if she were here right now.

She did it for two reasons. One, being ethical. She loved animals and didn't—she grew up on a farm and didn't like hurting animals. 

And two, she just had health problems in her mid-30s. She was a typical, sort of—not typical, but she was living, I should say, a typical sort of suburban working class life and—in Detroit. And she had health problems. And that through her research, she came up with this solution to her health problems of changing her diet, changing her lifestyle. She cut out all alcohol. She stopped smoking cigarettes. She cut out white sugar, she cut out white flour. She became vegetarian. 

And I mean, of course, there was a movement at that time that she was a part of. She worked in this—a food co-op in Detroit. Things like that. But that was her journey. It was about health and about—she loved everyone and everything, and couldn't stand to hurt anything. She didn't like to bring cut flowers in the house, a habit that I have continued. She didn't like to cut a tree for Christmas. She had like a little potted fir tree. 

Alicia: Wow. [Laughs.] 

Taffy: [Laughs.] Yeah.

Alicia: You write in your bio that you grew up in a family of artists and cooks. But I wanted to ask, what drew you into working in food yourself?

Taffy: It was kind of a long, slow road, I always was just deeply intrigued by food and cooking. And obviously, it was a big part of my family. But I didn't necessarily see it as my career goal. I think because it was so deeply ingrained in our family, that it just was there as this sort of backdrop. 

But as I got older, and I was doing—I was working retail and just couldn't figure out what to do with myself. And by older, I mean like my early 20s. I realized that what I spent all my free time on was food—and my love of food and collecting cookbooks and trying new recipes and trying to learn things. And that it really was my one great love, my one true love.

Alicia: Right.

And how have you expressed it in your life? What have been the ways in which you've worked in food and expressed this love?

Taffy: Well, first of all, when I was in school, I wouldn't—I was paying my way through community college, when—back in Michigan when I was young. And like everything I did in school, if we had a paper to write or project, I would always—it would be about food. 

So, I had to give a presentation in my French class. And I came up with a pie that I could make in like 10 minutes in class. And that was the beginning of my food demonstration career. I was like, ‘My French is terrible, but if I make a pie they won't care. Nobody will care.’ 

And I found this French cooking magazine and just pieced it, figured out how to give this presentation even though I couldn't speak French. My professor was like, ‘How did you do this?’ I basically just stole it out of this magazine. But the pie was this other pie, so I mashed it together and I made a pie. So that the end of my 10 minute presentation, there was a pie for the class to eat: this no-bake pie. 

So I was always doing things like that. No matter what I had to do, I would just figure out—food would be the way that I would do it. So at some point, it just sort of became—I would be taking a writing class, and everything I was writing was about food. 

My professor was like, ‘Maybe, I don't know. I'm gonna throw this out here: Maybe you're interested in food or something.’ I just kind of eventually realized like, ‘Oh, right. This is what I should just be doing.’ Then I made the decision to get into culinary school and pursue it that way, because I thought I needed to get out of my little pond and do—go somewhere bigger to pursue my career dreams.

Alicia: Where do you go to culinary school?

Taffy: I went to the Natural Gourmet Institute for Food and Health in New York City in Chelsea. Yeah. [Laughs.] At the time, I was still very much ensconced in that lifestyle of the vegetarian, veganism, whole foods. And I was wondering like, ‘Well, where in the world am I going to go to cooking school? What am I going to do about this?’ And then I found out about them. And they have since been absorbed by ICE, by the Institute of Culinary Education. That ICE. Not any other ICE. 

But at the time, I mean, it was really interesting to be there. It was a great experience. I made great friends. And I loved it. And I moved to New York City to do that. It was a big deal. It wasn't easy for me to do. But it made my life, my career, a little bit maybe more difficult to get a good foot into the culinary scene in New York. Because, of course, to most people it was like, ‘I'm sorry, where did you go to school?’ [Laughs.] But for me, it was the right thing for me to do at the time. And it was a great experience.

Alicia: Well, where did you end up getting your feet into the culinary scene then? 

Taffy: So of course, I had already done some work back home. My mom had a cake decorating business. My dad worked in restaurants, and my grandmother worked in a bakery. And I had done some work already with them growing up. When I realized I wanted to start cooking, I had started segueing into food. So I had done some food work growing up in Ann Arbor.

And then when I left school in New York, I had two part-time jobs. I worked in a little—another grad had opened up this little sort of lunch café place in Chelsea. And then I got a job working on a nutrition study at Teachers College at Columbia University. It involved macrobiotics, so that was how I ended up there. 

So I was doing those two things. And then I’ve done so many different, so much different work. A little bit of restaurant work. But again, it didn't always click between my background. And at the time, 20 years ago, being a woman of color in the restaurant industry, it didn't, wasn't amazing for me. It didn't really click great in the back of the house. 

So I kind of just kept on this funny path of different—doing these different things. So a lot of health and nutrition, private cooking, and so on and so forth, and demos and things like that. A lot of teaching. Gosh, have cooked in so many different places. [Laughs.]

Alicia: Well, I mean, it's funny, because I was going to ask you wha—how you have such a varied kind of portfolio in terms of different diets and different dietary restrictions, which I now very much understand. [Laughs.] Which is that you went to the Natural Gourmet Institute, you grew up with a vegetarian kind of background. It's interesting that that is something that has both held you back seemingly, but also been a way forward for you.

Taffy: Yeah, definitely. Absolutely. 

At one point in time, it was so unknown, so fringe in American culture. Now, it's become so much more accepted or popular, whatever you want to call it. And I always appreciated that I had that knowledge and that I had the understanding of it, because you can always—the other information and, is always there. And knowing how to make something taste delicious with butter was not really that hard to do. [Laughs.] It tastes good. We make stuff taste good.

When you know  how to approach food from a different angle, whatever it may be, and you know how to work with a minimum of ingredients or you know how to work with ingredients that might be outside of the ‘standard,’ that always, in my opinion, improves your cooking within the standard, because you have more tools to work with or this wider knowledge. And so, I was never undone by walking into a kitchen and finding out that there was nothing in there. [Laughs.] There was no equipment, or there was no—there's nothing good in here to cook. 

So, I worked in a place where I made gluten-free vegan soups five days a week, and—from pretty basic ingredients. So you can give me a couple turnips or a bag of lentils or whatever like, ‘I'm gonna make you some soup.’ You know what I mean? And that is obviously a skill that most of our ancestors have possessed until very recently. But it's also a skill that, as a professional cook, will really stand you in good stead. It's really great to be able to cook without needing to have the best of the best.

Alicia: Right.

Well, you live in the Hudson Valley now, right? And what are you doing now? What's your life like now?

Taffy: Hmm, yeah, that's a pretty big question. 

My husband and I are in Hudson Valley. We came up about six years ago to open our pizzeria restaurant that unfortunately is closed right now. And I mean, honestly, it was such a big change. It was such a culture shock for me—not just from New York City, obviously. But from my past life, even very different. We're in, I don't know, just a very different environment. 

And our lives changed completely almost overnight, because we found a place and just sort of took it on spec and just went from our—the lives we had in the city. I was working full-time as a cooking teacher. He was trying to sort of figure out what to do with himself next. And all of a sudden, we were just in this business. His brother was supposed to work with us, and he didn't. 

So all of a sudden, I went from having this, my job, to—we opened the pizzeria. And then suddenly, I was in the pizzeria all the time, too. Our other source of income was gone. And it was just the two of us in this pizzeria. And it was do or die. And suddenly, we were just together 48 hours a day and—just doing one of the most stressful jobs or businesses you can imagine. So I just really, there's not really words for it. 

And then of course the last year and a half, just everything ended up changing all over again. So I'm kind of starting over again. So it's just been one really wild ride, honestly.

Alicia: [Laughs.] 

Obviously, you've worked with your husband. You do recipes. You've also been a professional cook. How doyou approach cooking in a home way versus a professional way, or is there a difference?

Taffy: [Laughs.] 

That's a great question. A balance? I've never heard of it. 

I don't know. I don't think I do. When it comes to cooking, I'm like this amorphous blob. It's just all food all the time. And so, I obviously cook differently at home than I did in the restaurant. But at the same time, when we were in the restaurant 12 or 14 hours a day I cooked all our meals in the restaurant. Or he did. So home cooking didn't even exist. 

And then suddenly when we were shuttered, and I was home and I was by myself because he was stuck in Montenegro, where he's from and couldn't get home. I was just home by myself. So it was unbelievable going from cooking all day every day for our customers to just suddenly being home alone. 

But I've always had kind of this porous—I don't really see it as distinctly different. I cook at home similar to how I cook professionally. I mean, obviously, I wasn't at home making pizzas all the time. [Laughs.] But a lot of the things that I cooked in the restaurant, I’d cook them at home. I mean, the only difference for me is just the level of prep and the level of service and how I'm plating it. But I'm notorious for cooking enough for 100 people when it's two of us. Never mastered small portions. 

And the answer is, I don't. It's just me. That's what I do.

Alicia: Well, you've also been teaching online cooking classes. And why did you decide to go that route? They're very affordable, too affordable I noticed. And I noticed you're doing one called The Art of Salad. How are you deciding what to teach, and why are you teaching online?

Taffy: Yeah.

I just decided to keep that one like extra affordable, because I'm going off the cuff. I'm not giving recipes or anything, so I was like, ‘Whatever.’ 

Well, it came about because I had a couple companies that I was working with as a recipe developer doing some online work. And so at the beginning of lockdown, they had asked me to do some Instagram Lives when everybody was just doing whatever, just doing anything to pass the time. That was how I kind of got started doing virtual cooking. 

And then a couple opportunities came up in the last few months. And I had already done some filmed cooking demonstrations for a company I work with, so it was kind of natural. We didn't even think we were going to live in this apartment for more than a few months. I had never even cooked in this kitchen before we got out of the restaurant or got pulled out of the restaurant, whatever. 

So, it's been weird. It's been awkward. And that's part of why I've kind of just kept the bar low, because my kitchen is not up to a lot of demands here. But I realized that it was a good way for me—I miss people. I miss cooking for people. I miss my students. 

So, it's different. It's virtual. It's not the same, but at least it gives me an outlet to be able to share. Because I'm one of those people like, ‘Yeah, I'd love to cook,’ but if somebody isn't gonna be there to share it with—it's just half of s experience. It's not the whole experience. I'm definitely a nurturer, I guess.

Alicia: Right. 

No, I hate cooking for just myself. It's depressing. Yeah, I don't know. For me, I just make something weird. And then, it's not even satisfying. I eat it standing up. I think it is almost why I'm—I will often plate things nicely and take pictures and post them on Insta. It gives me content to make myself something, but at the same time I'm not that interested all the time in eating it because I just don't like eating—I like eating alone out at a restaurant or a bar. I don't like eating alone in my house. [Laughter.] It's simply not for me. 

Taffy: Yeah, I know what you mean. I don't mind the eating alone. But I just don't care then about the cooking. Just keep it simple. 

Once in a while, but rarely.

Alicia: Yeah, no, Maybe it's my Libra moon. I like to nest. [Laughs.]

But I wrote about hospitality for my newsletter this week. And when you quote tweeted, “Nothing’s ever made more sense to me than the connection between hostility and hospitality.” And I wanted to ask why you said that, and why that connection is so clear to you. 

Taffy: Wel. [Laughs.] 

So first of all, we had a restaurant. Or I don't know, sort of, maybe we still have a restaurant someday. We'll see. 

I worked in food service and in our restaurant for a long time with contact with our customers. In our restaurant, we had constant contact with our customers as opposed to having a lot of front of the house staff. 

And the truth of matter is, there's a lot of hostility involved. People are hostile. They feel very, I don't know, kind of—and around here, they tended to be really kind of aggressive and gruff. [Laughs.] And the first impression was always like, ‘Well, I don’t know you. Why do you hate me?’ So I mean, there's just kind of that—obviously, or of it-

But after having worked in this world for a long time, the reality is that—and I always think about this for myself. And I think I had posted something on Twitter about this. I used to work in people's homes and call myself a private chef, and I always in the back of my head used to sort of laugh at myself and think, ‘Private chef. Yes, right. But you do know that 50 years ago, you would have been the cook, right? [Laughs.] You know, this, don't you?’

There is this strange interaction, and sort of bristly space between people who are being served and people who are serving. My husband would always, always says, ‘I'm your server, not your servant.’ But the truth of the matter is that comes from—they come from the same place. It's a small difference. And there is, I think, from the people who are being served, a lot of times they actually feel very defensive about their needs or how they be treated, whether they think that if they don't tell you what to do, you're not going to do it. 

Or just that there's that uncomfortability. I mean, I remember that working in someone's home and in their kitchen and being all day with, around their kids and whatever. It was a strange feeling. You had to keep this sort of veneer of professionalism. And yet you're in someone's most intimate space, and you're doing something so incredibly intimate: preparing the food that they're going to eat, especially when it's right in their own home. 

And there is this sort of always this undercurrent of discomfort or almost—I don't know, you kind of have to be on the offensive. Or they're on the offensive. I thought, ‘How can I put this into words?’ I couldn't really, but it just seemed so clear to me. It's so obvious. I was like, ‘Yeah, totally.’ 

I mean, in our last place, it was our place. We had to be so defensive, so protective of ourselves. People would walk in and see a brown-skinned woman, an immigrant. I would get emails complaining about how the staff treated people when they were talking about me and my husband. 

There was so much constant, kind of this undercurrent of hostility and having to kind of be on the offensive to keep people in their place, because they just kind of wanted to come in and take over if they could. So yeah, it just really resonated.

Alicia: Well, I'm glad for that. But it is so interesting. As you said, your husband says the connection’s also between server and servant. These are very, very thin boundaries between these things: hostility, hospitality. Server, servant. And I think, yeah, people just aren't aware of it. They're hostile and they want a servant, and I don't know how that changes, really, on a broader scale. It's interesting. 

It's funny. When I worked at a bar, I ended up being the only employee that ever—someone ever emailed about for being rude. [Laughter.] As I remember it, I had a packed bar, and someone needed more time to decide what they wanted. And so I said, ‘Ok,’ and put my hand up in a way of kind of gesturing to say, ‘Ok, I've got what you said.’ And they were offended by that. Because I put my hand in the air and pointed to kind of make a mental note while I'm trying to remember what everyone wants?

It's just such a strange interaction all the time. If I ever go out with someone who ends up being weird or impatient with the staff, I'm like, ‘I'm never going out with you again.’ [Laughter.] I can't live like that. I can't be associated with that. Our friendship is never going to exist in these spaces.

Taffy: Yeah. 

It's weird. It's interesting. And obviously, I mean, if you've never worked in the food industry or in service, then I almost understand that you don't understand. If you have, then I really am confused by where you're coming from. ‘Well, I served people. Now I'm gonna take it out on somebody else’ attitude. [Laughs.] Just ignore the reality of the situation, I don't know. [Laughs.]

Alicia: I don’t know.

Well, for you is cooking a political act?

Taffy: Yeah.

I mean, absolutely. I mean hopefully sometimes it isn't. Hopefully, sometimes at home, it isn't. But food is. And food is so political. And everything about the act of growing, selling, consuming food. Even the connections between the food and our perceptions of our bodies is so politicized. 

It would be impossible for it not to be, because we all have to eat. So therefore, food is a point of really powerful control. So whatever your choices are, you think you're making neutral choices about your food. Believe me, the ramifications are political. And if you have choices to make, if you have the privilege of making choices, that's political. If you don't have the privilege of making choices around what you eat, that's political. 

So to me, it's just—it just simply is. There isn’t, I don't think, in this modern day and age, a place where anybody can just choose to live off the land, be free and make their own food. So I think we're all very much caught up in the web of the politics of food. And cooking and eating are so—oh, boy. Especially in the modern American culture, is layer on layer upon layer of social ramifications and guilt. 

Alicia: Yeah.

No, I mean—because these industries aren't regulated at all. The state is not taking care of us or workers or the planet. And thus, it's all on our shoulders.

Taffy: Yeah. 

But I think that's what they—I don't know, whoever they are. It's obviously all about consumption and consumerism, literal consumption, obviously. But I mean about capitalism, consumerism, and money: the almighty dollar. And so I think that just throwing it back on the consumer and saying, ‘It's on you. You figure it out. You do it. You do something and it'll fix it.’ is really—I think it's really a scam. It's manipulative, and it's toxic. The average person didn't create the system, isn't benefiting from it. 

And then obviously, when you talk about less served populations and under, ‘underdeveloped’ nations, which—I don't know. I was thinking about it the other day. I was like, ‘Why don't they call some place like America an overdeveloped nation?’ Because we are. We're not nicely developed, we’re overdeveloped. As long as it's just finger-pointing things, like ‘You're responsible!’ Like me personally is gonna change what they're doing, so they don't have to take any responsibility for it. And it's always just another ploy to create another industrial mass produced food that will be this, ‘That'll fix the problem.’ Oh, that's weird. 

My husband always jokes about fasting kits being sold, like fasting came into vogue and now you can buy a fasting kit. I don’t know what's in it. I think that just sums it all up. You have to sell something to somebody for them to not eat or drink. So I mean, that's the world we're living in. I mean, I would like to feel like it were, it was a little different. 

I mean, I can make personal choices. And I can do my best. But you know what? Somebody else is eventually going to have to answer for themselves and do something different. If it’s gonna change, actions are actually gonna have to change. 

Alicia: Yeah, yeah. 

Well, thank you so much for your time today.

Taffy: [Laughs.] Thank you.

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Amber Mayfield really knows how to work: She has started her own event hosting company, called To-Be-Hosted, as well as an annual magazine about Black food and drink called While Entertaining. The self-published magazine is printed on thick, beautiful paper and packed with essays, recipes, playlists, and ideas for hosting that come from some of the coolest folks working in food and drink right now—some that are huge, and others that Mayfield wants to see get more attention.

Because I love independent publishers, I wanted to talk to her about how she got into this business, what her vision is for a vaccinated world, and her vision for the next issue of the magazine. Listen above, or read below

Alicia: Hi, Amber. Thank you so much for coming on today. 

Amber: Yes, thank you for having me.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Amber: Yes. 

So I grew up in Rockland County, New York, in a small town called Nanuet. And I come from a very athletic family. So I was always an athlete growing up, so I ate pretty clean and balanced meals. I mean, most of my more exciting and vivid food memories come from holidays and gatherings and just country ham and mac and cheese and candied yams and cookouts with ribs and grilled sausages. So those are the things that stick out. They’re a little bit more exciting, that occasion type of eating.

Alicia: And now you live in New York?

Amber: Yes. 

Now I am in New York City. Which was always my goal growing up, was to be in the city and have that more what I thought was glamorous and exciting, and what I now know is just hustle and bustle and regular.

Alicia: Well, what made you interested in food and begin publishing While Entertaining magazine and launching To-Be-Hosted?

Amber: I mean, so many things. 

Growing up, I always loved parties and holidays and gatherings because I think I was always excited to see family and friends and even more excited about—that's when the more interesting food and flavorful food was going to come out, was through these events. I loved eating and dancing and laughing. And as I got older, I was like, ‘Ok, well, what does that mean as a career? I don't really know.’

Did you ever watch 30 Rock back in the day? 

Alicia: Of course, yeah. 

Amber: Ok, so you recall Kenneth the page? 

Alicia: Uh-huh. 

Amber: So I was a page. That was my post-college job, ’cause I was like, ‘This is perfect. I can literally bounce around the company and figure out what it is that I want to do.’ And it was an exciting industry. And while I was there, I was always mesmerized by the parties and productions. But what would irritate me as much as I loved that environment was there were the same caterers and the same vendors that were getting all of this big business. So that's when I decided I was going to start my own event company. 

Yeah, it was a natural affinity for liking events, and then wanting to kind of problem solve and having an event company that was food focus, and would actually hire Black vendors and hospitality businesses. 

So I started To-Be-Hosted in 2017. It was kind of a side hustle of throwing dinner parties. And before long, I had all of these interesting clients to work with Nestle and Equinox and Netflix. And I started planning their dinners and hiring Black chefs and Black sommeliers and Black-owned businesses to produce them and really saw that vision come to life. 

And then I started the magazine in 2019, because I was like, ‘Ok, how can I take this energy and scale it a little bit bigger?’ Because dinner parties are small, I was only reaching 20 or so people at a time. So I came up with this concept for a magazine that would help other people throw their own dinner parties, but also tell these stories on a bigger scale than what I could add in-person events. 

So that's the shortest version of the story.

Alicia: [Laughs.] Did you have training in food or in publishing that lead, that also kind of—or are you self-trained in all this?

Amber: Yeah. 

So I mean, in college, I studied communications and PR. So that's what kind of led me into NBC Universal, and that page program was kind of—I don't know, TV, grad school and content grad school, if you will. 

But no, other than that, I kind of just always worked in these industries in the media industry. I worked in hospitality. I was an executive assistant for a celebrity chef, for lack of a better term. So just kind of being around and loving these things, I've just been figuring it out as I go. [Laughs.]

Alicia: Well, and you do have a very specific knack and niche, especially in food publishing, because you're not really focusing on restaurants to go to. You're specifically focused on the home and on hosting. Why did you want to focus on that, and how do you continue to find inspiration and creativity in the home and the format of the dinner party?

Amber: Right. When I was looking at the media landscape, I was like, ‘Wow. Everything really is about restaurant chefs, television chefs.’ And often that kind of created an environment of exclusion for Black chefs and Black beverage producers because we aren't always necessarily only in those roles. So I was like, ‘If I actually want to tell Black stories and cover the breadth and depth of Black food experiences and food ways, I can't be a magazine that champions the restaurant story.’ I think there's a place for that. But for me, I was like, ‘Ok, I've got to go a little bit broader if I want to be able to tell the stories that I want to tell.’

And everybody eats at home every day. We kind of have the random Tuesday night dinner, the dinner experience, and we all want to cook and we all want to host people. So I was like, ‘This is a way that I can tell more personal stories and meet people where they are.’ And I mean, when I started the magazine in 2019, I didn't know how much at home we would be doing in 2020. But I knew that enough people, their first affinity for food and their connection to food and people was at home. So, it just felt like a natural direction for me.

Alicia: And how have you been eating in the pandemic, and how has—how have things maybe changed for you?

Amber: I definitely eat and cook at home more. I think, pre-pandemic, in working in events and doing productions, I was always out and about doing meetings. So I was always stopping at the bodega or the deli or doing work. I was always such a solo diner with my computer in the corner that I had made friends with the restaurant staff, so they were cool with me being in the back working and eating for several hours. 

So, that of course had to change. [Laughs.] I had to do so much more cooking and meetings and virtual coffees than ever before. I really love food, and I find my creativity in trying new recipes and was briefly baking bread with everybody. [Laughs.]

But yeah, I think I'm still kind of trying to find those places where I can either grab takeout or be inspired by one of these chefs and make their recipe at home. So not too much different. Perhaps a little better on the wallet. [Laughter.]

Alicia: Well, yeah.

And in this second edition of While Entertaining, you—which was published during the pandemic—you focus specifically on what you call reflections and recipes. And it kind of just acts as a cookbook and kind of a capsule of how inwardly focused we were at a certain point in time. What inspired you to gather these specific folks together to make this collection, and how did you decide on that approach?

Amber: Yes.

I mean, this approach is the approach that I'll probably keep for all issues of While Entertaining magazine, giving people stories and putting them next to recipes and pairing tips and playlists and all of that, because I really want to start making food stories an experience that lives with us in real life. So I think that format will be the same. 

But in tackling this topic, at first I was kind of like, ‘Well, this is awkward, because I'm starting a magazine that's about entertaining and inviting people over to eat with you. And the CDC said we could not invite people over to eat.’ [Laughs.] So that was my first moment of like, ‘Ooh, this is about to get interesting.’

But then second, as I just was living in the pandemic and canceling all of my events and eating Thai, I was kind of really curious about how everybody else was experiencing this and how they were slipping into new routines and what they were thinking about or writing about or coping. So that kind of inspired the whole reflections part of the theme, was ‘I want to eavesdrop on what other people are thinking about and doing and how they're getting through this, because I know that I've got this new routine. And I've been reflecting on work styles and what it means to rest.’

So I just started asking people in food and drink like, ‘What are you eating right now? What are you thinking about? What are you writing about? What do you want to talk about?’ And that's kind of how I guess the issue. And it was so interesting to see the, just the vastness of that, right? We've got some chefs like Kalisa Marie Martin, [who] was writing about figuring out what her identity was when she wasn't a chef. 

And I thought that was something that everybody could kind of relate to. How often do we explain ourselves by our work, but when you strip that back, what is it that I like to do and who am I? What is my identity? It became this really normal and almost not food related, but kind of food-related conversations that were so interesting. So I just kind of kept leaning into that with everybody else that I talked to, and that's how we got here.

Alicia: And there are big names in here like Chris Scott and Mavis J. Sanders, Lani Halliday. Who else? Hawa Hassan. How have you made all these connections, and how did you decide to include these folks specifically?

Amber: Yes. 

So that's a really good question because we're a new magazine and a small magazine and a self-funded magazine. So approaching people at first sight was like, ‘Oooh, this is scary. They're not going to take me seriously.’

But then I kind of just leaned into the fact that I'm a human, and I'm passionate about something. And I want to share this, these stories in particular. So I just told people the vision for the project, and why I thought it was important to see if they would be willing to do it. And I was always looking for people who had a strong point of view about something and who would be open, or who would be really ready to rally behind this sort of publication existing and taking up space. 

So that's how I found people. 

And then, yeah, it was all about being friendly with people. I would just email them and ask them, like, ‘Do you want to talk? Here's what I'm doing.’ I would slide in their DMs if they posted something that I also related to or wanted to talk about. I would set up virtual coffees to learn what they like and what they might be interested in saying that they don't necessarily get to say in other publications or are approached about being in other publications, ’cause I think we've got the heavy-hitters, but then we also have people that have never been mentioned in the media but still do great work and still have an opinion. 

So it's just been a lot of talking to the people. There's nothing really else to do in quarantine but talk to people. So that's kind of how I've approached it.

Alicia: Right.

And you bring in the playlist with the QR codes. You have all these cocktail recipes. You have a lot of quotes in here. I love the illustrations that you have of everyone who's included.

How are you coming into this? I know you're working with Vonnie Williams. How are you making all these creative decisions for the magazine, and what does it mean to be self-funded to you? [Laughter.]

Amber: This is a great question. 

So making creative decisions for the magazine is—it's interesting, because I've always kind of started—I started To-Be-Hosted and While Entertaining as a solo-preneur, as the world would call it. But I've always had these incredible friends and these incredible industry friends, for lack of a better word and community that was around me that if I was like, ‘Here's my idea. I put it on a post-it on my wall, and I want to tell you about it,’ they will be awfully honest with me about what's gonna fly and what's not gonna fly. 

So leaning into the people around me, both who share the same vision as me and also other people who are like, ‘I really don't get it. I don't think this is smart.’ Or ‘What do you mean, you're only doing dinner parties? And what do you mean, you're only covering Black people?’ Having that balance of voices that contradict yours to kind of weigh in has been really helpful to me, just in terms of coming up with this creative vision and also not really looking to the left or the right. 

I'm aware of other magazines and other food media coverage and their approaches to it. But following my own vision and breaking my own rules, I kind of stick to that, right? We're a yearly magazine. The whole magazine has one theme or question or pros. We're kind of, again, including the pairing tips and the playlist and all the things that maybe not everybody is doing all the time. And I'm like, ‘This is just what we're going to do and who we're going to be.’ And if people think that we're a magazine, and people think that we're food media or not food media, or smart or not smart, this is where we're kind of sitting. [Laughs.]

And again, just leaning into all the voices. I remember chatting with Vonnie, and I'm being like, ‘Ok, so this is how I want to organize it. Do you hate this?’ And her feeling comfortable to tell me whether or not she hated it. I've been really lucky to have people that want to be honest with me and want to work with me and just see me figure this thing out.

Alicia: Right.

And in the landscape of food media, it is interesting and wonderful to see the success of Whetstone Magazine owned by Stephen Satterfield and the launch of for the culture by Klancy Miller. And where do you see While Entertaining and also-

Well, you know what? I’m gonna ask you that question, then I'll ask you what I have in my head next. But where do you see While Entertaining in the indie publishing landscape? Or do you? Do you feel a part of a wave of new magazines?

Amber: Yes. 

I certainly feel a part of it. And I love chatting with Stephen Satterfield for Whetstone. He was somebody from the beginning that has always taken my calls. And he answered my emails on how to do this thing from a business perspective, how to do this thing. And even Kerry Diamond from Cherry Bomb also has welcomed me into this indie magazine landscape. It's been exciting and new. 

And I definitely feel While Entertaining fits in, I think about our perspective is food and entertaining specifically, and then also looking at home and personal stories. So I think we've kind of created a lane that's very specific to us, but also fits in this larger indie magazine landscape and Black-owned publishing landscape. Again, we're only a yearly magazine. And we print on very heavy paper. Everything is independently shot and really leans into the beauty of it all. 

My vision is to be in the collector's category. This is something that's super functional. And you can cook from it, and you can read and relate and can spark conversation. But also, this is something that you want to have each one, because it kind of commemorates where Black food and drink people were in this moment of time for each year and kind of holding on to that. 

Alicia: And that's what I love about the magazine too, because it's going deeper and getting broader because of its specificity. You're bringing in so many people who might be not necessarily ignored by mainstream food media, but not get this kind of space and this kind of depth of spread.

And so, how do you see mainstream food media? Do you read it? Do you see it as good? Do you see it changing for the better? What is your perspective?

Amber: I definitely read it, because I love—I do love talking about food. So I do read other publications. 

And when I think about some of the mainstream media and the bigger food media, I wish we could challenge them even more than we have in the past year in terms of the different voices and the different stories that they tell. From a business perspective, I also respect your decision to not do so or not change your perspective or fields of voice. So in that case, I'd love to see them create more championing of the indie magazines and the more niche perspective media that is arising because of their lack of coverage for the stories that we want to cover. 

I think there's a need for all of this, right? We're always going to want to read a couple articles before we go try a new restaurant or understand why this person's concept for this location is different than that location. I think there's a place for all of it. But I think what I think about While Entertaining and what I want to do as an indie magazine, I think about making food-related art more so than just pumping out a lot of different stories or pumping out a lot of different recipes. We have the luxury of being able to slow down and not answer to any advertisers or any clicks and really do things that we're passionate about.

Alicia: And now that the world is opening up a bit, we're being told vaccinated people can gather at home. What are you envisioning for the next issue with this new new world and new ways? [Laughter.]

Amber: I envision so many things. 

I mean, first of all, I'm super excited for post-vax parties and dinner parties and to have that come back and have more people feel comfortable about doing shared plates. [Laughs.] So I'm really excited about that. 

I hope that people who have the magazine and who have gone through and read the stories are now starting to envision how this recipe lives on their table and who they want to cook it for and who they want to invite over to talk about different things. So I'm excited for people to start having that experience. 

I mean, I've already started thinking about the 2022 issue. We start working on it in the next month or two. I bounce between themes. I mentioned that I come from a very athletic family. And one thing that I recall hearing my dad say is this is a rebuilding year, in a reference to a basketball team that just lost a really big player. 

I'm like, ‘What is there about a rebuilding year? How are we rebuilding our businesses and rebuilding our families because a lot of people lost loved ones and, and just rebuilding our world and rebuilding our social calendar?’ Something like that feels really interesting to me. I also feel I'm on the fence. I could run away from the pandemic and pretend it didn't happen and do editorial and filing entirely based on something else. 

So I think that's the nice thing about the magazine is, I can just keep a running list of themes and find the right moment for that theme and then find the right people that want to talk about that theme.

Alicia: And what are your plans for To-Be-Hosted? Is it coming back in full force? Are you already making plans for new events?

Amber: Yes, we are already making plans for new events. We have a few books for this summer and the fall. And I'm really just trying to expand that brand. We’ll still focus on dinner parties. But I'd love to focus on more like video content, and storytelling in the experience world. 

I mean, this is a whole separate tangent. But I'd also like To-Be-Hosted to have a venue where we can be hosting our dinners and also recording content, because I think there's something to the necessity of safe spaces for Black creators and Black culinary talents have a space where they can go where the venue coordinator isn't going to change rules and change energy when they see that the whole staff is Black, right? I really want to build safe spaces around To-Be-Hosted. So I think venue is next on my mind.

Alicia: That's amazing. And I love that plan. I just think it's a brilliant idea. And it's a brilliant expansion of that concept. 

And I am a little jealous because I do love planning events. [Laughs.] I know how hard it is, like deeply, deeply difficult and exhausting. But also so fun. 

Amber: So fun and rewarding.

Alicia: Yeah, it’s really rewarding. And I mean, I get to plan my wedding, but that’s about it. [Laughs.] 

Well, for you, is cooking a political act? 

Amber: Yes.

I hesitate, because I am not a chef. I understand why a lot of chefs and food people have, feel that cooking is very politically charged. And historically, there's many reasons why it should be. But I'm hesitant to answer that question, because I don't feel I'm a chef or a professional cook that I can really do that question justice. 

Where my mind also kind of went when you said that into my specific niche of hosting and entertaining. For me, that is very political, because we exist in this kind of space where if Black people are talking about entertaining and hosting and cooking and doing kind things to people when they're in their home, you kind of lean toward these mammy vibes, right? And if you're thinking about for lack of a better term, the ‘domestic goddess’ of it all, those are all white women, or Martha Stewart–adjacent women. And I don't really fit that. 

So when I'm talking about entertaining and doing a magazine about entertaining and having a company about entertaining and having Black people lead those things? And those Black people not subscribing to either the stereotypes that America has put upon us, or the stereotypes that social media gives their energy too. But just being Black, being Black or brown, being a person of color, and being really empowered about cooking and entertaining and not feeling you're subscribing to anything problematic. But I work, I cook, I clean and I do these things because I want to and I want to make people feel good. 

And I want people to come over and have fun, not just to be the person that's serving them something. That, for me, is very political. And I take that part of my work very seriously about not subscribing to these really problematic views of perfection that comes with a domestic goddess, or problematic views of servitude that comes with being American. That's where the politics kind of hit for me.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much again for taking the time today.

Amber: Yes, thank you for having me. I loved this chat. And I love what you're doing with your platform. So I'm excited to be part of it.

Alicia: Thank you.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe

I got dressed up to talk to Mariana Velásquez for this interview. From experiencing the elegance of her cookbook, Colombiana: A Rediscovery of Recipes and Rituals from the Soul of Colombia alone, I knew I had to wear a nice dress. Then I browsed her apron collection, Limonarium, and saw ever more style expressed. But there’s also substance, in the exploration of the regional foods of her native Colombia, the recipes for foods she grew up with and adapted to her life in New York City, and the styling, which is drowning in light and dripping in color. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Mariana. Thank you so much for being here. 

Mariana: Hi, Alicia. It's a pleasure being here today. 

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Mariana: I grew up in Bogotá, which is the capital of Colombia. And it's a city perched up 9,000 feet up in the Andes. And it was a pretty urban life growing up. 

However, I had the gift of going out to the country on the weekends and over holidays to my grandparent’s little farm in the flatlands near Venezuela. And we grew up eating arepas, which are these great delicious corn cakes. Pan de yucas, which are also baked—you got flour and cheese biscuits. And lots of fruit, lots of tropical fruit. I feel like my childhood was all about smoothies and juices and desserts, and kind of going outside and picking mangoes for the—from the trees.

Alicia: And you write that you never wanted—your mother never wanted you to be a cook. But at 18 you were working at Sierra Mar in Big Sur. So what was it in your upbringing that led you to that at such a young age, too?

Mariana: Yeah, I mean, I realized pretty early on at about 12 or 14, 13, 14, that food had so much power. And in my family, the table has always been the center of it all. And so, I wanted to do something that really had a beginning, a middle and an end. That satisfaction that you get from cooking that it's pretty instant. You prepare a beautiful meal, and you see it. And the satisfaction from people enjoying it happens, and it's right there. 

And so I wanted to do something that I was good at. And I started to feel a lot of pleasure from the process of cooking. So I sort of ventured into the world and against my parent’s opinion back then, and started cooking in restaurants and exploring that life in the kitchen.

Alicia: And what did you enjoy about it? What kept you there?

Mariana: I love the process, the meticulousness, the—that exercise of finding ingredients and turning them into something. Making that scene, the beautiful plating, the ritual of the wine service. I love the dynamics, especially in the kitchen. And in restaurants. I really enjoyed seeing how people would come to these fine dining restaurants to really have an experience. And we would orchestrate all of that from the kitchen and the floor. And I loved it. I loved the rhythm. I love the discipline. 

Yeah, and kind of it was also in line.

Alicia: And in that kitchen that you write about working in when you were 18, you had a moment where you're cooking potatoes and eggs in the same pot like your grandmother did. And you were nervous that it wouldn't be okay, that the chef would see it and be like, ‘This isn't how you do this.’ But the chef was accepting of it. 

That anecdote that you tell brings up that difference that we think about between chefs and cooks, whether that's really real. And so how, from your experience, both working in home cooking and focusing on dinner parties and that sort of thing versus working in a restaurant kitchen, how do you see the difference, if there is one, between the chef and the cook?

Mariana: I mean, the chef has a lot of structure, and lots of rules. And there's thermometers and timers going off. And things have to be this way, because you need to have the repetition and the consistency.

And I feel that it also comes from a sense of pride in doing your craft in a very precise way. Of course, I cannot speak for all chefs, but in most professional kitchens, it's really about that structure. And a cook, which I consider myself much more a cook than a chef, especially because I don't run a kitchen. There's instinct that goes into play. 

And the other day, on my last trip to Colombia, I went on a road trip going from Cartagena to Barranca, a city that’s on the coast. And we stopped for breakfast to have these deep-fried arepa with egg. And this woman on a side, on the side of the road in her little stand, was frying oil in this big vat over hot coals. The oil was at the exact temperatures you needed for the arepa to be perfectly crispy. There's no temperature gauge; there's no thermometer. It's just she knows, as soon as she drops that tiny piece of dough to test the oil, that the bubbles are right. And so, I feel that that's the difference. 

Alicia: Well, what made you make that leap from working in professional kitchens toward food styling?

Mariana: After working at Prune in New York, and beginning to explore the magazine world, I worked at the recipe testing kitchen of Saveur Magazine. Later, I worked at Eating Well. And I found it really good, just a position of cooking research, culinary history, photography, art, that really fascinated me, was all the things I loved into one profession that I didn't even know existed. I sort of found out about food styling being a full-time job from someone who mentioned it. And it was a perfect combination of all the things I love.

Alicia: And how did you develop your style as a food stylist?

Mariana: So how did I develop myself as a food stylist there? It was a little broken there.

Alicia: How did you develop your style and your approach, and where do your influences in that realm come from?

Mariana: So I mean, I first assisted for at least three and a half years. I assisted different stylists in New York who taught me so much. And I learned the craft, and I learned how to find the great ingredients. I learned the—that set etiquette that you need to understand to be able to perform on set and know who's who and what's what, and what things are appropriate. And that research of amazing ingredients and make a photo, what do you want it to be.

And so over the years, I started to develop my personal style that I think sort of grew organically. I really have an obsession with botanicals, with things that are very organic and imperfect but have this beauty, this innate beauty to them. And it's all about the details. So I mean, all of the textures of fruits and vegetables, the veins, the colors, and really taking that and potentializing it for the images.

Alicia: And you've worked on so many other cookbooks. What was the process like for creating your own versus working on other people's books?

Mariana: I mean, usually, when I've done work as a stylist for other people's books, the process where I take it from is really the recipes are ready, they're developed, they're tested, and they give me the manuscript and then we do the photoshoot. I come into the process when it's pretty far along, right? 

And so, for me, that part is about really communicating with the author and understanding where those recipes come from, and what they mean to them and how to really present them faithfully to what they envision. And then for my own book, I had to sit down and start to develop it from the start. What are the chapters going to be? What is this book going to tell? What's going to be the story, and how am I going to choose those recipes? And so it was a pretty personal exploration of going back in time and looking at those recipes that I grew up with, or foods that through my years of culinary research have left a mark.

Alicia: And it's a very organic and social approach in which you kind of feel that there are people at the table in all of the images. There's not this sense of, it's happening divorced from the actual act of eating. The act of eating is present in the book. And, even the way you describe making breakfast, it's kind of an event to put on your kimono, I remember reading.

And so, what inspired you to make the book so social, to bring in the playlists and the menus and that sort of thing? Just focus on the actual experience of being at a table?

Mariana: Well, because for me, it's all about the ritual. If it was just for nourishment, we could eat granola bars and call it a day, right? We don't really, really need to serve a table and gather. So, our needs are really all about that. 

And for the book and in Colombia, food, it happens with many people. And recipes usually make large batches and there's family lunches and people get together to eat for lunch, for dinner. There's all these events where we come together as a community. So I wanted the book to feel that way, and to really represent that ritual, that ceremony. 

Alicia: And where did you actually test the book, because you're using so many ingredients that are so specific to Latin America? Were you testing it in Brooklyn? 

Mariana: Yeah, so I was developing all the recipes in Brooklyn, tested all the recipes here, had different collaborators help me with the testing to make sure that in different cities in the U.S., you were able to find these ingredients. I had to make some substitutions. There were recipes that I was like, ‘Instead of a substitution, I'm just going to replace the recipe because it just won't be the real thing.’ 

But I want this book to be approachable and the recipes to be familiar. And Colombian cooking is pretty humble. Nothing is out of the ordinary. It's fresh cheeses, it’s plantains, it's mangoes, it's lots of onions and garlic and scallions and hot chilies. And so, I also selected the recipes that I felt could be prepared, far from the tropics, essentially.

Alicia: Right. [Laughs.] 

And in such a diverse cuisine as Colombia, you really showed regionality. What was the inspiration behind doing that? And also, how did you choose the—which regions, which recipes, that sort of thing.

Mariana: So I chose recipes that really have a story for me, either recipes from growing up and foods I ate at my grandparent’s homes, or recipes that I discovered on my trips of research and that have a little anecdote behind them. I want every recipe to have a meaning and to have a backstory. 

And so the way I organized it, I sort of thought about the book through times of days. So in the morning, the midday feast, which is when most of Colombian traditional recipes happen, like the big lunches are usually red bean soup, they are ajiaco, which are served midday. 

And then the different moments like the bits and bites of el algo, that afternoon little thing that you eat, and then kind of weeknight meals, which I use as a chapter called Columbian-ish, which I—Colombian ingredients with my own interpretation and that kind of New York influence, which I've been here for 23 years and some of my cooking definitely reflects the food and the style that I've learned here. 

Alicia: Right, right. 

[Laughs.] I had a noise.

Mariana: I'm sorry.

Alicia: No, it's ok. 

Colombia is very close to where I'm living in Puerto Rico. But people think about very specific ingredients from this region and not—don't really understand the diversity that's available in all these very different climates. I think in Puerto Rico, there are like seven microclimates where different things are—can grow. And I know Colombia has a similar environment.

Was it important for you to represent the diversity of what Colombian cuisine is versus what someone from the States might have in their head, which might be just arepa, which might—that might be the only idea? What was your approach to the diversity of Colombian cuisine and making it translatable to a book for everybody?

Mariana: So the way I did that was through the menus of the chapter called “A La Mesa,” in which I took five different regions of Colombia and described everything about them. So for instance, there's this one menu called “Medellín’s Only Season,” which really celebrates that coffee region, the Andes, the beautiful anthuriums, the way people set the table, the furniture, the music. 

And so with these menus, my intent was to transport the reader to the scene so that they could re-create those Colombian moments. And in each one of those moments, I highlight the regions by—I left some regions out, only because I didn't have a personal experience in those places. So I included the ones that really felt like home to me. And hopefully in a future book, I can explore other moments and other regions, but these were the ones that were closest to my heart.

Alicia: Women are present in such a significant way. You decided to give the book an explicitly feminine title. And so I wanted to ask about the role of women and the role of the feminine in your experience of food, and why you decided to express it so—in such an explicit way, with your first book.

Mariana: So I wanted to really celebrate Colombian women who are the backbone of our cuisine. They're the carriers of our traditions. In a country that has been through so much conflict, the fact that we're still making sancocho and we're still maintaining some of those essential recipes, I feel that it's thanks to these women who run the households and maintain those flavors alive. 

And then here in the U.S., as a Colombian immigrant, seeing other women who in New York work in food and carry those flavors even away from home was really—it was essential to me. My mentors growing up, in Colombia and here in the U.S., were mostly women. And so, yeah, I wanted to pay tribute to them.

Alicia: Of course.

Well, for you is cooking a political act? 

Mariana: Absolutely. I feel that with cooking, you make community. You bring people together to share each other's values, to share the table. It’s also the way you choose ingredients and where you buy them and who you support in that app. It depends on when you're—wherever your ingredients come from really, for sustainment. 

Alicia: Well, thank you so much again for taking the time. 

Mariana: Of course. Thank you for having me, Alicia.

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Camilla Wynne’s new book Jam Bake: Inspired Recipes for Creating and Baking With Preserves can make anyone believe they can make jam—even me, a person classically impatient with all matters of preservation. But it also goes a step further by helping you figure out what to do with those jars of jam, thanks to Wynne’s training and experience in pastry. From nostalgic whipped shortbread cookies with a thumbprint of jam to mango cream pie, it can change how one approaches fruit in the kitchen.

We talked about how fruit has changed since our grandparents’ time, how she found a style for teaching preservation, and what makes people afraid of jam. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Camilla. Thank you so much for being here. 

Camilla: Thank you for having me. 

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate? 

Camilla: I love this question. I feel very lucky. Well, I don't know if I feel—

I grew up in Edmonton, Alberta. So in the prairies, in Canada. I left when I was 18. I don't know, as a teenager, if I felt so lucky. But I feel very lucky about what I got to eat. So I had a set of grandparents in the country, two hours north, who gardened, on the farm that my mom grew up on. And so I got to eat a lot of homemade, homegrown food. And then my grandparents in the city had emigrated from Europe. And so, they grew totally different varieties of stuff in their garden and made totally different homemade foods. And they were both delicious. And there was this huge variety.

And then at home, which I think is unusual for a kid in the ’80s, is my dad was the cook.

And I complained a lot looking back on it during the period—they were separated for seven years—that my mom only made like five things. But retrospectively she was a working mom going to university and she made my five favorite things, actually. So it's great. 

But my dad was a super creative cook. He never followed recipes and he shopped all over the city, Asian grocery stores mostly. And he was a truck driver, so he’d go to the Italian store and the Mediterranean bakery and stuff. And they'd always be giving him things. I always try to give delivery drivers something now actually for that reason.

Alicia: [Laughs.] Wait, what were your five favorite things that your mom named? 

Camilla: Lipton’s Chicken Noodle Soup.Ichiban ramen. Cheese tortellini with butter. Well, I guess this doesn't count as making ‘em. Little Caesars pizza.

Alicia: I've actually never had Little Caesars, but people tell me it's good. [Laughs.]

But that's interesting. I used to eat, make cheese tortellini and put nothing on it. It was one of those—the only things I would make for me and my brother during the summer, when both my parents were at work, I would just boil the cheese tortellini. And we’d just eat it plain, which is, I don’t know. I haven't thought about how kind of odd that is. [Laughter.] 

Camilla: I mean, whatever. I ate raw noodles and stuff. [Laughter.] With a stick of butter.

Alicia: Right. [Laughs.] 

Well, the first thing I did after reading the introduction to your book, Jam Bake, was look up your old band. And it's always interesting, because so many people in food have these very interesting backstories to before food. First off, it takes a while sometimes for people to get to food. Either you're really in it from when you're a teenager or a kid, or there's always these signposts along the way that food is your thing. But you don't listen until a little bit later. 

But you write about touring with the band and everything you ate. And I wanted to hear a little bit more about how that part of your life influenced your coming to food eventually. 

Camilla: Well actually, for me, it was a break in my food life. Well, I moved to Montreal to go to university and then dropped out to go to pastry school. In pastry school, I joined a band and then started working at fancy restaurants and had to quit for the first time because you can't leave for two weeks when you’re a pastry assistant. That's fully impossible. On a two-week tour of the States, I remember.

But I'm so lucky that the owner, pastry chef, co-owner pastry chef that was one of my mentors, he would always hire me back. Very lucky. But then they kicked me out, and then I joined the one that had some more success.

And I think it was sort of a no-brainer for me to leave on tour and leave the culinary world for like five years, just because I felt I would never get that opportunity again. It's pretty amazing to be able to make records and tour around the world and stuff. 

But at the same time, I came back and all my friends had opened their own shops or become pastry chefs. And I was like, ‘Oh, my band broke up. And now I'm coming back, and I'm gonna be your assistant.’ I'm glad I did it. But yeah, it was an interlude, I guess, you could say.

Alicia: Well, what was it specifically? Because you're a master preserver. What was it about that that was a specific attraction to you. 

Camilla: It had to do with both pastry and being a touring musician, actually, I think. Because in pastry, so much of what we make is so ephemeral. We had to bake off new financier every day and stuff like that. And they had a one-day shelf life. So when I kind of discovered—when I realized that I could start making my own preserves, I was like, ‘Whoa, it's so satisfying to make something that I'm going to be able to enjoy six months from now.’ That seemed kind of magical to me. 

And also the same thing when I was on tour: I was so infrequently home. And I have so many fruits and vegetables that I'm obsessed with that it felt really important that I be able to hoard the ones that I really cared about during those times when I was home. 

Alicia: Can you tell me about the process of becoming a master preserver? What is that like?

Camilla: So, it sounds a lot fancier then it is. It's a really cool program that I wish existed in Canada, and it doesn't. And it's funny, I often get billed as one of Canada's only master preservers, but that's just because that's not a Canadian program. My frustration with, as originally a self-taught preserver, was always wanting to know more and why, and how does this work? And I'm not allowed to change anything. Well, why? And no book seemed to explain it. And so, I really wanted to know more. 

And so, I looked all over for the program. But a lot of them happen every second weekend or something, so it's not viable to travel for that. They only accept people from residents of the county, stuff like that. But finally, I found one in New York state that was like a three- or four-day intensive, so I just booked a hotel and went down there. 

And, for me, I'm really glad I did it. It was the two most charming women who taught it. And I did learn a lot, but it's about teaching people to be home preserving teachers, essentially. And for me, I already started my business. And I just really even wanted to do more. I wanted to know everything. So after that, I got some more education that really helped. That really wrapped it all up, and I felt pretty cool after that.

Alicia: How did you kind of develop the style that came to be the book, where you are making jam but you're not just putting the jam on a sandwich on toast? How did you come to your style? 

Camilla: Well, the concept for the book, for Jam Bake, is twofold.

So I ran an independent, a little preserving company for—in Montreal—for seven years or so. And spent a lot of time behind tables at craft fairs and farmers’ markets and stuff with people literally asking me what to do with it, beyond just put it on toast. And the answer was always obvious to me as a pastry chef. 

But also, I think because of producing so much jam, at a certain point you sort of divorce yourself from the edibility of your products. I don't know if this happens to everyone. But I remember working really late one night and just being starving, so hungry and not ever cluing in that I was processing a case of apples and that it’s really reasonable for me to eat one of those. You just have such a different relationship to your food at that point. It still remains actually very rare that I do eat jam on toast at all. I do bake with it a lot, so I was-

Alicia: That makes sense. 

No, it's funny, because when I was—I used to do farmers’ markets and stuff with vegan cake and cookies. People would always be like, ‘How do you not eat all of the cookies?’ It's because I made them. And so I'm looking at them-

Camilla: It’s like eating money.

Alicia: You really have that relationship to it where you really see it as a product and not like a food. Yeah, so it's an interesting thing that happens. 

Camilla: It’s kind of a shame. 

Alicia: It is a shame. I mean, I still don't really eat things that I bake. I've been eating the shortbreads that I made out of your book this week, actually, though, because I've been dying for a snack every couple of hours. So that's good. And people love them. 

Preserving is a complicated kind of science. And people think of it as complicated. And your book is very, very approachable. How did you develop your style of teaching when the conversation has to begin with botulism, but I guess that's how all food safety starts is about botulism. But how have you made this process approachable? How did you kind of get into your own style of teaching?

Camilla: Well, for the most part, I made it up as I went. To date, I've never really been to a cooking class aside from pastry school. I really do intend to go see more of what people actually do, ’cause I kind of made it up.

I was really lucky. When I started out, I had a college teacher volunteering, assisting me to learn to preserve. And so she sat in on a lesson one night and gave me pages of super helpful notes, getting people to introduce themselves, easy stuff that hadn't occurred to me. 

I mean, this is going to be a decade of teaching preserving now. And I think, I mean, it depends. My classes definitely are for everyone—or the way my writing, either, certainly. I am really curious. And I want to know exactly how preserving works so that I know what’s safe. That's what I always wanted to know and could never find the answers to. So I want to give that to people. 

But some people show up just wanting to make some—a jar of jam with their friends. There's so many different styles of cooking classes out there. And I realize that mine are heavy on the science and heavy on the info, that I try to balance that by being heavy on the jokes. And I just think it's so interesting. 

And the whole goal also is, for me, if I can be creative, that's the most important thing in my life, I think. And so I want to give that gift to people, because so often canning is—preserving generally—is seen as something really formulaic. And otherwise, it's dangerous. But if you understand the science behind it, then you can change things and know that it's safe. That's the gift I want to give to people, is to be able to judiciously use some creativity when they're making preserves. I mean, my other big goal is to lower barriers to access. 

But the other thing I really just want to communicate about my teaching style, that the idea there is I just—I know a lot of people are intimidated by canning and I think that's such a shame because for me it's such a deep pleasure. The process of it, the knowing I have a cupboard full of jars, the connection to my ancestors. And so is this thing that really connects people, I think, to their foodways, and to their—and just seasonality, certainly, and sometimes to their histories. 

I try as much as possible to make it as easy as possible to make it as adaptable as possible time wise, ways to break it up, ways to fit it into your life, because I know everyone's overworked now. Ways to get by with the most minimal equipment. Hopefully, none. So, lower economic barriers. All of that stuff I think is so important. And I try. It takes practice is the thing, like anything else. And you're never gonna—maybe you are good at the first time. But it's something that’s simply improved by repetition, and so people should stick with it. So I just want to encourage people as much as possible. That's my teaching philosophy. 

Alicia: Right. Well, it's a good one. 

Yeah, I definitely need to get into it. And I always have these intentions of getting into it. I have every Sandor Katz book so that I could learn how to make pickles. And I'm excited about your book, having it so I can make jams with different fruits that obviously—here, the fruit is so hyper seasonal. Very short windows for things like guava and passion fruit. It would make so much sense for me to preserve them. 

And I wanted to ask you about the things people are afraid of, in preserving and making jam. I mean, this might be a technical question, but what are the things that people are afraid of? Why are they afraid of them? How likely is it that things are going to go wrong, actually?

Camilla: I mean, certainly, people come to class definitely being afraid of botulism, because that's the big, scary, fatal one. I have had people attend the class who have given themselves botulism, and their friends. So it's not impossible. 

But it's very close to impossible when we're talking about jam. He made water-bath canned pesto, which is a low acid food that should not be water-bath canned. Yeah, I’d be surprised if any of his friends ever have his preserves again. But good for him for coming back to a class. 

That's the thing. That's why I think it's such a shame that actually the North American way that we're taught to can jam at home is to do the whole boiling water bath thing, because it's so unnecessary. And I think it prevents a lot of people from doing it. 

Botulism is almost completely a moot point. There's a few fruits I talk about that you can't use, but otherwise, the main thing worth dealing with is the possibility of is mold. Of course, if your jars are improperly sealed or sterilized, which we know is gross, of course. And if you scrape it off it is not gone, either. That's a good thing to know. I call it informed consent in the book, so whether or not you're going to eat it.

But at the same time, the toxicity of it, unless you have an allergy at home, you can just scrape it off, and probably you'll be fine. So there's hardly anything that can go wrong that's catastrophic.

Alicia: I wanted to ask, in the book, you mentioned some things in passing about how our grandparent’s tomatoes were more acidic, North American expectations around jam texture and how your recipes are different to that. So I wanted to ask about your kind of food philosophy, so to speak. What is your approach to sourcing ingredients, and how do you decide what to eat?

Camilla: I mean, I think I was shaped a lot working in fine dining. I'm really lucky that I got to work—I think I say it in the introduction of the book—but I went to work at a vegetable-focused restaurant for my pastry school in 2002. And I got told that that was a fad. And it was like, I shouldn't go there. And not only is that pastry chef now probably the most well known in the—in Quebec, but obviously, we all know that vegetable focus dining is here to stay. Let's hope. 

There was such a focus around seasonality. We changed the menu so much. So that really shaped me as a young cook. I mean, it is what it is, I won't touch a strawberry that's imported that's out of season. Why would I eat that when strawberry season is for enjoying strawberries? I don't need access to all things at all times. 

Definitely, that was a real challenge running a preserving business with very little capital. So a lot of the time, I ended up having to resort to frozen fruits sometimes and stuff like that just to keep up with demand and be able to make enough just to stay afloat. So in that way, when I'm teaching, certainly, I don't ever—I want to encourage people to use whatever they can use and is accessible to them. I think that's important. But for me, it's really important to, as much as possible, be working—I mean, in a perfect world—with farmers and stuff like that, with seasonal ingredients.

And using also as much of the food as possible. I mean, I think I learned that working in a—I don't remember there being a conversation around food waste when I was a cook in the early 2000s. But it was just you had to do it, because the margins are so thin that we had to use as much as we possibly could. So the strawberries that were getting sad got steamed and turned into juice, and now into the Champagne cocktail or whatever. We didn't throw anything away as much as possible. So that really got ingrained in me as well. I make jelly and I save the fruit pulp, and I put it in my kombucha and as much as possible.

Alicia: What is it like to support local food in Canada? I talk, I think, so much about it in a U.S. context, but what is the relationship to agriculture there?

Camilla: I mean, definitely, we have shorter seasons, certainly, than the majority of America. That can be challenging in some senses. At a certain point, what you have that’s local is overwintered root vegetables and apples and stuff like that. 

But, I mean, I think it varies all over the country. And I'm new to this, relatively new, to the city I live in. In the city I'm in, there's so many farmers’ markets. There's farmers’ markets every day, probably in multiple places. So you have so much access to buying directly from farmers, which I think is really important. There are cool businesses that have come up. There's one I'm really obsessed with where you can order stuff. They liaise directly with farmers and then pick, I think, and deliver straight to you. Different organizations like that.

I mean, it's so hard—at least in the circles I'm in—I think it's quite possible to be, certainly in the summer, to be buying all local basically. 

Alicia: Right. That's awesome. [Laughs.]

Wait, where are you living right now? 

Camilla: I live in Toronto. 

Alicia: Oh, cool. I haven’t been there.

Camilla: Oh, well, I don't know how it is as a visitor. I really like living her. I mean, it's one of the most expensive cities in Canada, unfortunately. That's very challenging, but living here—I spent a lot of my life in Montreal, where there's a real culture of preserving food and transforming food. And I lived right by the market where they sell all the bushels of things. And in summary, you just buy huge quantities, and everyone's doing it. 

And here, it's a lot of people in condos and all the farmers’ market sell just pints of things. That's the biggest amount you can get, has been confounding me since I moved here. So I just got a tip off on a more old-school market that does the real granny stuff that I'm very looking forward to visiting on Saturday.

Alicia: Nice.

Well, for you is cooking a political act?

Camilla: I think, yes. I mean, in as much as everything, I think, in a sense that we do is so undergirded by all of these systems. And there's so much potential in the path of where our food is grown, and all the ways it comes to our kitchens and our tables for abuse and injustice and—

So, yes, I think, certainly it's political. I try to make good choices. We just all have such different access, whether it's financially or mobility, or all these different things to be able to make the most ideal choices, right? 

But yeah, definitely, I think it is. And just in a broader sense, I suppose it's not exactly political. But what I think drew me to cooking, besides loving to eat, obviously, is just the spirit of generosity that I think—well, hospitality generally has. And I think, I mean, I think we really saw it in the pandemic so much with—there's so many pastry chefs raising money and stuff like that. Because I think that is the, this-

I mean, there's so many things obviously wrong with the industry. Obviously, hospitality as being a pure expression of generosity is not the reality, as is so often the case. But I do think that that is where a lot of people are coming from, at the heart of it, hopefully. [Laughs.]

I do think cooking is political. I struggle a lot with whether what I'm doing is explicitly political enough. So many of the people around me, my partner and my friends, have these very concrete jobs where they're obviously helping people, like harm reduction workers and nurses and midwives and doctors and stuff, that I get insecure sometimes that what I do is indulgent and unnecessary, and all these things.

I really think that's not true. I mean, I think people need delicious, beautiful things in their lives. But also, like I said, I try to bring the spirit of really wanting to bring people in and be able to—I mean, obviously, because I'm a business also, that complicates matters, of course. But you know, if anyone ever wrote to me and said they wanted to take a class and they didn't have enough money, I mean, I’d tell them, ‘Of course.’

But yeah, it's hard. It's hard. I try, and as much as I can by donating portions of sales from classes and stuff to things and trying to engage politically through my work as much as I can. But I guess it never feels like enough, because everything's just so messy. [Laughs.]

And then, just politically, I mean, it's the end of Pride Month, right? Which I think should, maybe isn't always anymore, but is a political thing. And I'm queer. And I think visibility is so important, and representation. And I didn't know, any hardly queer cookbook authors, I think, when I was a younger cook. And so there's also this struggle to balance—

I am not someone that people easily identify as being queer. And I think I struggle with that a bit, and wanting to represent my community, but also not—it never came up much in my book because it’s about jam making. It only came up as much, I think, as it's just a natural part of me.

So yes, that is also complicated. [Laughter.]

Alicia: Well, thank you. Thank you so much again for taking the time. 

Camilla: Oh, thank you. I’m just such a big fan of you. It's a real pleasure to—I feel very excited. Thank you so much.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about waves of interest in biodiversity and decolonization of various ingredients, and so it was the perfect time to talk to baker and co-owner of L.A. restaurant Friends & Family Roxana Jullapat about her book Mother Grains: Recipes for the Grain Revolution. Because who is really experiencing the grain revolution? And when will we revolutionize and decolonize global food systems, instead of just providing more artisanal choice to those with money?

Jullapat, who came up in some of the most influential farm-to-table restaurants on the West Coast, understands these issues better than most. We discussed how she came to bake with artisan grains, how we can think about flour differently, and how she managed to write a cookbook while still working in the bakery. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Roxana. Thank you so much for taking the time today to chat. 

Roxana: Hi, Alicia. Thank you so much for inviting me. 

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Roxana: So I was born here in the States, in California, to be more precise. But I actually moved to Costa Rica, where my dad was from, when I was just two. So my foods were just the foods of any typical Latin American kid, starting with tons of tortillas made with nixtamalized corn, of course. Tamales, tropical fruits like the ones you probably eat every day. And we actually start drinking coffee at an early age also. 

And then, of course, normal kids stuff, like, a spaghetti with tomato sauce and rotisserie chicken and all the things that kids like. But for sure, there were a lot more vegetables than you would imagine because there's just that access to produce everywhere year round. 

Alicia: And what was it about bread and pastry that drew you into working with them?

Roxana: When I decided to take a break from schooling, after I got my bachelor's degree, and before I commit—I was supposed to go to grad school. I was like, ‘Ok, let's do something manual. I need to use my hands and not study all day.’

And I went to cooking school, and I thought I was just gonna cook like any normal cook. At the time, I was vegetarian. And I had a real hard time in cooking school working with animal products. Really, really tough. I'm like, ‘Wow, this is so much blood.’

I remember having my first bite of steak that I had in a long, long time, like years probably, in cooking school. And so, bread and pastries seem so natural, right? These are ingredients that I’m not defensive about, ingredients that I use all the time even though there's a lot of dairy. But I was a vegetarian. 

And also my family, starting with my great-grandmother and my mom even, there's a lot of baking. So it didn't sound foreign. There were a lot of terms in Spanish and in French, which I was familiar with. So it seemed very approachable. 

Plus, by the time I graduated cooking school, having gone through the entire program, including all the savory food and all kinds of butchery and charcuterie, I was getting all these jobs in small restaurants. And I had been sent to the pastry station to plate desserts or make garnishes, etc. So I was like, ‘Ok, I guess this is it.’

And if once you know you like it, and you're kind of good at it. I found a really good job, which was working under Nancy Silverton. I was like, ‘Ok, let's go work at a great place that does this really well.’

Alicia: Well, what made you vegetarian and what made you stop being vegetarian?

Roxana: I was always not very—as a child, I was not super into meat. I thought it was really chewy and really hard and you needed a knife. And the flavors were really, really strong. Also I'm sure you're familiar outside of the United States, beef tends to be grass-fed rather than grain-fed, and it's not always confined so the texture and the flavor of the meat is very different. It's very forward, very meaty, very beefy. Almost barnyard. So I felt that was a—really hard for me as a child. 

I don't know what my parents were thinking. There were instances when we were very young. And in September we'd go pick the pig that we would sacrifice for Christmas. So, we’d go to a farm outside of San José, the capitol, and go visit the pig farmer and say, ‘Ok, this is ours.’ I mean, that's so cruel. Come Christmas, you don't want to touch that ham. So, I definitely felt like I couldn't separate the face of that animal with the meat on my plate. 

When I was allowed to say what I wanted to eat, in a family of five kids, you're—there's no menu to choose from. You eat what's in front of you. Once I had more freedom to say ‘I would rather eat this,’ I was a vegetarian. 

Alicia: And are you still vegetarian or no?

Roxana: I am very vegetarian-heavy in my house. I mean, we seldom purchase meat or fish. I mean, I think we have a can of tuna in the house, maybe in the pantry. So even though my husband is a chef, and we work in a restaurant that serves an omnivore diet, and we go to restaurants where we might enjoy the gamut of foods available to us, we eat very vegetarian, if not vegan-ish in my house.

Alicia: Oh, nice. Awesome. 

And I wanted to ask also how you developed your specific style of baking. You mentioned working under Nancy Silverton. You went to one of these—this really grand dame of baking. And how did you emerge from that and develop yourself?

Roxana: I think that the one thing that I felt very attracted to working in California, but also having come from a seasonal place, [where you] use what's available in front of you; there's not a huge amount of imports. I always found it very compelling and appealing to just go with that flow. Follow that seasonal rhythm. And that's what Campanile did so great, and why it was so important to me to work at a place like that. 

I'm very tomboyish in my baking, so I'm not into very intricate or meticulous technique. I want things to feel handmade and small batch–y. And that the ingredients are identifiable, that they didn't come in a jar or that they were in vacuum seal. I just want to feel that the process is more organic. It just unfolds unto itself, and you coax the ingredients just to do their thing rather than  impose on them your vision of the world. 

Alicia: Yeah. [Laughs.]

Well, you just had a book come out called Mother Grains. What was the process like—because I'm struggling to write a book right now—of being in a bakery and writing a book? What was your process for writing it, and how did you find that time?

Roxana: It’s really funny, interesting, and dramatic, you know? And I'm sure you feel all of those things, because when we—by the time my agent and I sat down and said, ‘Ok, this is a book proposal,’ I had a table of contents with a vast number of recipes. 

Now, these recipes are probably—were in a large format. This is for a bakery that makes more than a couple dozen at a time. So the first and the most challenging thing, when to just to downscale all those things. And then you think that you're explaining things very well until people say like, ‘What is ‘Add water to wet sand?’’ That doesn't sound that clear after all.

So, I would say that it took me a while to figure it out. And if I were to write another cookbook, I would do this process, which is we work—I work every day. I'm on the schedule; I work a station. I managed one of the ovens, or today, for example, I'm doing all the lamination for tomorrow. 

And I don't want to stop doing that. 

So I want to come in, do my work at three in the morning, whenever it is, and then spend one to two hours testing recipes or looking at them, getting familiarized with them. If it's downscaling, do that. Which is what I did last year, only I was disorganized about it. And then you take one day to write, and that's the day that you're in your house with your cat, pot of coffee, and just go for it. 

Impossible. Impossible. And I've seen I work with people that have done this, and I have no idea how they do it, but it’s impossible to just go, ‘Ok, I have an hour left. Let's go write.’ Ah-ah, that's not gonna happen. That’s not how it works. But I remember when Suzanne Goin was writing the Lucques cookbook. That's how she did it. She would be in between orders, go punch in a recipe. 

But yeah, it's incredibly challenging. Your entire staff is involved in the process. I was lucky enough to have journalists and English majors among my staff. I even have a—had a biologist. So I had a lot of resources. And then eventually, you're gonna have to—I don't know if this is for you also, but I did have to look for help. Look to those professional recipe testers and copy editors and have them help you out, because it takes a village. 

Alicia: Right, right. 

And so in the book, you write about how you came up in these very formative farm-to-table restaurants on the west coast, like Campanile. But it was local farmers getting into grains. There were new mills out there in Los Angeles that you visited. The Washington State University bread lab, that was what really got you interested in grain as a seasonal ingredient. Why do you think grain hadn't been more deeply considered by chefs, even the ones who were actively interested in sustainable and local sourcing?

Roxana: That is such an important question, and really the gist of why Mother Grains came to be. Because at some point, somewhere in our recent history—where we were pushing forward towards food security and industrializing processes to ensure that we could all eat—at some point we lost connection with the fact that this flour comes from a plant. It actually grows in the ground, literally in the ground. And there's several steps that can be mechanized and sort of divorce us from that connection to the land where the actual seed comes from. 

Even for a person like myself. I'm a baker, I know stuff. We all know, chocolate grows in a tree, but we see it in a bar pretty much always. So to actually really slow down and say, ‘Wait a minute. This is important. This was alive. It isn't anymore. Why isn't it anymore full of all these things, just like the fruit that I purchased at the farmers’ market?’

So for us farm-to-table people, which is a lot of us, right? And we kind of have a chip on our shoulder about how we work with our farmers, and we have a personal relationships with them and how we are really pushing for sustainability in an industry that is not known for it. We're making no effort to connect this important, humongous food group under that umbrella. Why are we not looking at it with that lens? And I think I think it was just part of a conversation that happened among many of us. 

But it really is kind of you have to see it with your own eyes to believe it and really, really feel the—that sort of fire in your belly, that ‘Oh, god, what have we done? What did we do to ourselves? How did we forget this? Why did we neglect all of this biodiversity?’

Alicia: No, I mean, talking about biodiversity is so important. And I feel that this is why your book is important and this conversation is important, because, it—We seem to be getting back to biodiversity ingredient by ingredient rather than—it hasn't been kind of a wholesale revolution of our food system. It's been a few people realizing, ‘Hey, we actually could have a lot of different types of grain and work with them,’ and that sort of thing. 

And I was talking to a bread baker friend, because I'm writing about sugar right now, and we were talking about how grain has had this moment. Of course, it hasn't had this moment necessarily for everybody or everywhere, but it's had this moment, and like sugar hasn't had this moment. 

And so here in Puerto Rico, which used to be—sugar carries a significant—You see the abandoned sugar mills everywhere. And now, I was talking to a farmer at the market, and she had some sugarcane. And she's like, ‘Oh, yeah, we have two varieties. But for us, it's a weed.’ One person is cultivating it to make rum here now, recultivating it, but for the most part it's either made for pitorro, which is a kind of a crude rum that people make in the mountains. And then there's just farmers with sugar who just are like, ‘Oh, sometimes we cut it up and eat it. But it's not for sale. But we were talking about, when is the moment going to come for sugar? 

And so—

Roxana: Right.

And it’s fascinating. It’s amazing. I'm sure that you're looking at ‘Ok, well now brown sugar? And turbinados and muscovados.’ And it is so incredibly flavorful, right? And it's hard for us to say like, ‘It's flavorful. It's not just sweetness, right?’

Alicia: No, I can't wait for more sugar.

In your baking, how do you bring your commitment to artisan grains to the rest of what you cook? Obviously, you come from farm-to-table restaurants. But how does the commitment to grains influence the rest of the restaurant?

Roxana: To be a seasonal baker with fruits could not be easier. You go to a farmers’ market, you visit a farm. It's very obvious when the fruit is organic or even when it's not certified. You know when a farmer is following sustainable practices. It’s obvious in the fruit; it’s obvious in their orchards. So easy to understand. I know how to work with this fruit. I know it needs very little sugar. I can do it in my sleep. Not to be arrogant, but it's been 20 years of this. So, it comes easily. 

But the thing about grain is that you really have to do your homework, because we don't—can we tell from a bag of flour that it is good or not? No. We can smell it. I mean, it takes a little bit of getting accustomed to the feeling, the feel of it and the smell of it, to really just know at first sight. And also you will find yourself picking your battles, because it's a huge battlefield. So how are we going to win this war? 

And for sure, there's a lot of confusion too, right? Because there's a sustainable aspect, but then there's also the health aspect. So the health folks, health advocates are pushing for quinoa, right? But we're like, ‘Hold on a minute. Quinoa comes from way far over there. And can we guarantee that those farmers are getting a fair share? I don't know. And why are we adding all this eco-footprint to this grain?’ And it's also not ours in a sense. We appropriated and became the food of white chicks from Santa Monica here in LA. It’s so multifaceted that you really have to just be like, ‘Ok, let's slow down and pick up our battles.’

So my first goal, which was relatively easy to achieve and is the reason I like to say that it’s easy because I want to see other people commit to it, is my first goal when we open the bakery, which was only four years ago, was every single thing we make has to have an amount of whole grain flour in it. We even committed to a percentage, which was 20%. And that was sort of imitating a policy that the California Weed Commission was trying to set up for local farmers markets here in California. 

So once you have that wind in your arsenal, you get more ballsy. And you want to do more. So now you see a lot of recipes that are increasing their percentages of whole grain flour. And now we're getting so good at it. Now, we understand like, ‘Ok, no, you really have to add a little fat if you want that effect. Or you really have to hydrate more if you want to produce this other thing, or build acidity, etc.’

So, it really is sort of a process. And I want to call it a journey or an adventure so that people are incentivized to jump in, because it really is sort of a road that will take many, many different directions depending on how you choose—what do you choose to down the road. 

And it’s interesting because the—because grain is so regional. We all have different experiences. No two bakers have the same journey. And I feel like that's fun. Here in California, we all buy sonora wheat because it's so drug resistant and so multi-purpose.

But I really hope everybody finds their thing, you know? 

Alicia: Yeah, yeah.

And I mean, that's so important and something that really has to—I'm really obsessed with people who write recipes and still maintain their originality and specificity. And I think there is still a point where you can still learn from a recipe even if you don't necessarily have those ingredients. You think about how you can approach this with what you have. 

And I think that we need more of that. We need more very specific, hyper-local and flexibility and originality and seeing originality as a good thing, because it promotes biodiversity and we definitely really need biodiversity. 

But at the same time, local grains, when you don't have that access—when I lived in New York, I would go to the farmers’ market and they would have the New York grain. Yeah, beautiful, and it's great. Lots of people are just going to the supermarket or just their—their local market hasn't caught up with that. So what do you think would be great steps toward making artisan grains more available and accessible to all bakers? 

Roxana: Thank you so much for asking this question, ’cause this is totally true. At the end of the day, I don't want to sound elitist and be like, ‘Go to your specialty mill, and buy a variety of wheat that has been rescued by this awesome woman.’ This is all true, by the way. This does happen. And those are conversations that I do have with people.

But we do have to meet each other where we're at, right? And at the end of the day, is it more important that you bake with the one bag of spelt that you can find in your local grocery store or is it more important for you to go and spend an outrageous amount in shipping flour from, say, Arizona or Pasadena, California, all the way to you?

So I think that we just have to kind of keep being realistic, and know that the market does—is a pushing force. And the more we ask for these products, the more we are telling the market, ‘This is what we want. We want to see more of this flour in the world and in our cooking. And this is the stuff we want to put in our body.’

I was just very recently in Costa Rica, visiting a baker friend who I met recently, actually, through social media. And I'm talking to him about the challenges of not—he does not work in a country that produces wheat. So he is actually having a completely different conversation. He is actually reaching out to the bread lab and saying, ‘Which wheat will thrive in the tropicals, tropicals region? What should we be doing to make this feasible?’ And he finds himself getting a bag of khorasan all the way from Oregon to Costa Rica. Just let me see what this is and what can we do?

So the thing about grains is that they are grains. And another friend that wants me to use the pejibaye flour, which is a fruit from a palm that grows in many Costa Rica—in Central American countries. Probably grows around you, and they all have different names depending on the country, right? 

But then we are changing the composition. A grain’s a grain and a root vegetable’s a root vegetable and fruit from a palm tree is fruit from a palm tree. Which means that at the end of the day, there's a lot to learn. And how do we build equivalences and become more adept at changing flour that comes from grain to be—how do we use those principles with flour that comes from our root vegetables like yuca, for example?

Alicia: Right. 

Yeah, no, that's the thing. Here in Puerto Rico, it's—we're not growing wheat, and we probably should be. That moment has to come where we have someone here who is interested and ask the folks like, ‘What is the grain that—’ 

I mean, we have seven different microclimates here. There's somewhere that grain could grow, and we could mill it and everything. But there is someone here at least who is getting wheat and milling it themselves. So we're getting closer, I think, to that. 

Roxana: Let’s not forget that wheat is an enormous multi-billion dollar business, right? There are forces at play here that are not interested in smaller groups making, adapting their own microsphere to their microclimate. It’s not important to them, it’s not—there's no revenue to be had. 

But this happened once before. We came from Europe only 500 years ago. And it adapted to the Americas, and now we're the top producers in the world between Canada and the United States. So this can happen. These are now heritage varietals that we consider precious.

Alicia: Right.

No, and it's just a mind-set change. Wheat is one of those things where there are big agribusiness lobbies behind the choices there. And I think it's kind of taken for granted. People are like, ‘Well, yeah, corn, there's a big lobby. Soy, there's a big lobby. Meat, dairy, big lobbies.’  But wheat is also one of those things. And yeah, we use it so much in everything we do. We should definitely be thinking more about that.

Roxana: When you mention corn, it's like, ‘We are the children of the corn.’ Yes, we are. Yeah. Let's not forget, it is literally our lineage, my very ancestors who tamed corn and actually made a flour out of it—a mush out of it. Now we can dehydrate and make, use almost as a flour. But there's also cornmeal, which is just that same kernel just dried up. 

So I mean, seriously, Mother Grains could have been Mother Corn. Corn is another mega-grain, another—is another juggernaut that is everything.

Alicia: No, I'm excited. There's folks growing corn here that I haven't tried yet, but I'm very excited about.

And for you, is baking a political act?

Roxana: 100%. Because everything is.

And I have to say that the last two years of social change, starting with even a little bit before the George Floyd assassination and the sort of reclaiming who we are and what belongs to us and the right to turn tell our own stories and the right to cook our own recipes. Leches be seis leches and all those things we were getting fights about, I always had this sense of advocacy. You really have to fight that good fight. And sometimes I have not been really good at finding my voice in the whole process, and let anger be the tone rather than persuasion, which is what we're—I'm leaning a little bit more. 

But yeah, it is a political act. But it's also an act of mindfulness. We talk so much about being in the moment and being present and ‘Let's meditate,’ but also what about that sort of moment in which you can make these decisions with calm—pure calm and are able to say, ‘This is the flour that I can see, that I can feel, that I can smell, is going to be different.’ So your whole senses are engaged, and you're going to taste something that is familiar but different. Your entire system is involved in that sole moment of producing a baked good.

I hope. I hope you're not that checked out, that you're like, ‘Oh, look at that cookie.’ It really pulls you in, and in doing so, you're 100% present. 

Alicia: Right. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. 

Roxana: Thank you so much for having me.

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There are eras of the recent culinary past that I was only able to experience through reading magazines and retroactively digging into cookbooks, and what I find most exciting was the development of farm-to-table “New American” cuisine in New York City. How chef and author of What’s Good? A Memoir in Fourteen Ingredients Peter Hoffman came to be a major figure in that development through his restaurants Savoy and Back Forty is an absolutely fascinating story, thanks to his candor and ability to self-critique. The book also explores the significance of certain ingredients, showing how local ecology and cuisine develop hand in hand.

Going back through the transcript to get this conversation ready for publication made me realize how deeply it dug into my psyche, that I have been thinking about its themes ever since we spoke in mid-July. This conversation forms the foundation of a lot of my forthcoming essays, because it is a rich and generous one that I know I will revisit again and again. We discussed the cultural significance of the embrace of olive oil in the U.S., why it’s important to name Palestinian cuisine, and how difficult it is to run a restaurant while maintaining one’s ideals. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Peter. Thank you so much for coming on today to chat. 

Peter: Yeah, it's wonderful to be taking this time with you, Alicia.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate? 

Peter: Yeah. 

So I grew up in Bergen County, New Jersey, a suburban town just over the George Washington Bridge from the city, where most parents commuted and traveled into the city. But my dad was a dentist. And so, he was locally based. My mom taught little pre-K, and then taught moms how to play with their kids in educational ways. And so, she did that locally as well. 

And our food, it was interesting, sort of what the food world was like there for us. My mom was born in Germany. She was an émigré from Hitler's Germany. And so, there were some strong European influences in some of the dishes, but clearly in the sensibility. And so, she was not one to embrace industrialized food for the most part, and really cooked with real ingredients and insisted on that in many ways. 

It's not like she was cooking German dishes. She was 10 when she left Germany, and actually got her culinary grounding from the Joy of Cooking, which her mother-in-law gave her when she married my dad, since she needed to know how to take care of her darling son. She was always grounded in good ingredients simply prepared. There was no Jolly Green Giant in our house. There was no Wonder Bread. When I was a young teenager, health food stores started to pop up. And she was packing me rice cakes and little gorp combos as part of my lunch. 

So my parents also brought us into the city a lot to experience the diversity of life and culture, whether it was art or cuisines. I was exposed as a young person to Middle Eastern food and Hungarian food. And an important sort of dining experience for me was when I got taken to a Brazilian spot and I ate feijoada.

The world is diverse. And it's exciting, and food is part of that discovery of difference. And whatever homogeneity was part of my experience in the suburbs, or deadening about being in the suburbs, they counteracted that with a lot of exposure to the world. So, grateful to them for that.

Alicia: And in the book, you write about this very food-centric upbringing. But was it different from how your peers were growing up, this no Jolly Green Giant, no Wonder Bread, and going into the city a lot? Did you have a sense that this was in contrast to kind of the dominant ways of eating?

Peter: I mean, we had other friends that ate good food. But my mom, if I think about my peers at the time, we definitely stood out as not completely outliers, but definitely on the good food edge of things. But in the dominant culture, in the school cafeteria, where lots of people were buying what the cafeteria ladies were preparing, I always brought my lunch. And so, that was always an expression of my mom's values. 

And so yeah, I had to explain lunch to people. [Laughs.] What are those rice cakes? But I don't remember it being a source of too much embarrassment. But it definitely was a shift there to say that I didn't look like everybody else. But there were lots of ways that I didn't look like everybody else.

Alicia: [Laughs.] And I've read a lot of memoirs of farm-to-table chefs that really aren't grappling with kind of economics or restaurant realities in the way that yours does. You write that your first jobs in French restaurants, you saw them as serving rich foods for rich people, but you kind of came around to the idea that a restaurant could have a bigger purpose through reading Wendell Berry. How did you establish your own politics, and how did they evolve while you went from working in restaurants to owning restaurants?

Peter: I mean, my politics — it's about how did I realize that food had a political side to it? Because my politics were always liberal. I mean, my parents were lefties, and so that kind of thing was always in the household looking through a leftist lens of politics. I don't think they had much awareness of what the cultural politics were. And a lot of people didn't. And some of that's only coming into conversation now. It's just what paintings hang at the Met or in MoMA is a conversation that nobody was really having about whether that was just white guys, or were looking at objects that were stolen from peoples who lived in other lands. And there was sort of the discussion about the Elgin Marbles being stolen from Greece, but that whole larger conversation about colonialism and wasn't one that was being had until very recently. 

So in the world of food, once I said and expressed the idea that I was interested in becoming a chef, it was well, ‘Go for the best.’ And so the best was defined as what's at the top of the pyramid, which is old cuisine, French old cuisine. 

And so, I tried to pursue that. And I got a job in a, what I say in the book, is sort of a second-level French restaurant, the holy trinity of Le Cirque, not La Cremaillere—Le Grenouille, and Le Pavillon. Those restaurants weren't interested in taking me, and—La Côte Basque, that's actually the three. And they sent me somewhere else. And so they needed some help. And I found it a completely oppressive kind of cooking and bogus in this sort of wonderful chapter. 

Speaking about your latest thing about wounds, I write the chapter about how I burned myself terribly in trying to hold on to my job. We were opening cans of escargot that were—that came from Taiwan and stuffing them in little shells and plugging them with herb butter. And the specials would be developed by the chef when he came back and was just kind of this interchangeability of this garnish mixed with that garnish, therefore, it has this name that Escoffier created 100 years ago. And it had no relationship to ingredients, to freshness, to anything inspirational. And I was like, ‘I hate this place.’ And I got fired. But I got fired because I didn't belong in that culture. 

And so, I found my way to—I mean, there probably were some other jobs. But I found my way to a job at La Colombe d'Or, which was cooking the food of Provence. And so, that was my first entry into regional food as opposed to old cuisine. And with that comes a very different approach to ingredients. It's not about making it richer and adding lots of butter and making it so refined that you didn't need a fork and a knife. You could eat it with one hand, or that you're attenuating the taste by adding all this butter to it. 

Regional food is much more direct. I worked unsuccessfully. I tried to get into the old cuisine world of Midtown, high-end French restaurants. It was a culture that I didn't belong in. And I also realized it wasn't food that was exciting me in any way. And slowly, I found my way to a job at La Colombe d'Or, pretty much the first Provençal restaurant in New York City, and certainly one to put it out there in a modern way for diners at that time. 

And what I realized in being there was that regional foods, and the cuisine of Provence in particular, was really diametrically opposed to what old cuisine, which was always trying to make things richer and more delicate and more attenuated as opposed to cooking directly with the ingredients. Maybe keeping the animal on the bone, but also that the vegetables were less adulterated. Not to say that we didn't chop things in brunoise or wanting it to look orderly, but that power and punch and zest and sort of explosions of flavor were goals in that cooking as opposed to delicacy. And that started to really change my head, and I never looked back from that and never really tried to get into the world of old cuisine again. 

But with it, there was also this conversation. I remember having a conversation with a fellow cook. And he was talking about, ‘Well, let's study the cuisines of the poor people of the world.’ And I was like, ‘Why?’ And I started to realize that this whole notion of old cuisine was wrapped up in a kind of colonialism and exploitation of cultures, in terms of trying to go out and conquer the globe. 

So then it sort of started to morph into ‘Well, who's in the dining room? And are these fat cats people that I want to cook for?’ And so there's always sort of that balance between what are we cooking and who are we cooking for? In a certain way, that was a choice that I made in terms of what kind of a restaurant that Susan and I opened, that it was never trying to be a high-end restaurant. It was not priced that way, because I didn't want to cook for those people and just be surrounded by that. It's not like it was cheap, or it—I mean, it was still a mid-priced or higher price restaurant, but I never wanted to develop a milieu in the restaurant, that this is food for the wealthy and what comes with that.

And I write about this a little bit as well, is that those restaurants are trying to sell—they're still selling you the idea that they have access to something that nobody else has access to. It's not just that the diners have more money in their wallet or on their credit card than other people. But it's this mythical notion of selling the idea that the chef, as the gatekeeper, has access to ingredients that nobody else has access to. And that's why you should come eat in my restaurant. 

And I've always sort of hated that notion. I want to be a good cook. I want people to like my cooking or appreciate what I'm doing, because I do it well and I deal with technique. And I make it delicious, or I make it beautiful. But I'm working with the same ingredients that everybody else is, has access to. And we can build the cuisine and a reputation based on abundance, not on scarcity. 

Alicia: Absolutely.

And I mean, how do you think about the role of a chef? In the book, you write about trying to have a non-hierarchical kitchen and trying to—and how that didn't work. Having an egalitarian kitchen didn't necessarily work. But we've been having these conversations now about how do we create an egalitarian, equitable kitchen space. And how did you take these ideas that you learned from what you didn't want and apply them in a way that actually made sense when you opened Savoy?

Peter: Well, we can only ever work with where we're at, historically, in a certain way. What might feel like standard practice today wasn't then, which was the idea that the front of the house was all pooled tips. And that was a way that I wanted to encourage cooperation and teamwork, now people have—

I mean, we understand even more acutely what's wrong with tipping today than we did then. But the idea that you were going to give a territorial section to somebody that they controlled the flow of dollars that came and went in that section. I mean, it's just absurd, right? 

So that was a change that we made and with it, the completely expressed values that we're going to work together. And we're also going to work together between the front and the back of the house. And so, that was always a challenge. Certain people came into the restaurant having had different life experiences or work experiences, and didn't always treat—cooks didn't always treat the front of the house with full respect and in the other direction as well. And so that was always a teaching moment, always an opportunity to continue to model for people that we need to treat people with respect. And so, that was an ongoing project. 

I opened the restaurant where we didn't have any prep cooks. Everybody did their own mise en place. And I was really dedicated to that idea, because I wanted people to take responsibility for how they—for what their mise en place was. Was it cut nicely? Was it clean? Was it fresh? It's not just sort of, like, ‘What is this product? Who did this?’ 

But people—It didn't always have efficiency to it. And there's this sort of a division of responsibility that is part of the manufacturing industrial model that people tried to convince me was more efficient, meaning more financially lucrative, that I needed to embrace. And they were right. I mean, they were right, because it's so hard to make any money in the restaurant business. And so, you look to what compromises can you make that still feel ok? That they're compromises, but they're not detrimental to the product? That's a whole project to, to say, ‘What am I comfortable with? What am I not comfortable with? And how do I continue to find that balance?’ 

I don't know. Without going deeply into the whole thing around the burger, there were compromises that then got made in the restaurants that then—I ended up going like, ‘This isn't the restaurant that I started out with, and that, that fed my soul. And I don't know how to get back to what I once was. And maybe I can't.’ And that sort of led to some discouragement, and ultimately to closing the restaurants.

Alicia: Yeah. 

In a similar vein, you write about butter, and you just spoke about butter as kind of representative of cuisine and of this French dominance of what good cooking is in the minds of people who both worked in restaurants but also went to restaurants, and how the rise of olive oil led to this kind of understanding that there were other cuisines in the world beyond continental European cuisine. 

And that was really interesting to me, because I think I remember the moment when everyone was, started to use olive oil. But I never, I think, thought about it in this way necessarily. And I wanted to ask, can you kind of expand more on that moment? 

And also, you, when you talk about other cuisines, you do talk about Palestinian cuisine. And that really made an impression on me, because usually, that's not something people in food media say. Palestinian cuisine goes a little bit under the radar. 

And so yeah, those I guess, are two questions. [Laughs.]

Peter: Yeah, those are two topics. But let's talk about them. 

So the butter chapter is really, to me, a very interesting chapter. In some ways, it really reflects some of the complexity of the book. I'm not just writing a memoir; I'm also sort of telling stories about ingredients and our relationship to those ingredients. And some of that's botanical stuff. And in the butter chapter, it's really historical and cultural. 

And I open that chapter by talking about the fact that there was only margarine in my house when I was little, and sort of what that, I think that grew out of rationing food, and specifically butter being rationed during World War II. And that my parents experienced that and got used to margarine and sort of—you come to like what you have around you because that's what it is. And then it was our Black housekeeper who introduced me to butter and showed me what a far superior cooking fat and tasting fat it was. And it wasn't long before there were two butter dishes sort of side by side that—there was this half-stick leftover that she hadn't finished when she cooked food for us next to the margarine. And then soon I was buttering my toast with butter instead of margarine. 

And so that part of the chapter is sort of about a Black cook who came out of the South and came—made the Great Migration to the north for better opportunity. Used a great skill set that she had, which was that she cooked with skill and flavor, and that was part of what she did in our family and that we cherished her for, all of us. But I took that with me going forward, and so I have some gratitude there for introducing me to that world. 

But what butter was doing in French cuisine was that they were always looking—the French cuisine is sort of looking for homogeneity, right? They want a sauce that is, whether it's a cream sauce, or a butter sauce or bordelaise, it kind of lays over the—whatever you're saucing and completely envelops it. So, the idea of emulsification, it's sort of going into this, the poetry or the philosophy of pursuing emulsification as opposed to the unemulsified. 

And so, Italian food and cooking with olive oil tends to be about unemulsified sauces, that is showing the different ingredients and that something is broken or not brought together, or we see the diverse and varied ingredients. And so, there's something kind of deep in that, that we're not trying to bring everything together. We're saying that herbs are herbs and oil is oil, and here's some chopped up capers, and some bits of olive. And that there's beauty in unemulsified life. And I think that that's part of what olive oil did. 

It's the beginning of shifting away from France as the center of old cuisine and beginning to look to, well, who else cooks with olive oil? And what did they do with it? And so that took me into the Mediterranean, and being excited by the foods of North Africa or the eastern Mediterranean. Turkey, Greece, Lebanon, all of that. And all of those are such exciting flavors. 

I mentioned the Palestinian cuisine in the book, because I think it's important. I'm Jewish, and I write about some aspects of that. There's a chapter about Passover in the book, and then I used Passover to explore the world of Sephardic foods, that is the Jews who were expelled from Spain. And those are not my people. And my people are kind of the Northern European Jews, what are known as Ashkenazi Jews. And that was matzah ball soup and pot roast. And it had been served at my Passover table for decades. 

And I was like, ‘Oh, I'm so sick of this.’ All the jokes that people sometimes make about Jewish food not being very interesting, or just a hunk of meat on the plate kind of thing. And well, we've then over the last 20, 30 years, people have started to say, ‘Well, Jewish food can be really exciting. And it's really diverse.’ And so for me, I use Passover as a way of exploring all of that, and looking into ‘What are the Jews of Morocco eating? Tunisia, Greece, Turkey?’ All of that. 

And so with that, then you start to go ‘Well, many times those foods reflected the cuisine of the place itself. Where were Jews living? And is the food, really all that—aside from following the kosher rules, kashrut rules—is the food all that different from the people who were living there, around them, who were not Jewish?’ So a lot of those foods are similar, or the same. 

And so it led me to be able to then sort of say, ‘Ok, what is going on in Israel today?’ And specifically, sort of, at the same time that we have this rise of Israeli expansionism and Israeli exploitation of the Palestinian people and the conflict not moving any closer to any resolution in—it's been going on all my life, that there's this rise of interest and excitement in the food media around Israeli food and Israeli cuisine. 

And so, it immediately begs the question of what is this food? Where did it come from? What is—Not where did it come from, but I mean. It sounds like it's coming from outer space. It’s like, ‘What is this food about? What stories does it reflect and part of?’ Not all of what's being talked about in terms of Israeli cuisine, because there are many cultures and many Jews who have come to Israel. And so those dishes are diverse. 

But a lot of that is the food of the region, which is the food of the Palestinians. And what is that? And why isn't that something that we are really celebrating and paying attention to? And using that moment, to go, ‘How does this whole culinary story feed into the political story, and—or vice versa? Is the food story being used to color the political story that somebody wants to tell?’ And then, history is always told by the victor, right? One of the phrases that I think is important to look at, is like, ‘What is this history? Who's telling the story?’ And so, this is a good moment for us—a really important moment for us—to be looking at that, in terms of the cuisine as well. 

And so, yeah, our food is always has a political aspect to it and is always worth looking at and thinking about and—

I guess a while ago, you said something about Wendell Berry and all of that. It's just that moment of finding that essay, and that changed my whole outlook and my lens. So, it is expressive of our culture and our root values. And we need to be looking at that. 

One of the things that I, that I'm using as a signature and inscription in my book when I'm signing it for people who I don't necessarily know is ‘Our food is a self-portrait. Keep painting masterpieces.’ So, the part of the self-portrait is that what is it—

What is our food saying about who we are and what our culture is and what our values are? And so, we need to keep thinking about that and keep making choices and shaping that so that it really reflects what our values are.

Alicia: Right, right.

Well, you mentioned here also food media, where it was telling the story of Israeli food, and what does tha—what did that really mean? And what did it really reflect? And one of the first mentions, maybe the only mention of food journalists in the book, refers to complaints about ramps, about how they're trendy, they're not actually that great. The kind of stuff that food writers who have to write five things a day and put it out there do to just get people's attention. 

But I wanted to ask, what is your perspective on food media generally? Has it changed when you had a restaurant to when you don't have a restaurant? Do you really consume a lot of food media?

Peter: Big topic, Alicia. 

The world of the food media was a lot smaller when we opened the restaurant in 1990. But we still understood at the time that they had to generate content all the time. And so, that was both good and bad for us. We saw that if we could figure out that the reason people came around and were looking for things or that we could suggest ideas to them was that they needed content. But you also start to see where that's hollow. 

I also think that we’re in a moment where, independent of the food media, I think we've come to realize that reporters are not just innocent bystanders but they are actual participants in this story, in the shaping of the story and the framing of the way we think about things and how fraught that is in terms of the politics. And for a long time, I don't think we understood what that looked like in the food world. But now we do. We understand that in certain ways that as the gatekeepers, that certain people who write at certain publications, they are the tastemakers. And so, they tell you where to go or what to think about food experiences.

It’s fraught. And again, some of it gets shaped as white, elitist, sometimes male people being the ones who are anointed. And partly, they continue to reward the people who were part of the club that they're in. That gets back to the old cuisine thing, and it gets back to what paintings are hanging at the—in MoMA or at the Met, right? What is blue chip art, and what is blue chip food?

But we're starting to shake that up a lot, and in ways that are very, very profound and significant. And I think, still, where I'm most disturbed by where the food media hasn't really come to terms with their own role is that over and over again, we see that these chefs who are running toxic environments, whether it's sexual harassment or just a toxic workplace that is abusive of people's humanity in order to get the ultimate finest product of the night. Or the idea of that tough love is actually a valuable way of running a company culture. All of that the food media still hasn't moved off of that. 

And so that over and over again, we see all these James Beard winners or highly touted restaurants, then turns out the chef is a creep, or—I don't mean like a sexual creep, necessarily—but possibly—but not a good person. Not fostering good culture. I don't think the food media has come to terms with their own role in that. And we're still seeing it over and over again, that somebody gets called out and you go, ‘Well, how did they get here? How did that person rise to the level that they were at?’ And that's the story.

And even though some of the food writers have written, done deep research and gotten people to talk about it, it's like, ‘How did they get there in the beginning, and what is food media's role in that?’

And I have, I guess, I have some bad feelings about where and why I wasn't always considered part of the in crowd, whether it was the in crowd by other chefs or the in crowd by the food media themselves. And a lot of that had to do in its time, or in that time, had to do with that I didn't carouse in the way that was, what was the dominant social force in the food world at the time. And that was exciting, that people were living large, staying up all night and drinking hard and expensive—eating excessively and doing blowouts. I didn't want to live that way. 

So that's not as good a story as people who are living large. Still on my path and feel better about it. And my body feels better about it too.

Alicia: [Laughs.] 

Well, it is interesting, because I think that I've also wanted to see that sort of internal media criticism where when there's a great piece, maybe, at Grub Street, about—Mission Chinese Food was supposed to be this good restaurant to work at, but actually, it was terrible and toxic, the same as all these other ones. And you want to say like, ‘Well, where is the criticism of how this place was built up? It didn't come out of nowhere. Part of the fostering of the toxicity comes from the hype that we give to restaurants.’

But it's true. There hasn't been a real moment of looking inside and saying, ‘Well, what is our role in this, really?’ it's kind of just this vague correction, of course, that, you know—and I'm guilty of it, too, because I don't know how else to do my job, where we just kind of take chefs for their words on whether they're good people or not now. And we're not really still necessarily doing the real inquiry into how things really are in their kitchen. 

And now, Food & Wine changed its thing so that it was like 25 people doing good in the food and beverage industry. Why don't we just stop putting people on pedestals? Why don't we just tell stories? And it really is upsetting to me that we don't have a real reckoning because it's still trying to sell in the same old way, just kind of put it in new packaging.

Peter: Yeah, I agree with all of that, Alicia. And there's a way that as people, as individuals, that we still succumb to even if we are trying to get our politics right or we understand the stories that came before, there's a way that we are excited—or actually, maybe, I want to say titillated. I mean, that's part of it, too, is just like, ‘Where did it go wrong?’

Food is sensual, right? When we have great food experiences, it makes us feel great to be alive. It makes us thrilled. And what makes it tilt into sexual, right? 

And that's why I use the word titillate, right, because there are certain chefs who crossed that boundary. I don't mean with their workers or with customers. I mean, in their—in the way that they talked about food, that it crossed over into a sexual place. I mean, look what we called it. We called it food porn. Right? I mean, I was horrified when I first heard that term. I mean, it's like, ‘I love photographs of beautiful food, but food porn?’ 

All of a sudden, we've taken it to a place that is the debasement of one of the most glorious things that that our body has sensitivity to. And food is right there with it. It's such a debasement of people's beautiful cooking to call a photograph of their dish ‘food porn.’ And so, we continue to support that way of thinking about it through travel films, and what—

Look, I love travel. And I love food travel. It's been part of how I've expanded my mind and experience my understanding of what it means to be human and the glory of diversity on the planet, both in terms of what grows here and who lives here and what people have done with it. 

Alicia: Yeah.

And I mean, in the book too, you talk about Anthony Bourdain in a way that I think most people—I don't know. [Laughs.] We've kind of deified him in a way. And you write about how the early bravado, the devil-may-care attitude, and then the later coming to focus on land, labor, culture. For you, what was his influence when you were in the restaurant? And how do you perceive things now? What is, do you think, of his lasting influence?

Peter: Well, I think he gave license to a lot of the bad behaviors. And so, I hold him. I mean, it was there. But he romanticized that. And I think that was really detrimental to the restaurant world, to us, culturally. 

He moved off of that, and people really came to love his travel pieces and his exploration, that—and felt he had compassion and was able to connect to all kinds of people. There's truth there. I mean, he certainly was no longer following the old cuisine that he started out following in the same way that I was following that 30 or 40 years ago.

I think that what he moved on to certainly opened people's eyes to the wonders of the world and in different food and different cultures. But he still loved being outrageous, and got attention for that. And so, he continued to be a controversial speaker. And people love that. They love extremities. What we have politically going on in this country now to that, that we don't have real conversation, we have people who are at the extremities and saying outrageous things. And some people get behind it and vote for those people and other people are offended by it and vote against that person. So, he's complicated. 

Alicia: Yeah, no, very much.

[Laughs.] Well, to talk about kind of another sort of passing mention in the book, but it's actually—you're going to talk to Amanda Cohen of Dirt Candy tomorrow for MOFAD. And she emailed me while she was reading the book to say that you mentioned working at Hubert’s, because we're—we had a conversation at the end of last year where she was like, ‘You're the only person I've ever heard talk about The Vegetarian Compass.’ 

So, we are both the only people who've ever talked about this book and this person together. So when you write in the book about working for her, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ If you could tell me more about that experience, because it seems there's not a lot of information because she passed away so young and before her cookbook even came out. And you mentioned that it was where you were introduced to going to the Union Square Greenmarket. And so, can you tell me more about what she was like, what the restaurant was like, and how a vegetable-kind of focused restaurant was operating in that time?

Peter: So Hubert's was a fundamental restaurant in my development and in my life for many reasons. One is, I met Susan, my wife, there. But there was a group of people who were cooking there. And maybe this is true for lots of people that they have sort of, they're coming-of-age restaurant, or they're still connected to those people. And Hubert’s was that coming-of-age for me in many respects. 

So after sort of doing my attempts at old cuisine, and then finding regional food by working at La Colombe d'Or, then I ended up at another restaurant that was sort of trying to do old cuisine but from an American point of view. And that was the Quilted Giraffe. I had a lot of problems with what that food was. But I learned a lot there. And at least it was being run by Americans. And so that, there was a culture there and an excitement about food that was different than what was happening, or my perception of what was happening in the French world at the time of Midtown French. 

Then I went to France and I studied with Madeleine Kamman, and she was all about the regional cuisines of France and Italy. And so, she really pointed me towards not just cooking with the seasons, but that all these cuisines, all these regional foods grow out of what was indigenous to the region. And these wonderful dishes are classics, because everybody cooks them, because that's what everybody has on hand. And so, I was very excited by that notion and exploring the world of food through that. 

And so, after riding my bicycle around France and Italy and a little bit of Spain, following my time with her, I came back to the United States. And I landed at Hubert’s. And what they were realizing that they were interested in, and we were part of shaping that, but it was this idea of new American cuisine, that is the historical foods of this land, and the different peoples who came to live here from different places, but also what grows here. What's great that we can work with instead of flying things in from Europe. And so, that's the beginning of the whole farm-to-table movement. 

And so Len and Karen, Len Allison, Karen Hubert, a couple. They married while we were working together, but they had been a couple for a long time. They weren't cooks, really. I mean, they weren't professional cooks. They came to it from the world of philosophy and filmmaking, and they kind of had this idea of a group project. And so, Len saw himself as an auteur that he was. He was a film director without knowing anything about film. He was a chef director without knowing anything about food. 

And so, he gathered interesting people together and threw them into the lab of the kitchen and said, ‘Let's see what comes out of it. And it'll be interesting, and we'll serve it to people.’ And that was an incredibly exciting and liberating experience to be part of it. It wasn't necessarily a good way to run a restaurant, but there was some very exciting food that came out of that. 

And people that we got to meet, one of them being my friend Romy Dorotan, who now has Purple Yam out in Ditmas Park and had Cendrillon in Soho for many years. Masami Kawata, who I met through—we did an exchange program with Omen restaurant, the Japanese restaurant on Thompson street in Soho ‘cause it was across the street from where I lived. And I was so excited by that Japanese food, which was again, kind of regional food of Kyoto. Not just trying to be a sushi restaurant, but cook with all these interesting ingredients. And so, we did an exchange, and Masami taught me all kinds of things about food and technique and Japanese approach to cooking. 

And so, Len and Karen provided the environment in which all of that exploration could take place and that was supportive to so many people. It was interesting, Len kind of ran the show because he was the bulldog or more dominant person in their relationship. But she was the one with the real food sensitivity. When she tasted something, that was a more important critique than when he tasted something. 

And I'm sorry to disappoint you, at least in this moment in her evolution or her involvement in the restaurant, she wasn't a very important culinary force. She had a vision, but she was letting him run the show in many ways. And then, of course, we were this force of all these food artists doing our thing. So I wouldn't say that I really learned much from her in terms of being vegetable focused. 

I think it's there in certain respects, some—I've always known that what was most exciting about flavor on the plate was not the protein, as in the animal protein, but rather the vegetables, what the garnishes were and what that—what those flavor combinations were. Len and Karen were very close with Evan and Judith Jones. They ate at the restaurant regularly, and they socialized with them. And I think that as they moved into the world, the professional food world, that they looked to Evan and Judith as mentors to them. I don't think that they always had their own voice yet. Again, that was to our advantage as a group of cooks who were looking to find their own voice. There was a structure, but not necessarily a dominant culinary voice there. 

I don't know. It's interesting. So she wrote a book. It's funny, Alicia, because I don't—I didn't even remember that she had, that this book came out. First of all, it came out after she died. It was sad for us that she passed away. Len and Karen had moved to Hawaii, had left New York, partly to be in an environment where they could deal with her illness better and try and treat her in some more holistic ways. We didn't end well. Mostly, again, my relationship with Len more than my relationship with Karen, but that was sort of—she came along for the ride. 

She wrote a book that was a thinly veiled, fictional version of life at Hubert’s. And she was completely ungenerous in depiction of me, and I was very angry about that. And I felt that I had given everything to them. It was the most important thing in my life at that point, and it was so ungenerous. Not to say that I didn't have faults and things to learn and ways to grow, but I—they depended on me. And I gave them everything I had, and all my good spirit. Not just hard work, but I gave them my spirit. 

And none of that, other than that—she called me a workhorse. It was in this way that she was just like, ‘We're going to exploit this workhorse, because that's what he's good for.’ And it felt so debased. And I remember telling Len after she died, that that hurt me. And he said, ‘Well, that was fiction.’ He was deflecting, because it was barely fiction. 

So, I didn't realize that she put out a cookbook. But when you sent me that on Friday or Saturday, I went online and bought a copy to have a look at it and read his foreword. And so, I'll see what it is he was thinking about.

One of the things I just thought of, ‘cause of your interest, they were also very good friends with Anna Thomas.

Alicia: Oh, right. From the Vegetarian Epicure.

Peter: The Vegetarian Epicure. 

And they were filmmakers as well. And so, I don't know what's in Karen's book in terms of recipes or whatever, but she would bring dishes to us that came out of there or the things that she was eating. 

And I want to tip my hat to Len and Karen was that they had—they, in realizing that they didn't really know anything about food, they brought in guest chefs. This is before my time, when they were in Brooklyn. And so they had developed relationships with, among other people, Madhur Jaffrey and Edna Lewis. And so I got to know those women, because they came around to the restaurant. Again, I don't know what's in the book. But Madhur was an important influence for them, as well as a respected cook. 

And Edna as well, who we—those of us who were in the restaurant on the times that she came to eat and came into the kitchen and discovering her book, which is about—and Judith Jones was her editor. And that book was about seasonal cooking, right? I mean, sort of, she's telling you, from the community, the free Black community that she was raised in about pig killing in November. All of that was a revelation to me, in terms of that the industrialized food supply has evolved to try to be ubiquitous, to be manufactured, that you can have this item any time of the year anywhere that you are. And that that's not what food has been traditionally, and rather to explore a way of living in the moment and responding to what's in season. 

And so, that isn't just a fancy, elitist project that I can do because I drift in and out of Union Square Farmers Market. But it's really the way people have lived, and is economical because we're not shipping things all over the planet so that we can have them all the time and burning fossil fuels in order to do that, causing climate change. What does it mean to try to have animal protein, or even perishable vegetables on a year-round basis? And what does that do to the flavor? What does that do to the people who are producing that food, and to be much more—that local is political in that way? 

It's not to say that local doesn't have issues of labor exploitation involved in it as well, because it does. But when we eat locally, there are fundamental societal changes that can come with that. And they have implications that are, as I said, about climate change, as well as just what's—enjoying what's here. And realizing that life is transient, and we can't have it just because we want it or because we have money all the time.

Alicia: Right, right. 

Well, related to that, there have been so many stories lately about fake claims of local seasonal food, on restaurant menus. There’s the Willows Inn thing where they were serving people Costco chicken and stuff. And in the book, you write about hiring a chef who wanted to put spring peas on a menu before they would have been available, and how that's a—that was a constant struggle to maintain integrity in that way. 

Why do you think that this has become kind of a thing? There was the big exposé in Florida also a few years ago about farm-to-table restaurants lying about being farm-to-table. Why is this something that people have, don't allow themselves to be honest about or to pursue nuance with or maybe explain why something couldn't be local or available, or that sort of thing? What is your take on that?

Peter: Yeah.

Well, it's complicated. Alicia, I'm not going to excuse any of it, right? Economics drives people at times to make decisions where you cheat or you fudge it. But the idea that this guy was buying Costco organic chickens when he was saying that he was sourcing food completely from the island, obviously is filled with deceit. 

I never maintained that everything that we cooked with and sourced was local, but some people thought that that's what I was doing and went after me for having a lemon tart on the menu or something. The extent to which people are interested in having the conversation about where our food comes from and how we source it is over dinner, or on the menu, is limited. People, on a certain level, lots of people just want dinner. And they don't really want to know the backstory.

But plenty of our customers were interested in the backstory. And that's why they came to us, but there's still plenty of people who aren't interested in it and have yet to embrace that or change with that. 

So farm-to-table was both political, but it was also the fashion, the food fashion of the moment. And in many ways, the food fashion has shifted away from that. And the political struggle, or the food awareness, has shifted away from farm-to-table in many ways. We're talking about labor a lot more than we are about how the food was produced or where it comes from. And we're talking about what are the conditions in the restaurant itself, whereas that wasn't something that we had a whole lot of awareness around when we were writing on our menu that the carrots came from Guy Jones's farm, or that it was Maytag blue cheese or whatever. 

I don't know whether that's the pendulum swinging in another, in the other direction. But it certainly is a shift of focus. It's a good shift to focus. I worry sometimes that some of the restaurants that are now all about identity have stopped sourcing in the way that is still thinking about the sustainability issues. Because, again, the financial pressures to run a financially viable restaurant remain. It's really, really hard. And to do both, that is to buy sustainably sourced ingredients good for the environment and good for people and run a restaurant that's good for the people that are there, it is a huge challenge. 

But it's where we're at, right? It's sort of what we face here and now today. And so, I think it's a great moment, an important moment to try and say, ‘We can do both. We must do both. And what does that look like?’ 

And most importantly, is in that part of the whole equation is, what is the—what then is the cost of going out for dinner? And are we really prepared to pay the full cost of food, of dining out? And I think people still want to buy their fancy cars and their fancy watches and restore certain ways of travel post-pandemic and aren't necessarily ready to say, ‘Well, yeah, I'm good with a 30 percent increase in the cost of dining out. And what that will mean for me, which might mean I eat out 30 percent less but I'm doing it in ways and in support of companies that are doing it in ways that reflect my values.’

Alicia: Awesome. 

Well, thank you so much for the time today.

Peter: Yeah!

It’s wonderful to have the opportunity to talk with you in this way, Alicia, and the fact that you read into those parts of the book is exciting to me. In that same way, that our food is a self-portrait, I mean people find things in the book that resonate for them. And there's lots there. There's lots of nuggets to be had in What's Good?And I'm so glad that you found nuggets that are really important to me and are there for people to think about. So, I'm glad you thought about them.

Alicia: [Laughs.] Well, I'm glad to have read the book and to have had this chat with you. So, thank you so much. 

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe

It’s almost funny that I haven’t had Mayukh Sen on my podcast yet. But the truth is, I’ve been waiting for his book, Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America (out November 2—preorder it!), to be available so that we could discuss it in all the glory I knew it would achieve.

Here, he presents what we discuss is an Almodóvar-esque constellation of women who all moved to the United States and made their mark on its cuisine—to various ends. Their stories are rendered cinematically, richly. It’s a book you can’t put down until you finish. It’s an absolute triumph that challenges popular and dull liberal assimilationist narratives.

In full disclosure, Mayukh and I are good friends. But I think that only enriches this discussion of his work and especially this text. We discussed how food media has and hasn’t changed over 100-plus years, what it’s like to receive Establishment accolades at a young age, and how teaching food writing at NYU has influenced his work. (I didn’t end up quizzing him on Best Actress winners since 1960, but I trust he’s still got that knowledge.) Paid subscribers can listen and access the full transcript.

Alicia: Hi, Mayukh. Thank you so much for being here. 

Mayukh: Thank you for having me, Alicia. [Laughter.] 

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate? 

Mayukh: No, I can't.

Yeah, so I grew up in suburban New Jersey, two towns: Edison and North Brunswick. So most of my food memories from my childhood revolve around my mother's home cooking. 

So my mother is an immigrant from the Indian state of West Bengal, just like my late father was. And so, every night for dinner, she would cook some sort of Bengali meal that had rice and dal, some sort of vegetable preparation, and then a non-veg protein. So those were most of my memories, kind of just her home cooking.

We didn't really go out to eat at restaurants very much. I grew up comfortably middle class, I'd say. But I don’t know, there's something about the etiquettes of going out to eat at restaurants that just seemed very foreign to our family. So what we considered luxury, when I was growing up at least in the ’90s and the aughts, was places like P.F. Changs and Cheesecake Factory. Bertucci's was a really big event in our family to go there, but that was kind of the extent of our restaurant-going experiences. So I didn't really grow up with a sense of what it was like to go out to eat at restaurants and partake in the culture in that way.

Alicia: Do you maintain the kind of eating at home that you grew up with, that your mom gave you?

Mayukh: I am such a bad cook in general that I find that a lot of those kinds of dishes are probably too involved for me to pull off as well as she could and still can. Sorry, she's not deceased or anything. [Laughter.] She's still with us. And she's still cooking this stuff really nicely. 

The stuff that I cook at home now, over in—Brooklyn is where I live—is just staple stuff that is enough for me to survive on. I purely just only cook well enough to feed myself and exist in this world. [Laughter.]

Alicia: Well, and I mean, that brings me to my next question, which is that you didn't come to food writing out of a passion for food, which is what so many of us do. And that also is why you're such a unique voice in the field. You're not interested in why people cook well, that's not an interesting thing to do in your work. I mean, maybe it is interesting to you. That's sort of the least interesting part of why people cook and why food is interesting. And you're not kind of dazzled by that. [Laughs.]

Mayukh: Totally.

Alicia: Yeah, how did you come to write about food and how did you kind of find your way to create your voice in this field?

Mayukh: For sure. 

First of all, I just want to say thank you for even regarding my initial lack of passion for food as a qualification, because I think that a lot of people who we call colleagues and peers in this industry would consider that a demerit or disqualification for me existing in the space at all, but whatever. So, thank you for that. 

But in terms of how I came to food, so I have been a professional food writer for five years now. Can you hear the exhaustion in my voice? [Laughter.] I never imagined that I'd be doing this with my life for this long. 

But what happened was, so I grew up wanting to be a film critic. And I was the kind of kid who devoured Entertainment Weekly. I memorized everything about the Oscars in high school. I could name every Best Actress nominee from 1960 onward. Now I'm a little rusty, but we can end the conversation today with some tests and see how good I still am. But I was very hell-bent on becoming a film critic in the vein of Pauline Kael. And that didn't quite happen just yet, even though I still do write about film.

But basically, I graduated from college in 2014. And in 2015, when I was living in New York, I started to freelance a lot about topics like film and television and music. Everything but food, basically. I had only written one food piece, and it was for the RIP Village Voice. The OG Village Voice. And that piece was held indefinitely. And I think that the editor just didn't have the heart to actually kill it, you know? So, maybe that was a sign that I actually don't belong here.

But regardless, fast forward to summer 2016. I got an email from an editor at a site called Food52, which many listeners, readers may know. And they were just like, ‘Yeah, we're hiring for a staff writer position right now, someone who is not necessarily a food person in terms of home cooking or going out to eat at restaurants.’ And that’s like, ‘I'm your guy. ‘And someone who is going to be able to write about food to a broader cultural lens, and perhaps tap into a segment of the audience we haven't quite reached just yet.’

And initially when I got that email, I was like, ‘This is hilarious. Please. Absolutely not.’ But I took the meeting, because back then I was 24 years old. I was a freelancer. I wanted to write more ambitious, deeply reported stories. That was back when I still equated the length of a story with narrative strength in some way. I was like, ‘I want to write long stories,’ which I've now kind of moved away from. But we can talk about that later. 

But anyway, so I took the meeting. And I really wanted the trust of an editor to allow me to write those kinds of stories that I just did not get as a young freelancer. And the fact that this was a salary job with benefits, those were hard to come by in 2016 just like they are today. A salary culture writing job with benefits? Excuse me. It’s a rarity. 

So I kept interviewing for it, and then I got the job. But I just remember in the days leading up to me realizing that I was going to accept this offer, I was kind of laughing to myself. And I was just like, ‘Wow, I'm going to be a food writer. That's hilarious.’ 

Because I had grown up—and I'm not sure what kind of cultural depiction is responsible for this. But I'd grown up thinking that food writing was very much the domain of straight, white, affluent men. And I was one of those things. I was a man. But otherwise, I was a queer person of color and child of immigrants. I grew up speaking two first languages. It just seemed so not an option for me career wise, and so I never even considered it. So, I just thought that the whole little ride was kind of hilarious. So just like, ‘Strap in, Mayukh. See what's in store for you here.’

So, it was definitely a challenge in those first few months. It remains a challenge, of course, to be in this industry coming from marginalized communities and having leftist points of view. But back in late 2016 when I started that job at Food52, I had to struggle for a few months to really find my footing in that site because I was the only person of color on an editorial team of white women—wonderful white women. A great collection. [Laughter.] But I was just writing from a different center of gravity than everyone else. And it was quite apparent that I was a new voice to the site in the sorts of comments that I got that were just so allergic to my point of view, and the way that I expressed that point of view. 

So it was tough, but the way I started to kind of ease into the job was writing a lot of personal essays, because throughout my life I had never really considered what food meant to me beyond providing me mere sustenance. I was always like, ‘Ok, cool, this is something I need to do. I need to eat, and then I'm going to go to sleep and wake up and do this over again the next day.’

But being in the job at first really asked me to consider like, ‘What does food mean to you, especially as a queer Bengali person?’ All that stuff. And so I wrote a lot about my identity and how food is tied to it, and how I'd never really considered all these things and how food had shaped me in ways that I just was not aware of, so early on in my life. 

And after I got all those personal essays out of my system, I started to grow extremely bored with myself as a character. I was like, ‘I've exhausted every story that lives inside me, so let me move on and turn my gaze outwards.’ So what I started to do was write a lot of profiles of figures who were like me, kind of on the margins of the food industry, were not from the dominant, over-represented populations within this industry and really made an impact with their food or their writing or both in some way. 

So often, these figures tended to be people of color, women of color, immigrants, immigrants of color, queer people of color like myself, etc. And I found a lot of comfort in exploring these stories, because they made me understand my place in this industry a bit better because I just felt so alone and so confused and those first few months had me be just like, ‘What am I doing? How did I get here on this planet?’ And I still feel the same way, but just less intensely now. 

And it was also kind of a way of me educating myself, because there's so much about culinary history in America that I was just so unaware of when I stepped into that job. You think that that's kind of a prerequisite for taking on a food staff writing job, but I was just like, ‘I'm an idiot. I've seen Julie and Julia.’ That was kind of the extent of my culinary history education. So, writing these stories as a way of schooling myself in a very public manner. I was learning on the job, in that sense. 

Alicia: Yeah. 

I mean, it's funny because I think still, the picture of food writers in movies is so far from what it actually is. [Laughs.] Well, it's funny that you thought food writers were straight dudes, because I was—I think restaurant critics have always been straight, white men generally. And then, the people writing about lifestyle like Craig Claiborne or James Beard or—it's always been women or gay white men. It's always been such a segregated field where—and maybe now we're getting better. I don't know. 

Mayukh: Oh, I don’t know. [Laughter.] 

Alicia: I mean, there is a movie I really like because it's one of those—one of the last middlebrow adult movies, which I hope are making a comeback. But it has Toni Collette and Greg Kinnear. And they go to dinner at a friend's house, and I can't remember—is it Dinner with Friends? 

Mayukh: Little Miss Sunshine? I don't remember that scene. 

Alicia: Wait, there's a different movie where it's them, I think. 

But anyway, the people whose house they go to are writers for Saveur. And they're just going on glamorous trips, and they have kids and they have a huge house. And it's like, ‘Wow, I did think that that's what it would be like to be a magazine writer.’ I was like, ‘Oh, my life is going to be so glamorous. And I'll have money.’ I had no conception of how difficult and poorly paid this job was. 

Mayukh: What are you talking about? It pays so well. 

Alicia: It pays so well!

Mayukh: Scrooge McDuck over here just swimming in money, you know? 

Yeah, I'm trying to think of what film kind of made me think of food writers in that way. You're definitely correct that I equated food writing with restaurant criticism. Maybe it was Mystic Pizza. I don't know. But I remember—

Alicia: Oooooh.

Mayukh: Yeah, ’cause I remember—there's that scene near the end where the restaurant critic comes in. 

But yeah, I can't think of what else. [Laughter.] But anyway, my point stands, which is that however you cut it, whether food writing was the domain of those white straight rich dudes or gay white men or white women, there—there's not a place to me there at the table, so to speak. 

Alicia: No, yeah, we could go on forever about that. 

But in your book, Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America, you profile seven women. You put them in there chronologically, which I think tells a really great story and really kind of contextualizes an evolution of food in the United States in the 20th century. And you kind of vary your selections between popular people like Marcella Hazan and also the less obvious choice like Julie Sahni. The obvious choice, if you wanted to talk about a woman immigrant in America who did Indian food, you talk about Madhur Jaffrey, right? 

But by making these choices, you get to present some really interesting contrast between reception of how people were received and how people really change things. And even what kinds of books were successful, like I—so much about what someone's book would look like versus someone else's book, and how that also influences the reception. 

And so I wanted to ask how you decided on those women? I know you write about it a little bit in the afterword, but how were your—what was your process for deciding?

Mayukh: Yeah, that's a wonderful question. 

It took me many months. And it even changed after the proposal writing process, because the women who were in my—whom I had selected for my proposal were not the ones who ended up in the book, which is funny. In terms of selecting people like Marcella Hazan, I realized that I needed to provide some sort of entry point or way in to readers who might be scanning books at a bookstore or online and be like, ‘Oh, this sounds kind of interesting. Is there anyone I know here?’ And Marcella Hazan is close to a household name for people who are home cooks. 

And actually once I selected her, it really illuminated why certain other women were kind of in that book as well, because Marcella Hazan is someone who I obviously have great affection for. And I have even more affection for after reading about her. Yet throughout her career, she was dogged by so many accusations of being a ‘difficult woman.’ We now recognize that as a sexist dog whistle to call a woman difficult when she stands up for what she believes and fights for the integrity of her work. 

But it's interesting how those sorts of criticisms, you could say, did not torpedo her career in the same way it may have for other women who didn't possess the same advantages of her, that she did, you know. 

And so, that's why I selected someone like Madeleine Kamman, who is from France, who was so brilliant, had just an incredible sense of French technique and how to apply it to different styles or—cuisines rather, excuse me, like American cuisine. Throughout her career, however, her brilliance was overshadowed by the fact that she was very openly critical about Julia Child and Julia Child's position as a white American woman being this ambassador for French cooking in the United States. And as a result, throughout her life and career, Madeleine Kamman faced all these accusations that she was just this bitter woman who could not stand to see other people succeed, etc. 

And so I start to wonder, ‘Why is it that someone like Marcella Hazan did become a big name in spite of these perceived difficulties versus someone like Madeleine Kamman, her road to recognition was so much more rocky.’

And in terms of selecting other women—so, I initially did not set out to write about Julie Sahni, because I did go for the obvious choice, Madhur Jaffrey. This didn't have much to do—Sorry, how do I say this? This had a lot to do with the fact that she was a film actress, in addition to a food writer. And of course, my whole topical passion and interest is in film. So I was like, ‘Oh, this is gonna be fun for me.’

But then I realized, in spending more time with Julie’s work, I realized that there has not been the kind of deep appraisal of her work that she certainly merits and—A. And then B, I think that her whole philosophy in general is just so admirable to me. She is someone who truly focuses on the strength of the work. She puts her head down, lets the work speak for itself. She's not always out there and trying to grab eyes or attention. Which is okay, if she were to. No judgment there. 

But that's just such a fascinating way to live as a creative. And it's really aspirational, to be honest. And I think that there's something to say in his story about the kinds of—what it's like to live as a creative person under American capitalism and how to survive in public memory through that. And so that's why I was like, ‘Julie Sahni might actually be a more interesting challenge to me.’ Also, I had written about Madhur Jaffrey before, back at Food52. So I was like, ‘This is kind of worn territory for me. I want to tackle a fresh story.’

So, those were the kinds of considerations I had when I was curating this list, let's say—cast of characters rather. It’s a more diplomatic way to put it. 

And then in terms of my last story subject. Surely you know, she was from Jamaica. The way I landed upon her actually was, I googled ‘the Julia Child of.’ Just that phrase, literally. And so many hits for people like Marcella Hazan and Julie Sahni. They've been called respectively, Julia Child of Italy, Julia Child of India. 

But Norma Shirley is a name that came up as well in one article. And she was from Jamaica, and I thought that her story was so fascinating because she did live in America for a few decades, from the ‘60s ‘til the ‘80s. But then she went back home to Jamaica, and she became a star there. And I think that her story had so much to say regarding the hurdles that Black immigrant women from the Caribbean had to face in terms of getting enough capital to make their creative dreams a reality in this country, in culinary terms. 

Alicia: Yeah. No, I love that. 

Have you written about the phrase, ‘the Julia Child of’? [Laughs.]

Mayukh: I would love to. There's an op-ed in there. 

Alicia: There is definitely an op-ed. [Laughs.]

Mayukh: I have a little spiel about it in the Norma Shirley chapter. But originally, it was this long thing, super blown out. But then, I had to cut in subsequent drafts. But yeah, it was there originally. So yeah, thanks for the reminder.

Alicia: ‘Cause I want to read about it. There's a cookbook author from Puerto Rico, who's been referred to as the Julia Child of Puerto Rico. I actually have to open her cookbook today. 

Mayukh: What's her name? Do you know?

Alicia: Her name is Carmen, and I can't remember the rest of her name. [Laughters.] But she wrote Caribbean Cookery, I believe. Oh, no, Cocina Criolla.

Mayukh:, Right. Ok. Ok, that’s what I figured. 

Alicia: Yeah. 

Your appreciation for the difficult women is maybe part of—And you also mentioned this earlier that you knew the Best Actress since 1960, was the winner of the Best—You have a love of women and drama and glamour. And I think that you bring that to the book with how you write about them. You really bring them to life, and you see all sides of them. And you just appreciate them in such a way that is—I don't know, it's just so alive and vivid and cinematic. 

And so, did you think about that while you were writing the book? Did your love of film and of actresses influence your appreciation of these women and your ability to render them so vividly? 

Mayukh: First of all, thank you for saying that. That’s a huge compliment, because the last thing I want anyone to say about my book is like, ‘Oh, this is boring as s**t,’ you know? That's my big fear. And that's what I asked myself when I'm self editing is like, ‘Is this boring me to tears? Does this feel like homework?’

Yeah, I would absolutely say that my love of cinema, and actresses in particular, influenced the way that I approached these stories. When people ask me what my favorite films are, of course, I have a list. The conversation almost immediately pivots to, what are my favorite film performances? I have that running list. And my favorite performances in the film are ones by actresses who just dominate a whole movie and their performance just overtakes the entire film. 

So I'm thinking of, like Jane Fonda in Klute. That was one performance that when I first saw it in high school, I just—it completely expanded my notion of what a movie performance could be. Because her skills such that you are able to understand what this woman, who is a sex worker and actress in the movie—it's a wonderful movie. You should watch it if you haven’t yet. You're able to understand what she is feeling at any given moment in time, without the need for dialogue or narration. First-person narration, excuse me. 

And so many of my other favorite performances in film operate along those same lines, like Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas and the Indian actress Sridevi in English Vinglish. They don't need dialogue to tell you what they're feeling. And I wanted to bring something similar to these chapters. 

And that's why I took the approach that I did, which is that I don't necessarily—I did a lot of reporting for this book. Of course, yeah. I don't directly quote those people. It's like ‘Julie Sahni’s friend said this to me about—’ The kind of journalistic gaze there just feels so apparent in a way that feels antithetical to the kind of book that I want to offer, a book experience that I want to offer, excuse me, to readers. And so, I decided to instead just kind of write this book in a way that would allow readers to kind of step through these women's lives as this woman lived those lives.

So that's why it was really important for me to find women who had memoirs or were still alive, like Julie Sahni, Najmieh Batmanglij, whom I could speak to about what it was like to experience all of these different things at different junctures in your life. So that's one way in which performances, the performances that I love really influenced the way that I approached these chapters. I wanted readers to feel what these women were feeling at any given moment in time, as intimately as possible. 

And you might appreciate this because I know you're a fan of his as well. But the filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar really influenced my work so much and my writing, because he is someone who, like me, is a queer man who has tremendous affection for female stories and renders them with—sorry, not to compare myself to him in saying that I've done—He, not myself, does such a wonderful job of rendering these stories with such love and care. 

In my favorite movies of his, he really works in such a broad canvas. I'm thinking about All About My Mother and Volver, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. All of those movies have so many characters and so many vivid women who are interacting with one another. And I want to do something similar with this book as well. That was kind of my approach because, of course, the question that was hanging over me as I was writing is how will people react to the fact that I am someone who presents the world as a man writing these stories? And so he was kind of a very helpful model for me to follow in terms of what sensitivity looks like in that regard.

Alicia: Right. 

And I think you really achieved that sort of—what would be the adjective form of Almodóvar? [Laughs.]

Mayukh: Almodovarian? I don't know. Sure.

Alicia: Yes. [Laughs.] No, but your book is Almodovarian. 

Mayukh: Or esque. Yeah.

Alicia: Almodovarian-esque. [Laughs.]

But I mean, I was thinking—when I was writing, when I was reading the book, when I was writing these questions, I was thinking about that because I know it's been a criticism that you've anticipated that you’d sort of superficially maybe received. 

It never would have occurred to me because I do love Almodóvar. Another of my favorite writers, Reinaldo Arenas, is a queer man who wrote a lot about women. I think most women love being seen and—by queer men. I'm going on a weird tangent now. It really is when you see Almodóvar films, when you read your book, when you read Arenas, when you like Manuel Puig, too. And so much honesty and humor and affection and warmth. It's not the male gaze or something. It's not the same thing. That criticism is completely off the wall. If it does come, it's off the wall. And I'll head that off at the pass right now. [Laughs.]

Mayukh: Thank you. Thank you for going to bat for me prematurely. 

And I think that what's difficult for me, that I didn't have words for until I was kind of done writing this book and I write this in the intro in the book itself, but as a queer person, I, like many other queer-identifying people, have a very complicated relationship to gender and gender expression that my appearance might not necessarily reflect. And so I wish that more people who would come for me in that regard would understand that about me, and not try to erase my queerness and all its attendant complications. And it's really hurtful. And we live in a very inhospitable world for queer people. And so, it's not easy to kind of live with this. 

So yeah, whatever. If that comes for me, I'll go to bat for myself. Well, whatever.

Alicia: Well, and the book’s introduction also takes aim at the kind of milquetoast nature of food media, which is where you might see this kind of baseline really banal criticism that doesn't engage with people in their entirety. 

And that's also expressed in the text. Craig Claiborne comes up so much from the New York Times, how he named Elena Zelayeta the definitive voice of Mexican cooking, then later switched it, made it Diana Kennedy. And the contrast between how Madhur Jaffrey was received against how Julie Sahni was, despite the fact that Sahni has restaurant experience, which would later be erased, which we can talk about. 

And that is a constant theme in the book, how women were pitted against each other, how being white and/or American allowed you to have authority where lived experience did not. It tells these stories, but it's also a critique of how narratives about women in food have been constructed. 

And so, what do you think is the contemporary significance of the food media narratives that you portray in the book itself?

Mayukh: Yeah, that is a wonderful question. 

I would definitely say that a lot of these sorts of patterns still persist. I think that food media, regardless of what lies it wants to tell itself, is still infatuated with stars and stardom. And as a result, that creates a culture in which there's a hyperfixation on one specific person as a sort of representative of a movement or cuisine or whatever, and that can sometimes blot out other figures who are doing equally commendable mark—work, excuse me. So, that definitely is still a thing. 

In terms of who gets to be assigned authority, this kind of dovetails with my answer to your last question, but—the previous question, excuse me—But it is interesting how there's maybe a bit more scrutiny regarding white folks with material power, and how they get to ascend to positions of authority on cuisines or cultures that are not necessarily the ones that are inherent to them, or the ones that they grew up with, etc. Yet, I don't know that those kinds of questions are asked as urgently as they should be, at least by the people in power. 

Just speaking from my own perspective and position, I think that I have gotten so much blowback from people in power about being a queer man of color writing stories primarily about women in a way that does not feel equal to the sorts of questions that, I don't know, a white woman writing a cookbook about Mexican food does, a white woman who is not native to Mexico, excuse me. And it just feels like there might be an imbalance.

I definitely think that, well, everyone should be asking those questions about who benefits materially from telling what stories based on their position. That's what diligence looks like. That's what accountability looks like, etc. Yet, I do find that whiteness is still quite powerful in this industry, and it goes unquestioned. And there's usually more scrutiny reserved for people from marginalized communities telling stories that people perceive to not be their own. 

Alicia: No, I mean, it's really incredible how the power structures don't change at all. Yeah, we would still rather Diana Kennedy than a woman who appears and is indigenous to Mexico. And when I say indigenous, I mean actually. 

We would rather have it filtered through Diana Kennedy who does learn things from people. I mean, nothing against her. I think she's actually pretty wonderful and a real spitfire, and that's great. But the narrative really hasn't changed from a sort of pre-feminism idea of how hard a white woman has to work to be equal to white men. And the narrative hasn't adjusted from that. We still are like, ‘Women have to work so hard to be the same as white men.’ It's like, ‘Well, that shouldn't be our goal. Our goal should be a bit more nuanced than that.’

Mayukh: Yeah, it should be in terms of equity for a lot of other people who are quite oppressed, you know? Yeah, so that's certainly true. 

I also will just add that this is probably stating the obvious, but there's this presumption of objectivity, that dirty word, when it comes to folks like Diana Kennedy—and who I agree is she's really put in the work. And in spite of some troubling things that she said in the past, I have a lot of respect for her labor. I'm so sorry to put her in the hot seat. 

But yeah, there's still this presumption of kind of like, ‘Oh, this person is coming to this culture, this cuisine from a very even-keeled place. And they're going to be able to be the interlocutor for this presumed white affluent audience.’ And so, I think that presumption of the reader remains the same, as well, on food media, it's still kind of, at least in the mainstream food media, you see stories that are kind of written with white rich audiences in mind. 

Alicia: Exactly. Yeah. 

And one thing I noticed also throughout the book was how teaching was a really essential part of many of these women coming into their own in food. Julia Child was teaching before she was writing a cookbook. I think Marcella was cooking, I mean, teaching before she was really writing a cookbook. And also, you are teaching food journalism at NYU. How has teaching complemented or not your writing practice? How did it work with the book?

Mayukh: Well, I love teaching. So I've been teaching at NYU since 2019. That was the same year I was working on the first draft of the book. And I teach two classes there at the journalism school. First is an introductory class to food writing, and the second is advanced reporting food journalism class. 

And so, that first semester I was teaching, it was the introductory class. And so, I was dealing with a lot of students who were not necessarily used to writing in any sort of journalistic capacity. So I had to really revisit the basics and figure out how to communicate those basics to students who really wanted to learn. And so, I talked about story structure. I talked about sentence structure. I talked about varying your sentence length, and resisting cliche when you describe food as an object. All these kinds of one on one things that were incredibly helpful for me, as I was writing.

One lesson that I impart upon my students, for example, I kind of said earlier, which is that if this is boring for you to write, chances are it's going to be boring as hell for the reader to absorb. And they’re gonna put the book down. You don't want to lose the reader in any way. And that is something that I really tried to tell myself as well, as I was going through multiple drafts of this book. It's like, ‘Are you bored as s**t? Let's go back to the drawing board here.’ 

Yeah, so it was immensely helpful. I will say this. Teaching is a lot of work. Grading is so much work. And I was definitely a disaster trying to balance book writing against the demands of teaching. But ultimately, I do hope that it served this book well, because it really asked me after years of just kind of feeling as though I had gotten into my little groove as a writer, really asked me to take a step back and be like, ‘Ok, are you being as disciplined as you can?’

The flip side of that, of course, is that when you do kind of have that rigorous self editor in you, you risk kind of, I don't know, losing a sense of play or whimsy in your writing. And that's something that I worry about with my own self. I'm not fishing here for compliments. Please don't reassure me being like, ‘Oh, yeah, no, no, it's so playful. I’m really into it.’ I'm not looking for that. No pressure there. 

But when I revisit my early writing, I'm like, ‘Damn, this is so overwritten.’ But there's also a sense of kind of throwing s**t at the wall and seeing what sticks. And I don't quite have that anymore. And so, that's something I'm trying to get back. And trying to have more flexibility with what I teach my students as well. I encourage them to kind of experiment a little bit rather than hew to some sort of trusted format. 

Alicia: Right. 

Do you write for yourself? Do you journal or anything?

Mayukh: I don't. I really fear just writing something that I'm going to revisit a few weeks, months, years down the line and being like, ‘Oh, my goodness, this is just this incredibly mortifying time capsule. And I don't want to revisit what, these raw thoughts in my mind.’ It takes me a long time to write something these days. I like to give myself that time, so I don't. I know so many writers who do. Just never worked for me because I'm so, so repulsed by myself.

Alicia: Oh, no. [Laughs.] 

Well, I mean, it helps with the editor and the—and shutting yourself down, I think. If you do the stream of consciousness thing a little bit. I think this isThe Artist's Way, this is what The Artist's Way teaches you. [Laughs.] I've never done it. I think I have a natural inclination toward whatever it tells you you're supposed to do, which is write indulgently and take yourself on dates. That's easy for me to do. I can do that. [Laughs.]

Mayukh: Yeah. 

I will say this. I reread my first draft of this book. It's a total vomit draft. I don’t love that phrase, but it's just like, damn. I had to do so much culling after that point. But yeah, yeah, no, I did kind of indulge my worst tendencies as a writer in the first draft. I got it out of my system. 

Alicia: I think it's important. It's important to do.

And in the book—this is jumping into a different area. But many narratives about cuisine in the U.S. are all about assimilation. I wrote about this when I wrote about Taste the Nation. And I wanted to ask how did you resist that easy pull about how they were only significant in terms of what they taught and brought to whiteness and to Americanness?

Mayukh: Yeah, that is a wonderful question. Because you're right, in that assimilation has been kind of the dominant narrative when it comes to talking about immigrants and cooking and cuisine in America. And I am no longer interested in assimilation just as a concept when it comes to immigrant cuisine, ‘immigrant cooking,’ because it is in service of white supremacy. 

One of the things that's so troubling about a lot of these texts, including one of the ones that you just mentioned, being very diplomatic, is that it doesn't quite question the idea of the nation itself. And I personally, as a leftist, I am troubled by these alleged notions of America being predicated upon ideals of inclusivity and being a melting pot and everything like that. 

And that's what I want to trouble with this book. And I want to show that there's so much struggle involved in creating that picture of America, and it can be really unsustainable for the people who are making that happen because they have to survive under capitalism. 

So, I know that there have been books over the past few years where writers are writing about cuisines from the Global South or adopted from the Global South, they try to assert, ‘X food is American food. My mother's cuisine and what it represents is American food.’ With all due respect to those writers, that's ok that that is their prerogative, but it's not mine. Because ultimately, it centers the comfort of a white affluent reader, which is what food media has done for decades. And it's just useless. Why seek approval from white institutions?

And I think that it's easier for me to say this and come to this realization now, because I was very fortunate to get that approval, those crumbs of attention, let's say, from white institutions that gave me access to opportunities and capital that I would not have had otherwise. And I understand what that kind of recognition is useful for now. And I realized that that's not necessarily the world that I want to be a part of. And it's more gratifying to write for your own communities, or people from typically underseen—underseen by whom? Underrepresented communities, let's say. I think that's a little more careful. Yeah, it's more gratifying work to do than just seeking the approval of white institutions in any way. 

And so, that's why I ended the book, excuse me, on the story of Norma Shirley, because it's kind of an indictment of people's conception of how wonderful America is because you can get a taco down the street and then you can get saag paneer on the next block or something. This was a woman who is a Black immigrant woman from Jamaica who tried to get her concept and vision of Jamaican cuisine filtered through French technique, tried to get it off the ground in New York in the ‘80s but it was incredibly difficult for her because she could not secure the capital to make that happen. So she literally had to return to Jamaica to make those possibilities and dreams come true. And it was only then that the American food media started to pay attention to her and her enormous talent. Yet, she literally had to leave America to make her creative dreams a reality. And that should embarrass readers, I hope, especially readers who are like, ‘Oh, America’s great, you know?’

Yeah. I'm not interested in assimilation. 

Alicia: I'm really interested to see how people engage with that, or if people ignore that. That they ignore that there is an anti-assimilationist, anti-obsession with the nation state as a significant cultural force. And I hope that people do engage with that.

Mayukh: Yeah. I mean, I hope they engage in positive terms, because I'm sure that some people will be like, ‘What is this trash? I was expecting some heartwarming story of American food or whatever.’ 

Yeah, I do hope that point is not lost on the readers who need to absorb it. 

Alicia: Well, has the experience of writing the book, as well as your experiences in food media, changed how you consider the ways in which white supremacy and capitalism kind of use identity? You really resist in the text that simplicity that—the circa 2019, 2016 response to Trump where it's like, ‘Immigrant restaurant, immigrants feeding America.’ This really patronizing perspective that does continue. People say that food media from 2016 really learned a lesson about something. I don't think it did.

But anyway, you in this text really resist that. How have you responded to that? I think you answered this, but also how do you perceive that sort of tendency in food writing?

Mayukh: Totally.

Well, I actually am so glad you brought this up because those 2016, 2017 conversations, those talking points that were so pervasive in food media, that was what kind of animated me to start working on the proposal for this book. Because I just found it so, as you say, patronizing, so condescending. It's almost always white liberal gatekeepers, both men and women, talking about immigrants as the other immigrants, as people who only exist to serve the white, affluent consumer. And it's just plainly dehumanizing. 

And it also rests on all these assumptions about what America is and what it represents, of course. And I really, really wanted to disturb that notion, and actually put those voices and stories of these actual immigrants who are treated like abstractions by these white liberal gatekeepers. I wanted to put their stories first. 

So, I don't think that whole attitude has gone away in food media, at least from my observation. It's still quite pervasive, and I wanted to write against that. I think that's through writing this book, and also experiencing just a comical level of racism and homophobia in this industry. Comical, to me, at least. Also traumatizing. But made me realize that a lot of people who posture as being down with the cause or whatever, their politics are not fundamentally rooted in care. And that sometimes comes out in really ugly ways. 

I think of people who in 2017, 2018, would say things like, ‘Screw Trump. Immigrants are great,’ in front of a stage of hundreds of people. They're the same people who turn around, and they look at my queer brown ass. And they're like, ‘Oh, you're too loud. You're too obsessed with ‘political correctness.’’’ Talking to me like they're a Fox News commentator or something. And it's just so plainly discriminatory. 

And those sorts of moments just reveal how hollow a lot of these talking points are for a lot of these people because they don't see people from marginalized communities as actual humans. They don't treat them with care. And I wanted to restore some of that dignity in writing this book, and I definitely wrote through a lot of my anger at what I had experienced from people who were quite powerful people I very naively trusted because I got Establishment approval early on in my career. So that's definitely a thing. 

I think also, I came to become aware through experiences like that, and also writing the book about how white supremacy and capitalism, these twin terrors, let's say, they commodify people based on their identity. 

I think that there are probably a lot of people throughout my career who have aligned with me, because they see me as this queer brown young writer who they perceive to be someone they should publicly support in some way. Yet, how often do those people actually engage with my work? Do they read the substance of what I have to say? And do they realize that my politics are very far left? They're not kind of just stroking liberal preconceptions of the world. They usually don't. They just see me as this little toy. 

And so, I became cruelly aware of all this as I was writing the book, and dealing with various episodes that exposed just how racist some people in this industry are. And it's very scary when those people who are very racist, very homophobic also have a lot of material power, and you do not. But I hope that has resulted in a richer, more sensitive book. 

Alicia: Yes, and it has. [Laughs.]

Mayukh: Thank you.

Alicia: No, it's interesting. There are so many people who, yeah, will be kind, so to speak, to your face, or your virtual face. And then once there's some sort of upheaval or something, they're always looking for a reason to discount the people who are critical of the Establishment. And it's a really delicate balance to strike how outspoken and how—yeah, just how outspoken to be, because they do not actually want to reward anyone who is critical. 

Mayukh: Totally.

I mean, everyone loves an underdog until they stop becoming an underdog, A. And B, I think, when—at least this is something that I felt, and maybe it's totally bogus, or whatever. Just my own kind of paranoia. 

But as someone who did get Establishment recognition when I think I was like 26, I think that there may have been a perception in some corners of food media, especially in its highest ranks, that I was being a brat and getting all this stuff handed to me, as if I didn't have to work for it. Getting all this stuff handed to me, and then having the audacity to bite the hand that feeds him. [Laughs.] No pun intended. Yeah, that stuff. 

And that's why I think in the past year, really reevaluated just how much of myself I put out into the world because I realized that no matter how righteous I felt in what I was articulating and broadcasting to the world, my mental health was suffering and my work was also suffering, because I was giving these uncharitable, ungenerous readers a reason to discredit me before they actually care to engage my work.

Alicia: Yeah. No, it's such a lesson that everyone needs to learn. [Laughs.] 

Mayukh: Yeah, sometimes it comes in a really hard way. But whatever. That’s therapy. Therapy’s the answer. [Laughter.] Gotta do it.

Alicia: And since you are teaching food journalism, are you optimistic about the future of food media?

Mayukh: Yeah. Oh, sorry. I did not mean to say, ‘Yes, I am.’ [Laughter.] I meant, ‘Yeah, that's a good question.’

I am a cynic by nature. But I will say that I see fewer students these days, at least the ones I teach at NYU, who see writing for Establishment publications and the dominant mainstream publications as the best path forward. There was a time—and certainly, this was true for myself, where writing a story for a very big newspaper in a metropolitan area was considered just the Holy Grail. And once you did that, you've arrived. 

And yet, I think that there are more students who do not see that as the only way to find success, in part because writing for those publications does not, is not always easy, especially when you have points of view that are a little more radical let's say than the left of center/center ideals that these papers champion. It's not easy to write about Palestinian food for a major newspaper. There's a lot that is compromised. 

And what I've tried to tell my students is that you don't necessarily want to put your name on things that you know are going to compromise your integrity or your sense of how you view the world. And so that, coupled with the rise of independent food media like Whetstone, for example, I think that has convinced a lot of my students that writing for these big name publications is not the only way to find success. 

So, I do hope that we see less fixation on those big publications. I'm cautiously optimistic. But I don't know, I'm not going to hold my breath. These institutions still have so much power and influence. And that's also where capital is concentrated. And I want my students to be able to eat. I want them to survive. Where's the good money? Where's the stable money? I don't know. [Laughter.] 

But yeah, so sure. Cautiously optimistic.

Alicia: Well, usually I ask people, is cooking a political act for them. But you cook for sustenance. And I respect that. And so I wanted to just ask you, for you is writing a political act?

Mayukh: Right. Is sustenance political? Yes.

No, writing is absolutely a political act. For me, I think it's the most meaningful form of political expression that I can think of for myself, because it's a way for me to distill my thoughts on who I am in this world as a person of color who has leftist politics in a way that is more direct than any other form of political engagement or action, you know? Yeah, it is absolutely a political act for me. 

But I hope others perceive it as that. I do worry sometimes that, like you said earlier, that some readers who want those more milquetoast narratives will pick up a book like mine and just be like, ‘Oh, how nice,’ and not truly absorb the more radical points of view that I have to offer. 

But, whatever, one reader at a time. That's all I can hope for. If I make a convert of one person, then I'm good. I’ll see.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much. 

Mayukh: Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

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Cathy Erway came to food writing through home cooking and that’s also how she has maintained her career. It’s a pathway that is rarely tread anymore, as restaurants have become so central to how we talk about and think about food.

But Erway has stuck to her guns and somehow carved out a space for herself as someone who cares about where food comes from, both in terms of the actual land it was grown in and hands that tended to it, as well as with regards to cultural significance. We discussed how she came to create her food-writing niche, the way she framed her cookbook The Food of Taiwan, and how she told readers to use the entire chicken in Sheet Pan Chicken. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Cathy. Thank you so much for being here.

Well, can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Cathy: Yeah.

So my parents were living in Brooklyn Heights when I was born, and then they moved to a town in New Jersey in Essex County called Maplewood. So that's when I was a baby, like 2. So, that's where I grew up. 

And I remember—well, my parents always cooked a lot. But if we did go out to eat, I remember in the earlier sort of part of my childhood, we would go into the city. And sometimes we would go to Chinatown or something like that. But then over the years gradually, my parents became more attuned to where some other Chinese—not some other because there was no, not really much of a Chinese American community were in our town. So they figured out where some of these spots were and where some of these good restaurants that they wanted to go to were, and had more of a Chinese American sort of community of families that they would go to. And for a while there, we were going to like dim sum every weekend with this sort of clan of just Chinese American families that were sort of eating buddies. Very important to have. 

And then we would also get-there's tons of great pizza and Italian food where we lived. Great bagels. The kind of New York stuff. We would try everything. There's a new Ethiopian place, we would try it. There was a Malaysian place, we would try it. 

So yeah, I mean, I'm pretty blessed in that sense. [Laughs.]

Alicia: For sure, for sure. 

And you don't have formal culinary training, but from your blog, Not Eating Out in New York, which you turned into a book, to your cookbook,The Food of Taiwan, and then your latest cookbook, Sheet Pan Chicken, you've made food and cooking your life. So how did that happen, and was it what you intended to do?

Cathy: Oh, gosh. I mean, I guess, yeah, I have no full formal culinary training. But I've always sort of tried to focus on home cooking, and try to show my real practical home cooking, like through my blog, Not Eating Out in New York. So just kind of keep it, kept it real, sometimes mistakes and all. Share some of those failures. But yeah, so I hope that that's helpful for home cooks. 

Yeah, I mean, I think I wanted to be a writer always. I studied literature and creative writing. And after school, I was just sort of trying to do some journalism. And I never really thought of food as something—I guess before that, it wasn't something I thought of that you could study, food writing or something like that. 

But I guess sometime in the—oops. That's my phone. 

Alicia: That’s ok. [Laughs.]

Cathy: Yeah, sometime in the mid-2000s when blogs were blowing up, I started a food blog in 2006 because I couldn't get published elsewhere. I would write these horrible pitches.

I actually took a class in food writing that was taught by an organization that no longer—it's called Mediabistro. And then for a while, they had food writing courses. And my course was taught by Ramin Ganeshram, who was an amazing food writer. And I actually just caught up with her recently. What I was taught was that you had to identify editors at these glossy magazines, write them a pitch. And then I would do that and crickets, of course.

So, I just started a food blog and said, ‘To heck with it.’ And I think everything just happened from there. People were reading my food blog, and then they—I got a, an offer to write a cookbook, right? I was approached by an agent. And actually, two years later, I finally kind of wrapped my head around what a proposal would look like for that cookbook, ’cause at first I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ 

And so, everything kind of just fell from doing the blog. And so, I've been-—yeah, I just kind of been doing freelance writing and cookbook writing. The Food of—

Alicia: Yeah, my question was, how did you come to make food writing your life, which you—is what you’ve done? And you had another book come out last year, another cookbook.

I think you answered the question, which was that you did your blog and you just kept kind of going at it. Which is, I think, when people ask, ‘How do you do—how do you become a freelance writer?’ The answer really is being persistent and consistent, and a lot—just taking more risks than you would think you would want to do.

Cathy: I also like to create community, and I threw a lot of events when I was starting out. Especially when I was doing my blog, I would throw a lot of kickoffs, and other potlucks and stuff like that. And it was just a great way to meet people and just form a community around it. 

In terms of how I make a living today, yeah, it is also—it has actually always been sort of a mixed bag, where I did a lot of freelance copywriting sort of on the side all along. And now, I do that full-time. And sort of the freelance food writing is my sort of night happening. [Laughter.]

Alicia: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Well, you in your blog—which you don't have, you don't update anymore, right? 

Cathy: Yeah, yeah.

I only write about things for money now, instead of—I spent a lot of time and effort on the blog. So it's just like, ‘Ok, I'm gonna try to move those projects into a different and more visible field.’

Alicia: Yeah.

But you maintain your focus really on home cooking. And what is your advice, and how is that kind of changed? Has your approach to cooking changed since you had the blog to now? I know you were always about local and seasonal and no waste cooking. How has your cooking changed since you were starting out as a blogger?

Cathy: Oh, that's a great question. 

I think that I always like to sort of learn something new from every season of vegetables that crops up in my CSA or at my farmers’ markets. And you do see trends come and go. You do see new ingredients all the time. So I think that that just experience and working with all different kinds of stuff that—

And joining a CSA is a great way to have this, because you get all these things that you didn’t intentionally set forth to buy. And so, it's kind of great. So I think that it just, it's only enriched my cooking. 

I've also been really interested in learning about all every cuisine in the world, basically, I want to learn more about. So, I've been collecting cookbooks along the way. And yeah, so I hope that it's just kind of enriched my awareness of—and it's also led to a lot of clutter in my pantry of random, not random, but just a lot of spices and stuff. [Laughs.]

Alicia: Yeah, yeah. The spices and the vinegars really take up a lot of space when you get going. Yeah. 

But yeah, with that focus on home cooking, you have a James Beard award for writing about home cooking. So what is your relationship to eating out these days, since you built your career on cooking at home?

Cathy: Oh my god.

I've always sort of thought of eating out as the special treat, rather than—I know a lot of people who are not used to cooking, they see cooking as a kind of big to-do. And it's a little bit nerve-racking. And so that was always sort of the reverse for me. So I've always treated going out as like a special occasion, whether it's to try something I could never make at home like dim sum or to celebrate somebody's birthday. 

I feel the last year—I usually don't get takeout in my local neighborhood, but in the last year I've been doing a lot just to support my local restaurants. So, the last year has really changed my relationship in a big way in that sense. 

Alicia: Yeah, that's interesting. 

And there has been so much conversation about the ethics of restaurants and hospitality in the last year. And I was going to ask you, how did the pandemic kind of change your approach to food? And how did it other—obviously, a little more takeout. But what was it like for you?

Cathy: I mean, it didn't really change my day to day terribly much. And I'm so fortunate and I'm so privileged to say that, because I always sort of cooked—I always sort of had a stocked pantry of things that I could whip together if I needed to with rice, or some nice sauces and an egg and I'm happy. So it didn't really change my cooking routine too much in that sense.

So I was really looking around and seeing what other people were doing, what other businesses were doing to stay afloat. And I saw so many of them started pantries and grocery stores, weird kind of pop-up thing—or not pop-up, but delivery things. I got some partially cooked stuff and then threw it together as a meal cooked from one local restaurant. And all these kind of solutions and pivots that folks were doing, I really wanted to support that. 

And I really wanted to support by buying gift cards. So I've just used a few of the gift cards I bought a year ago by eating out. I think that it's just really important to show up for your community. And a lot of restaurants are really struggling, and I tried to hear them out and wrote about some of them as well.

Alicia: Yeah.

And you're also well-known as a podcaster, for Eat Your Words and Why We Eat What We Eat. And how did you get into podcasting, and how did it kind of open up different creative avenues for you versus writing?

Cathy: Yeah.

I think it happened really organically through Heritage Radio Network, which was a project from Heritage Foods USA, which is a heritage meat distributor. And I was friendly with the folks who ran it, and they just started this radio-back then, they called it a radio station, they still do-outside of this little shipping container at Roberta's Pizza in Brooklyn. 

So, I was friendly with some of those folks. And they invited me on a show, on my friend’s show Snacky Tunes. And I was a guest, and then they, the producers, asked if I wanted to come up with a show. And they were creating a show about—their show was like food and music. There was Anne Saxelby’s cheese show. And so, I created a show about home cooking. And then, it evolved into being about books and food of all kinds, books about food basically, whether it's a cookbook or a food memoir.

So, it just was totally organic. And it was a great way to again form community and meet people that I wanted to talk with and kind of support their work and showcase it however I can, without having to sit down and write a whole long profile about somebody. It's just like, ‘Hey, let's have an organic conversation.’ And so, that was a lot of fun. 

And then from there, yeah, I guess, Gimlet Creative reached out to me when they were looking for a host for their food show, what was Why We Eat What We Eat. And a longtime friend of mine who used to be a food blogger, James Boo, decided to start Self-Evident, which is a community-based podcast that's exploring Asian American experiences. I had experience as a-being a host. And I was really dedicated to the mission, so that's how I became the host of Self-Evident.

Alicia: [Laughs.] Nice. 

Well, something I love about your book, The Food of Taiwan, is that it starts by giving a cultural, political, agricultural background on the island, which you would say or think is necessary to understanding any cuisine. I think a lot of cookbooks don't necessarily start with all of that background, which is something interesting about yours.

Have you always considered those factors important when talking about food? And if so, how did you kind of develop your consciousness around food, politics and agriculture? Because it's not always a significant angle for a lot of food writers, especially talking about home cooking.

Cathy: Right.

Yeah, I definitely think it's essential to understanding the food of a certain place to understand ‘What are some of the people that have emigrated here over the years? What is the climate? What is the agriculture situation?’ I mean, that's how cuisine is formed. Cuisine is just a totally social construct that is formed with, from people and the land. 

Especially in the case of Taiwan, where I think it was really hard for me when I was shopping this book around 10 years ago or so, to explain without getting into a long history lesson about what Taiwan is. It's still like a kind of a long winded thing to—its political situation is a little bit tricky, right now, and it has been for quite a while. I felt like it was really important for that book. 

But that said, I really enjoy cookbooks that give you that really thorough glimpse into the people who have created the cuisine. So I definitely think that that's important to understanding any, any cuisine. 

Alicia: Yeah, yeah.

And have you always been interested in food politics and how agriculture works in that way? I know you said you have a CSA, so you're obviously supporting local farmers. But was that always part of your kind of food consciousness?

Cathy: Oh, definitely. Yeah, I mean, just from the very first sort of-I think when I was in high school, or maybe it was during college is when I read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. And I also read a book called Grub by Bryant Terry and Anna Lappé . And it just really just that that book, I think, in particular, really just changed my consciousness. And I always felt food was intertwined with politics. And we all have an ability to enact change with every decision we make around food and how we interact with it and how we talk about it, especially if we're going to be a writer of some sort. [Laughter.]

Alicia: Right.

Well, what are you working on now as a food writer?

Cathy: Right now, I’m working on a story about sugar. [Laughs.]

Alicia: Oh, I just filed a story about sugar. [Laughter.]

Cathy: I hope you figured it out, because I can't figure out my story. I can't wait to see yours. 

Basically, I've been working on this story. And it turned into a much bigger story than I was initially thinking it was, and much thornier, and much more difficult. So I don't know how it's gonna turn out right now. [Laughter.]

Alicia: Well, it's interesting, because I do think that you do—you tackle thorny topics in food with, in a very accessible way. You do take thorny things and make them easy for people, not easy as in digestible, but you make it understandable and approachable. 

And one thing I did want to ask you, especially talking about politics and agriculture is you have written vegetarian recipes. You've written about the Buddhist history of mock meat, which I love that piece and reference it in the manuscript of my book I'm working on. 

But you did a book called Sheet Pan Chicken. And obviously, I'm a vegetarian. [Laughter.] And so, I wanted—

Cathy: I wanted to add you to the press list, but I was like, ‘Wait a minute. No, no, wait.’ [Laughter.]

Alicia: No, no.

But what I wanted to ask, because how did you regard that? The politics of chicken, the sourcing of chicken, the impact of its production? How did you kind of deal with that? Because you are a writer who asks those questions.

Cathy: Thanks. Yeah. 

There's a section in the introduction where I talk about how to shop for chicken. I sort of run you through some of the labels you'll find on chicken nowadays, and what they mean and why they're important. And I encourage people to be curious and look beyond the grocery store and hit up their local farmers’ market, if they're going to buy meat. And they can ask even more questions.

But I think beyond that, I hope that the book demonstrates the type of cooking that I really like to emphasize, which is just using every little piece of meat and just maximizing the full value of all the flavors that you can get out of it and have it carry through other ingredients. And that's just the way I tend to cook is, if I'm using meat, it's a small amount that just lends their drippings and flavors to vegetables or starch or tofu. And then, I think something kind of magical happens with that synthesis of both things.

I tried to kind of emphasize that in this book. The worst thing I think you can do is cook a chicken all alone with nothing to catch its fat or juices. So chicken should always be cooked on top of or with some vegetables around them to absorb and kind of trade off one another's flavors and benefits and whatever. 

So that's what I hope people get out of the book, ’cause I have you do things like scrape the brown bits from the pan and make a sauce out of that reuse. I have them use bone and chicken with the skin on and then say, ‘You can make stock with it afterwards, or like keep the fat.’ And I don't know, in my fridge I have jars of duck fat or bacon fat from whenever I've cooked these things. So, suggesting you can use them next time you're cooking vegetables. 

That just feels very harmonious to me if you are going to eat animal meat, even more than using olive oil that was grown in a Mediterranean climate that is very far from New York City. But I still buy olive oil, because I love it, but keeping fat also just makes a lot of sense to me.

Alicia: Yeah, for sure. 

And for you is cooking a political act?

Cathy: Yes, definitely. 

I mean, I don’t have a great answer for that. [Laughter.] But I think that, again, every day, you choose what you put into your mouth to eat and to nourish yourself. And I think that it's a very important decision. It’s more important than what color nail polish and what the hell my hair looks like today, or how I present myself to the world. To me, that's reflected in what I'm cooking and eating and talking about with regards to cooking, and eating and shopping for food. So these are all decisions that are made on an everyday basis three times a day. And I think that's a huge opportunity. 

Alicia: Yeah. Thank you so much for taking the time today. 

Cathy: Thank you so much, Alicia. That was fun.

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Hannah Howard, author of the memoirs Feast: True Love In and Out of the Kitchen and the forthcoming Plenty: A Memoir of Food and Family, is a wildly generous writer. She gives of herself and her experiences with such vulnerability and verve, to the point that I wanted to ask her if she is holding something back for herself. The new memoir chronicles becoming a wife and a mother, as well as leaving the restaurant and food retail world for writing. She spends time with women in food that have influenced her life and work, but haven’t yet gotten their major accolades. It’s a beautiful testament to the complications of a life of food and words. We talked about why she’s drawn to memoir, how becoming a mother has changed her writing, and the differences between writing and working in restaurants. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Hannah. Thank you so much for being here. 

Hannah: Thank you so much for having me, Alicia. I'm a big fan, so I’m very excited that you asked me. 

Alicia: Well, can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate? 

Hannah: Absolutely. 

I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, with a food loving mom who loved to cook and try new recipes for new cookbooks. So we didn't often have the same thing for dinner twice, which was kind of disappointing when I loved something. 

But one of my best childhood memories is just our Saturday morning grocery procuring pilgrimages, where we would go to our local farmers market. And we'd go to Ma Stallone's, which was this tiny Italian grocery store owned by Mrs. Ma Stallone, who would be making fresh mozzarella in her arm. She had these big arms that would be flapping along, and she would give me a taste. And we would go to this little Egyptian grocery store and stock up on olives and halva, and just just go home with all these goodies. And it was so exciting to see what my mom would concoct from them.

Alicia: [Laughs.] That's really an exciting way to grow up, I think. Wow. 

Hannah: I feel really lucky. 

Alicia: Yeah, yeah.

I was thinking recently about my mom, how on Long Island we didn't have that kind of abundant diversity of things, and when-one day my mom was obsessed with cooking with bulgur wheat, and we went to a million stores and no one had it. 

But yeah. [Laughs.] And then you went on to study creative writing and anthropology at Columbia. So, how did food become such a major force in your life?

Hannah: I really have always loved food. Hanging out in my mom's kitchen always felt like a great place to be. I loved restaurants. I felt the kitchen was at the heart of where the action was. 

And in college, I wanted to have a job. And I was reading Kitchen Confidentialat the time, and I thought that I wanted to work in a restaurant. And I found a job on Craigslist as a hostess for a very old school Michelin-starred French restaurant on the Upper West Side called Picholine. 

And I just fell in love. I fell in love with this whole world that felt both kind of familiar and foreign to me, familiar because that excitement about food and ingredients and what they could become, and that felt so innate to what I cared about. But this whole world of fine dining in New York City was a new territory for me. And it was intimidating and fascinating and very alluring to my 18-year-old self, for sure. So much so that I really dove in and worked in restaurant jobs throughout college and thought that I wanted to have my own restaurant until I spent a bunch of years managing restaurants, and realized that I wanted to be close to restaurants but that maybe the day-to-day operations weren't the best fit for me.

Alicia: Right. It's a hard life for sure. 

And so, you really got super into cheese. There's so much cheese in your books, and you have a very deep expertise about it. What is it about cheese that keeps you excited, engaged, and just really obsessed?

Hannah: There's so many things about cheese that I keep coming back to. One is just that whenever I tell people that I work with cheese, or—people really love it. There is something about cheese that just has a power to make people happy. I don’t know what it is, but there’s that. And I mean, I'm one of them. 

But I think there's also something cool that there's this whole history and tradition and world of cheese, and you—mostly from Europe. Cheese only has a few ingredients. It’s milk, salts, culture, and rennet. And from those ingredients, you can make a creamy brie. Or you could make a super-aged gouda that tastes like butterscotch, or you could make a really nutty cheddar. I think it's kind of this magical alchemy that you just can milk and you can get so much from it. 

And then, I've also really gotten fascinated by learning about how cheese has played a part in humanity and how an-alpine cheeses kept people in the mountains basically alive through these long brutal winters. In Greece, it's the fresh cheese and feta. It's such an integral part of all these cuisines. 

And then in today's world, there is also something about cheese that just seems to attract some really quirky and really amazing people. So I've just loved getting to know the cheese-makers and mongers that I've gotten to connect with.

Alicia: Right. 

And your forthcoming memoir, Plenty, is about forging a career and a community around food. And when did you know that you wanted to move from the restaurant and retail side of food to food media, and how did you make that happen?

Hannah: It's funny that you say that. I just had this kind of pep talk with my husband, because I still work in a way in the retail side of food. I do a lot of food copywriting, which is kind of how I pay my bills. But it's very true that my love is more, is, I write memoirs. My next book is coming out. And I love writing personal essays, and I love writing some journalism as well. 

It's kind of been slow, because I think there's a part of me like, ‘This is the big dream.’ And it feels too good to be true, or it feels intimidating. Definitely not the easiest way in the world to make money. It's definitely a slow-burn book. I know you're in the process, so you know what a long haul it is. 

Alicia: It sucks. [Laughs.]

Hannah: It sucks. It sucks.

It's like this low-hanging fruit of things that I can do and get paid for is much more instantly gratifying. So, there's a lot of reasons that I've been kind of reluctant to dive in. But the more I have, the more I’ve felt happy. So I’ve really tried to kind of find that balance between work that pays the bills and work that brings me creative, juicy joy.

Alicia: [Laughs.] Right. 

And why do you think you’ve focused on memoir? ’Cause this is your second.

Hannah: [Sighs.] [Laughter.] I don't know. And people ask, I think totally rightfully so, they ask-I'm relatively young. I'm 30. I’m almost 34. But that's relatively young. I was 30 when my first book came out. Like, ‘Right, who are you to be sharing your life story?’ 

Alicia: No, I'm not asking that question. No, I'm saying, ‘Yeah, what is as a genre—what about memoir engages you so much?’

Hannah: I feel that I've always had this kind of compulsion to share, maybe to transform things that happened in my life into something, to make something of them. When I was in middle school, I wrote a zine about me and my friends. I just love telling these stories.

For me, it does help me make meaning of things, make sense of things to turn them into stories and share them with people. And I do think some of the memoir—my first one was a lot about my eating, struggling with an eating disorder. And I think too, that whole situation just felt incredibly lonely and difficult and really shameful. Not that it was easy, but being able to take those, even the really embarrassing things, and then turn them into something that I could share with other people. It made it feel a little bit worthwhile, and my hope was that some people would feel less alone. 

And I think that has happened. And now it feels like another really cool sort of alchemy, is to take something really shitty and make something good come of it.

Alicia: Right.

And have you found in food writing the same kind of community that you find when you work in a restaurant or in a store that sells—because I think that those places, when working in a magazine versus working at a bar. It's much more communal. It's a real sense of being in a fight together. And I think that, yeah, writing, it's harder to come by. But you do talk in the book about finding a little bit of that.

Hannah: Yeah.

I think that's one of the biggest things I miss from working in restaurants, for sure. And I think I even mention in the book, one of the women, Tammy, who I wrote about, who has this beautiful restaurant, invited me just to her pre-staff meeting. And just being a part of that, I remembered what I-

Yeah, I really felt oftentimes when I worked in a restaurant, it was a sort of a family. And I don't really get that sense from writing. I think writing can be incredibly lonely. It's you and your laptop. 

But yes, I think in the book I spent a little bit more time with the women I wrote about then just if I was writing something quick and I would talk to someone for an hour, and then write it and then that would be that. But I tried to spend days, multiple days and multiple experiences with these people. And that did feel much more rewarding and satisfying in that kind of connection realm, which I think, ultimately I find, is what I care about and is one of the things I keep coming back to about food, is that it provides that. 

But that's been one of the biggest challenges of being a full-time writer for me. It can be really lonely, especially during the pandemic.

Alicia: Yeah, of course. Yeah. Usually, we would be able to drink and complain together. [Laughs.]

Hannah: Yeah, my days would be—even just these people that I am writing a quick story about, it was so cool to get to spend an hour with them at their kitchen, an hour with them in their olive grove, instead of an hour with them on Zoom. 

Alicia: Zoom, yeah. [Laughs.]

Well, and the book is also a love letter to women in food. And it brought to mind Skirt Steak by Charlotte Druckman. I'm not sure if you've read that. But it's really, I think still, even though we're in the year 2021, such a new thing to still talk about women in food and in the kitchen in a way that really captures all the nuance of what gender has meant in food for so long, where women have always been cooking but it's the men who have gotten the credit for it. And that continues still. 

And so, I wanted to know why you wanted to write the book about the women you've worked with in food. Do you think that women in food are getting more attention? What is kind of your perspective on how things have changed, or how they've stayed the same in terms of the ways we talk about gender and food?

Hannah: Yeah, it's kind of astonishing how far we still have to go, I think. Although women have been cooking and feeding people forever, when men do so it seems to automatically get taken more seriously and garner more respect and more rewards, rewards and awards and all of that. 

But I do feel really hopeful. And one of my reasons for writing about women in food was kind of selfish. I was kind of answering for myself why I've had so many food jobs, and men have almost always been my mentors and my bosses and oftentimes my co-workers. And just like, ‘Why was that?’

And the book started out when I was just in that really early idea stage I had—I was thinking a little bit more about sort of profiles of more prominent, big deal women in the food worlds. But then I kind of was more interested in people in the trenches doing this work every day. And I did find myself completely inspired and impressed. And it just made me feel like if these women's stories are in any way representative, which I think they are, that there's going to be a much more-

And I think, too, in these last few years, people are paying a little bit more attention to the voices they're listening to and caring more about where their food is coming from. And I’m hopeful. I'm optimistic.

Alicia: [Laughs.] Yeah.

And you write so candidly and vividly about your experiences with an eating disorder, a miscarriage, pregnancy. Why has it been so significant to your work to document those vulnerable aspects of womanhood? And how do you decide—because I think every writer is always making these choices, how do you decide what to tell people and what to keep to yourself? How do you walk that line?

Hannah: Yeah.

I mean, I think for me, these kind of personal things are, do occupy such a big part of my headspace and heart space. And so, not sharing about them would feel like I was missing such a big part of the story. 

Same thing about how eating disorders to me felt so secretive and so shameful, and then getting to share really shifted something about that. I think that was a similar situation with having a miscarriage, which I did—I was kind of surprised, because I hadn't really thought much about the whole thing until until I experienced it. And then I started to realize that I knew—Why didn't people talk about this? And I was almost hungry for these stories. 

I watched on YouTube about Beyoncé’s miscarriage. And I was so heartened to read about Michelle Obama's miscarriage. Of course not because this happened to these people, but just to be like, ‘Ok, this is a part of life. And I'm not alone.’ So being able to kind of pass that along and diminish some of the weird stigma in silence, I think, is really important to me. 

I think that is such a fine line, hard question, as someone who writes about personal things, is how personal, how much. One of my writing teachers that I really admire kind of reminded me that we also get to decide what we don't share. I think that's just as important, right, as what we do. And I share a lot. I do open my heart to the page. But I think of it just as kind of one part of me and one part of the story. And then sometimes, you look—I look back on it. And I cringe. But I think that's life too.

Alicia: I think that's definitely life as a writer, where you put things out there and you see what lands. I mean, so much of understanding writing comes from how people interact with it, I think, even more so than what we think we're doing when we write. [Laughs.] 

But one thing I wanted to ask you is because I don't think we hear enough about what it's like to be a writer and a mother. And when people do write memoirs about this, I'm thinking of Rachel Cusk’s A Life's Work, people are wildly critical. You are just not supposed to talk about being a mother and being a writer, because—I don't know why. 

But as a freelance writer, especially, you write, it's about—we have a life of constant anxiety, where it's like, ‘When is our next work coming? When is this check coming? Do I have the stamina today to write anything at all?’ And so, how has motherhood changed your relationship both to writing and to food, if it has?

Hannah: So, I've been a mother—also, I became a mother right as the pandemic started, in April of 2020. So everything changed in the world and everything changed in my little world. And sometimes it's hard for me to separate out which was which. And I feel like I'm still a new—so my daughter is six, about 16 months old. So I'm still, feel I'm still very much figuring it out, for sure. 

And I don't have it figured out. I have found the whole—I don't think I've ever been so challenged creatively as in this last year and a half. I have found it enormously—being a mom has been so consuming and relentless. And it just really requires a huge amount of, such a different part of your brain than writing, but some—one part, and then it's hard to find sometimes that energy with the other part. 

But I've also surprised myself in how the process of being, becoming a mom has made me value writing in my creative work more in a way. I think it just feels almost more sacred than it did before. I don't know if that's just the kind of silver lining of having such time constraints. The time I do have feels magical. In April 2020, like so many people, my life shrunk in such a way that it was this tiny world of me and my little family, that was something about writing and getting to—and being a freelancer in a way, just doing work that felt valuable to someone, where I got to connect with other people. And it just felt really rewarding in a way that being a new mom didn't, because it was just so thankless, rote tasks over and over again.

So it's been interesting. But I think it keeps changing for me, right? Yeah, definitely. And I'm pregnant again. I'm expecting another in, around Thanksgiving. That's one of my biggest fears, because I feel like I'm barely managing with one. But I'm really excited, and I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't also find it such a amazing challenge,

Alicia: Right. Of course, of course. 

And for you, is cooking a political act?

Hannah: I think cooking is always a politi—I thought about this question a lot. And I know it's very much at the heart of your work. Yeah. I think it has to be. I think that there's, like so many—I think there's a part of me that would like it not to be, because after a long day, cooking can feel, for someone who loves to cook, it can feel like an escape. And I think it can be that, and it can still be political because it's part of who is—who creates, produces, makes, feeds our world, is a political thing. So, yes.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much, Hannah. for taking the time. Good luck to you with your book launch and everything, and also having another baby, which is so exciting. 

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People assume I’ve interviewed Tunde Wey—the artist, writer, and cook whose work has been the subject of other people’s award-winning profiles—before because I’m a big public fan of his work, but I hadn’t felt myself properly prepared. His work touches on everything from racism to immigration to colonialism to capitalist extraction, and I didn’t really know my way into a focused interview. I was nervous, basically. But I think we had a good conversation, one that gets at a lot of issues with food as a lens toward bigger systems and problems.

In many cases—most cases, if I’m honest—I’m doing an interview in order to work out a problem I’ve been thinking about, and this one was no different. We waded into whether food can really be an agent of change in a capitalist world, because I’ve been wavering on that idea myself, and Wey has the economic knowledge to discuss why it isn’t so in depth. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Tunde. Thank you so much for taking the time. 

Tunde: Thank you. 

(:07) Alicia: And I know you are in Lagos, now. Can you tell us about how that's going, what you're doing there?

Tunde: Oh, I'm actually not in Lagos. [Laughs.] I was supposed to fly two weeks ago, and my COVID result didn’t come in time. So I just pushed for my flight till a couple of months from now. Next month or something.

Alicia: Ok, cool. 

Well, can you tell us about where you grew up and what you ate?

Tunde: Yeah.

I grew up in Lagos. I ate regional Western Nigerian food, I guess. So I'm Yoruba, so I ate Yoruba food. My mom is Edo, so I ate that food as well. My dad is also part Efik, so I ate that as well. So I'd Yoruba, Efik, and sort of the Delta region food, so Edo, Itsekiri food. And then we ate, I guess, white food too.

Alicia: Which white food? 

Tunde: When we were growing up, we used to call it breakfast things. But when I came here, then it was lunch meats and s**t like that. So sausages and hams and stuff like that. So, we ate that. So it was a mix. 

We usually would eat that on Sundays. My dad would cook, and we'd go out to this store. My data would buy a whole bunch of things, and then he'll cook. Pasta. My mom would mix s**t like beef stroganoff, just random s**t. She went to school in England, so she came back with certain notions around food. So, we have those kinds of things. 

And growing up in Nigeria, I came from a middle-class background. It wasn't out of the norm for folks to eat that kind of stuff. So cereals and pancakes, stuff like that. Plus, we also watched a lot of American television with that kind of stuff on the TV.

Alicia: Right, right. Yeah. 

And you self-identify as an artist, a cook and a writer. And I wanted to ask, which were you first and how did the rest come? [Laughter.] 

Tunde: Which was up first? [Laughs.] 

Alicia: Yeah, yeah. Which identity? Or which came to you first, in terms of your work? 

Tunde: Right. 

I don't know how to answer that question. I feel like it just depends on who I'm, who I am talking to. I think I say I'm an artist because it's just easier to convey what I'm trying to do. I remember, I was trying to raise money for a restaurant. And I was telling people that this restaurant is not going to make any money. And they couldn't understand that. They were like, ‘Huh, what does this mean?’ But then if I was talking to, say, a curator, and I'm like, ‘Well, this project is this and I need this amount of money,’ then they get it. So it just depends on who I'm talking to. 

So I guess in the chronology of what is on public records? Artist came last, and it's probably still not on record. So, maybe that’s the first time.

Alicia: Well, it is difficult, I think, for multi-disciplinary people to use that word, to make themselves legible, I suppose, in a world where you have to make everything legible to obtain what you need to do your work at all. You have to be very, very strict about what you are. That is really funny that saying artist allowed you to get the capital for the projects that you needed, that you wanted to do. [Laughs.]

Tunde: Yeah, I have a friend who's a curator. She's a friend, but she's also a colleague. She's based in Pittsburgh, Chenoa, and she was the first person—I did a dinner in New Orleans, and she happened to be there ’cause she was there for the opening of some hotel or something. And she had read about it. She just came through. And then, that's how we became friends. But she saw it as art. And then she gave me sort of the words to be able to describe myself to myself and to other people. And then she sponsored the project as art. So I'm like, ‘All right, I f**k with this.’

Alicia: Right. 

And your work focuses on power, colonialism, capitalism, racism. You've written for food sections and food outlets. But lately, you've been self-publishing, I wanted to ask if that was a conscious decision to move out of traditional media, or whether this is something that—if you're just not finding the space in food media.

Tunde: Yeah. 

So I'm not sure how it is for you. But I never pitched anything, just because that's not—I didn't grow up. I mean, I wasn't a journalist or anything so I didn't understand pitching. And the way I got my writing gig with the Chronicle was through a relationship. All that to say is if I want to publish something, I don't know who to contact. And I also don't like rejection. 

And then also, I'm not necessarily interested—because this has happened a couple of times, when people will reach out to me and then I’ll propose something and they have a different idea of what I should do, which is fine. But I just tend to want to write what I want to write. So I think that the medium of posting on Instagram or using my newsletter just seems to make more sense. And I have been recently fortunate where I'm not reliant on my writing to bring in an income. So it's fine to just release it on Instagram.

I remember when I put it out, when I put out—when I started putting out my essays on Instagram, a friend told me, she was like, ‘This is very difficult to read.’ [Laughter.] I think it was this awkward, ‘I can't read your 75-post essay on food.’ And I was like, ‘All right, f**k it.’ And I kept doing it.

But I think there's something about, interesting about playing with the medium, at least, on the ‘Gram, which making the posts be these essays that nobody wants to read. 

Alicia: Yeah. [Laughs.]

Well, I mean, you've been written about a lot, interviewed a lot . People kind of set you up one way as sort of a provocateur in food. Do you feel that that gets your work right? It's funny to ask you this while interviewing you, but when you're—when people interview you and write about you, do you—How does that feel? Do you see yourself when someone actually is writing about you?

Tunde: I mean, I guess it depends on what was written or, you know? 

Yeah, I don't know. I think sometimes I step into—and I think you get this too—people writing about you, too, right?

Alicia: Not really. [Laughs.]

Tunde: Then you do more of the writing?

Alicia: I mean, I do want to understand this because it is—I have a book coming out and everything. And I know it's going to be a weird position to be in.

Tunde: Oh, right. To be quizzed. 

Alicia: Yeah. [Laughs.]

Tunde: Yeah.

I guess it just depends on who was writing and what they’re writing about. I think this is not because of anything that I've done but just just who I am, that when I read something about me, I'm interested. So I separate myself from whoever—from the person who's reading it, me, from the person who is being portrayed in whatever the piece. And I'm just looking at it interestingly. So if it's interesting, I'm interested. If it's not interesting, then I'm not interested. 

But then all these labels too, they all find it—they all find use for me in context. If somebody is calling me provacautour, depending on the context, that's true. Other times, that's not true. Depending on how I feel, too, that's true. So yeah, it's just all those things. 

How would you describe me to yourself?

Alicia: I think of you as a writer and an artist. And I don't think of you necessarily as a provocateur. I think of you as someone who bends the narrative in different ways than we are accustomed to seeing in food especially, which is a very, very boring cultural field. [Laughs.] It's a young cultural field, I suppose, in terms of cultural criticism. And so, I do think that anyone who says anything somewhat outside the norm of the narratives we get gets labeled an activist. A provocateur. 

Tunde: Yeah. 

I imagine that, depending on who is talking about your work, they are saying the same thing. So again, the context is everything. To a lot of folks, I am—people have told me this to my face—I'm not radical at all.

Alicia: Yeah, no, I feel that way, too. Just by doing anything for money, I am ultimately a bad person and not radical enough. And that's fine with me. I've really made peace with that. I think in the last year or so, it's like, ‘I'm sorry, I have to live.’ [Laughs.]

Tunde: Did you make more peace as you made more money? Is that how it happened? 

Alicia: Exactly. Yeah. [Laughter.] 

I was like, ‘You know what, there's no use for—I'm of better use to people this way. [Laughs.] I'm of better use to people when I'm not broke and worried and have to go work in a bar, or do whatever the f**k to to keep myself going. I'm a better writer when I don't have to worry about those things.’

Tunde: Yeah.

I think having resources, whether you want to call them money or whatever, that is pretty pertinent to survival. 

Alicia: Yeah. 

No, you can't do good work if you're not—if you're worried about survival, and so it is what it is.

Tunde: Some people don't worry about money, and so their resources are different. But most of us need it.

Alicia: Yeah. [Laughs.]

Well, I wanted to ask you about last year’s ‘Let It Die’ essay was a big hit. Was it the first time we wrote an essay on Instagram? Or maybe it was just it really took off. People were obsessed with it. 

Tunde: Right. I don't know if it was the first time. I don't remember. 

Oh, sorry. Was that a question?

Alicia: Yeah. Tell me about ‘Let It Die,’ yeah. [Laughs.]

unde: Oh. Yeah, well, I do want to correct one thing, but transgression is just part of how I see the media landscape, which is I don't know how much it took off until Helen Rosner wrote about it. I'm pretty sure it didn't take off until Helen Rosner wrote about it. [Laughs.] So yeah, so that was it. It just happens to be the essay that Helen Rosner decided to write about. Not to say that the essay is not strong. But to say that for it to get to a certain critical mass of people, it needs a lever, and the New Yorker was the lever.

Alicia: Right. 

And around that time, though, you did tell WBUR ‘What is important to us is not necessarily how it tastes. It's more about the theater around the thing.’ And I think this is what I was talking about when I was saying you've been bending narratives that we're not used to seeing. 

And that most people take things very literally, I think, ’cause I wrote something about the death of the chef and people were totally up in arms about, I want to put the guillotine on chefs or something. And it's like, ‘No, that's not the idea. The idea is like, ‘What does this idea mean to us? What does this narrative mean to us? How can we change that narrative so that we create different systems that are better for people?’ But food media at large, I think, is extremely literal in its thinking.

And so, I wanted to ask you what do you expect as a result of your work? Do you have an expectation around anything concrete, or do you have an expectation more around changing ideas and changing narratives?

Tunde: Yeah, so I think that I'm interested in really big things. To be very specific, I'm interested in changing the material conditions of people who are disenfranchised, specifically people in Nigeria, West Africa, Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa. That is my interest. 

So, do I think writing is gonna do that? No. Do I even think that any of the work that I do affects the material conditions of folks in such a way as to change them permanently, or even temporarily? No. But then maybe people impacted by some of the work to think differently, to act differently on an individual scale, and depending on their sphere of influence, have that different action influence other people? I think, possibly. Yeah, that's what I think.

Alicia: Yeah.

No, and in your recent essay about returning to your home of Nigeria, you write, ‘All these convoluted numbers to say that Nigeria is fucked, and it is this ‘fuckedness’ that is termed underdevelopment.’ And I love this essay. It was such an immediate—it was just really good. The writing was really good. 

And so, there are so many types of food system futures that are discussed from the global north perspective. And I saw connections between this piece and your piece, ‘what is profit, and how is it made,’ where you wrote, ‘for capitalist food production to flourish it has to eliminate indigenous food production, and one important way this dismantling occurs is through displacement.’ 

And these are connected by the idea that Indigenous food production, the ‘underdeveloped country’ , requires change by colonialist entities by capitalist production, which we already know is unsustainable. And so much of what I get stuck on right now in my writing is that one of the only ways we've created concrete responses to these problems and to these structures developed by colonialism is that we have fair-trade food. And we have these other food projects working in the global south. You've worked with Burlap & Barrel. And it's kind of just a re-tinkering of the old systems where the capital is still concentrated somewhere else. It's just through these sort of really pined means that we are kind of trying to make more equity there. 

And so, you know, I guess I wanted to ask you what do you think of these kinds of food projects? What are the limits of working with them, and what are the possibilities of working with them?

Tunde: Yeah, wow. 

Yeah, I think the problem is big, obvious. Ok, the problem that I'm talking about, which is a racist problem, talking about Nigeria, which is kind of getting to West Africa and the continent as a whole, because Nigeria is the biggest country on the continent in terms of population size, and GDP. Fair trade doesn't solve that problem. By fair trade, I mean this—engaging in global capitalist trade, we're trying to do it with sort of fair, more ‘fair terms.’ That doesn't solve our problem. 

Yeah, that problem is historic. It’s contemporary. So I don't know, I know that that is its own problem. I know that. What solves the problem? I don't quite know yet. I'm still thinking about it. 

And I also know that there’s a solution. So it's not the end of my thoughts, and after it’s going to emerge. I think that whatever people are terming radical, whoever is talking about that, that sort of radical progress happens in stages. 

We're not going to end capitalism tomorrow, or in 10 years. At least, the people who I f**k with who think about this kind of stuff think about it in in terms of transitions and long periods of time and a continuum. I don't think of our economic system or capitalism as this system that holds everything that is bad. I think that what is true to all the different economic systems possible is—as humans, we are the constant. What is inherent in us is to a certain extent to be selfish and to—not selfish, but to have differences in wants and needs and perspectives.

Anyway, all that to say is we can move from a capitalist mode of production to, I don't know, socialist or communist, and we could still experience the same, or some of the same things that are happening with the degradation of the planet with exploitation and other things. So, fair trade is not the answer. That's what I’m saying. [Laughter.] 

Alicia: Yeah, no.

I was writing a piece about sugar, and I just had this moment of being like, ‘Everything—there is no way to fix this at all.’ I mean, there are ways to fix it, but it's so historically rotten at its core that it is—the whole world would have to change for our relationship to sugar to not be something completely extractive and completely—Just to take one thing, one foodstuff and look at it. The whole system would have to change for this to not be an absolutely terrible product for us to use every single day. When we think about equitable trade, it's just such a limited idea. 

Tunde: Well, just to be just to be specific, when we talk—I'm assuming that when we're talking about fair trade, we're talking about the stickers they put on products. Not talking about global trade, which is a completely different thing, which—that will change everything if it was actually fair trade between countries.

I'm reading this book, and the writer talks about—or at least so far has referenced this idea of comparative advantage, which, when I was in school, in primary school in Nigeria, so—or secondary school—I learned that comparative advantage is how you grow your economy. It’s you find out what you're really good at, and then you develop that and you sell it to other people and people buy them. Then you have this trade. 

But the way the global system is what happens to be what, say, Nigeria is good at is what Nigeria has been shaped to be good at to benefit the West. So Nigeria happens to be good at having mineral resources in the ground. Then it has a, an overdeveloped extractive sector to the detriment of everything else. 

So all of that to say is that real fair trade doesn't happen on a product by product basis.To your point about sugar, the whole ship needs to change.

Alicia: Change. Yeah, exactly. 

No, and as you mentioned before, your project is about getting resources to those who have historically lacked access to resources. And whether that's you charge white people more for food, or you price an issue of Sandwich that you get started at $100, or the salt that was $100. 

And I think about these things constantly. There's a literal law where Americans from the U.S. get, can pay 4% in their taxes. But Puerto Ricans aren't able to get that same break. And then now, there's this problem with the bitcoin people buying up all the property. The tourists have made where I live, Old San Juan, so unlivable that basically anyone who owns property is looking to sell it to the highest bidder, which is going to basically just mean displacement by bitcoin bros ‘cause they have the capital In cash to buy it. 

And I think, of course, in terms of food about everything. So I'm like, ‘All right, how if we-’ I think we just talked about this, but if you—if we saw those real changes on a fundamental global level, what would the food world look like? What would change in the way we have a relationship to food? 

Tunde: Yeah.

Full disclosure, I'm invested in Bitcoin. Not on that scale. 

Ok, so maybe I’ll say something controversial. I think that there's a difference between fault and responsibility. So we're all responsible, but—and responsibility has their degrees of responsibility. So I think as long as you're born and you participate in the system, you're responsible. But depending on your power and your sort of subjective position, that responsibility either grows or shrinks. But then there's sort of people at fault, but even that is a very complicated thing, too. 

So I feel it’s maybe a little disingenuous to complain about the effects of the economic system if you are actively participating in the economic system. And by that I mean that what—the sort of speculative nature of Bitcoin is the same, is not the exact same thing, but it's connected to, say, the continuous production of vehicles every year. Last year, Ford produced 1.5 million vehicles. Tesla produced 500, or manufactured 500,000 vehicles. That sort of investment in consumption goods, and the proliferation of credit and debt and all that s**t. That s**t is connected to Bitcoin. That s**t is connected to the housing market soaring. That s**t is connected to everything. 

So we can pick and choose. We can pick and choose if we want to, but the truth is that it's all connected. So, of course, that's what's gonna happen in certain communities, because that's what money does in this economic system. That is not to say that it's right, or it's going. I'm just saying that. 

And I feel if maybe a lot more people were talking about the, were actively trying in little ways and big ways to address the economic reality, in general, as opposed to specifically when it makes them uncomfortable, then things would be—I don't know about better, but things would maybe be different. 

I'm also just not very interested in the food system as a lens to experience transformation, just because it's connected to everything else. I don't necessarily think that it is the lever that could change things. I’m sure it’s one of the many levers, but I think that it's probably not the first lever, if that makes sense. Did that make sense or not? 

Alicia: That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. [Laughs.]

Tunde: Just be more specific. I think that monetary policy, fiscal policy, reining in, say, the financial industry, financial services. That drives the economy. And addressing that probably has a greater impact than working on, working directly on food policy. But they're all connected.

Alicia: Well, do you feel that you're getting away from food as a lens then to look at the world and politics?

Tunde: No, I don't think so. 

Food is a lens to appreciate all the politics. I think that when you're talking about policy and changing things on a global scale—if you're talking about sugar, for example. Changing how sugar is produced is just a, maybe a really difficult way to change the system if the whole system needs to change. But focusing on, say, the global mechanics of fair trade is a better way to do that. But if you look at sugar production and consumption, then you see the global mechanics of trade, and these other aspects of the system that are kind of fucked up. But when it comes to actualizing change, I'm not sure that food is the place that we start from.

Alicia: No, that makes complete sense. Yeah. [Laughs.] We don't maybe acknowledge that enough. When I say we, I say food writers, that we're not enough engaged with all the other aspects of the world and the reasons these problems ultimately exist. It’s all about—Yeah, these small things that maybe allow you to see the bigger picture, but don't give you the tools to necessarily engage on a deep intellectual level with those issues. If that makes sense. [Laughs.]

Tunde: Yeah, that makes sense. 

Alicia: But well, actually, to get back to food, because you have—I know that you worked with the Beard Foundation. And then also on the Sandwich Magazine you worked with—I think, Sir Kensington's owns that, which is owned by Unilever. So you've worked with these big organizations that have a lot of kind of power. But you also have written that ‘And in all spaces, food and society, we see the faithful and continuous reproduction of this social control, which reinforces the idea that white domination is the natural order of things.’

Tunde: I’ve said some s**t, huh?

Alicia: I'm sorry, I read, re-read everything you've written, obviously, to talk to you. I know, it's weird to have your stuff read back to you. 

What do you see the role of interacting with these kinds of—the Beard Foundation with, a magazine owned by a company, what is the purpose of this engagement? 

Tunde: I do want to shout out my partner Ruth on the magazine. 

So, I guess it just depends. So, what did I work with the Beard Foundation on? I don’t remember.

Alicia: Did you edit some pieces, I think, for the blog? I know Mayukh wrote a piece for you. 

Tunde: Yeah, I wrote a piece. Yes. I just wrote a piece about the work that I was doing. At the time, Mitchell was the VP. Yeah, he reached out and I wrote a piece. 

Yeah, it just depends. But if we're talking about money and capitalism. This is how I feel about money. Nobody owns money. That s**t is for everybody. Like they say, money belongs to the game. I don't care. I don't have a problem taking money. I think there's certain monies that I wouldn't take, not because I think the money is ‘bad.’ It’s just that it’d make me look crazy. Yeah. And I don't want to look crazy. 

Money’s so not real. And it has such real consequences. And nobody owns it in my mind. It belongs to everybody, or it should. So I'll take money. All that to say, organizations and just the way our economy or the global system is structured is that capital accumulates in certain places. It accumulates in the states and accumulates in corporations and organizations and individuals. It is unevenly distributed. So I don't care who you are. If you're looking for some sort of sustenance, you're not printing dollars or mining gold by yourself. You have to go to the deposits where they are. And huge corporations—they have the money. The state has the money. By the state, I mean, the nation state’s structure. 

Sir Kensington, specifically, and Unilever, the kind of work that we were trying to do at the time, Ruth and I, was to talk about certain global systems. It was fantastic that it was Unilever, because Unilever is an antagonist in our story. And we had conversations with them about that. Ruth and I were interested in the possibility of extracting just something so small from them, something tiny relative to how much they've taken from Africa, from Nigeria, in particular for me. So to me, that made sense to work with them on that. 

So, yeah, it depends on the opportunity. But I think when we're talking about money and resources, the folks who have that money are the ones who are distributing that money. And so if you want it, whether you get it directly or indirectly from them, you're getting it from the same source. So, that’s how I think about that.

Alicia: No, it's a really useful way of thinking about things. [Laughs.] ’Cause I think if you're very online, and you're sort of on the left, all of this becomes a very, very personal responsibility issue rather than an issue of taking the money from who has it when you need it. And every move you make is sort of either an endorsement or a rejection of massive things, when actually it's really none of that. It's a useful way of thinking about things that I think isn't—it doesn't get enough attention, to talk about it in that way.

Tunde: Yeah.

There's obviously money that comes with caveats. And most money does, soif  the caveat sort of infringes on certain things for me, then I won’t take that money. But if it's relatively chill—for example, with the magazine, I think they told us that we couldn't specifically—we couldn't make the whole magazine about Unilever as an evil corporation. That would be a little too much, right? And then we're like, ‘Sure.’ It doesn't mean that we didn't critique what Unilever's stands for? Whatever. So there's that. 

But I think more about now, more about how—I just think about how I'm hoarding money, as opposed to where I'm getting money? So, if I get money, I think about like, ‘Okay, this money that I have now, what am I going to do with this money? How can I use money to further my mission?’ And then I think in that way, I think of my stewardship of resources as opposed to wondering about the optics, which is like, ‘How do I get it?’ Which is I do, but I'm less interested in the optics and more interested in how the money that I have can maybe do something different. But it's such a small number that—

Alicia: [Laughs.] That's extremely useful. Thank you for that. 

—film projects. 

Tunde: I'm sorry, I lost the first part of that question. 

Alicia: Are you working more in film now?

Tunde: Yeah. 

So my production partner and I, Ruth and I, we got a grant. And we're working on a docu—series on food, using food to explore the sort of larger questions. So yeah, that's sort of what we're doing. 

Alicia: That's exciting. Yeah. 

Tunde: And speaking of money, and—sorry, just one thing and the grant. We got money from a couple of foundations. So you have people who maybe take money from foundations, but then criticize how other people make their money off foundations. A lot of them are invested in the stock market. I don't care if you're invested in ESG or whatever. You're invested in a very speculative medium. And that sort of speculation, that sort of idle capital that is sitting in bank accounts, or what do you call them? In ledgers? That is money that is, or that is a system that is deeply exploitative. 

So, we don't get to pick and choose. I try not to, especially, even with money. And I just think about how the money that I have, again, to what I say, can be used differently. 

Alicia: Right. 

And for you, is cooking a political act? 

Tunde: Just at home, just chilling and cooking?

Alicia: Cooking in general. 

I ask this question to everyone. It's usually just a kind of a Rorschach test of what they think of the word ‘cooking’ and the word ‘political.’ [Laughs.]

Tunde: I don't know. I mean, if I'm just cooking by myself, no. If I'm doing a dinner series, or something, then possibly. I could be wrong, but I don't think of cooking—I think identity is political. So, sometimes just being is political. But all of this is contextual. Your identity in a particular place is political. But I don't think of cooking as an identity. I think of cooking as—yeah, it's an act. I don't think of necessarily actions as inherently political. Most things are contextual. I think it’s not everything. So, just depends on the context. 

Alicia: Yeah, yeah. 

Well, thank you so much for taking the time today. 

Tunde: Yeah, I have a question for you, actually.

Alicia: Ok. [Laughs.]

Do you want to ask me while we're recording, or–

Tunde: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alicia: Ok.

Tunde: So something that is just fascinating about—to me—about your work is, and I could be wrong, because I get your newsletter, but I don't read it every week. But I read enough to know that you talk about the same things. By that I mean, your perspective is the same, which is anti-capitalist. I want to say anti-racist, but I'm not sure how you describe yourself.

But you have this perspective. And you keep writing like every week, right? Every week you’re writing, every week. And just, how haven't you exhausted? No, really, I'm so serious, ’cause I feel I—when I wrote for the Chronicle, I wrote four essays. And I'm like, ‘The next four are going to be about the same thing. And the next eight after that.’ And so I'm just curious about how you keep the s**t fresh.

Alicia: Right.

No, I mean, I think a lot of people would say I don't keep it fresh, that I have a shtick, that I’m just always saying, ‘Capitalism is bad. Climate change is bad. We have to stop climate change. We have to eat less meat,’ like that. I just bang the same drums over and over again, which is valid. I think I have a beat, so to speak, as a writer. These are the things I cover, is how our cultural relationships to food are part of these larger systems—of economy, policy, white supremacy, all a part of larger systems that control our everyday ways of being and thinking. And that is my beat. That is what I write about. 

But I do think, obviously, within that there is so much to write about. There is so much to think about. I don't know. I think during the more peak of the pandemic, I really exhausted everything that I had to say for years, but no one ever let me say as a food writer. And then I think now, I'm interacting more with the world again and finding more ways into the things I have always written about and thought about, but they're more rooted in my interactions with other people. 

I don't know. I've always been a compulsive writer. So it's not hard for me. This is the natural way in which I communicate. It's easier for me to write something down then it is to say it. Yeah, just to communicate in writing. That's my way of communicating. Yeah, I'm happy to talk to you, but I find it is—I'm going to feel tired after I do this, because I—it's a less natural way for me to communicate, you know?

Tunde: Yeah, no, I dig it. I think that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, if that's easier for you, then it makes sense that you do that. Because most people say the same thing, anyway, over and over again with their mouth. But you’re just writing it. 

Another thing that I want to tell you is I met a man through you. Mr. Byrne.

Alicia: Mark Byrne. 

Tunde: Yeah, from Good Vodka. I was in Lagos. So this is a super short story. We're filming for the docu series in Lagos in Kogi State, which is central Nigeria. And we had this really delicious local drink. I was blown away by it. And I just kept thinking, ‘F**k, this is so delicious. I need to f*****g bottle this and sell it or something.’

And then I was in Lagos a couple of—a month after.I had read the interview that you did with him. And then I'm like, ‘I need to call this man or email this man and see if he'll work with me.’ So I emailed him, and he agreed to work with me. So I don't know, sometime in some soon future we will be releasing a Nigerian palm spirit. 

Alicia: Oh, that's amazing!

Tunde: Yeah. It's not a commercially viable product. I guess it's a project about exploitation again. 

Alicia: Yeah. [Laughs.]

Well, Good Vodka is basically that as well. I mean, it's a product and it's a commercial product. But it's also more about how spirits exist and are made. The history of spirits is, it's usually made from waste rather than growing things to make spirits, which is a bad way of doing it. [Laughs.]

But that's amazing. I love that. I love talking about—and maybe when it comes out, we'll talk again, but I love talking about spirits. [Laughs.] I love talking about alcohol. Because I do think people have a really weird and complicated relationship to it, obviously. But it's nice to talk about it on a level of appreciation rather than the very, very American perspective on alcohol, which is wildly problematic. [Laughs.]

Tunde: I don't know much about spirits. I just know to the point, earlier point about seeing all the systems and everything, I just know that just a really small thing, the Indigenous production of alcohol at scale. That s**t is happening. Folks in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria servicing half the country with this s**t. And you're doing it from these small, small camps, all these different small camps by the water. And so just thinking about thinking about what that means, and thinking about how the disparities that exist between, say, African production and European production is what inspires me to do this kind of thing as opposed to like the actual food product or beverage product. So yeah, I’m excited about it. 

Alicia: That's awesome. Yeah. [Laughs.]

Well, thank you again, I'm so excited about that, and everything else. 

Tunde: Absolutely. Thank you.

Alicia: Thank you.

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