#11 | Who Is Food Media, What Is Its Net Worth, and How Many Children Does It Have?
Plus: apricot wars, what state intervention means for restaurants, and botanical piracy
This is the eleventh 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 and @jameskhansen on Twitter, and forward it to a large number of people. It should feel like too many. It won’t be enough. Thank you.
The Sqirl ricotta toast | Sqirl
Food media has lionised terrible chefs and terrible employment practices at the expense of workers who suffer most from them. That’s impossible to deny, and it’s the overarching premise of Kate Telfeyan’s article in the New Republic, How Food Media Created Monsters in the Kitchen.
The “monsters” are the chefs: Jessica Koslow of Sqirl, who has been accused of taking credit for recipes from chefs of colour, locking employees in a health hazard of a kitchen, and letting jam go mouldy. David Chang, who gave a limp statement in response to former collaborator Peter Meehan’s departure from the Los Angeles Times after multiple accounts of abuse shared by colleagues and food and drink writer Tammie Teclemariam. Mario Batali and Ken Friedman, who were both investigated by the “food media” and jettisoned from their restaurants, despite clinging on like limpets for many months.
Those are the “monsters.” Who is the food media?
For starters, this newsletter and its author, both of which/whom have skin in the game. Eater, for whom I work; Bon Appetit; Food and Wine; restaurant critics all over; newspaper food sections; Instagram influencers; all the people who work for all of these outlets and their social media presences; this New Republic article, if not the New Republic (a hazy line to draw); David Chang. But wait! He’s one of the “monsters!” You said the food media created the “monsters!”
This is where a solid overarching premise gets messy, by virtue of its very argument. David Chang is both a lionised chef and the owner of Majordomo Media, the presenter of Netflix’s Ugly Delicious, and a collaborator on now-folded Lucky Peach. He is food media. His food media is both public relations and publication. They are indivisible.
And if food media is an “uncritical hype machine,” which like all generalisations flattens some truths in order to latch on to others, then Telfeyan’s article, which is also food media, is unable to extricate itself from that. It’s germane that after nearly three years at Mission Chinese, the most she can say in print about Danny Bowien and Angela Dimayuga’s accusations against them is “I” — the only “I” in the piece — “have no reason to doubt.” This isn’t to say she should be saying more, because as she writes, “Why should it be up to individual employees to put their necks on the line and tell these stories of abuse, often at great risk to themselves and their future employment prospects?.” It’s to say that the piece can only prove its overarching premise by condemning itself to be tied up in the knots it’s trying to unravel. It's like the fair response a lot of people have to “not being surprised” when a bad person is proved bad: it's a lot easier to be personally aware of something and act ethically on that knowledge — blacklisting restaurants for coverage, say — than it is to outright say that they are bad, and why. The same mechanism is at work when, against the background of social justice protest occasioned by the killing of George Floyd in police custody, and a pandemic that has moved so much online, Instagram — once food media’s fluffy safe haven — becomes a place to publicly air out toxic cultures, taking advantage of immediacy and anonymity. That’s food media too, and it’s both a place of uncritical hype and much much more.
The same week that Sqirl’s employees took their stand, the Financial Times put out an instalment of Koslow’s jam book press. An editorial calendar is an editorial calendar, but much in the same way that it often feels like food writers don’t read the news — or, more precisely, per Alicia Kennedy, don’t "let the news impact the way they write about food enough”— the FT either hadn’t read the news or decided to ignore it. And while it would likely never label itself “food media,” that particular article’s heady jar of hype can’t help but be part of it; much as it would like to squirl itself away.
Anna Nguyen dives deep into the effectiveness of state support for restaurants for STS&Crisis. One of Nguyen’s local favourites, Pho O-Sha in Watertown, Massachusetts, has been waylaid by COVID-19 like so many all over the world, and Nguyen traces the material impacts of local and national state intervention in a compelling, troubling study of how apparent granting of freedom tends to reinforce institutional control. “Idealized representations of democratic society, as we might find in invocations of state law and in the pronouncement of allegedly universal public health facts, actually function to further exclude non-dominant groups and experiences.” Interviewing worker Mali Too, Nguyen introduces an individual character to a story shared by so many, clearly demonstrating how abstractions like “the economy” and “public health” are composed of countless livelihoods and lives.
Elisabeth Sherman documents the decolonisation of Indigenous cuisine through fry bread for Matador Network. Pivoting around chef Brian Yazzie’s experience cooking at Standing Rock Indian Reservation, Dakota, the centre of the story is fry bread, a complex food that carries “resonances of home, family, and nostalgia, but [whose] origins are rooted in strife.” While it is reliant on ingredients “introduced” to Indigenous cuisine by white settlers and government — perhaps the only true “U.S. food” — and the product of an enforced relocation that claimed 200 lives, it remains true that “for many Indigenous people, casting fry bread as a symbol of oppression and trauma doesn’t tell the whole story.” Sherman gives the mic to various Indigenous communities to tell their version of that story, and the result is a faithfully knotty perspective on the decolonisation of cuisine.
Andrew Leonard tracks the 21st century resonances of 17th century spice imperialism in his newsletter, The Cleaver and the Butterfly. Describing the “Hortus Malabaricus, a gorgeously illustrated 12-volume compendium of the plant life of Malabar” as “the product of a massive collaboration between the colonizers and the colonized” is probably a generous perspective. But: Leonard’s assessment of how the text, translated into English, “the language of India's most disastrous colonizer,” by K.S. Manilal, functions as a protection against new colonisation of the country’s botanical resources and knowledge is sharp, effortlessly linking over 400 years of history.
Clarissa Wei delights in the manifest pleasures of the durian for Nikkei Asian Review. Spanning “flavors that can range from creamy custard to bitter, boozy liquor,” Wei’s survey is a testament to the durian’s range as much as its significance, and has time to thoroughly undermine Western media’s defaulting to “how it is awful.” From sakawas, which are tastings designed to showcase a panoply of flavours and textures, to dedicated durian buffets, Wei passes the mic to show what the fruit means to a range of devotees. There’s even more than the sakawa: "A lot of these festivals are not festivals in the Western sense," says Lindsay Gasik, who attends an average of two a month. "There's not much to do except to buy durian.” And that’s precisely the point.
Liana Aghajanian reports on a battle over apricots for her project, Dining in Diaspora. The “apricot wars” are a proxy for ongoing conflict along the Armenia-Azerbaijan border, with Azerbaijanis buying “pallets of perfectly luscious apricots - Armenia’s largest export and treasured national symbol” in order to destroy them. Aghajanian documents an effort to turn “Operation Apricot” from a disaster, in which even more pallets would spoil after being denied at markets in Moscow, into a celebration of the fruit. As “relations between the two minority communities in Russia are generally stable,” the blockade came as a surprise, with locals buying kilo after kilo in an effort to preserve them, both literally, and as a statement of nationhood.
An interview with Liana Aghajanian on this piece, its resonances, her wider work, and its relation to food media will be the ninth paid post on In Digestion, going out 25 July. Thank you again for being here.
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