#13 | Mea Culpa, Your Kitchen
The tenancy of recipes, the chef as auteur, and an inheritance of hari mirch
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This is the thirteenth 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.
Bev Jozwiak
It doesn’t feel good to be betrayed. First, the sudden feeling of unmooring; second, the deeper, bleaker questioning of whether something — a relationship; a piece of art; a bottle of wine — was ever “good” at all.
But betrayal is, in some ways, a recognition of having had access to that goodness. It requires not just reversal, but revelation; a changing of state, of mind. So when Valentina Passalacqua’s father was arrested for exploitation of largely West African migrant workers, drinkers of the natural wine — wine that told consumers it was holding itself to high standards — felt betrayed. When D.O.P. tomatoes were revealed to be picked by exploited migrant workers, eaters of the tomatoes — tomatoes that told consumers they were holding themselves to high standards — felt betrayed.
The problem with revelation is that it involves a particular privilege, of newly knowing something the people actually suffering under it have always suffered and always known. There is no reversal of belief, no introspective questioning, for them. In the case of wine, the word “natural” is extremely complicit in this, but whether it’s Casillero del Diablo or Calcarius, it’s also much more handwringing and facile to assess whether language around fermented grape juice is fit and proper than it is to assess whether it is being co-opted by fit and proper people who exploit people to pick their fit and proper grapes. Why does there need to be a sense of betrayal, of exception, to make labour practices that are patently systemic stick as bad? Why does it need some sensational volte face to make consumers care about who makes their food?
Chefs are currently perceiving a betrayal of their own. Andy Ricker, appointed maestro of Thai food, sees in the shifting of narratives from chefs to workers, the need for writerly mea culpa:
It’s certainly true that food media, of which this newsletter is part, is complicit in elevating chefs. Time’s GODS OF FOOD cover will live longer in the memory and do more cultural harm than its creator’s flimsy defence of that cover has ever done to the magazine or the chefs involved But while food media did help accelerate and thicken the chef-as-auteur paradigm, it did not demand the mechanisms by which chefs cleaved to it. Getting a glossy magazine profile's worth of ego inflation seems like a flimsy defence for assaulting a kitchen porter. Being lauded by Channel 4 or Netflix for developing the tenets of molecular gastronomy, or committing to “sustainable” food production, seems like a flimsy defence for systematically underpaying staff.
At the core of both betrayals is a fundamentally flawed conception of "sustainability," irrevocably tied to the fact that restaurants, vineyards, and media publications are capitalist enterprises. A restaurant that forages and doesn't waste ingredients but makes 60 hour weeks on minimum wage the norm is not actually sustainable. A wine producer who gives workers healthcare and a living wage but relies on synthetic fungicides that slowly poison them is not actually sustainable. A publication that says it will pay equitably but just tries to lowball people of colour is not sustainable. Doing one to facilitate the other is proof of that; if sustainability does not include people, it is simply not sustainability. I’ve been thinking more than ever recently about Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, about how its mission to expose worker exploitation led to food safety reforms and … More worker exploitation. Thinking about labour in every part of food coverage is the only way not to feel betrayed; it just might mean feeling more culturally critical about industries too prone to celebration.
Tejal Rao reflects on the impact of auteur culture in restaurants for The New York Times. “The notion of the lone genius in the kitchen has fostered culinary creativity — and restaurants marred by abuse and unfairness.” Notion is a good word, hinting at a not-quite-real existence, a syllable of scepticism. But as Rao shows it is nonetheless there and powerful, exacerbated by books by chefs about them being chefs and books by journalists about them being chefs too. Rao’s work builds on Meghan McCarron’s assessment of auteur theory in restaurants as it pertains to Onda, Jessica Koslow and Gabriela Cámara’s ill-fated Los Angeles restaurant. It also builds on Alicia Kennedy and Tien Nguyen’s inquiry into de-centering chefs in restaurant culture, and asks how restaurants, and the media that covers them, can “consider the restaurant as a whole — a collective — with so many people at work beyond the chef.”
Saniya Kamal builds a recipe out of loss for her eponymous newsletter. Before “summer heat barges in” on Karachi, on a “good day to attempt impossible things,” Kamal and her mama attempt to retrieve a lost recipe for kachay gosht ki biryani, “suspended in memory where it acquired a legendary status.” The person at the start of their family Hyderabadi recipes — this one and mirchon ka salan, whose “complete expansion” of chilli heat answers its usual “cordoning off” — is bari nano. In winding the histories of peppers around those of her family, provided by her family, Kamal shows how the line between history and nostalgia is always a hazy, moving thing. Much like the kachay gosht biryani, which requires right quantities of rice and masala, meat and yoghurt, while, unsuspended in memory by Whatsapp voice notes, being “less exact about the rest.”
Rebecca May Johnson, Edwina Attlee, Jen Calleja, Huw Lemmey, Nina Mingya Powles and Rebecca Tamás make Claudia Roden’s reiz kugel for MAP. This is the second in a two-part project on the tenancy of recipes, commissioned by Helen Charman. “A recipe text demands translation into praxis and hangs limp in theory,” so its inhabitance on cooking is necessarily a kind of tenancy: “Tenancy for all is legally permitted, with no landlord. ~Imagine!” Imagine, indeed. Each writer’s tenancy of Claudia Roden’s rice pudding has its small, particular decorations — Attlee outlines her exchange of thought with its text; Calleja likens the tuning of sweetness in a dish to that in a translation, neither too saccharine; Mingya Powles admires how good recipes “prepare you for the worst.” Each ends in a bowl of rice pudding, theirs and not.
Leah Douglas outlines the impact of one huge meat company on COVID-19 for The Fern. This framing might seem backwards; surely COVID-19 hits meat companies. But, as Douglas has been tracking for months, meatpacking is both a perfect biological host for the novel coronavirus and, in the case of Smithfield, a notoriously opaque one about its response to being a petri dish full of at-risk workers. Smithfield chief executive Kenneth Sullivan, who ruins my middle name, said “social distancing is a nicety that makes sense only for people with laptops,” using the essential worker narrative to excuse America’s bondage to beef. For Douglas, this claim should only galvanise deeper investigation: “to rigorously hold companies like Smithfield accountable for the conditions faced by the necessary, and vulnerable, food workers who feed us all.”
Farah Yameen uses Bakri-Eid as a frame for culinary solidarity for Scroll. The qurbani sacrifice is the duty of anyone who is “nasb-e-maal, or a possessor of wealth. There are different schools of thought on what constitutes wealth.” There are, therefore schools of thought on what does not. With 30 percent of residents in Yameen’s neighbourhood unable to afford a sacrifice, “their Eid depended on the other 30% upholding their end of the religiously mandated social contract.” Yameen’s essay refigures the terms of that contract in meat — “the brain of the goat we slaughter to fry with a seasoning of pepper and cumin” for Shahnaz, “our neighbour and our cook”; seasoned too with wry asides about internalised senses of “caste and class guilt … the facade of moral superiority and religious piety.”
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