#2 | Citation Needed & Other News
Scripture in soil, the power to bring people with you, and the tedium of Alison Roman
Hello. Thanks for being here.
This is the second 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 on Twitter, and forward it to a large number of people. It should feel like too many. It won’t be enough. Thank you.
What the fuck is flaky bread? Bon Appetit is making it. Christina Tosi, founder of dessert empire Milk Bar, is making it. It seems to have emerged from the aether, shiny and new and scattered with flaky salt, like Alison Roman’s #TheStew. Is flaky bread #TheStew of 2020? Because, like, it’s not just bread — any bread, that could flake — it’s Flaky Bread. Its quality is its essence. It has no context, no referent, nothing but flour and butter and salt and oil. It belongs only to who makes it, as they make it.
[endless screaming]
Whenever I read recipes like these, see discussion of Alison Roman’s putting down Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo because she gives no fucks and can give no fucks freely, I feel like the stick figure in the illustration, a footnote drone. Cite. Cite. Always be citing. Citing is generous. Centering a recipe on its qualities is arrogant. Particularly one like this, whose range of cultural reference points and shared but distinct methodologies are testament to its being an iterative technique, passed on to be flexed, but not broken. To not cite is to break it, to not accurately translate its layers, whether paratha, whether malawach, whether cong you bing. To centre the “I” insulated against everybody else.
It’s this misgiving that led to the exclusion of the widely adored meditation on appetites from Jerry Saltz that landed this week. Its autobiography courses with trenchant, agonising awareness of how history has shaped Saltz today; of how his diet cannot be extricated from the history and trauma he endured; of how a supermarket trip is so swollen with fear. It is deeply moving, and I recommend the prose, hence the link. But his diet is — both here, and in a previous explanation of his coffee preferences, divorced from history, and from trauma, and from their endurance. Even the vividly drawn portrait of the supermarket relegates its staff to a gloved hand, to his undoing. The risk is not shared; gas station coffee is not $1 because it leads to fair conditions for the people who farm, pick, and serve it. The mantra might be, “don’t yuck on someone’s yum,” but what about the yums that, together, yuck on millions of individuals, who will never have the opportunity to express the textures of their pleasure.
As such, many of the pieces this week revel in the process of citation — taking account of previous work and previous places to scatter their illuminations like a disco ball. To paraphase one of the selections, whether the furrows in the earth; the layers in bread; or the cartographies of ingredients… They always come from somewhere.
Rebecca May Johnson surveys the kinship of plant and person for Granta: “My neighbour participates in the cycles of growth, decay, gestation and renewal on his plot – the plot nourishes my neighbour.” It nourishes Johnson too, even as she leaves it; it nourishes itself, with “slutty ingenuity,” to find “new, in-between forms and colours”; it grows; it withers; it lives; it dies. Woven through this is a frank honesty about the tension between public and private space that courses through the word “allotment,” a kind of benevolent warning, and about the “allotment earth”: like “the cache on a public computer, it holds too much information.” As Johnson reads its “entrails,” like footnotes from a past time, there is “the dim echo of an emotion.” Dim, but resounding.
Roxana Hadadi lays the foundations of the tedium of Alison Roman for Pajiba. The first line is a corrective to the violently decontextualised mode of cooking: “Look back in history long enough and a certain portrait starts to appear of how our interconnected world was formed.” Look back and it appears — this hardly seems like too much to ask of those whose recipes are put on pedestals. Hadadi doesn’t just interrogate the steady flow of misgivings that broke their banks in a torrent last week, but interrogates what forms those banks, what justified their containment. The erosion that shaped their contours, of “the cultures she’s mimicking on her path to overwhelming success.” The use of “colonialism as cuisine.”
It builds to the conclusion that the essential ease of acknowledging where things come from, how they got there, and who gets to own them need its own acknowledgement. Ignoring and erasing cultural context is ignorance and erasure that too often gets recast as “authority,” Hadadi citing Lorraine Chuen on the matter, asserting its necessity. And then, the nub: “‘Do I really need to know about North African culture before using harissa?’ Yeah, dude, maybe you should! Your lack of an attention span should not excuse cultural erasure!”
Eric Ritskes cites Hadadi’s exhortation at Anise to Za’atar. By pivoting from the first person to the narrator’s voice roughly halfway through, Ritskes cannily, immediately situates one individual’s slipping “in and out, taking what you want, leaving what you want, but guided always by what you want” in context. He shows the lack of attention paid in demonstrating just how easy it is to pay attention. But Ritskes also shows how paying attention isn’t quite enough:
Citation and acknowledgement is to enter into relationships with care; it shows you value those relationships. Citation is a kinship practice: who have you learned from, who are the branches you have grown off of and wouldn’t be here without? Citation honors those who have come before. It is an offering: to begin a relationship with humility and a thirst to learn, rather than positioning oneself as an authority. It’s a chance to listen before you speak.
Ritskes then cites Sara Ahmed: “Citation is world creation. What world are we creating?” Through the “relational strand” of a recipe, he gets to the heart of what so many, so many, so many recipes glance at without seeing: they are fundamentally tools of relationship, generosity, and connection. But it matters what the connection looks like. What it severs as it joins.
Alicia Kennedy traces the inadequacies of boom and bust in food media for From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy. Kennedy writes that her piece itself is an amalgam, a “Frankenstein,” a stitching together of “the misguided attempts by editors to make [food writing] more accessible—while still keeping it white as hell, the hegemony tested in only the smallest, safest ways.”
It’s an excision of the focus on the individual over the systemic, the reconstitution of individual writers and editors and chefs and influencers into shadowy monoliths that hide their choices from interrogation: “Casual racism never rocks the boat, nor does latent homophobia, nor does lack of concern for where the food comes from and who picked it and who profited. These things are as American as a $1 cup of coffee.” This in turn puts taste ahead of justice, cutting the through-lines that would actually show how food that tastes good, can be good: “Calls for locavorism and seasonal eating, in the white mainstream, never came with the full acknowledgement of the systemic barriers that most people would face in accessing and affording them.”
Osayi Endolyn and Stephen Satterfield connect these strands in a discussion of Black power in food media for fellowship Black Food Folks. Endolyn cites Alison Roman’s assertion that she has “no culture” in assessing how the “myths of whiteness become the neutral truth,” a blank authority detached from the systemic racism, the time, and the money that gave, and sustained that authority; the smoke detached from “the fire below.” Satterfield develops this when showing how the power structures of editorial mastheads muffle Black stories they purport to amplify: “people of color and Black folks in particular are only able to tell our stories through channels we have no ownership of.” His magazine Whetstone and this fellowship stand against that muffling, and Satterfield and Endolyn show how Roman’s lack of citation is a textbook example of not just muffling, but erasure, presenting herself and her food as neutral while perpetuating conflict.
Ruby Tandoh centres cooking in care homes for Vittles. A “preposterous cake” of crumbs and sugar and rum, engineered to be safe for a patient with dysphagia; “bright beetroot and puree of parsnip”; this is food with nourishing ingenuity, rich skill, and ultimate need. So why do so few talk about it? Tandoh gets to the heart of this dissonance and the truth it has to tell about who is deemed deserving of good food. The writing “chip[s] away at our calcified biases” that privilege spaces related to capital and de-centre “blurred spaces, one person’s home and another’s workplace, where some of the knottiest issues in our food systems are worked out.” No spoilers on the opening, that will swell your heart before bursting it like a feeble balloon.
An interview with Tandoh, on this piece, its resonances, his wider work, and the relations to food media will be the second paid post on In Digestion, going out 20 May. Thank you again for being here.
That’s all for this week. Before the next edition, why not find a recipe for crusty sour paratha, stare at this and weep for a while, or subscribe to Stephen Satterfield’s Point of Origin, a podcast about the world of food, worldwide. Oh, and please forward this to those three friends and one nemesis. Or just, like, everyone.