#23 | Blind Carbon Copy
Just get to the newsletter, you jerk.
Hello. Thanks for being here.
This is the twenty-third 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.
Hi everyone; it’s been a while. The last few weeks have been pretty heavy, so I apologise for the extended absence. And, since the discourse prescribes is no preambles before the goods, onward.
The Bon Appétit / Reply All spiderman-pointing-at-spiderman-mixed-with-hotdog-guy meme … Read, if you haven’t already, the testimony of Eric Eddings and CC Paschal. More recently, writer and paid subscriber interviewee Tammie Teclemariam put her finger on something connected to what four podcast episodes — two fulfilled, two in holding pattern — can say about the inequity of (food) media at large. “Being ‘cancel-adjacent’ is exhausting,” Ms. Teclemariam said. It’s especially enervating, she said, when you’re adjacent to people being canceled for their coverage of other people who have been canceled. “There is a word for this, but I’m not sure what it is. ‘Irony’ is insufficient.” With the testimony of Bon Appétit staff potentially never being heard because the people they trusted with it let down their own colleagues, who is losing out for Reply All to … Grow? Be better? Self-flagellate? When Jonah Peretti can wake up, have someone set a meeting password to “Spring is here,” fire 47 people on the spot, and shut down three newsrooms — space to tell stories winnows further — who is quiet reflection, ostensibly doing nothing but nevertheless performing something, really serving?
One really excellent piece on the situation was Jaime Wilson’s newsletter on how while restaurants and restaurant media necessarily overlap, they often don’t do so without friction; tension; even violence. And they’re right that food media often takes two paths — it either takes account of that friction, and feels its heat, or pretends it isn’t there.
“There are people who believe that an alternative is impossible, or that a more ethical and equitable future is too idealistic. They consider these ideas too aspirational to be applied to an industry (and a world) that’s so deeply infected.
I hear this argument far more than I would like and, quite frankly, I am sick of it. It surfaces when an editor tells me that sexism in restaurants is too “endemic” of a problem for them to cover, or if a restaurant owner says that indoor dining is the only solution for the survival of this industry. I hear it when publications are unwilling to talk about no-tip models and more progressive businesses because they are simply not popular enough.
But when it comes to alternatives, there are plenty.”
Just get to the recipe discourse broke new ground with the life, times, and death of Recipeasly, all of which passed in a few dunk tweets (guilty) and what felt like thirty seconds. Finally, it had expired.
But then! A senior editor, that is to say, someone who is supposed to understand the relationship between content and the internet at Time; and Britain’s most overexposed clergyman, that is to say, someone who wanted some cheap likes on the bird app, both got in the boat formerly occupied by Mindy Kaling, Chelsea Perretti, Kevin M Kruse, and their many thousands of devotees.
The definitive counter-pieces are by (Eater colleague) Jenny G. Zhang and Claire Lower, at Lifehacker’s Skillet vertical. But what gives this seemingly unkillable meme such cadence, such power? The fact that it is both a seemingly genuine sentiment — that hits some kind of ugly sweet spot between having a lamentably simple solution (nice intro, shame if someone were to … scroll past it!) and requiring an infinitesimal amount of effort on the part of the moaner — and a definitely facetious clout-chasing meme all at once is probably about the size of it. See you next week, when it’s circulating in three places at once.
Bettina Makalintal wrote an incisive piece on food media’s evolving relationship to this platform, Patreon, and other subscriber medias at Vice. “By necessity and by choice, writers and other creators are leaning on platforms where devoted followers can support them directly, instead of putting all their effort into traditional distribution models like newspapers or magazines.” In probing how smaller-scale publications and newsletters can influence legacy food media in breaking from it, the piece repudiate another one of those genuine-sentiment-meets-clout-chasing-meme chimeras that are floating around: that Substack is composed entirely of megabucks headhunted writers “making it” at the top and everyone else is downtrodden by their dominance of the platform.
Stephen Satterfield and Melissa Shi’s Whetstone continues to set the benchmark for independent food media — the new South Asia vertical edited by Vidya Balachander has made a fast start with its coverage of the farmers’ protest in India from Ruby Kaur. Simar Deol drew some really insightful parallels between that protest, solidarity, and the exploitative nature of swathes of the wellness industry for Bitch Media.
‘Tis the season. (Sorry U.K., if anyone sees “wild garlic” on a road sign please get a snap.)
Jesse Bernard’s fluid, evocative essay on the mythos of food in New York rap for Vittles is wonderful, as well as a firm, guilty reminder that London’s food media is yet to accord London’s food the mythos it ought to carry. That newsletter and From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy are always on top form.
On Monday for paid subscribers, a study of Flavourtown, and how understanding this utopia as no-place rubs up against food media’s relationship with Guy Fieri and blue-collar food. In the meantime…