#1 | Who Gets to Anthologise & Other News
Fluffy podcasts, difficult wine glasses, and the responsibility of obituary
Hello. Thanks for being here.
This is the first edition of In Digestion, a weekly survey of the best food media on the web, and why you should care about it. If you like this newsletter, please follow @in_digestion on Twitter, forward it to three of your very best mates. And your nemesis. It’s a power play, trust me.
In her introduction to The Best American Food Writing 2019, chef, award-winning cookbook author, and Netflix star Samin Nosrat starts with damnation: “J.Kenji López-Alt and I are the only nonwhite authors whose work has been accepted into the canon of general cookbooks.” She goes further: “Neither of my two industries — culinary and media — boasts an exemplary record of rewarding people who stray from an all-too-narrow definition of excellence.” This act of anthology is an opportunity for corrective; for redefinition; for redressing, to “challenge your preconceived notions.”
“Canon” is a word that looms like a beady eye, unblinking. “Anthology” at first feels more chill; a gentle bringing together of pieces that were already what the anthology will say they are, a detached assembling, a party. These pieces of food writing were already the best, and now they are together, like pretty flowers in a pretty vase. The etymology of “anthology” is flower-picking, which reinforces this idea of extant beauty; I apologise for the big in-this-essay-I-will energy.
This milquetoast gentleness is an illusion. Anthologies do not merely arrange: they label, they set parameters. The most anodyne and dangerous reading of any anthology is as a benign collection, a proof that its title has referents — the only useful one is to enquire not just what, in this case, “best,” “American,” and “food writing” mean, but what they are being told to mean by the work they anoint. Anthologies are part of “the canon,” another stratum in the sediment, but they are their own canons — small ones, things you can pick up, that concentrate their power like a neutron star. An anthology of the best American food writing will always be a guide to what isn’t considered American and what isn’t considered food writing. The notion is preconceived.
This is all in mind as I write a weekly newsletter collecting the “best food media on the web.” It can feel a little like putting flowers in a vase. Flowers in vases forget their roots. Flowers in vases die. That’s where the second part comes in: “and why you should care about it.” Anthologies tell readers to care without saying why they should; I hope this newsletter is able to go further; to not just put flowers in a vase, but to trace the fine lines in their petals, the tangle of their roots, the material of their vessel. To not just challenge our preconceived notions, but conceive new ones. And to stop talking about fucking flowers.
The editor of Best American Food Writing 2020, as it goes? J.Kenji López-Alt.
Yi Jun Loh collapses the froth of dalgona coffee on his podcast, Take A Bao. It begins with Loh giving up on hand-whisking the mixture of instant coffee, sugar, and water four hundred (400) times, a small gesture of honest rebellion against something that Tiktok splices into effortlessness. Then, the vaccine against so many viral foods: the taste.
“Spoiler alert: it’s not great.”
A drink like dalgona coffee, expedient in its ingredients but faintly absurd in what they produce, is the perfect foil for Loh’s grounded curiosity and gentle expertise —You can almost see the wry smile when he calls Tiktok “the frontier of food trends.” He’s as happy interviewing a Malaysian coffee professional as his mum, talks to a friend in India to reveal dalgona’s less than singular origins, and connects all of these resonances and contributions on an even, generous keel. This is a theme running through the podcast: Loh anchors the show in the assumption of no assumptions. There’s no hierarchy to his many reference points and perspectives, no muted concessions to the assumed omniscience that Western ideas about food so often hold. It’s kind, clever, and, at half-an-hour, clearly aware of its form’s tendency to outstay its welcome.
Zoe Tennant shares the story of the Canadian Native Haute Cuisine Team and the 1992 Culinary Olympics for Granta. This piece came out in February 2019, but was recently nominated for a James Beard Award, and is included here as an illustration of the powers — and problems — of the extent to which these bodies signal boost and propagate the state of food writing. It’s a fitting example, as Wet’suwet’en Nation chef Andrew George helps the team win medals and acclaim in 1992 and looks back on it all over twenty years later. Tennant decentres herself to offer the “assumption of no assumptions” platform that makes Take A Bao so good, and resists drawing conclusions by letting them make themselves, as beaver tail soup, the legacy of Indigenous Canadian agriculture, and the “violent scrubbing” of cultural genocide reverberate across the decades of one life and the millennia of millions more.
Soleil Ho acknowledges the knots and vicissitudes of feeding and family for The San Francisco Chronicle. That’s “acknowledgement” in its richest, truest sense — the recognition of a need on its own terms. Broaching a sisterly relationship marked by “lives in tessellation, the distance between us always shrinking and growing like oceanic tides,” Ho reflects on her eagerness to do the right thing for her sister and new baby according to history, according to culture, according to “grocery lists of pigs’ feet, pork belly, chayote, ginger, banana flower, green papaya and fish sauce” — according to everything but what her sister wants. But between one massive chuck roast, “five dozen chocolate cookies,” and “quarts of Bolognese sauce,” their tessellating lives, at least for a time, overlap like the breaths between mother and daughter: “exhaled by one and inhaled by the other”; fed by one, eaten by the other. Never mawkish, radically honest, Ho acknowledges too how cooking allows her to be “in the thick of things while stepping out of the way.”
Vivek Menezes goes deep on mango oneupmanship for Livemint. A cursed food ranking infographic is the cause; Goan mangoes the victim; Menzes the weary observer: “Spring ripens into summer, we commence drooling about mangoes, and everything descends to ranting and abuse. But what gets me steamed is the sheer ignorance, because the hierarchy of mango deliciousness was established hundreds of years ago.” Don’t mistake this as oneupmanship itself — this piece begins with “I have less than 1,700 Twitter followers.” It then unwinds into an account of how mango fights online map the sociocultural history of India beneath their “hullaballoo”; how Goa’s history of Portuguese colonisation informs the varieties now “bequeathed like family jewels.” While deeply studied, an unsentimental love of mangoes trickles down to stain every word, like juice from a greedy mouth.
Amelia Soth crystallises some wine glass sociology for Gastro Obscura. Wide, flat glasses with sheer sloping sides ridged like cliffs made drinking wine a battle with physics — but “the difficulty was the point.” What follows isn’t just a fine-grained history of dining’s significance in the Italian Renaissance; it isn’t just a lucid decoding of sprezzatura, the Italian courtly ideal of making the beautiful look effortless that fulfils its purpose in being gracefully, defensively untranslatable. It’s a reminder that difficulty in food and drink can’t be extricated from its context. There’s a chasm, say, between impossibility precision designed to test virtue as a mode of gatekeeping, and the reassertion of the value of labour and expertise against the siren call of “just do what you want!” The former is trying to drink wine out of a glass that is basically a plate for kudos; the latter is what makes shaking a negroni sketchy even if it looks good — or really good, if you’re Stanley Tucci.
Mayukh Sen surveys the responsibility of obituary for Eater [Disclosure: I work for their London publication.] Garima Kothari, who died in an alleged murder-suicide at the hands of her partner, Man Mohan Mall, had been steadfast about the possible closure of her restaurant Nukkad, in Jersey City, as COVID-19 spread when she spoke with him: “I hope not,” she said. “I have plans.” Sen’s piece is the only obituary in the food world, and in compiling a full and celebratory remembrance of Kothari’s work, it acts as a genuine corrective to what it damns and proves. “While American food publications are infatuated with celebrity, they too often seem to impose a higher barrier of entry for figures like Kothari, an immigrant woman of color who didn’t quite have the resources.” There’s hope that “greater sensitivity for the stories of restaurant owners like Kothari” will percolate through the food writing machine, but also the rueful reality that for her, like so many other chefs and restaurateurs, it’s already too late.
An interview with Sen, on this piece, its resonances, his wider work, and the relations to food media will be the first paid post on In Digestion, going out 13 May. Thank you again for being here.
That’s all for this week. Before the next edition, why not remember restaurant trips with friends, brush up on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, or sign up to Vittles, a new food newsletter for novel times. Oh, and please forward this to those three friends and one nemesis. Or just, like, everyone.