#14 | Don't Hate the Player
The Blackness of fried fish, a scary coffee story, and the geophysics of bagels
Hello. Thanks for being here.
This is the fourteenth 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.
Last week’s introduction touched on the mechanisms of betrayal in food sustainability. It looked at how “revelations” of worker exploitation often require the fall from grace of something that promised it was “good”:
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, of course, plenty more to discuss about why those products deemed of value are both produced in the Global North, farmed by often exploited workers in the Global South, and in the case of tomatoes, come from the Global South in the first place.
Last week’s intro concluded that if sustainability — which in restaurants, is often talked about as a concern adjacent to plants and animals alone — does not include people, it is not sustainability. More: the systems that deny that people should be part of sustainability are composed of and perpetuated by, surprise, other people. Per Osayi Endolyn, discussing the conduct of a Top Chef producer:
Critiquing systems is, therefore, critiquing people and their actions; but criticism of systems, of food, of restaurants, is cultural criticism. It’s not interpersonal, and shouldn’t be taken as such; using books, films, or restaurateurs to prove a broader thesis about publishing, cinema, or restaurants is not always an interpersonal drag. Blocking someone on Twitter is not cultural praxis.
It’s also not that hard to see why people believe the opposite. Food media isn’t very good at cultural criticism, partly because it’s too often siloed in that broad-brush malaise of —lifestyle content— partly because restaurant criticism’s roots are in telling rich people very literally how style their lives; and partly because Brillat-Savarin never realised that his famous maxim “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are” would come into contact with things like Instagram and the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen; and partly because, at large, elements of fandom and breathless acclaim have united to denormalise critique and frame it as an attack on personhood, either of the creator or the consumer. Just ask Pitchfork.
It’s therefore not that hard to see why genuine, sustained arguments about how Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat are promising to solve climate change caused by billion dollar disaster capitalism by gifting the world billion dollar disaster capitalism based on plants get sidetracked by the idea that individual “foodies” don’t like pea protein. It’s not hard to see why Alex Delany’s apology for racism, homophobia, and benefiting from the purposeful inequality of Conde Nast Video leans on the fact that he too was underpaid, that the elite is always somebody else in a discourse where, by now, “Certain phrases, like “privilege”, “elite”, “middle class”, “hard work”, and “self-made” are used all the time to mean completely different things.” It’s not hard to see why “no-one is talking about …” has become a favoured crutch of allyship even when it can so easily erase the talking and work of the people it professes to help. It’s not hard to see why, also in last week’s intro, chefs take criticism of chef culture as an attack on their own kitchens even when they are not being talked about.
To reiterate: systems are made up of individual choices, and “don’t hate the player, hate the game” isn’t enough, because player and game are symbiotic. But to torture this metaphor to its end: before taking the player and not the ball, it’s always worth asking: “Who made the rules?”
Yasmin Zaher surveys the benevolent and hostile forces that have shaped Palestinian cuisine for Haaretz: “The concept of a national cuisine is a by-product of the nation-state, or in the case of Palestine, its lack thereof.” Zaher uses the movements of ingredients by people and of people by people who deny their existence to show that “global trends in food industrialization and normalization” are additive to occupation of land in their impact on the ingredients that endure and those that do not. Hyper-regional dishes, criminalised herbs, poetry that compares aubergine to “a taste like saliva a generous lover freely offers,” and a field of vision that takes in 25,000 years, this is a piece of “baladi”: a word that can contain both a single ingredient and an entire nationhood.
Nafeesah Allen centres the Blackness of golden, flaking fried fish for Whetstone. It starts with curiosity about a staple that “bears neither iconography of stigma nor signals of celebration”; that holds court, solid with the variousness of “Escovitch fish from the Jamaicans in Newark, poisson frit from the Haitians in East Orange, fish yassa from the Senegalese in Harlem.” Allen identifies fish fries as an historic, persistent method of “affordable way to practice communal self-care. Large meals meant for an entire neighborhood can be cost prohibitive and cumbersome, but for fish fries, the largest outlay is the grease.” Allen, having surveyed the tradition’s past and future, stands “eternally grateful to my ancestors, direct and indirect, for their creativity in making fried fish an ode to all things us.” Pair with Korsha Wilson’s interview on centering Black foodways with Soleil Ho and Justin Phillips on Extra Spicy.
Yusuf Amanullah and Lennaert Woudt discuss the histories of curry with Krishnendu Ray on The Seasoned Migrant. With an introductory tone, the opening looks back over the enmeshed histories and unequal power dynamics of vindaloo/vindalho/vina d’alhos, and with Ray’s arrival discusses the feeling of being “assaulted by nostalgia,” and how failures to emulate family cooking tradition become new repertoires of their own. Ray also outlines the discrepancies between which cuisines get to be lauded as prestigious and who is giving that prestige, and the ways in which eating habits at breakfast, lunch, and dinner signal the complexities of assimilation food, using New York City as his vantage point.
Kevin Vaughhn talks to a geophysicist about bagels for Matambre. Don’t fall for my quirk-bait: Sheikob’s Bagels is both a Buenos Aires stand-out and the home of complicated thinking about being a genuinely sustainable business that doesn’t fit into the priorities of suppliers. “For a company that sells to big restaurants that do way more covers than us but also each cover involves half a kilo of fresh produce, we just aren’t important clients to them.” Whether interrogating what it means, culturally and economically, to serve lox in a country with no sustainable salmon, how that feeds into a precarious food system economy, or stopping “contributing to a food system that I don't agree with and know it is bad for the people eating it, the people fishing it, for the planet, it’s just bad,” owner Jake Eichenbaum-Pikser is reflective on his place at the top of a business, in the middle of something much, much bigger.
Michelle R. Johnson’s coffee diversity horror story, The Panel, gets adapted into a radio play for Sprudge. Performed solo by actor Nova Omega, and with no spoilers for scares, central character Micah’s experience on a coffee diversity panel unfolds into a waking nightmare, making manifest the emotional and intellectual labour expected of people and colour in coffee by white owners doing the bare minimum, or less, to be inclusive. “Those people? Did I really just hear a “those people” live on stage at a diversity panel?,” Micah says internally, at the start of a panel only gets worse. It’s fiction, until it’s not.
An interview with Jordan Michelman of Sprudge on the publication, its resonances, his wider work, and its relation to food media will be the eleventh paid post on In Digestion, going out 15 August. Thank you again for being here.
That’s all for this week. Before the next edition, why not read about the lives and afterlives of cheese in a deep cut from last week, connect the dots between cappuccino custom and lactose malabsorption, or subscribe to the Coffee Sprudgecast. Oh, and please forward this to those three friends and one nemesis. Or just, like, everyone.