05/21/2020
From Nadine Nelson: "Put the links of people of color food personalities you love in the comments so people can follow and support them, PLEASE!)
(Professional tips, being jealous or jelly has been romanticized in American culture with the rise of social media. Anyone that uses that word with me and there have been many and some people I really respect, you go on the list to watch my back. Jealousy is a terrible way of looking at the world and reeks of insecurity. On a food group that I am in that is populated with academics no less, they were downplaying the relevance of Alison Roman’s actions, why it was news, and why did the New York Times put her column on pause. When you are the NYT and arguably what most people think is the best newspaper in the world whether you agree or not, why would you want a jealous, winy, mean spirited journalist writing for you that speaks about her colleagues in such low regard because this was not the first time she was caught. Roman could have gone after plenty of White male chefs that over commercialize products which I also would not agree with because you should not have to tear anyone down to build yourself up especially publicly that is common decency and morals (would you want to work with her or be her friend?). That people do not get that is baffling because some of you have to put things in the what-if is a person of color said that and then add what if a Black person did that and then synthesize and analyze after that because in most situations your thoughts might change to see White people get away with too much bad behavior others would not. Lastly, I was at a food writing conference at Boston University many years ago, it had all the top magazine editors of the North East there. As probably the only black person in the room, I asked Chris Kimball (always asking White men tough questions lol) then of America’s Test Kitchen and Cook's Country, as a person that teaches cooking class in Boston my “ethnic” cooking classes always sold out be them Caribbean Cooking, Vietnamese, Greek, West African, Brazilian etc. My marketing strategy was always to leverage my background being born in Toronto, the most multicultural city in the world, Jamaican whose motto is “Out of Many One People” and my love of global food and supporting small ethnic markets to create classes no one else was teaching. I dare you to say I am appropriating too because of the respect, connection, and knowledge I have about many cuisines and will readily tell you what I don’t know). I asked Kimball why the magazines were so white bread and he said middle America would not cook with international ingredients. Fast forward how many years and Milk Street is born with a global focus and I don’t think they have one chef of color represented. I say all of this for all of your liberal white editors that have a friend that is Black, Indian, or from Iran, why don’t you hire them. There are too many chefs of color like myself that have nary an opportunity as a person like Roman. For all of you saying that build your own table, I have been for over 10 years and the majority of my clients are not people of color and it has been the biggest struggle to represent myself in the totality of my being because people see the transmitters of anything food as White. We have a changing demographic and I think representation in the mainstream matters in money and in changing the world that perhaps when a Black man jogs down the street you don’t think thief and kill him but might actually think he is your neighbor.) I don’t even have the energy to analyze how people of color cultures are loved however the people not so much. Excerpts from this excellent article, analysis spot on and writing I wish I could synthesize so adeptly, not jealous though, total respect. Go read the whole thing.)
In this, the age of the global pantry, ingredients like turmeric, tahini, and gochujang have finally shaken off their hitherto “exotic” status. But it’s white cooking personalities like Alison Roman and many of the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen stars who have had viral success using them…
Alison Roman is the “prom queen of the pandemic.” Or, at least, she was. The cookbook author and YouTube star, who rose to fame on the strength of her heady-yet-approachable recipes, low-key glamour, and self-effacing charm, recently experienced what she referred to as “baby’s first internet backlash.” It stemmed from a recent interview that Roman gave in which she criticized both minimalism icon Marie Kondo and cookbook author Chrissy Teigen for peddling branded merchandise, implying that they were sellouts — while discussing her own “capsule collection” of cooking tools, no less. A low hum of outrage greeted Roman’s choice to rebuke two women of color, then positively exploded after Teigen created a long thread on Twitter to talk about how hurt she was, as someone who “genuinely loved everything about Alison.”
But now, as the COVID-19 pandemic has forced most of us to stay home and make the most of our kitchen skills, the global pantry is most visible on the pages and websites of establishment food media. It’s Bon Appétit’s gluten-free coconut-turmeric pie and kimchi-cream cheese toast; Food & Wine’s tofu masala and rosy harissa chicken; the New York Times’s brothy chicken soup with hominy and poblano; and Every Day With Rachael Ray’s minty matcha smoothie and Korean barbecue burgers. You can see it all over social media and particularly Instagram, where its most viral example is , Roman’s 2018 recipe for a chickpea-coconut milk stew whose broth is made golden with turmeric. And you can see it on Bon Appétit’s extremely popular YouTube channel, where its test kitchen stars make everything from saffron brittle to “dahi toast” to slow-roast gochujang chicken to spicy chicken katsu sandwiches (though it bears noting that the first two of those recipes were created by people of color).
The question that such representations present for the food world is a difficult one: Who gets to use the global pantry or introduce “new” international ingredients to a Western audience? And behind that is an even more uncomfortable query: Can the aspiration that has become central to the culinary arts ever not be white?
Because the aesthetics of food media are indeed white. That white aesthetic is not, strictly speaking, the abundant natural light, ceramic plates, strategically scattered handfuls of fresh herbs, pastel dining rooms, artisan knives, or even the butcher diagram tattoos that the food media so loves to fetishize. It is more accurate to say that the way we define what is contemporary and fashionable in food is tied to whiteness as a cultural norm — and to its ability to incorporate other cultures without actually becoming them.
Only whiteness can deracinate and subsume the world of culinary influences into itself and yet remain unnamed. It’s a complicated little dance of power and desire: The mainstream is white, so what is presented in the mainstream becomes defined as white, and — ta-da — what you see in viral YouTube videos somehow ends up reinforcing a white norm, even though the historical roots of a dish or an ingredient might be the Levant or East Asia. You might say whiteness works by positing itself as a default. You might also say that this sucks.
You cannot have influence without authority. It’s why well-known (usually white) chefs and cookbook authors have historically been so effective in popularizing global ingredients among the North American mainstream. Think, for example, of Rick Bayless, the Chicago chef whose Mexican restaurants introduced many Midwesterners to contemporary regional Mexican cuisine, or Andy Ricker, the Portland, Oregon, chef whose Pok Pok restaurants spread the gospel of Northern Thai cooking through the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Then there’s Yotam Ottolenghi, the Israeli chef and cookbook author whose London-based restaurants and cookbooks were so effective in communicating the joys of Middle Eastern ingredients like Aleppo pepper and tahini that his influence earned its own moniker, the Ottolenghi Effect.
But to recognize white privilege is one thing; to actively combat it or resist taking advantage of it is something else altogether. That balance between competing and contradictory ideas is a useful way to think about food media in 2020. It doesn’t help to say that certain people own ingredients, or have dominion over certain types or presentations or techniques. But the way that excitement over particular trends and recipes circulates publicly, whether on Instagram or in Bon Appétit, can reinforce whiteness as a norm, just as divorcing history from food erases the contributions and lives of people of color from Western narratives. When whiteness is allowed to function as if it weren’t that, it hurts us all.
Yet Nosrat’s success isn’t only about who she is inherently, but her ability to bridge worlds, to speak about and make comprehensible to the mainstream the assumed difference of minorities and the places and cultures they come from. To paraphrase postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak, it’s indicative of the way in which minorities must contort themselves to ever have any power: They have to manifest it in ways recognizable to those who hold it.
The only way that changes is representation. “As long as staffs of food websites and publications are mostly white, and as long as the leadership of food websites and publications is mostly white,” Krishna says, “everything other than white food will always be seen as the other, as a museum artifact versus someone’s lived experience.”
In the age of the global pantry, ingredients like turmeric, tahini, and gochujang have finally shaken off their hitherto "exotic" status. But it’s white recipe developers like Alison Roman and many of the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen stars who have had viral success using them.
