#16 | Someone Is Right on the Internet
The price and cost of mass meat production, putting a spice in context, and how not to start a restaurant review
Hello. Thanks for being here.
This is the sixteenth 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.
Just a short intro this week.
If you wanted to make up a story about the state of the U.K. food media in the novel coronavirus pandemic, you might imagine one of its longest serving critics responding to two articles running at thousands of words, using statistics, to show that the review landscape was not very diverse. They might begin by saying that “someone on Twitter” — a close relative of “Tweets Monday” — had claimed that the U.K. restaurant scene was obsessed with pasta. They might detail not being bothered to check the veracity. They might then excuse it with the fact that pasta is “familiar”; children like it; and Most Reasonable People embrace that alleged familiarity “rather more readily than say, an Eritrean offering.” A wonderful satire, in which a group of people largely appealing for kindness to restaurants as they reel are all good with using Black African foodways as a punchline, even while managing to choose a country to laugh at which, due to Italian colonialism, is actually very much indebted to the violent introduction of pasta to its people, an influence that persists to this day. The review would then be removed, put back up with zero edits, then removed again, before being put back up with the parts about children liking pasta and pizza removed but the Eritrean punchline remaining, because laughing at African food in print is totally fine.
You probably worked out immediately that this story wasn’t made up at all.
Shorlette Ammons puts words to the price her family and thousands like them pay for other people’s chicken dinners for The Bitter Southerner. Seeing writers that frothed over the Popeyes chicken sandwich in 2019’s summer of paltry poultry coverage acclaim this piece has been weird, given its relentless focus on the making invisible of Black women’s pain and labour in the service of pale, white chicken breast. “Two of my elderly aunts and one of my cousins are still employed at the poultry plants back home. Swollen hands and pulsating varicose veins trail the tired limbs of older Black women, like my aunts, who have worked these plants for over 60 collective years (34 years each as of September 2020). They are part of an invisible, devalued labor pool that is deeply affected economically, emotionally and physically by a tainted history that has bled into today’s meat and poultry processing industries. All this, to put chicken pastry on our supper tables.”
Vidya Balachander puts hing in its fullest context for Whetstone. The beauty of this piece is in its structure, which spends a great deal of meticulously researched, affectionate time stitching together a picture of the spice’s “place in the vividly diverse panoply of regional Indian cooking,” with the purpose of pulling it apart at the seams: “The downside of not representing this diversity truthfully is that it allows for the unchecked spread of problematic ideas that uphold a skewed power differential.” Pair with My Annoying Opinions’ ongoing survey of South Asian food writing and writing about South Asian foodways, whose latest edition also includes this piece.
Gastronomica releases its latest issue, and it’s a banger. Whole magazine recommendations are a rarity here, but this collection of essays — whose lodestar is the pandemic’s impact on food — is so rich that it will reward multiple re-readings. Read at will, but particularly interrogative, revelatory pieces include Daryl Li on the transposition of street food culture off street in Singapore; Guillermina Gina Núñez-Mchiri on eating on borderlands; and Patrizia La Treccia on the politics of Italian farm work. Individual PDF links have a tendency to break, so scroll and see what appeals.
James Hoffmann drinks U.K.-grown coffee for his eponymous YouTube channel. The possibilities for U.K.-grown coffee videos to be a Brexit-y, last night of the Proms bombast at British ingenuity are vast, but this does not do that. What it does in little over 9 minutes, with a focus on the intensity of agricultural care and stewardship that goes into producing a coffee that is mostly fine, is show how much skill, knowledge, and understanding of terroir goes into producing a coffee that is excellent. Perhaps it will make people new to or newly excited by coffee — who Hoffmann’s accessibly nerdy videos attract — value the luxury of their new fascination even more.
I am turning on my out of office until 7 September, so interview and newsletter alike are taking a break until next week. Thank you for reading.
That’s all for this week. Before the next edition, why not remember that variety is the slice of life, remember to wear a mask, or subscribe to You Must Remember This. Oh, and please forward this to those three friends and one nemesis. Or just, like, everyone.