#8 | "We" Didn't Start the Fire
The dangers of well-meaning oversimplification, the myth of "weeknight" cooking, and decolonising wine
This is the eighth 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.
Oh, Billy.
Remember this?
Bon Appétit Test Kitchen Is a Green New Deal Fantasy
Narrator: It was not.
Or perhaps it was. It was fantasy as get out clause: a continual self-repudiation, that does enough to provide an alibi against the charge that it cannot sustain its argument — it need not, it’s a fantasy! — but not so much that it undermines a thesis of endorsement. The Test Kitchen _is_ a fantasy — it exists, but on a plane of non-existence. It’s a fantasy; its realisation — both the making real of something previously unreal and the new, eureka understanding that it had been an illusion for so long would shatter each other. Bon Appétit and its audience are going through this right now. But as with every realisation, what is new knowledge for some has been a lived experience of pain for others.
If that is the broken promise between fantasy and reality, then it is also the promise of the omniscient “we,” that peppers this — and to be clear, so many — articles on food and culture. On a very basic level, it is a gesture of community, of shared experience. A pact between reader and writer. But this stretched out hand waiting to be clasped in union is desperately seeking validation as much, if not more, than it promises it. This “we” can only make good on its pact if the reader agrees to its terms. Its fatal flaw is that to promise commonality, it must necessarily risk alienation; a “we” that goes undefined is really just an “I” with a spare ego and its appeal to omniscience can only be sustained if it excludes those who aren’t buying what it is selling. Every undefined “we” contains a “they,” whose implied but never expressed contrary experience is treated an invisible leaning post for the all-consuming “we.” An undefined “we” is almost always white, or takes on the Alison Roman “no culture” pose.
This is not to say don’t use “we”; this is to say that it must be defined. Ask, who is “we?” This is also theoretically basic and not remotely new thinking, but it lurks in food media. It lurks in this piece, which says “A world where we can all spend four days making gourmet Sour Patch Kids is one where we can cook long dinners with friends and family without fear of deportation.” It lurks in the “realisation” that shouts that service workers are now essential; it lurks in the “realisation” that food is linked to the environment…
It lurks when Padma Lakshmi says “you” should not be threatened by immigrants…
It lurks in just about every “realisation” that blows David Chang’s mind on Ugly Delicious. These are all realisations demanding to be real-isations, desperately trying to speak into existence something that, for the invisible “they,” was already true, on the grounds of effacing previous ignorance with the shiny veneer of new liberal knowledge, bright and naive. The omniscient “we” — or, “you” — allows prejudice, inequality, and, more gently, just not having used a search engine to use individual ignorance as a source of collective power. Saying service workers are “now” essential doesn’t need its amoral counterpoint explaining; saying “we haven’t even broached the subject about restaurants and the environment yet” is little more than a free pass to ignore the “they” of numerous writers and publications who have, for years. Per Tim Marchman: “What matters is that the external world does nothing more than reflect what happened (and didn’t) in the writer’s mind.”
This weaponising of ignorance as a position of authority takes various forms on food TV: on Bon Appétit it makes, as Cathy Erway discussed below, non-Western dishes “weeknight”; in Taste the Nation it abets the “food brings us together” myth; in Ugly Delicious it bolsters Chang’s default pose of being against the haters — as well as the pretence that personally having precisely zero preconceived ideas of a food or cuisine is a neutral liberal starting point for revelatory education, rather than incuriousness made to appear cosy and benign by the fact it’s about fuzzy, floofy food. In the case of Chang, it appears to speak to wanting to maintain the position of the alternative, without the ceding of power and space that this would entail.
The net result is an aggressive flattening and oversimplification, which Yewande Komolafe speaks to below in her phenomenal piece on palm oil. The omniscient “we” just wants to make something true that can’t really be proved, without ever having to do the work to prove it. It has no desire to be what it actually should be: a genuine first-person plural, a collective of I’s whose individual experiences make the “we” that they form vibrate to the point of near fragmentation. As Tammie Teclemariam showed in her interview with this very publication, it, when deployed by food media, delights in revelling in how it Asks The Hard Questions, while displaying competuous impotence at asking them of itself. Bon Appétit’s toxic culture thrived in a journalistic petri dish. “Who is we” is a useful question to ask, but “who are we” is the more powerful: for a construction that thrives on the veneer of omniscience, there’s nothing more fatal that, actually, it doesn’t even know itself.
Alicia Kennedy examines how food TV that treats food as “American” is bound to reinforce white supremacist ideas of nationhood, for From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy. The show at hand is Padma Lakshmi’s Taste the Nation, which seeks to show how foodways in the United States “have been determined by immigration patterns, as well as by indigenous and enslaved peoples.” And sure, it does that. But in binding those foodways together as “American,” the show arrives at the chance to interrogate what it means to put an imperial label of unity on cuisines whose people it oppressed, and leaves it limp like a flag on a breezeless day: “Taste the Nation side-steps the white supremacy that is foundational to this country in favor of assimilationist thinking.”
Yewande Komolafe unbottles the real history of red palm oil for Heated. It reciprocates its role as the “glue” that bonds many Nigerian dishes in oozing gracefully through Komolafe’s writing: “mildly floral at first taste, it blossoms slowly as it coats your tongue, revealing an almost smokelike presence.” In dismantling the blanket Western preconception of palm oil as an environmental scourge to be eliminated as carelessly as the forests that burn to produce it where it is not indigenous, Komolafe lays out how “Palm oil criticism is well-intentioned, but it is founded upon ignorance — ignorance of how colonial systems have evolved into our current global trade.” Concerns may be valid, but only when they are able to define their terms, with a reframing that banishes white saviour optics: “The focus of the palm oil debate so far has been to make regions on the other side of the globe the first to be implicated for the crimes of an industry that includes all of us.”
Miguel de Leon puts the wine world on blast for Punch. He interweaves personal violences inflicted on him by people in the industry with a broad dissection of its inequities, “steeped in a language that is coded and arcane, tied up with legal jargon and French techniques that only the privileged, monied few are able to decipher.” From tasting notes to viticulture, de Leon exorcises “the systems that dehumanized and demeaned me and my BIPOC colleagues,” and reveals how their tendrils wrap around the industry so completely that the only future is to uproot them.
Cathy Erway examines the biases behind “weeknight” cooking for Grub Street. “For the editors at Bon Appétit, who published these recipes, it may serve an important function in distinguishing itself from a sea of online recipes and asserting its value.” But what the word also does is create a two-part economy — dishes that are “weeknight” and dishes that are not — labouring recipes labelled as such with a laboriousness perceived, as per usual in food media, by a white gaze. The two key examples, mapo tofu and pad thai, “are tossed together quickly in a hot pan,” so the labelling is not for time; it leaves the lasting “impression that non-European recipes need to be sanitized or policed if they are to be included at all.” Erway makes an irresistible case for the fact that “developing recipes is a lot more like reporting than current media brands may let on, and it is not up to a white test-kitchen cook to “perfect” ideas that already work” — as well as underlining how the dominance of such a recipe media will need to be dismantled to make real change. Pair with Joey Hernandez laying out how Bon Appétit intends to approach recipes in the future.
Kevin Vaughn previews a new magazine on the food politics of Buenos Aires, Matambre Mag. Through interviews with chefs and restaurateurs on their experience of the COVID-19 pandemic and Argentinean food systems, from eliminating machismo to meaningful discussion of food sustanability, the contours of the magazine’s future landscape emerge. Vaughn’s magazine is bilingual, and this does much more than expand his audience: it illustrates how terms and their meanings become resound differently between places and peoples, and how the act of translation can be transformative in food media. For more on this, sign up to Alicia Kennedy’s forthcoming newsletter issue on the subject, out today.
That’s all for this week. Before the next edition, why not cringe, cringe some more, and subscribe to Matambre. Oh, and please forward this to those three friends and one nemesis. Or just, like, everyone.