#20 | Some New Stories
A new publication that centres Black women and femmes in food, a new newsletter on meaningfully addressing food systems, and a podcast named for MSG
Hello. Thanks for being here.
This is the twentieth 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.
A short intro: trying out a less rigid style for the round-ups, let me know what you think! The other most interesting food story of the week was Guy Fieri’s Bernie Sanders meme; Guy Fieri’s ties to an organisation that fights against the $15 minimum wage; and these two things’ adjacency to the pantheon of “Guy Fieri is misunderstood” profile that comes around time and again as a proxy for food writers to get a confessional on their taste preferences…
But that’s an essay for another time. Take care everybody and see you next week.
Klancy Miller’s For the Culture magazine is one of the longest awaited pieces of food media of recent times, and its first issue is now in print. In her own words, it’s a corrective to the fact that “Black women are the architects of cuisines and kitchens in the U.S. and in so many countries throughout the world and our stories about our expertise, experience and relationships to food do not get enough attention or coverage.” Read her interview on the work behind it with Aaron Hutcherson at The Washington Post.
This Observer Food Monthly profile of Manchester United and England footballer Marcus Rashford’s free school meal campaigning by Tim Adams is best read in tandem with Jason Okundaye’s analysis of that same campaigning in the London Review of Books. Okundaye shows how Rashford’s insistence that “children’s access to nutritious food isn’t a matter of party political persuasion, but of basic human rights” is not some naive ignorance of who is making policy that prevents children’s access to nutritious food. It’s a denial of a Conservative “article of faith”: that “people should be dependent on the will and generosity of the private sector and the free market.”
This illuminates the Observer profile, which focusses more closely on Rashford’s upbringing and early sense of the importance of collective action that he remembers: ““Acts of kindness there were common and sometimes unrecognised,” he says; he remembers Sam at his local chippy frequently slipping him a free bag of chips when he looked hungry. “It’s only at my age now that I realise those subtle acts were my community wrapping their arms around me and saying, ‘We have you and we will protect you.’ That’s really special.”
The debut edition of Lisa Elaine Held’s newsletter, Peeled, sets it up as a meaningful entry to the nebulous field of food sustainability. There’s the interview with Anuradha Mittal, the executive director of The Oakland Institute, which puts one company’s plan to work with smallholder farmers on selling fonio, an ancient African grain, in the context of how extractive colonial food systems stymie growth long after independence. There’s the introduction, which ties fonio and those themes into its forerunner, quinoa. And there’s the long-view on Joe Biden’s early policy moves in the food and agriculture space. One to watch, and subscribe.
MiMi Aye and Huong Black recently launched The MSG Pod, and it’s made an elite start — how many can count Nigella Lawson as a guest within its first four episodes? Whether with her, chef Tim Anderson, psychologist and Great British Bake Off finalist, Kimberley Wilson, chef and writer Dan Lepard, or actor and comedian Evelyn Mok, food and food media are a jumping off point from which to explore broader issues with a winningly wry seriousness.
An interview with MiMi Aye on her podcast, its resonances, her wider work, and its relation to food media will be the eighteenth paid post on In Digestion, going out 24 January. Thank you again for being here.
That’s all for this week. Oh, and please forward this to those three friends and one nemesis. Or just, like, everyone.