#25 | Do Call It a Comeback
[Crowd groans]
Hello. Thanks for being here.
This is 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.
Hello, everyone. It has been some time. Instead of ruminating on the passing of seconds, I’m going to get straight to the links; the only piece of admin is to say that for now, paid subscriptions are remaining on pause. Free food media, food media is free (of me, I got laid off, but am still writing, sorry to tell you that.)
Jonathan Nunn, Sharanya Deepak, and Rebecca May Johnson have dropped the season trailer for Vittles, and it’s on food and policy. This already great publication has gone from strength to strength under the trio’s stewardship, and there’s a pressing urgency to their chosen topic. As I got to discuss at a panel for the London College of Communication with the brilliant Yvonne Maxwell, Arielle Vetro, and Dr Rebecca Wells, “food” and “policy” are too often siloed in U.K. media, with newspapers covering things that intersect as separate issues. I vividly remember, in spring of 2020, a London newspaper advertising a restaurant guide in its food section while its “news” pages were declaring a rocketing rate of COVID-19 infection. This sounds like a corrective in waiting, and it’s going to pay well, so get amongst it.
Nadia Kougiannou, Pedro Mendonça, and Ian Clark cover the exploitative shadow food delivery economy for The Conversation. Sustained precarity is already a functioning principle of food delivery’s business model, with Deliveroo having admitted in the past that a given market offering enhanced protections for their riders could force them to shutter business there altogether. One consequence of that precarity is riders renting out accounts to undocumented workers, with the delivery companies able to wash their hands of the consequences.
Marianna Giusti digs into the question of Italian culinary worldbuilding and mythology for the Financial Times. This is an ICYMI kind of thing, as this came out in March, but, one: dormant newsletter; two: it slaps. Its main character, Alberto Grandi, delivers one of the great culinary burns — “In a normal country … nobody would care where [and when] a cake was invented” — in a compelling account of the inventions of tradition, and the way they swell dishes beyond the realities of their origins.
Matt Rodbard and Aliza Barbanel’s Taste Podcast is on a bit of a tear when it comes to guests. The brilliant Alicia Kennedy gets into her, well, brilliant newsletter; Jon Bonné talks about his journey to the centre of French wine, and a recent focus on restaurant critics saw Ryan Sutton provide his essential wisdom on the beat’s necessary ties to labour (and how that is too often left off the menu.)
That’s all for this week. Welcome back! It’s great to see you. Please forward this to those three friends and one nemesis. Or just, like, everyone.
Welcome back, James!
Yayayayayay!