[The thing about food is that everyone eats, whether it’s
written about or not; knowing how to cook can be political because in
times of economic uncertainty, it can sustain you not just with
nourishment, but with the money needed to survive. ]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

ON MEDIA AND THE IDEA OF ADVOCACY  
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Alicia Kennedy
June 15, 2020
AliciaKennedySubstack
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_ The thing about food is that everyone eats, whether it’s written
about or not; knowing how to cook can be political because in times of
economic uncertainty, it can sustain you not just with nourishment,
but with the money needed to survive. _

,

 

When I talked to who is now the interim editor-in-chief at _Bon
Appétit_ for a piece at
[[link removed]]_The
New Republic
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she said, of my question about whether they believe they have a role
to play in covering policy changes that could make the food system
more sustainable, “We’re not lobbyists.” My eyes went wide when
I heard her say it over the phone. _There’s no shame here_, I
thought. _No sense of duty bestowed by this massive audience_.

The thing about food is that everyone eats, whether it’s written
about or not. As journalist and filmmaker Victoria Bouloubasis pointed
out in our conversation
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last week, knowing how to cook can be political because in times of
economic uncertainty, it can sustain you not just with nourishment,
but with the money needed to survive. That extends to those of us,
like me, who know that they could get a clandestine cake and cookie
business together if they needed to for a little extra cash, or—like
the woman Victoria knows—do a mole pop-up on a Saturday, announced
via text. $12 a plate. 

The flexibility of food service work gives it its pirate-like
reputation, which results in both freedom and exploitation, low wages
and the ecstasy of earned exhaustion. Survival, with or without the
glossy treatment—that’s what food is, that’s what cooking is. Do
we want survival to look pretty on the plate, to go down easy? Of
course. That’s another facet of surviving.

What I’ve found interesting, among a torrent of interesting things,
in the week of excavation of the racist, toxic workplace at
[[link removed]]_Bon
Appétit
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is how it shows that food _media_ work can exploit all those notions
and combine them with the worst of passive-aggressive, hierarchical
corporate culture obsessed with perception and metrics and a
specifically gentrified-Brooklyn concept of cool. They can confuse
people into believing a workplace is a happy, egalitarian
family—despite all filmed evidence to the contrary—by taking
advantage of the rabble-rousing, devil-may-care idea of a food-based
business, because _food is supposed to be fun_ (who told people this?
Probably _Bon Appétit_). I just want to know how the food service
industry can employ so many people in the United States _and_ that
magazine can be as popular as it is. How do we live in a world where
these are both true? Did people want to believe the test kitchen was a
utopia because that’s the image they want to lay over the staff at a
restaurant where they tip poorly or treat their server
condescendingly?

A combination of structural forces made it so those who were suffering
abuse at _BA—_namely Black women on staff and off, and also every
person of color who came into contact with the magazine—couldn’t
simply _leave_ when a paycheck and benefits were on the table, when
“human resources” was set up to protect the higher-ups and
gaslight everyone else. Without a safety net, without universal health
care, without controlled rents (all truly the bottom of the barrel, in
terms of a gentle democratic socialism), inequity will continue.
Systems that must generate profit will also generate inequality, no
matter who is at the helm. Worker-owned media models are probably the
only real future the industry has, and thank GOD. Representation has
been sought, but that means nothing without broad changes that happen,
in the immediate future (unless there’s a true people’s takeover
of the country
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on a policy level.

As Soleil Ho wrote in the
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Francisco Chronicle
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the problem of _BA_’s lack of diversity is a bigger issue in media:

While it may seem that this is a problem of Bon Appetit’s own
making, the takeaway here is that the way its sausage gets made looks
a lot like how it gets made in the rest of the food media (and the
media itself). Its gatekeepers, the editors, are largely white and
well-to-do and/or governed by a structure of white and well-to-do vice
presidents, publishers and owners. It’s why so much of what gets
produced is framed in a way that centers on white and well-to-do
people: what they eat, what they want to eat and what they see as
inedible.

Izzie Ramirez, in _Bitch_, noted the need for systemic shifts
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Though there’s a broader spotlight on _Bon Appétit_’s failures
right now, they’re working from an old playbook. It’s a story as
old as time—and now that publications are scrambling to take a stand
to shield themselves from criticism and protect their bottom line,
Black and brown employees aren’t going to stand for this continued
posturing without actual systemic change. We don’t need to because
we hold all the cards now. I foolishly once believed that I needed my
culture to be trendy in order for others to share my joy, but
trendiness just means bastardization. Don’t tell me that a story
about pastelón or fufu is not accessible, but that pierogies are. If
you want our bodies at the table, then you have to accept our
ideas—and pay us for them too. 

These pieces came out and, almost immediately, Bloomberg published a
very bad piece on tofu. “It’s white, chewy, and bland,” the
social copy read for
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perplexingly, Bloomberg Asia. The piece, written in 2020 about whether
tofu might be something meat-eaters are ready for, called tofu
“niche” and noted its “funny name.” The _Toronto Star_’s
Karon Liu responded
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“Stop calling tofu as the next best thing to meat! It stands on its
own! Not everyone eats tofu because they can't eat meat! This is what
non-white food writers are frustrated with: who gets to call the shots
in framing food narratives.”

How do we take the power from these narratives, from these writers and
these big media companies that feel no responsibility, fully? Is it to
create such a strong alternative that people begin to recognize the
failures of a test kitchen and the framing of non-European foods as
“weird” before someone tells them why? When will a Black writer or
editor be provided the support to change a magazine from the inside
out, not just piecemeal through freelance pieces here and there that
pay a few hundred dollars a pop? This current reckoning required the
strength of the Black Lives Matter movement and a broad-based
awakening of the population in the wake of George Floyd and Breonna
Taylor’s murders at the hands of police, as Osayi Endolyn pointed
out [[link removed]]. But
what will truly change? That, of course, remains to be seen.

As a food writer on the outside of the corporate clique, I’ve felt
for some time that my work has been in opposition to this one
magazine. _BA _and Adam Rapoport (enabled by even broader toxic forces
at Condé Nast) and their vision of the world stymied and poisoned the
whole of food media: sucking up air, giving a massive platform to no
interesting ideas, and using considerable financial resources to make
gourmet versions of Hot Pockets. I don’t know anyone personally
who’s written for that magazine and has come away feeling like their
soul is intact, like their editor didn’t remove any bit of sincerity
or care in the lines. I wrote two things for their website in 2016 and
thought it would be a big step for me, career-wise. It wasn’t, and I
looked them up the other day and couldn’t recognize the voice. Ever
since, I’ve always told everyone how I was instructed to mock the
idea of terroir in a chocolate bar even though cacao does come from
the earth and its taste reflects the soil in which its tree was
planted, cared for. In a way, I’ve been making up for that piece
ever since, hammering home at any opportunity just how much origin
matters. 

But again, the thing about food is that everyone eats, whether it’s
written about or not, whether they know the origin or not, whether the
magazine from which the recipe came was staffed with abusive racists
or not, whether the figurehead chef is a massive asshole or not,
whether the bartender or server or line cooks are making a living wage
or not. The food writer’s role is to sway the reader in the
direction of caring about these things, in myriad ways, through
multiple avenues. “We’re not lobbyists,” no, but perhaps in the
post-_BA _world, food writers might at least be free to conceive of
themselves as advocates for something, anything better than what
we’ve been doing. 

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