#15 | Hate the Game
Asking who "food cities" feed, the history of steamed hams, and taking back control of food
Hello. Thanks for being here.
This is the fifteenth 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.
About five minutes after sending last week’s newsletter, writer, academic, poet, and friend Dr. Anna Sulan Masing tied its theories in a bow:
For context on this particular example, which as always, is part of but smaller than the systems it is part of, see this thread from reporter Jie Jenny Zou. It makes a mockery of one of the laziest arguments against cultural appropriation — and systemic criticism; here comes the link to last week — which is treating it interpersonally. Taking individual frustrations at individual appropriations of power as isolated events (sorry you were offended; I didn’t mean it that way) ignores the magnification and accretion at seeing them happen over, and over, and over again. At being part of a rigged system of rules:
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.
One consequence of lockdown has been the collapsing of some of the spaces in these systems. It’s provided opportunity: the transposition of work discourse to Slack and Zoom alone, leveller playing fields, if not flat ones, was, according to Tammie Teclemariam, one of the drivers in making change at Condé Nast quicker and deeper than it might have been. There is also the chance to observe that it remains not all that quick and not all that deep.
Meanwhile, Instagram Lives from chefs without restaurants and cookbook authors without tours saw everyone cooking in their home kitchens, but some home kitchens are bigger and fancier than others. The net was an increased codification of interpersonal spaces, the fusing of professional and private, the food newsletter boom (hi, everyone), and critique of the mechanism of the memoir, possibly the most explicit codification of interpersonality in food. (Been thinking about David Chang’s “opening up” memoir that is subject to at least a few non-disclosure agreements. Tell-some, I guess.)
But once again: don’t hate the player, hate the rigged system of rules. Asking why the two most popular noodle and dumpling purveyors of lockdown in the U.K. were both white doesn’t make them bad people. Critiquing the systems baked in behind food memoirs doesn’t mean individual food memoirs suck or shouldn’t have been written. But when personal tastes and passions, this newsletter included, enter explicitly into systems of power and capital, it’s important to recognise that, as for Sally Rooney’s characters, which cannot self-determine their futures no matter how much critics might want to believe they can, the rules are already rigged. The difference is, that unlike those characters, people at least have the opportunity to take steps to change them.
Sharanya Deepak asks who “food cities” are really feeding for Vittles. The impetus comes from Deepak’s experience of — and bemusement at — Delhi being labelled as a “food city” by international, white food media, and how a phrase that promises vigour and depth and connection between people and place is more often code for “tubular linearity that presented glossy, predictable versions of it, instead of what it was actually like — layered, temperamental, and riddled with unfairness at each bend.” The story is the particularities that gloss hides, here exemplified in the North Eastern Indian economic migrants in the Humayunpur neighbourhood, who define the food but are left out of the city in being denied ownership of the land on which they walk and eat. Pair with Vittles editor Jonathan Nunn’s look at the state of British restaurant criticism.
Brian VanHooker gifts the world an oral history of seminal Simpsons scene ‘Steamed Hams’ for Mel. Per Simpsons writer and co-show runner Bill Oakeley: “I actually didn’t know at that time that steamed clams was a real dish and then steamed hams just seemed like a preposterous, half-assed lie.” And so the absurdity unfolds.But VanHooker’s oral history isn’t just of how the scene came to be, but of its slow burn into popular culture, courtesy of shitposters, memes, and memes by shitposters. I hope you’re prepared for an unforgettable … Sequence of YouTube deepcuts. Pair with Rebecca Onion’s assessment of I Think You Should Leave’s Hot Dog Guy and his place in popular culture for Slate.
Nikita Richardson talks to Tammie Teclemariam about her impact on the present and future of food media for Grub Street. Richardson, more than any other coverage, gets at how Teclemariam’s posting of a photo of ex-editor-in-chief Adam Rapoport in brownface was not the story: the story was that “For many staffers at the exceedingly popular food publication, who for years had dealt with what they considered to be rampant mistreatment of minorities and severe pay inequities, the photograph was simply too much.” Teclemariam’s work, in a larger context, is about redistributing and challenging those imbalances of power: “If freelancers are going to have to suffer all of the consequences of not having health insurance or a steady source of income, then at least there had better be some benefits. And the benefits had better be that we can police the workplaces that we interact with. It does not have to be a whisper network.” Pair with In Digestion’s interview with Tammie Teclemariam, which like Richardson’s piece, sees her place her work in the context of social justice, and how there’s simply nothing to gain or lose when publications actively make themselves unsafe places to work.
Sarah Cooke ruminates on food’s differences in cooking and eating for Deliciously Intense, Surprisingly Balanced. “For me, food was a lifeline, both the antidote to old pain and its antithesis—a comfort that continues, sustains.” The shades of antidote and antithesis come from moving into telling a story of self, rather than being consumed by being in the middle of it: Cooke contextualises it using Maggie Nelson’s idea of a “report from the field.” But: “what that momentum moves us toward must come with knowledge of what has passed,” and Cooke cites Michael W. Twitty and Apoorva Sripathi’s destabilisations of heritage, and who the word leaves out, as exemplifying how the actual act of cooking in the present enables power over the past: to “assert what we choose to value.”
Dr. Anna Sulan Masing discusses decolonisation and knowledge in the bar world with Ryan Chetiyawardana for Sourced. Chetiyawardana shows how having multiple global vantage points encourages a plurality of understanding, particularly in the context of drinks, whose language around systems and ingredients can sometimes get left out of culinary discussions. He talks about how the bar industry is learning to trust a knowledgable audience, the limitations of plastic straw approaches to “sustainability,” and increasing the maturity of conversations around the industry that can be pushed into big brands as much as independent bars.
An interview with Dr. Anna Sulan Masing on this piece, decolonisation, her new projects, her wider work, and its relation to food media will be the twelfth paid post on In Digestion, going out 22 August. Thank you again for being here.
That’s all for this week. Before the next edition, why not give Hot Dog Guy his due, read the Story of the Legendary Grilled Cheese, or subscribe to Deliciously Intense, Surprisingly Balanced. Oh, and please forward this to those three friends and one nemesis. Or just, like, everyone.