#3 | How to Kill the Restaurant Industry & Other News
Recycling routines, renovating burning houses, and finding folk art in focaccia
Hello. Thanks for being here.
This is the 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 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’s the worst thing a restaurant critic can do in a review? Make an egregious error; continue to uphold a toxic chef; cast a swathe of their city as “stabby” because it deviates from their cosy neighbourhood.
It was not a restaurant review that prompted this question, but a passage from 1905 essay In Dejection Near Tooting that read like a 2020 London restaurant review. Public intellectual C.F.G. Masterman describes Tooting, an area of south London, as “shadow shapes of mean houses,” but more interestingly, he describes a feeling of uncanniness:
I shivered and fled the scene: with a vague discomfort that did not disappear till I had again mingled with the procession of mean street and shabby edifice; had recrossed the river and recognised again the kindly familiar buildings.
Don’t mistake Masterman as the Giles Coren of the early 1900s — he was attuned to the dangers of income inequality and pressured the government of the time to address them, despite his patrician tendencies. But here, he is projecting: he is treating the object of his critique not on its own terms but as a palimpsest, whose texture can be scrubbed smooth of its contours and remapped with the cartography of his feelings and desires. This is the worst thing a restaurant critic can do: treat an ingredient, or a dish, or a cuisine, or an entire restaurant as a palimpsest on to which to write their review. To strip away its reality in favour of their own, and, simultaneously, treat their reality as the default perspective; as the default comfort; as the “kindly familiar.” To rewrite its truth and stories. But it’s also a powerful force in other contexts: using the structure designed to contain or subjugate as the chassis of agency, and actualisation.
This remapping, as Navneet Alang lays out in his essay on Alison Roman and the mechanics of the culture that produced her, discussed below, is one function of the privilege of whiteness, which “can deracinate and subsume the world of culinary influences into itself and yet remain unnamed.” It’s a privilege which courses through all the pieces below in different ways, and one that, as a white person collating stories, I too need to address. The structure of food writing — its forms, and which forms are seen as valuable — is a place of unevenly distributed power, where credit and authority are given freely and summarily denied.
An easy and systematically overlooked way to do this also speaks to Alang’s essay: citation. But that’s not really enough, which leads to Tunde Wey’s stunning analogy, also below: “Can you renovate a burning house?” To take it a step further — should you renovate a house that’s not burning at all? Should you strip away the paint and the wallpaper, the tiles and the laminate, to a blank, plain default, when the default’s foundations are so riddled, and yet so steadfast?
It would surely be better to build new houses. I hope this newsletter can be at least one room.
Tunde Wey recomplicates his vision for letting restaurants die with Helen Rosner for The New Yorker. Existing at “the intersection of capital, finance, social life, food production, sustenance,” Wey diagnoses the restaurant system as both an object representation of wider inequity, and an unremarkable particular whose salvaging is best sacrificed in the interest of “policy and government programs that support people generally.” Responding to Rosner’s incisive questioning of the need for and danger of expediency, Wey is both sanguine about seeking the incremental change he would ordinarily dismiss — “I’m conventional in that sense. I don’t want people to die.” — and steadfast that one of the only ways to access nuance is to begin from a place of critical hyperbole. When he says “let it die,” he also knows “the restaurant industry is not going to actually die”; when he asks whether you can “renovate a single room in a burning house,” it’s clear the “structures of whiteness” behind The New Yorker are part of the foundations, and this interview is a single room.
Marian Bull provides further kindling for The New Republic. Citing Wey’s certainty that restaurants should “just be compensating workers in such a way that restaurants become a luxury,” Bull incrementally welds each link in the industry chain, beginning and ending with its workers, to show how its unmaking is the only route to forging a stronger system. To fix the restaurant, fix the agricultural system; fix the healthcare laws; fix the real estate — individual actions will otherwise always be “equal parts reassuringly radical and sisyphean.” Moving to critique the lack of self-reflection from figures like Gabrielle Hamilton, who seek to become collective advocates for an industry whose status quo preserves their individual security, the piece lays out what will he necessary for “a complete reworking of diners’ expectations and perspectives.” For a rejection of individual security by the powerful. Where Bull looks long-term, Devra First puts similar concerns in the present at The Boston Globe: “The public isn’t trained to think about hygiene the way the restaurant workforce is. Less generously, the public can be unconcerned or downright disdainful when it comes to the well-being of others. When restaurants reopen, diners will be taken care of. Will workers?”
Nicola Miller unpicks the vulnerability of offering “up our private appetites for public consumption” for Tales From Topographic Kitchens. The driving force is the power of female agency: the ways in which “august bodies,” from regulators to market forces to Instagram, dishonestly refract that power and how it might be reclaimed. Miller’s unencumbered and luminous prose hangs itself from the signposts of her own ideas, rather than packing itself in to a structure that would otherwise contain them; would otherwise dishonestly refract their power. In the sharing of recipes, often romanticised as a force of tradition, “feeling able to ask is a form of power and feeling able to refuse is an act of agency”; in the power dynamic between cook and owner on historic U.K. estates, uneven by design, “the secrets of the kitchen are also a form of fiscal currency." A nascent Instagram trend for flowery focaccia can “serve as a kind of folk art albeit one divorced from the atavistic drivers of such behaviour, or even a form of play which we all know is not something that women are encouraged to value.” The piece concludes with a thoughtful, thorough list of reading across the subject.
An Uong ekes out independence from dependency for Hyphen. Remembering the “two donut twists dusted in sugar” that are emblems for her mother’s first American money that is truly, entirely hers. They are representative of Miller’s “power to generate capital within their own space, and Uong unravels their history, a “recycling routine.” The narrative wraps food’s double valency of sustenance and pleasure around her mother’s finding her feet in Los Angeles and the loss of her routines in Vietnam, while tracing the gradual unpicking of “all the locks my father put on our door.” Its ending is rueful with its hope, as visions in which “she meanders through the market, freely touching melons and herbs” prove both the power of desire and the strength of capital’s grip on whether or not it can become reality.
Navneet Alang surveys the silent power of whiteness’s cultural dominance for Eater. Zooming out on the foundations of Alison Roman’s recently fallen empire, Alang follows last week’s thoughtful contextualisations from Alicia Kennedy, Eric Ritskes, and Roxana Hadadi with the “complicated little dance of power and desire” by which whiteness “can deracinate and subsume the world of culinary influences into itself and yet remain unnamed.” Whether dissecting the subtexts behind too easy words “global,” “cool,” or “authority” — all of which he unspools at length — Alang keeps the jelly nailed to the wall. The logic and aesthetics of whiteness aren’t yet visible against the backdrop of “mainstream North American culture,” because they look exactly the same.
There’s an infrasound of wealth and class’ power over the levers of representation that could be at a higher frequency, but Alang deftly uncouples power from desire in recentering his own iterations of both: “Aspiration is about wanting, and what I want from food media isn’t a bone thrown in my direction, but simply more more representation, more diversity, more sense that the mainstream isn’t just accommodating me, but instead making room for me.” Don’t renovate the burning house. Let it collapse and build a new one. And don’t paint it white.
An interview with baker, cookbook author, and columnist Dan Lepard will be the third paid post on In Digestion, going out 27 May. Thank you again for being here.
That’s all for this week. Before the next edition, why not ask the big questions, figure out your own free lunch, or subscribe to Tales from Topographic Kitchens. Oh, and please forward this to those three friends and one nemesis. Or just, like, everyone.