From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy

I don’t know that Korsha Wilson needs much introduction. Throughout the course of our conversation—not our first, nor our last—I found myself constantly reminded of various pieces she’d written over the last few years as she’s carved out a space for herself as a sharp thinker, warm interviewer, and gorgeous writer at outlets such as Food & Wine, Eater, Bon Appétit, and more. But it’s with her own A Hungry Society, both the podcast and website, that her voice and vision are most brilliantly displayed—unadulterated, with the subject at the center. (Follow it on Twitter and Instagram to keep up.) We spoke about how she began her own outlet, the pros and cons of culinary school, self-help books, social media, and more. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Korsha. Thanks so much for coming on.

Korsha: Hi, thank you so much for having me.

Alicia: I'm excited. I've been on A Hungry Society twice, technically, and I never have gotten to interview you, so this is a big day.

Korsha: Actually, I was thinking about the last time you were on the podcast. The circumstances. Chefs running late and filling in.

Alicia: And I had no voice at all, so I was straining my throat to say anything, but I did get to eat pizza after, so that was good.

Korsha: Yes, that makes it worth it.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Korsha: I grew up in Maryland and grew up eating—my mom liked to cook, and she would make all kinds of stuff, like spareribs that she baked in the oven with like, you know, jarred barbecue sauce, and mashed potatoes from scratch, corned beef and cabbage, and pierogies. She just liked to cook from all over the world. But some of my most formative food memories are with extended family. So my dad's family's from Virginia, and my mom's family is from the Virgin Islands, and I—just my favorite food memories are of those two places, eating, but in both occasions, eating seafood and just being surrounded by my family, so yeah, that's I guess my most favorite food memories from my childhood.

Alicia: Right. And then you lived in Boston for a while.

Korsha: I did. I lived there for nine years. I moved there after going to culinary school in Hyde Park. I moved there to go to Emerson for journalism. And, man, I just kind of ran out of money to go to school and hung around for several years, just working in restaurants. And you know, I met my now-husband up there and like, lived in Boston and thought I was gonna stay there until it started to feel way too small. We moved to New Jersey, which is where I am now.

Alicia: And you wrote a really great piece I remember for Food and—was it for Food & Wine, or was it for Bon Appétit, about the oysters in Boston?

Korsha: Oh, that was for Bon Appétit. When we were laid off.

Alicia: So seafood seems to be the real sticking point for you in terms of your food memories.

Korsha: Absolutely. It's always super-comforting to me. There's something very visceral about eating seafood, and actually, it makes me think of your oyster piece. The immediacy of seafood, the fact that it can't be, you know, dead for—Oh, that sounds really bad. It can't be laying around for days and days and days; you have to have it as fresh as possible. And it tastes like the sea. It tastes like—good seafood, anyway—it tastes like water. It's like, you know, the beach, and that's my favorite location on Earth, so I cannot imagine life without seafood.

Alicia: Yeah, there's something really not just visceral about it, but you know, alive and that feels, I think, so human about eating seafood, even if it's just an oyster.

You started your podcast and website A Hungry Society in 2016, and that's a time many U.S.-based food writers keep pointing back to right now as a turning point in terms of what the mainstream food media covered. Did that moment in time feel like a shift to you in the bigger food media scene, and what inspired you to create your own space then?

Korsha: I was thinking about this. I don't know that the larger food media landscape pushed me to talk about anything that I wasn't thinking about or having conversations about already. It was just like you said, like things just kind of shifted to where I finally could get paid to write about these things.

And I didn't start A Hungry Society to do that either. You know, at that time, it was just kind of a natural sort of organic way for me to have conversations with people that I thought were doing incredibly dope work and not getting enough attention for it, which was kind of my MO anyway, when I was writing. It just happened to coincide with white people realizing racism exists and then being like, “Oh, do you want to write about this for us?” And “do you want to talk about this topic for us?” and I've been able to kind of carve out a living in food writing, which I'm very grateful for, but I think I would be doing this work anyway, even if food media wouldn't pay me for it. I would definitely need another job on the side, but I would write about the things I write about.

Alicia: And what has having your own podcast and your own website allowed you to do that you maybe wouldn't be able to do in mainstream food media or in a magazine?

Korsha: It allows me to not have to quantify or validate people that I think are really amazing. Someone who just popped into my head is Omar [Tate], who I know you've had in your newsletter before, but the first time we talked, he didn't really have that many pieces out about him. And I just—I knew and I understood his reference points, and his food is delicious, and I thought Honeysuckle is such a brilliant concept, and, you know, his poetry is so amazing that I wanted to have that conversation. I didn't have to ask anyone; I didn't have to create a pitch around him. It was just, I can see that this person's work is dope, and so I'm going to highlight them, you know, like having the space to have those conversations with people who are doing really cool work and documenting their work and where they are in that moment is—it's freeing. It feels like my own space to fully explore whatever I want to in that moment.

Alicia: Were there any challenges to launching A Hungry Society when you maybe didn't have those bylines at major publications? Was anyone kind of hesitant to talk to you? Or, you know, was it hard to get on Heritage Radio like—was there any gatekeeping that—Korsha: No. No, like, it was honestly—With Heritage, it's interesting, because I cold-pitched them on A Hungry Society, the podcast. I looked at their programming and I remember Nicole Taylor's show Hot Grease, and I realized it was off of their weekly programming and there was this gap in, you know, telling Black stories or having a Black host even—like, there wasn't a Black host. And so I just cold-pitched them on the idea of me talking to people that I thought were dope. Originally—I know a lot of people don't know this—originally, A Hungry Society was a T-shirt company, and a very unsuccessful one. Like, my mom bought a shirt, my aunt, and Cory [Editor’s note: her husband] has one. But that's it. Like, you know, even people I've been friends with for a long time were like, “Oh, that's such a cute design. What is it?” Like, What? Why? Why? Yeah, it was just not very successful. I was selling the shirts to raise money for an organization that was helping kids with going to culinary school, which I felt great about, but they weren't selling, so I wasn't raising any money, right?

I was realizing it would be more helpful to write stories about cool organizations. Launching A Hungry Society as a website with stories was actually pretty terrifying, just because I knew I could talk to people in a way that was really good for a podcast, but writing it down and honoring each story and what makes this person special and their work special. And maybe that's in the Q&A format or maybe that's in an essay format. Or maybe that's you know, them drawing something or just—having all of that on my shoulders, while freeing, was also terrifying because I wanted to do people's stories justice. So I'm still working through that.

Alicia: No, that's super difficult. Actually, I was thinking, you went to culinary school, you've written a bit about culinary schools and what they do and don't teach, and you were raising funds just to get kids to college. How do you feel about culinary school? I feel like it's been such a topic of controversy—I mean, all of higher education has—but culinary school especially, because you're sending people into a very low-paying profession, maybe with debt and that sort of thing. So what are your culinary school feelings these days?

Korsha: I mean, I feel differently for sure.

Beyond the fact that culinary school is incredibly expensive, there's also it's—because it's incredibly expensive—super white, and the coursework reflects that, the student body reflects that, and the administrators reflect that. I wrote a piece last year about how curriculum work needs to be more diverse and pilaf should be taught next to jollof rice and mole should be included in the mother sauces. If you're trying to teach students about the complexities that are available in these cooking techniques, why not expand the curriculum to really show the breadth of cooking and food?

I don't know that I would tell someone they need to go to culinary school today. I don't regret going—it was a really fun time. I'm still paying the loans off. But I don't think it's completely necessary, especially in this moment where there's so many questions in the air about the restaurant industry, so up in the air about what's next and what's coming. I don't think it is completely necessary. I would say, work for someone that you really respect their craft, you really respect their point of view, and they treat people well—work there and work your way up and go from there. I think that kind of experience is way more important than a degree.

Alicia: And as you said, you wrote about that for Eater, I believe, right? And you've been writing so much for different outlets like Food & Wine; you've written for Vogue recently, I saw. Congratulations on that.Korsha: Thank you. I have mixed feelings about that.

Alicia: Of course. But, you know, there's been this kind of food media reckoning recently with the revelations of how toxic and racist it has been at Bon Appétit. Do you feel that food media is actually going to change and if so, what would you want that reckoning to look like?

Korsha: You know, I hope it changes. The reckoning is frustrating. It's like when a friend introduces you to a friend of a friend and you're like, I have a bad vibe, like, I don't really like this person, but they're like, No, no so-and-so's wonderful. Like, They did this for me or like, you know, They're so cool. They're into that. And then maybe a few months or a year or a couple years later, some s**t goes down. And you're like, See, see, I told you. I told you. That's how I feel about this whole reckoning thing. It's a reckoning for whom? I think these conversations have been happening with I—I am liking the term POC less and less—but I think among writers of color, these conversations have been happening about what it's like to be at these institutions and how they treat freelancers and how they don't promote the people of color that work within their organization. And so I wonder who we’re even centering in the response to the racism. I think sometimes, like I described—I described food media dramas like a dog chasing its tail sometimes. Like, it's so self-involved, and I don't know that it honestly does anything, but I hope—I truly, truly hope—there's a lot of introspection and then outreach, because there's just way too many dope Black folks and Latinx folks doing amazing work in this space for them not to be recognized and hired and paid way more than they're getting paid.

Alicia: It's funny you said a dog chasing its tail, because—I think I reference something Layla [Schlack] has said, like, every time I do an interview—but we were just talking about how it's an ouroboros, the mythical creature, where we talk about how we need the system to change and we know that, but the systems aren't going to change unless the individuals push the systems to change and the individuals have too much stock in the systems not being changed too much.

So many people would have to change their definitions of success in order for there to be even room at these, you know, magazines and websites that just don't do a good enough job being inclusive—and not just being inclusive and not just saying, you know, diversity and representation for their own sake, but really investing and getting the best work from people and investing in giving people the resources they need to do their best work. There's too much bound up in people's success. I think, yeah, I don’t think we’ll have the reckoning that we really need to have. I think it's gonna be very piecemeal, whatever changes really do happen. Which stinks. 

Korsha: I just finished reading—I don't know how you feel about Brené Brown—but I just finished reading The Gifts of Imperfection and she talks about defining meaningful work for yourself and creating your own definition of what is meaningful and then when opportunity comes your way or work comes your way, measuring that opportunity up against that definition and then deciding from there if you're going to take it on or not. And so, for me, it's been really useful to think about it in those terms instead of going after an award or prestige or this publication. It also helps me center A Hungry Society, too, because I’m not thinking about the other places. Oh, this is actually what I'm chasing. It's like, Well, where would the story best fit? So the story comes in the center instead of where it lives.

Alicia: No, I think that's so important. And I've never read Brené Brown, but I'm hugely in favor of self-help, like New-Agey type—

Korsha: I don't think you can be a writer and be closed off to these kinds of things. Alicia: I've read Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert twice, so I'm all aboard—I would say read that, for sure. But you also reminded me of something Toni Morrison wrote that I remember The New Yorker published called “The Work You Do, The Person You Are,” which was basically about the same thing, about making sure that your work and the stories you want to tell are at the forefront of your definition of success, which, yeah, like I said—I think that's so important, and I think that the shifting meaning of success is something that—if people dedicate themselves to doing that work, that'll really have some sort of change.

Korsha: Especially as Black writers, right? Oh my God, if—oh, I shivered just thinking about it—if I had the white gaze or white validation as my ultimate goal, how hollow would my work be? You know what I mean? I would be constantly chasing this validation that could never come. And for what? I'd be so sad at the end of my life.

Alicia: Last week you were tweeting about Juneteenth and it's being branded kind of a holiday. And I thought those were super interesting, especially as you discuss the fact that Black people in media are understood to be a monolith, when in reality, there's so much diversity there, of course, regionally, et cetera. So do you see independent- and Black-run media as the space where those complex narratives can be told? Do you think there is other space?

Korsha: Yeah, absolutely. I think that there's space for Black breadth across independent publications and the existing ones, too. I think there's room for all these different stories to be told. With Juneteenth, I saw a couple of explainer-type pieces out there that were like, “for Black people, it means X.” And it's like, “Hold on, Juneteenth is very specific to Texas.” Like, you know, I grew up in Maryland; we didn't celebrate Juneteenth. And I know other Black folks like that, who grew up on the East Coast and didn't celebrate that. But people from points west, even in Alaska, grew up celebrating it. I get pretty upset when I see Black people and Black culture being referred to as if it’s ubiquitous when it's not. I mean, the regional differences with what you serve with fried fish alone, like it shows that it really depends on where you're at in the country, what you have access to, where your family comes from. I think those are the types of stories I want to see told, are these very specific regional stories, because I think for too long there hasn't been enough exploration of that.

Alicia: And yeah, it's funny, I think, because you're not on social media—I admire this about you—but you're not on social media in a really intense way the same way many other writers are. I'm implicating myself here. So I do think that when you kind of show up on the Twitter timeline, I'm like, Oh boy, Korsha really has something to say. But at the same time, it's funny, because the way you said that there are explainer posts about this day and that they're not grasping the real nuance of it, and it's because, or it's seemingly because—and this is the way that the content machine works—people were like, Oh boy, we have to kind of make up for a lot of stuff right now by doing a Juneteenth explainer, and then not even doing it justice. And it's like, you know, take a step—everyone needs to take a step back and maybe you only publish something when you know it's solid. There was a lot of this with the Bon Appétit thing, too, in terms of the way people were talking about it. It was like, Have you talked to anyone from this community to understand what actually is going on here? There's just this rush to comment, but I admire your restraint in commenting and that you really only get on Twitter when you have something to say.

Korsha: I appreciate those words. It's just so bad for my mental health that I have to take a break. I honestly, like, in quarantine, I've been doing this thing where I turn off my phone for a day or so at a time, which is really freeing; it just becomes this like little plastic brick that's useless and I love it. Maybe that's my Scorpio thing—I don't know what that comes from. I figure if I'm gonna say something, I should say something useful. I don't know.

Alicia: But again, it makes sense—you’re a writer. I'm a Scorpio, so I don't know what my excuse would be. It's my Gemini rising, I think, that keeps me too chatty. Korsha: I don’t think you’re chatty.

Alicia: I'm not really chatty as a human being, but I talk too much on the internet for sure. Like, I just—I post too much stuff, but like if someone actually wants to talk to me about it, I'm like, Yeah, like, no. It's like, Read what I wrote. Someone emailed me today—this is totally irrelevant—but someone emailed me today and was like, “you should write about like colonialism and cocktails,” and I just sent a link to my piece that I wrote last year about colonialism in cocktails because it's just like dude, Google something. Too many people just want, like—when you're a writer and you seem available on the internet, people just want you to do things for them. I don't know. Anyway—

Korsha: They think you work for them.

Alicia: Yeah, it's very interesting. Yeah, it's super weird.

But for you, is cooking a political act?

Korsha: Oh, definitely. I would say, you know, even before it gets to the cooking, it's like, you know, shopping is a political act. I'm working on this piece about my conflicted feelings about Johnnycakes. Like I said, my mom's side of the family is from the Virgin Islands—and not far from you, they're from St. Thomas and St. Croix—and Johnnycakes are this frybread that's flour and shortening, and baking powder and a sweetener of some kind—sugar or honey—and when you look at the history, that recipe is only possible because of colonization and because of not having access to adequate sustenance and the food supply chain in the Caribbean being completely disjointed by colonization.I’m reading—goodness, what’s his name, it just went out of my head. Chef Sean Sherman, an intro in that book [The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen], where he says, you know, you won't find any sort of recipe for frybread in here because it represents a dark period in my tribe’s history—like, it represents us being cut off from natural resources, being cut off from natural food supplies. I won't make you an Indian taco—absolutely not. And so it made me think about my relationship to Johnnycakes, which my family makes every time we get together when we're in St. Thomas. It's something we have with fried fish and rice and escovitch sauce with butter and Scotch bonnets and I love it so much, but it does also represent this disjointing of a people from the very land that they're on. And so what does that mean? And am I willing to never have one again, or do a bit more research into what actually makes sense? You know, from a culinary standpoint.

Alicia: Thank you so much for coming on today.

Korsha: Oh, no problem. Thank you for having me. It's nice to be on this side. I usually have to come up with interesting questions for you. And yeah, it's nice to be on this side.

Alicia: I'm glad, I'm glad. Well, thank you again.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit pendingdeletiond27a89986e6248e.substack.com

Jonathan Nunn is a wonderful tweeter (he’ll allude to some reasons why in our conversation) and singular writer on the city of London, and he has now emerged as a visionary editor with the newsletter Vittles, which has been a bright spot during the pandemic. In his own writing, Jonathan questions the role of the restaurant and attempts to transcend the list format and, most recently, gorgeously told the story of one road in London and its various diasporas to envision a “restaurant community” outside the monied and glitzy idea of the “restaurant industry.” At Vittles, he’s been giving seasoned food writers a chance to stretch themselves and new writers an opportunity to share their work without the sterile editorial gaze of more established publications. Here, we discuss how he came to food writing, s**t-posting, the authority of the writer, and his obsessive methodology for list-making. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Thank you so much for coming on and taking the time out.

Jonathan: No, not at all. Thank you so much for having me on. I was telling you earlier, I had an interview with the BBC like a month ago and this is entirely more nerve-wracking. I consider this platform much more important.

Alicia: Oh, well, thank you so much. Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Jonathan: Yeah, so I grew up in a place called Stoke Newington in the borough of Hackney in London. I guess for an American audience, the analog of that would be something like some parts of Brooklyn. I remember when I was in New York, actually, I was walking in Greenpoint, I was like, This is exactly like Stoke Newington High Street—it is kind of uncanny, if you took away all the New York signifiers, it could be the same place. But Hackney is a very interesting borough. It's been historically and still is, actually, a poor borough, and it has a very big Muslim community, a big Orthodox Jewish community, a very large Black community as well, and it's undergone immense changes over the last 20 years—the story of most cities, but a lot of gentrification. The eastern end is where the London Olympics took place, and so you had a huge amount of regeneration going out there, but then where I grew up, Stoke Newington, because it's had such a strong Orthodox Jewish community and it's always kind of been the Bohemian part of Hackney anyway, I think it's undergone less change than other areas and it's kind of stayed very similar to what I remember. I sort of grew up between there and Manor House, which is not that far away. But both my mum and my dad grew up in the same estate there, and so we always had both sets of family there. My dad is white Londoner, and my mum emigrated here when she was 15, from Kenya, but my family on my mother's side is originally from Goa, so that kind of informed what I ate growing up, which definitely wasn't all Goan food, but I guess, because Goa has always been a predominantly Catholic state and because I never learned the language—which is spoken Goan, which is Konkani, mainly because there aren't really enough Goans in London; when I was offered the chance to do it as a child, I didn't take it up. It doesn't have a huge amount of context within London—I guess food, then, became the only sort of main way that I could access Goan identity. I couldn't really do it through religion, because most Goans in London aren't Hindu or Muslim; they’re Catholic. And yeah, I can’t speak the language, so I guess food became an important part of my identity that way.

On another note, I think I've always had trouble with sort of just identifying yourself through food. I think that can be a lazy way for first-generation immigrants to talk about their culture, like what actually goes on back in their home countries. There's lots of discussion in America about many Indians not speaking out about the CAA and the situation that was going on in India with the rise of Modi, but sort of like using their using their identity to talk about food when obviously food is just one small aspect of the culture. So I'm always wary of sort of just talking about my Goan-ness or my Indian-ness just in terms of food and yeah, trying to interrogate that sometimes.

Alicia: Well, American media forces a commodification of one's culture through food, I would say. I don't know if you feel that same pressure. 

Jonathan: For me, not so much, I guess because I've never really felt the need to call my identity through food too much; I've not written a huge amount—I've only written one article for Taste which is specifically about about a Goan dish, and I'm writing something about Goan sausage at the moment, but I'm going to try to sort of do the interrogation which I maybe didn't do in the in the Taste article. I'm always wary about that aspect. And even with Vittles, as well, I don't want—of course, I am platforming more diverse voices and having people talk about their cuisines. I don't want that just to be the endpoint of what writers talk about. But yeah, I mean, so I grew up in Stoke Newington, and then after that, my family moved to Bounds Green, which is in the north of London. It's kind of like a nothing area where nothing really happens—nowhere near as interesting as Hackney. But there is a big, big Greek Cypriot community there, which was a big part of how I ate but wasn't really covered at all, sort of, in my experience, in the media, and then I went to school sort of right on the border of London—you could hear the 25, which is London's periphery road and kind of like divides London from not-London, from the school. So traveling was a really big thing, so it would be an hour bus journey every day. I guess kind of my idea of London was maybe a bit more expansive than others, just because I spent so much time traveling in quite a sort of suburban part.

Alicia: And you mentioned Vittles, which is the near-daily newsletter that you run. You started this during the pandemic, I believe, what was the inspiration there?

Jonathan: I think when I started I just told everyone that I was bored and had nothing to do, which was true, but it wasn't something that just came from the pandemic, although that was the impetus to do it. It's been something I'd been thinking about—not that specific project, but the idea of having a space which wasn't owned by a sort of big media conglomerate and the space to talk about issues which weren't being covered within mainstream media and also the idea of being able to own my work as well. I was talking about the tea shop and one of the writers who's a regular is actually Nigel Slater, and he told me very early on when I was food writing to make sure you own your work and it's great that you're doing all this but make sure to find your own way, as well. And I guess that and some pressure from my boss as well was kind of the impetus to actually do something myself.

And I mean, it's very difficult, I think, if you're a food writer in the UK to have spaces that want to take on your writing; you feel that you have something important to say, especially something political to say as well, and I think if you’re a writer and you kind of have leftist politics—You've got about six or seven papers which publish food writing. Most of them are right-wing or owned by Rupert Murdoch. The only left-leaning one is really The Guardian, but The Guardian has its own issues as well—like really big issues. And then if you want to write outside of that, I guess you have Vice, which again, some people might not want to write for, and then you have Eater London as well. Eater’s a very new thing for the UK; I think it opened 2017. And, although Eater is not a particularly radical publication, I think in the context of the British food writing system, it automatically became the alternative. And I think what that alternative is has actually changed quite a lot over the lifecycle of Eater London so far. I think it’s a much stronger space than when it started, mainly with Adam and James’s editorship. 

This has been something I've been thinking about and, yeah, the pandemic was just like, Well, now I am furloughed. I can’t write about restaurants because there aren't any restaurants open to write about. This is the time to actually start it up. I've been really taken aback by the reaction to it, actually, because I expected it to be something small and something that would prove a welcome diversion from what was going on and for people to try new things out, if they were chefs who wanted to write or first-time writers who wanted to do something. To be mentioned in the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday was just a bit astonishing for me, because I didn't expect it to get anywhere near that point. 

I am probably going to go back to work next month; I really have to think about the future of the newsletter, whether it stays a newsletter or becomes something else, but it seems like it would be a huge waste if you've got all this energy and all these amazing writers—either writers who were already writing but wanted to change the direction of their work or people who wanted to get into food writing—it'd be really great for that to continue well after the pandemic. It seems like I put a huge amount of thought into everything, yet I really don't know what I'm doing. I really don't know what I'm doing. Everything is ad hoc. I mean, I write everything every morning and sometimes don't know what I'm going to send out, but it all seems to kind of come together in the end. But I guess I need to start thinking about actual structures and ways of funding to make it continue.

Alicia: Well, yeah, it doesn't look thrown together and ad hoc, but I do think that the best things that people make are the ones that they just kind of start doing without, you know, without considering all the angles and making spreadsheets and that sort of thing. And I think that it's been something sorely missing from food media, obviously. I mean, we could talk about Bon Appétit all day. But for you, what is a Vittles story—when someone sends a pitch and it lands in your inbox and you read it, what makes you understand that Vittles is the right place for it?

Jonathan: I think that has changed over the lifetime of Vittles, which is still only three months. Like really in the beginning, I accepted everything and it was just really lucky that everything that was pitched was actually really good. It was a mixture of friends or people who followed me on Twitter or people who I had been following and contacted because I thought that they might want to write something, and then as it's gone on, I guess it's found its way outside of that sphere that I was in and who knew that I set it up to like freelancers’ newsletters who had no idea about what Vittles was or why it was set up. 

That was actually a really big learning experience for me, getting proper pitches as if I was a real publication. It was really eye-opening into what freelancers are normally taught to pitch like, which is something I've not really had experience with myself. I had all these pitches from experienced people, yet they were nowhere near as interesting as the pitches I was getting from first-time writers. I think people have become quite used to pitching things which don't grapple with politics or policy, and I had to explain, this is not what I want. Or they seemed quite opportunistic. They weren't coming from places of knowledge; they were just things that I felt that they just thought of and tried to make a story. Whereas the pitches that I was getting from first-time writers were coming from a place of knowledge; they were really engaged. They were personal, but they weren't self-indulgent, which I think can be the worst thing about sort of first-person personal writing. They were using a way of sort of extrapolating their personal experience to a wider experience and to something political. They had something to say, I guess. I think this is what your newsletter—your newsletter yesterday, actually, right—summed up so much that I've been trying to think about and put into words about the role of food media and what the point is of food writing in the first place. There seems to be such a dearth of people who have something to say in food writing. The great thing about receiving all these pitches is that it turns out there are loads of people who do have something to say and just haven't really been given the opportunity to say it yet.

I guess I set up some sort of structures around the articles I wanted to see to make it easier. So obviously, I have a section for recipe writing, but I want them to be recipes which actually tell a story, or recipes that you wouldn't necessarily find in a broadsheet paper. And I guess in that section the most obvious analog would be something like Taste in the U.S., where that is essentially a recipe site, but they come with something more than that.

Because all the articles so far are with the angle of the pandemic, I had long-term projects, because I know there are people who want to get into things like fermenting or foraging or baking. I really want to write a tea guide one day, when I have the time, to tell you why you should definitely get into tea and get into really good tea.

I've got a section for restaurants, but I really wanted obviously not restaurant reviews but pieces that would be really critical about the restaurant industry. I've got a section for shopping guides or for food shops, because I am fairly well versed in London's restaurants and the different diaspora communities that are spread across London which used them, but because I didn't do a huge amount of cooking before the pandemic started, I wasn't clued up about food shops and shopping, so I wanted writers to sort of use those shops to tell their own story of their life in London and hopefully get more different people shopping and opening their eyes to sort of different ways of living in London.The last one was essays, which I guess is anything that doesn't fit in, but I guess wanted those pieces to be quite politically engaged and from people who really know their stuff, have done their research, have maybe been working within that industry as well and haven't had a mainstream platform to say something. I know a lot of people have come in from academia and wanted a way of sort of simplifying very complex ideas for a more mainstream audience, or like for some of them, it's come from, for example, the Greggs article, from the experience of working in a really low-paid hospitality job and being able to talk about their experience.

I feel like all of this makes it sound like I thought a lot about what I want a Vittles story to be, but it just feels like that's what I felt was missing from lots of the British food media and it is really just stuff I wanted to read, whether it's the more fun pieces or the serious pieces. I think it's really important to have a mix so you don't become too po-faced but you also don't become just toothless at the same time, I guess.

Alicia: No, it's interesting what you pointed out about the pitches that you were getting and the way people are kind of, I think, beaten down into believing that, you know, the least interesting aspect of a story is the one that'll sell. And just yeah, how we just learned to become marketers for ideas rather than writers. And we don't think and—I think that your newsletter and, as we were talking about before we started recording, the time that we've had to think lately has made this kind of a period of unlearning, I'd say, around what we should be doing and what we should be talking about, which, you know, hopefully has some some resonance even after things start to be a little bit more normal.

Jonathan: I really don't mean to be like, harsh on freelancers. I do think it's true, what you're saying, it’s something that's been learned over time and it that can also very easily be unlearned as well. It's just that so much of the food writing that gets published in this country is like incredibly, incredibly asinine. This is a form of lifestyle, right? And I really, I'm, again, like coming from a place of huge privilege in that I haven't had to rely on writing as my main form of income. I've been really lucky that I've been able to choose what I want to write about, but that is not something a lot of people in the industry have; they have essentially have to live and take on sort of fairly dull commissions and that's not something that I've been used to myself, I think. I think it can be unlearned. It has been really refreshing to have stuff from people who haven't been beaten down like that. Even if they haven't written before, and they're not stylistically great writers or they're not very efficient writers, I don't think that's anywhere near as important as just having a really interesting perspective with something to say. You can edit that into something that works but you can't edit the other way around. You can't edit something that has nothing to say into something good, no matter how well it’s written.

Alicia: I've talked about this with Layla Schlack. I don't know if we had this conversation when I had her on the newsletter podcast—whatever this is—but we've talked about this before, how it's just laziness on the part of so many editors who have these jobs where they work with the same people over and over again, because they know, you know, they'll turn in good copy or whatever, but it's like, then all we do is read the same stale s**t because someone at a big newspaper is just too lazy to really do their job and find new writers and be open to new voices and really working with people's writing, which is so depressing, but that's why it's so nice to have spaces like Vittles where that's actually happening. You mentioned that you haven't had to rely on on writing as your job, but—I don't know if this is true—but when I was writing the questions, I was like, you're kind of famous, right, for your list of value restaurants and reframing the concept of cheap eats for Eater London. I was wondering if you could give some insight into your methodology for tackling such a massive city and how you have become fluent in so many cuisines, which is certainly something lacking a lot of the time in food writing.Jonathan: I didn't set out to sort of unpack this, but that is kind of—as the bread and butter of like what Eater London do. I'd always wanted to write; for a long time, I'd been thinking about writing about food and I hadn't written anything before and for years, I would talk about it to people and say like, I really want to write something but I have nothing to show people. I really had no confidence in myself and even when Eater London started, I didn't submit anything; I really had no CV of any sort. My degree was actually in maths; I really hated it and spent the like, the next sort of seven, eight years trying to do something else.

But yeah, I really only got an opportunity to write through luck. One of the writers, George Reynolds, was a fan of some of my more unkind tweets about Jamie Oliver and saw I had gone to Kingsbury, which is this area of London with a big Gujarati community, and I was there to pick up some mangoes and some mithai, and he just DM’d me the same day, “I see you seem to know a bit about food, have you thought about writing for Eater London?” I was kind of trying not to sound too excited, because that was kind of all I really wanted to do. And I think like literally the next day I submitted a capsule review and Adam really liked it and said, “Do you want to write a map?” And so I guess that's how the list started. From the beginning, I wanted to use the idea of a list to try and do something a bit more than what the format normally allowed, so I guess the first thing I did was a list of restaurants and Green Lanes, which is a street I grew up near and has always been a really big part of my life and is home to really amazing Turkish, Kurdish, and Turkish-Cypriot restaurants. And I was trying to write that through the lens of immigration and immigration waves and how this affected the food.

It really took off and I guess I was really lucky that I had already had a ready-made platform on Twitter—I was generally just s**t-posting on left Twitter, but it was also kind of the right audience as well. I really didn't want the food audience; I wanted an audience of politically engaged people who do like food. With the best value project, that was kind of everything that I really set out to say at the beginning of my career. When I started writing, I wanted to to come up with a kind of canon of restaurants which represented a different vision of London to what was normally projected by the food media.

That image of London is mainly written by affluent white food writers, influenced by affluent white PR mainly representing mainly white but like maybe a purchase of East Asian or Indian restaurant owners, all of which have investment from extremely affluent white investors, all for an audience which is always presumed to be affluent and white as well. None of this has ever tallied or conformed with my experience of London. It seemed to completely sort of ignore and sidestep everything that I found interesting about London as a city, actually.I do actually say that I see myself actually as much of a city writer as a food writer. I think most of my food writing is just a way for me to talk about London and to talk about different experiences of London. 

There are a huge amount of problems with lists and ranking things, but I think the power of a good canon is to sort of change perceptions of what is important and what should be written about. Although there has been this kind of writing in the UK before, for the last sort of 10 to 15 years, it definitely hasn't existed in the mainstream, so I thought it was important to put out a really well argued and sort of overwhelming list to make the case for these restaurants, that there is such a wealth of different communities and different experiences that are going on, all of which aren't being covered. Best value was kind of a way to smuggle that idea into Eater, although I think Adam knew what I was aiming for right from the beginning. But “cheap eats” has been the place to talk about this kind of stuff and “cheap eats” is a phrase that I hate anyway, although I've been guilty of, I think in the past, talking about cheapness too much.

But it was a way to reflect my experience of London and also to talk about restaurants that have a lot of context within the history of London as well, to talk about immigration patterns, first of all, colonial immigration patterns, which means advocating for the restaurants owned by Caribbean Londoners, by West African and East African Londoners, by not just rich Indians but also Pakistani and Bangladeshi restaurateurs, as well, which are nowhere near as closely covered by food media as their Indian counterparts.It's interesting—I find that the relationship between British food media and American food media is very strange. I do think that we look up to you in a way, and whether it's the younger generation who—I feel like a younger generation of food writers like are probably reading like Soleil [Ho] and Tejal [Rao] and Patricia [Escárcega] and Ligaya Mishan at the New York Times if they want to read restaurant writing, maybe over our own restaurant writers. I think they're probably reading like Mayukh [Sen] and yourself and Tunde [Wey], so there is that feeling that American food media is a lot more advanced.But even not necessarily a different generation but a different type of food writer, even if they don't think that American food media is that influential on them, I think that the idea of what is important to write about, I think it's definitely informed by American food media [Editor’s note: Jonathan here refers to restaurant writing, specifically]. Obviously within America, you have a huge amount of context for talking about sort of mainland Chinese cuisine and Japanese cuisine and Korean and Mexican. And over here, those have definitely become things which the mainstream media wants to talk about a lot more, but that's kind of been at the expense of restaurants and cuisines which have a huge amount of context within London, but they've never really had people advocating for them that they're important. So part of it was to redress that balance as well. I really didn't want a list that kind of had the same demographics as a list in New York or a list in Los Angeles. They had to be something that was also reflective of London, especially since colonialism has massively shaped these cuisines as well; they’re cuisines with a huge amount of context in British history. But then you also have the newer restaurants reflected by newer waves of immigration, so that was kind what I was writing about with the Old Kent Road piece yesterday, but it was really a way of getting all those ideas underneath the banner of a list that people could enjoy. And in terms of how I write about those restaurants, I guess it's a mixture of—I think googling and using the internet only takes you so far; that can be a useful tool. I honestly think the two best ways of doing it are one just walking. Before the pandemic, I would spend a weekend just walking through areas of London and just seeing what was there. I think Jonathan Gold talked about going into a fugue state while driving through Los Angeles. There is an element of like obsessiveness to my writing method as well, except it is mainly walking rather than driving. 

But the most important thing is just to keep talking to people. Talk to as many people as you can talk to—to fellow food writers, talk to the chefs, talk to people who have absolutely no connection with the food but will have something useful to say. Honestly, like the amount of recommendations that have just come from—I normally have to take an Addison Lee between work and my warehouse. I don’t know if this exists in the U.S., but it’s a taxi company, and just talking to Addison Lee drivers and talking to them about food, because most of the drivers are recent immigrants and you always seem to get a recommendation for something which you probably never would have found otherwise.

What you're saying about like how I become fluent in these cuisines so quickly? Like, I guess the answer is that I haven’t, and I think writers—we all try and pretend that we're clued up on everything, and I think what there needs to be is more admissions of a lack of knowledge because no one can be an expert on everything. And if you do have a lack of knowledge about a cuisine, I think the best way of remedying that is not pretending that you do or just to read a Wikipedia article, I think it’s to actually platform people through your writings, and this is something that I was about to do. I was scheduled to write a rewrite of the best value project this year. And what I really want to do is, instead of having me as like the all-knowing, authoritarian author is really open up the whole project to other writers and perspectives, especially people from those communities, to talk about what that restaurant means to them. And honestly, I think you get a much more interesting perspective that way. I've seen it, a little bit of it in British restaurant criticism. I really think like the best, the best restaurant critic review in like the last year was when the musician Stormzy, he edited an edition of the Observer magazine and just took the Observer critic Jay Rayner to a local Caribbean café in South London. It was mainly platforming Stormzy to talk about what the food meant to him and what it meant to his community. I think it's such a richer way of talking about restaurants. I guess it requires you to give up a bit of your power and a bit of your image as an expert.

Alicia: That's such an important point, that we don't let go of authority enough in writing, and I think that's also a product of these weird editorial visions. I just wrote a piece for a big general interest magazine in the States and my editor kept being like, there's not enough of you in here; just make it you. And I'm like, but I'm drawing on, like, so much work, but I have to present it as though it's just coming from my brain. And I'm like, I'm so uncomfortable. It's just so strange. It's like, but I'm citing years and years of thought and then, but it's like, We don't want that. We don't want the thought; we just want, you know, this kind of like bloviating character, but that's the problem with op-eds, I guess. But it's kind of where I'm finding my footing, sadly enough. You mentioned that in your work lately, you've been focusing on what the restaurant can be and represent beyond being a business. That most recent piece for Eater London you mentioned about the restaurant community versus the restaurant industry of Old Kent road, and how these mainly immigrant-run restaurants have become hubs for their diasporas and more during the pandemic. And yeah, you talk about how industry is a cold word, and the responsibility of writers to see beyond the PR machines. And yeah, I think this is something a lot of us were thinking about before the pandemic, but now we're kind of allowed to talk about it more openly—which is something I've noticed, which is like if something terrible happens, you're finally allowed to talk about how things actually are. It's something that happened with the hurricane here in Puerto Rico, where it's like writers were allowed to talk about how it's a colony of the United States only after there was a big disaster, and now we're seeing that happen with the pandemic in different ways. But why do you think that this has been kind of a moment of reckoning not just for restaurants, but for food media, and how do you hope to see it continue into a future where, you know, hopefully, we're not just opening up for the sake of the economy, but there's actually a vaccine and we can go out again and feel safe.

Jonathan: A big question. I think the pandemic has been such a—it's horrible that it's had to happen this way. But I think it's been like such a vindication for writers who were trying to talk about this before the pandemic. And I actually wouldn't consider myself, although I was talking about some things, I definitely wouldn't group myself in those writers. I think there's been so many writers, including yourself, who were talking about these structural issues way beforehand. And I think it's been such vindication for them because now that they're writing, they've really put in the work to now be able to talk about these kinds of things with authority and say, this is the stuff that we knew was wrong before the pandemic and these are possible solutions to fix it. But I think some people's eyes have been opened, but I think it's not been a case of eyes being opened. I think people knew it all along. It's just that now people suddenly have the opportunity to say it without looking like they're kind of pissing on everyone's parade. I, especially in London—London was enjoying such an amazing boom in restaurants ever since sort of the recovery from the 2008 crisis. The industry just kept growing and growing and growing. And I guess the industry said to itself like, as long as we keep growing and growing and more restaurants keep opening and more launch parties and the more money it's making for people—certainly higher up the system rather than lower down the system—the better it is and kind of talking about the London restaurant industry as sort of this world-class product. I think the chefs, certainly, knew that this wasn't the case, from what I know about my experience talking to chefs before the pandemic and also after—they knew that this wasn't sustainable; they knew that the image of the London restaurant industry that was being built up mainly by writers and by PR wasn't true, because none of them were really making money themselves or they weren't able to cook the stuff they really wanted. So what was really surprising to me when I wrote my first Guardian piece, which was kind of about this whole issue, I was expecting much more of a blowback from people within the industry like basically saying, What do you know? and All you want to do is be critical, and I was really wary about that piece, and I put a lot of work into it and did a lot of rewrites to make sure the tone was correct and make sure it was clear who I was blaming. But the reaction to that was really overwhelmingly positive from people within the industry from not only from chefs. I mean, I criticize PRs quite heavily and a lot of PRs actually came to me afterwards—not the owners of the PR companies, but individual PRs—to say, You're right about the whole industry. 

I think a lot of stuff we're talking about has been an open secret for a while and this is kind of the opportunity to say it. But I guess in terms of my own writing, having restaurants shut has been I guess useful for my own writing. It's really forced me to have a look at what I've missed and what kind of failures and gaps that exist within my own writing. And part of that is because I haven't really had an opportunity since I started writing to really just look at my own writing and think about really what I want to do, but especially because I'm writing for a publication which only covers restaurants. I think since starting the pandemic, I've been thinking, Well, I really privileged restaurants in my writing, but that is just one form of what food can be; it's just one narrow form of what cooking for another person can be, and there's a whole wealth of ways of writing about food, which may involve exchange of capital, but often don't. Whether it's a community kitchen, whether what, in the case of what Ruby [Tandoh] wrote for Vittles, about cooking and care homes. I think that there could be a conversation about food in prison. And in terms of school food, we had a big national conversation a decade ago, prompted by Jamie Oliver, about what food in school should look like. And of course, it was slightly high-jacked—I think a lot of classism ended up coming into it, which was to its detriment. But one conversation they’re having right now is about free school dinners and the fact that the government weren't going to let the program happen over the summer holidays, and it was it really only through the intervention of a footballer, a young black footballer, Marcus Rashford, to petition the government and now the government's done a complete U-turn on the on the subject and will now implement free school meals over the holidays. But it's still a case of this will happen this summer, but this is really something that should happen all the time. And I guess it's a fear of mine—this is great that we're talking about it, but we really can't just talk about it for the length of the pandemic; this has to be something that just needs to become a permanent part of how we write about not just food, but really anything, to be honest. I'm trying to be optimistic, but I guess it's ingrained with you if you have any sort of leftist politics that probably the change isn't going to happen, but you kind of keep trying. There was a period after the election where I was like, completely despondent about writing at all and I became very cynical about whether writing can enforce any change at all. And I guess I'm feeling a little bit more optimistic about that now. I think writing can be part of that as long as it's part of a big groundswell. I think that's what's been really great about Vittles, actually; it’s made me feel like it's not just one person. It's not just a few sort of food writers speaking into the ether. It’s really like a whole swathe of people. Vittles has achieved more change in three months than the entirety of my writing in the last two years. It shows you the power of being in a coalition. I think if we want to keep that change happening, I think we will kind of need to be on the same page and kind of pull it in one direction—one direction collectively. I don’t think any of us can do it by ourselves.

Alicia: Absolutely. And for you, is cooking a political act?

Jonathan: Yeah, like it obviously is. It’s not like every time I make an omelette, I’m thinking, This is great praxis.

I was thinking even one thing I wrote about recently was the sort of the conversations that were going on with sourdough bread over here. I don't know if the same conversation was happening in the U.S.—sourdough being this kind of middle-class affectation.

And over here like, obviously you have class issues of your own in America, but the class issues in Britain are kind of like impenetrable unless you grow up in them and even when you grow up in them, you can’t see how absurd they are. It kind of reduces class to a set of signifiers, like your accent or where you shop or buy whatever brand you use. And sourdough has become, I guess, like a symbol of the middle class, but I found these conversations completely baffling that someone could say that someone who wanted to make bread for themselves was kind of like performing, almost becoming a class traitor if they wanted to make a loaf of bread. But I think the fact that people have had the time to cook again in a way they haven't had before is such a—it's such an obviously positive thing. Like, of course, it's a good thing; people should have the power to be empowered to learn about how to cook and how the food that they consume is made. I hope that restaurants can be a part of not just—I feel like up to now, I guess they've been kind of like gatekeepers or some of them have been like kind of gatekeepers of knowledge. And what I think has been a really obvious positive coming from the pivot is that I think a lot of them have been a lot more open with sharing things, with allowing people to make stuff at home. I know for example my favorite restaurant in London sells their dough for a really cheap price and that kind of removes the big labor people have with making pastries or pies, but it still allows you to do the cooking yourself, which I think is a really positive thing and hopefully people will be a bit less reliant on restaurants to outsource their labor to.In terms of like every day, obviously everything is an interconnected process, so it's kind of who who grew it, where it comes from, the labor that has gone into it before you start cooking yourself. I think that another positive thing, is people are becoming a bit more—or maybe this is just my sort of middle class foodie bubble—but becoming a bit more aware of the labor that has gone in. This is something that I've been trying to—I've been doing this for years to get people to talk about tea, to talk about where the tea in our cups comes from; we seem to be having the same conversations about our food, so it's been really great to be able to get produce straight from people who are working with the land properly, who are not just farming a homogenous modified product, that are using, for example, to get flour which is using heritage grains and to get fish which has been caught sustainably, and to be able to have that again is really amazing. 

I just hope that continues afterwards as well. I know we can shorten the supply chains a bit more and have restaurants as a conduit to open these things up to be a bit more transparent. It shouldn't just be praising restaurants, but like the whole interconnected community. Yeah, I don't know what I'm saying. But those are kind of my very unformed thoughts on that. But yeah, obviously it is.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much for taking the time again, Jonathan.

Jonathan: Oh, no, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, a pleasure to be on and to be invited.

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Journalist and filmmaker Victoria Bouloubasis has carved out a space in food media that is truly all her own. From short films depicting the fullness of labor in her local community in North Carolina, such as El Buen Carcinero and La Comida de Los Cocineros, to reporting on the human impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on immigrant workers at meat-processing plants, to food writing that brings the reader’s attention to the forces that control the global movement of goods and people. In 2018, she received a James Beard Award nomination for Local Impact Journalism while working at the alt-weekly INDY Week.

In our conversation, we talk about how she came to have such an eclectic career, the failures of mainstream immigration reporting, and the connected mythologies of both the American and Global South. Listen above or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Victoria. Thank you so much for taking the time out to chat with me today.

Victoria: Of course, Alicia, thank you.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Victoria: Sure. This feels like it will be a long-winded answer. But I was born in New Jersey and then moved to North Carolina when I was seven. And so my family's Greek, so most of our food at home was that Greek. But, you know, the restaurant sort of shaped our lifestyle. We were in the restaurant business. And so my grandfather had a diner in New Jersey. My father came to North Carolina to run what we call the Fish Camp, but it was basically just popcorn shrimp and fried catfish and hush puppies. And so there was just a mix of, you know, home-cooked food and then like, pulling up to some booth in my dad's place or my grandpa's diner and getting like a cheeseburger deluxe or a hush puppy.

Alicia: I didn't know you you spent so much time in New Jersey; that's interesting.

Victoria: Yeah, it was. I left when I was young, but my family is either there or in Greece, so we'd go up multiple times a year; we've taken the train up, we drove a lot. You know, my whole family and so I still visit a lot. I have very close cousins there. 

Alicia: Your work is in film. It's in journalism. You've also done food writing. How did you come to have such an eclectic career, and how do these various facets of your work complement each other?

Victoria: I went to journalism school because I really wanted to tell like—at the time, I couldn't really pinpoint what “long form” was; I don't think that was even a coined term back in the early 2000s, when I went to college. But, you know, I definitely wanted to tell more humanistic stories that didn't feel like the fluffy sort of local news human interest stories. But I did root everything I did in community-type journalism. Sorry, can you hear a dog?

Alicia: That's okay. A little bit.

Victoria: There's a community journalism approach to everything I do, and I think that parlayed into film once I realized, especially with food, like—I used food to get people to pay attention to other issues that were not just what they're eating and the people behind all that, but film was a much easier access point for that. And so I started collaborating with filmmakers and getting into it myself for that reason.

Alicia: You've made two short films that I've watched online grounded in local communities in North Carolina. Are those people and places that you had a relationship with before filming? Or did they present themselves as interesting subjects? How did you find those subjects, basically?

Victoria: I think it's all of those things.

The first one I ever did was in 2014, and it's called Un Buen Carnicero, A Good Butcher, and that was commissioned by the Southern Foodways Alliance. Their original idea was “Cliff's Meat Market is an institution; this man, Cliff Collins, how cool, right, that he is catering to the Latino community. Let's explore that.” And I thought that was not the story. The story was about how is he able to, quote unquote, cater to a community—who are the workers there? I started talking to the butchers behind the counter, and we all recognize each other from me being a customer. That particular meat market is down the street from where I went to university, UNC-Chapel Hill, and so I kind of knew them. But then since then, my other small short film was about some cooks at Lantern Restaurant in Chapel Hill, and both the butchers and a lot of those cooks are from the same part of Mexico, Celaya Guanajuato, so I did my master's thesis work there with their families and sort of doing cross-border stories. And so I got to know them even more so after making these two short films, because I then went and stayed with their sisters for weeks and hung out with their mothers and got their recipes down and did this whole exchange with the families. A lot of times it develops into more personal relationships.

Alicia: And you focus your work on both the American South where you live and grew up and the Global South, namely Mexico and Central America. What inspired you to ground your work in these places?

Victoria: I think, you know, we coin that term Global South a lot and it's obviously a physical geographical region. But, you know, these places flow into each other. The people do, commerce does. Commerce is allowed to cross borders, people are not. There are so many parallels, especially when considering the rural South here, you know, when I meet families who speak Mam, and they're from Guatemala, and I meet families clustered in this one rural area in North Carolina, but they all come from this one place in Mexico. There's so many connections because of the people and because of—you can call it academically, migration patterns. A lot of it's rooted in labor. With my work, I'm trying to make those connections of the South not being what we think it is, and as you know, as people from the United States, we tend to even use the term America and Americans to just mean the U.S., and that's not true either. I'm sort of doing the same thing with the south and sort of pushing the idea of, you know, what the South actually means, what the Global South is, what Southern is.

Alicia: And I know you mentioned in your bio that you're into the idea of dispelling the myths— and I think these are, certainly because of the things you named, because of the ways in which we conflate these places in the ways that human migration is denigrated but commercial migration is considered a natural part of our lives. These places that you cover and where you've spent so much time are places that are subject to mythmaking by this specifically like white gaze and specifically a media gaze that doesn't get a lot of nuance. I don't know if you wanted to work in more mainstream food media or if the nature of your work simply doesn't allow that because of, you know, all these issues.

Victoria: A great question, or a comment rather. I mean, I'm not sure if I wanted to work in mainstream food media. The second part is true, that anytime I've been asked to and approached by editors and have tried, I always just feel like my work has— it's not even my work. The stories that I'm trying to share have been diluted. 

You're right in saying that there's no nuance on these, like, even in migration and immigration reporting, like talking with other immigration journalists, like, we struggle with this a lot. Anytime there's a border crisis, it's labeled as such. When often a lot of those things, a lot of what's happening in that moment of crisis, is something that has been compounded over time, and these families that are being featured and stories are just sort of written about as literal foreign bodies coming in. And even when there's this tinge of empathy in the reporting, it kind of misses the point and the connection. I meet a lot of people who have just arrived who have cousins or other family members who have been here 20 years or whatever. Everyone already has a story of the North, which is what they call us. You know, they already have stories of people who have been here, and I think that gets lost too. And then when we do talk about history, a lot of the work is very intellectualized and that's important and has its place, and I do it too. But we fail to recognize the actual people and, you know, new generations of growth that are happening within demographics and social circles and families related to maybe the labor history purporting to or other things.

Alicia: And you've been reporting so much recently on the lack of protections for workers at North Carolina poultry plants during the COVID-19 pandemic. And I think you've been doing such an amazing job of presenting this kind of this empathy without paternalism that maybe is always missing from the coverage of immigration. You depicted this day in the life of a worker who also had a birthday amid the uncertainty of sickness, and you noted how local officials ignore these workers needs because they're largely undocumented. And so, has North Carolina always been home to the meat-processing industry? And in other times, non-crisis times, if that ever exists, does the lack of concern for undocumented workers—how does that manifest politically and culturally? That was a long-winded question. Sorry.

Victoria: Yeah, well, no  thank you, thank you for your commentary on my work. I appreciate that. And it's very—those things are very hard to do. Also, because I've been covering these sorts of issues for so long, I also have to make sure I don't slip into a formula as a writer and just kind of regurgitate the same type of story. And so part of that is really getting to know people and asking questions about them. It's harder nowadays during COVID. I did meet that one woman. I drove out to her home and we spoke through her window, and part of that was to make sure that she felt okay sharing, because there are a lot of risks attached to you know, being public about your story when you have precarious legal status. But, you know, I usually spend a lot more time with people and it sometimes shows up in three sentences, right? But meat has been huge in North Carolina. We are one of the top pork producers. And there was a moment and—I'm not sure if it's still that way—but up until very recently, there was definitely this common sort of catchphrase where we would say “North Carolina has more hogs than people,” which is absolutely true. We had pigs being raised and slaughtered in our meat industry, in the state, than we had people. There was another stat about how we pumped more antibiotics into those animals than we were giving out to the human population of our state. So it's huge here; Smithfield is one of the bigger ones, but then there's also poultry. And so you know, the story you're referencing was out in eastern North Carolina. I did another story here in the more central part of the state, about a town called Siler City that has had poultry plants—it sort of revived the town, then closed during the 2008 recession, then reopened. I was interviewing workers at the current plant who had arrived here in the ’90s because they had heard that there was work in poultry. And so there's a small town that is, right now it's about 30 percent Latino, but at a moment, it was 49 percent. And it's, you know, rural North Carolina, which is another thing—like, there's no dearth of diversity here, but people just expect to hear American South and they think of just a very fine narrative. Does that answer your question?

Alicia: There is this huge population and, you know, on Long Island, where I'm from, there's been a massive influx of immigration from Central America and South America since like 1990. And that manifested in some in violence, the shifting demographic, and also in this very Trump-ist but before Trump, political, local, political, kind of I don't know—just the way that the local politicians would talk about people was insanely dehumanizing and just disgusting, and that's kind of not really changed in the last 20 years. Long Island continues to be very segregated, very racist. It manifests in policy and it manifests in something as small as a village town board, you know, where like, one third of the population might be Latino, but everyone on the board is white and that sort of thing. People think, when they hear North Carolina and they think of this monolithic, extremely, you know, black and white, kind of population and demographic. But how does that kind of diversity that you're talking about—what does it look like in the day-to-day life of someone who lives in North Carolina?

Victoria: You know, I think it depends on where and in the more rural areas, it's still low-wage workers who aren't Latino and other immigrant populations. A lot of these poultry plants, for example, hire refugees from different countries in the Middle East and Africa, from South Southeast Asia too. So I think it just all depends on where, but from what I'm seeing, you know, the two poultry plants I did just in the last month in eastern North Carolina, there's really no political power. There aren't any Latino representatives in our state, period. There's no Latino senators in our state. Which is interesting because we are the fastest-growing Latino population in the country. And so, you know, you think of a place with, like, a rooted Latino population like Texas, for example, or even Florida where there are, you know, politicians representing their own communities. And here that hasn't happened yet. There are a couple of people now. 

What's been interesting to me is seeing that, a lot of times when I interview workers, I interview their kids and their kids are finishing college or just finished college, but very few stay. Even if they do go to a state school, they end up leaving and finding jobs in other states. And so that's been interesting to me, and I haven't really explored that much. But there aren't even a lot of native Spanish-speaking journalists here. But there are amazing initiatives on college campuses with like undocumented students and allies, you know, working to push for in state tuition for documents, students, like there's a lot on that level. But as far as actual power players to affect policy, there's no one making those decisions representing this community at all. Alicia: For you, personally, is cooking a political act?Victoria: I think it is, and I think you know, curing this pandemic, I often said to myself how glad I was that I knew how to nourish myself.

It was always around in my home and I think I'm realizing more and more. But it is, you know, I always had an interesting—to me, it felt very traditional, and it was always something I wrestled with. My family, I would not say is conservative at all, but my culture can be, and it can be very much—their traditional expectations of a woman, especially, and so me knowing how to cook made my grandmother and other aunties really proud, but in a way that showed that I was marriage material, right? And here I am 37 and unmarried and that's fine by me. But you know, I had to like sort of wrestle with that. My friends growing up who didn't cook or didn't know how to do that were always these more like intellectual folk. And I'm sitting here realizing okay, maybe I didn't know how to navigate a college application or I didn't know how to do some things that they did. But here I am not starving and growing my little garden in the back while we're having this pandemic and stretching food, the way I learned just by sitting in my mother's kitchen doing homework. I do think that there's something political in that.When you asked me that question, it made me realize that people should frame it that way more. I think a lot of labor isn't—labor in the kitchen isn't honored in that way. It's seen as, especially when it is an immigrant woman, for example, it's seen as like, Oh, you must have learned that from your grandma. Oh, you must have like, I don't know—it just kind of falls into a trope, but it's not seen as political, but you think of people now, like women I know who are texting me saying, “Hey, I'm making mole this Saturday, $12 a plate.” Great. There are folks surviving right now because of cooking in more ways than just nourishing themselves and their family, but actually making an income because there's no other way for them to do so. And that's political.

Alicia: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Victoria.

Victoria: Thank you Alicia. Thanks.

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While I’ve never had the privilege of personally enjoying one of chef, poet, and writer Omar Tate’s Honeysuckle pop-up dinners, it’s been joyful enough to vicariously watch his career through social media—to read his work, to see his food, to thrill at the sight of the poetry ’zines that usually accompany his meals. The originality and vividness of his vision is not dulled by having not been able to experience his food, because Tate is doing much more than serving dishes.His pop-up draws on his own culinary roots, growing up in Philadelphia, with the addition of historical and origin context, making Honeysuckle an educational experience as much as an artistic one and as much as a culinary one. During this time of limbo, we discussed the future, which include a brick-and-mortar concept that won’t be like any restaurant we’ve experienced before. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Omar. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Omar: Yep. My pleasure.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Omar: I grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and I ate a bunch of things. One of those things, obviously, would be cheesesteaks a lot. But really, my mom was a home cook. You know, she made pasta a lot. We grew up Muslim, so we didn't really get a whole lot of pork. She made lots of greens, greens with potatoes, greens with turkey. Breakfast was lots of eggs, lots of grits. On the weekend, she would make pancakes with peanut butter and honey. We had a lot of snacks and junk food, because it was just really accessible.

My mom also bakes. She’d make pizza, she baked breads, cookies, cakes, all sorts of things. And one one thing that's really interesting about my upbringing is that we were vegetarian for three years. My mom became a nutritionist and a physical therapist, and served women in the neighborhood by talking about exercise and health, so we were vegetarian for a while and ate like, Morning—Morningside—that textured, processed vegetable meat.

Alicia: Morningstar.Omar: That's what it's called, we ate those for years and I hated them.

Alicia: Did that affect your perception of vegetarianism? How do you feel about it now?

Omar: Oh, 100%, the way that we came into vegetarianism is from a “replacing meat with meat substitutes.” And so I'm like, “This is what vegetarians are?” and I mean, we ate a lot of vegetables. We always ate a lot of vegetables, but it was just kind of removing one actual meat protein for meat protein substitutes.

Alicia: So you launched your Honeysuckle pop-up dinners in 2017 and before that you'd worked in restaurants, but you took a little bit of a break. You wrote a story for Eater, I believe, about this. When you returned to cooking after that break, why was a pop-up your form of choice?

Omar: I mean, it was the only—it was the most free outlet that I found for myself. I could have done catering or things like that, but I didn't want to be cooking in people's homes making shrimp scampi.

I've always felt the need to express myself and ideas in food, and from what I found, working alongside chefs and being a part of the chef community and the restaurant community, like the best chefs in the world were always expressing who they were or their environment or their stories in dishes and plates. People that come to mind like Massimo Bottura, Virgilio [Martínez], that restaurant Central—he talks about the mountainous regions in Peru. I wanted to be able to create food on that level that was personal to me that way, right? And a pop-up gave me that freedom.

Alicia: Right and it also, for me, from the outside, it looks like not just with the pop-up but also through your writing that this has been a means of controlling the narrative in which you work and that surrounds you. I wanted to ask if you were a poet and writer before you were a chef, and how those things now complement each other.

Omar: I've always written poetry. Food, food is poetry. The physical act of it, the ingestion of it, you know. I really enjoy watching people consume my food. There's always a pause of concern a pause of, like, introspection, I'd like to say, because I also talk about the food before they eat it. I can't divorce the two for me, and also, as a Black chef who's been trying to offer people a varied perception or varied perspectives on Black identity and Black culture through food, I knew that a lot of my dishes, if I just placed them in front of the guest, wouldn’t impact them as strongly as I would like them to without having to explain the dish. And poetry became—it just grew out of that need to substantiate the work on the plate.

Alicia: What has the response been like from folks who aren't maybe aren't poetry readers but are going out for food a lot. What has what has been that response to the poetry?

Omar: People love the poetry. I was kind of nervous. I never read the poetry at the dinners. What I do is I create a ’zine and the menu items almost always have the same titles as the poems. So I want people to experience the poetry for themselves without me, you know, hammering them in the head with it. Also people don't like to be lectured at dinner. They get the ’zine; they have the meal. Oftentimes people realize that the ’zines have the same titles to the poems. I don't tell people that when they come to dinner; I like the discovery aspect. Again, I like watching people have these meals. This meal is really cool to me. So some people read it before, some people read it during, and sometimes people read it afterwards or take it with them. Some people don't take them at all. And all of those scenarios are fine with me.

Alicia: You wrote in Esquire recently about the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on your livelihood and all the gigs that dried up, and you moved back to your hometown of Philadelphia. And in the piece you were very candid about the contents of your bank account, the limits of cultural capital, and how the politics have never worked in the favor of Black folks. And so I wanted to hear your perspective on what does a politics that works in favor of Black folks look like to you?

Omar: I mean, that's a hard question for me to answer, because I've never seen it.And honestly, I'm not sure if it's really up to me or Black folks to come up with that answer. We have a government that figures out the answers for themselves every day, every damn day. 

I can cite specific things that make it difficult for Black folks to progress. I can name several different sets of business owners who have suffered from financial instability and have lost their restaurants where other white chefs have been able to lobby, petition, and get more money to keep the restaurants afloat. I think it begins with the specifics that make it difficult for Black folks to succeed across industries, not even just in restaurants. You know, if I wanted to open an advertising agency, it would be difficult for people to be able to trust me, as a Black person, regardless of what school I went to. There's no real answer that I can offer you. I'm not like an economist, and the fact that I'm a poet and not academic—poets describes the human condition. Poetry offers up a sort of examination of life. It doesn't always offer solutions. Some things don't have solutions. 

It's hard to say—I don't want to give you, like, a Kumbaya scenario. The first thing that comes to mind is the government's like, “Yeah, here, we've eradicated racism; it's in our bones and bodies and so here, we're gonna make it all equitable.” That's not gonna happen.

Alicia: Tunde Wey posted about your pursuit of funding for a brick-and mortar-restaurant. How did that come about? What are your plans for that?

Omar: I've always wanted a brick-and mortar-restaurant—and maybe this can tie into that last question that you asked me.

I realized once everything kind of dried up and all my money stopped coming in and all the contracts were going that I was living in a very precarious contract, contract, contract to contract life, which is not very different from paycheck to paycheck. And I realized that through my pop-up and engaging in these dinners, very small, exclusive, focused dinners and charging people $150 to $300 a night, however beautiful those dinners were, that's not the only way that I could serve the community.

But the entire time that I've been cooking through Honeysuckle over the past few years, my goal was to gain access into this system so that I could disrupt the system. Kind of like The Spook Who Sat by the Door situation. And once it all stopped, and I moved back home to Philly after being in New York for eight years and being situated in my community and looking around and being entrenched in a neighborhood right now in West Philly that is at the beginning or on the precipice of severe gentrification, I found it very important to kind of touch on, or just really exist in. All the old and nuanced ideas that I've been explaining in dishes, I wasn't living in it anymore. And living in it and again forced me to look at what I was doing and how I could shape it and evolve it for a more equitable future from my hands and perspectives and in the soil that I'm standing on right now. I don't have the resources to raise $100,000, so I decided to lean on the community, express this idea of a place that is focused on the people who live in this neighborhood in terms of hiring them at all levels, serving them at all levels, bringing outside dollars into this community so that I can help, you know, build economy in this community, which is what we do by putting our dollars downtown. I wanted to bring downtown up here.

Alicia: How do you envision your approach to the pop-up changing when it's in a more permanent space?

Omar: I've also learned the restaurants were just unsustainable, and my idea prior to this community center was having a membership-based model where there was an art gallery and then the pop-up happening in the back. But I never wanted to build a space where I was completely reliant, seven days a week, upon customers to pay their dollars to put food in their mouths to put food on my table, because that just wasn't working out. And so the approach is to offer a more expansive experience where food is at the center, but other engagements can take place that revolve around the food. I've always had art in my dinners, so I still want art to be a big part of that. Education has been a big part of my dinners, so building out an educational aspect, with classes or you know, engagements with youth, or things like that, and maybe a small bookstore or something like that, but all of it will have food be the cornerstone for this space. The space is gonna kind of determine what faculties will be existing in that space.

Alicia: In the pandemic, you have pivoted your business model completely. You're doing takeout versions of the dishes that you had been serving at the pop-up. Is that correct, based on my social media perception?

Omar: They're not necessarily take-out versions of dishes. I mean, I'm drawing inspiration from different dishes that I've done, but it's hard to re-create those dishes in a take-out format and have people be satisfied. So what I am doing is taking the philosophy around the food that I built to build more thoughtful take-outs using more of my personal stories and affection to create these dishes, digging deeper into the actual practices. I have figured out a way to cook food in a pit in the city in Philadelphia to serve my guests and I'm still ordering from my friends, minority-owned businesses and places like Anson Mills and things like that to create these dishes. So it's still very thoughtful. This whole pivot forced me to really evaluate my model and remove the superficiality out of it. And, you know, just dig heels deep into what the ethos was. And that's how I'm able to create these takeout meals.

Alicia: And we've all been saying now that restaurants are unsustainable, because we've been able to see it so clearly, but how was that idea maybe manifesting for you even before the pandemic—that the way that we've structured restaurants hasn't really been working for chefs or for the workers at restaurants?

Omar: Man, I wish we had, like, “a restaurant industry piece of s**t” dartboard; I could just throw darts at a topic, but just every facet of it was just unsustainable. I mean, before it even became public knowledge that they were financially unsustainable, just from a cultural standpoint, they were unsustainable from how they exploit resources, how they exploit people, to how chefs exploit themselves, servers, and even guests to a degree, when you consider—and I only noticed this working closely with chefs—chefs lie to guests to appear as if they're doing ethical things when there's exploitation at every single level. Restaurants seem like they've been built entirely upon deception. If you want to go back as far as American history and the history of slavery, there is a deception around this elegant, opulent meal you may be having with people in servitude who hand you meals with a smile. So until we can rectify the beginnings, the founding, of America, I don't think we're going to rectify the restaurant industry in general. But most recently, I would say that inflation, in the cost of goods going up, the cost of labor going up, the cost of real estate going up, and our financial faculties in terms of how people are being paid for their labor. It's just not—it's not balanced. It's not balanced in any way. Seeing that over the course of ten years—really, well, 11 years—but really seeing it amplified over the past five years, and becoming more and more and more precarious with every day, made me realize that doing a traditional restaurant was not an option for me.

Alicia: Have you seen any models of people kind of actually dealing with these inequities that are both built into the restaurant system and also built into kind of the cultural fabric—is there anyone you can point to that is actually reckoning with these things in the industry?

Omar: Yes, I've seen it. The Brownsville Community Center in Brooklyn. I worked very closely with them. South Philly Barbacoa works on it every single day here in Philadelphia, in terms of their advocacy for undocumented workers. La Cocina in San Francisco does really great work in advocacy for helping to aid women to be in positions of power and agency in their own work. 

There's, you know, a million places in Detroit, so I'm just gonna go ahead and say Food Lab as a big one. And all these places are sources of inspiration for me, in terms of how they pull on community resources and operate outside of government subsidization to create a sustainable business.

Alicia: For you, is cooking a political act?

Omar: I never really labeled it as such. Something someone said to me just yesterday was really powerful to me. A person said—they read a quote; I'm gonna butcher it—but it's something like this, where it says, “As long as you see me as Black, you'll never see me as unweaponized.” And so if I'm doing anything, period, as a Black individual, if I’m doing a restaurant, even if I was making fried chicken, it’s a political act—even if I'm doing it innocently and honestly, it's political. So I mean, I would have to say yes. But I never set out intentionally to be a rabble-rouser or provocateur. But just existing is provocative in itself.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much for taking the time out to chat.

Omar: Thank you. I really appreciate it. And also, I really admire your work and your writing. I know I've told you that in a message, but in voice, I have not. So thank you. Thanks. It's a real honor.Alicia: Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 

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When I launched “Meatless: A Podcast About Eating” in 2018, one of the people I knew I wanted to talk to most was Bryant Terry. That didn’t work out until this week, but I’m so thrilled to have had the opportunity to speak with the chef, activist, and cookbook author about his upbringing, the inspiration for his veganism, using the term “food apartheid” rather than “food desert,” the definition of food justice, and much more. The author of, most recently, Vegetable Kingdom: The Abundant World of Vegan Recipes, as well as Afro-Vegan,Vegan Soul Kitchen, and more, has worked with the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco as the chef-in-residence since 2015. He is a James Beard Award winner and lives in Oakland, California. Usually, these Friday interviews are for paid subscribers, but I wanted to share this one with everyone. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Bryant, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today.

Bryant: Thank you so much for having me. I've been a big fan of your work for a minute and have wanted to connect. So I'm glad we can make it happen. Alicia: I'm so glad, too. Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Bryant: Sure. So I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. And, you know, I think it's always important to talk about my family's roots, which are in rural Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas. And the fact that we had farms that we owned, and I got a chance to, you know, visit one of the farms. Unfortunately, as many African-Americans experienced throughout the 20th century, two of the farms that we had actually were taken away from us. It's important for me to really put the work that I'm doing and the kind of practices that I promote in context. I always say that, really, I'm simply imparting the lessons that I learned by my elders and ancestors, because many of the practices that I would argue are rooted in survival, some in pleasure, you know, things such as growing food at home, canning and pickling and preserving, making meals from scratch—these were the type of practices that my grandparents, they were just kinda central to the way that they lived. And, you know, I say that because so often when we talk about these things, they are kind of attributed to—or at least the stories that we hear often about, at least as of late—young urban gentrifiers who are taking on these practices as a way to push back against our industrialized food system. For me, it's important to recognize that working-class, working-poor, rural and urban Black folks, particularly in the south, have embraced these practices. It's about understanding that this was just a way that they lived; they didn't feel any need to name it or kind of classify it; it’s just growing food was cheaper, growing food made sense; they had the agrarian knowledge and skills that they wanted to apply in an urban context. Our food was as local as our backyard garden. We mostly ate what was in season and we would often literally go out and harvest food right before we made it. That's really the foundation of all the work that I'm doing, and I stand on the shoulders of ancestors and elders who taught me these things when I was a child. Alicia: How did you end up eating a vegan diet or getting connected to the world of veganism?

Bryant: Once again, I think it's important to acknowledge that my early kind of contact with these ideas came from Black folks. When we talk about the vegetarian, vegan diet, plant-based eating, or however you want to talk about it, you know, once again, so often in the popular imagination, you know, people immediately go to the practices of these upper-middle-class white suburbanites, or the kind of urban gentrified white hipsters, and the first time that I even learned about vegetarian and veganism, it was from some Black family members who were Seventh-Day Adventists; obviously theirs were theologically driven practices around eating in this way, but that was the first contact that I came into.

I would say the pivotal moment as a young person that launched me into food activism—and I can talk about what that food activism looks like in a second—was when I heard the song “Beef” by the rapper KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions, in which he just so brilliantly talks about the impact of factory farming, not only on animals, but on human health and the environment. That was a major shift in my habits and attitudes and politics around food.

One of the things that is so funny—it's funny now, but back then, I'm sure my parents were really disgusted with me, because whatever stereotypes one has of the self-righteous, dogmatic, finger-wagging vegans, that was how I was showing up. And there were a lot of fights and me haranguing them and trying to get them to shift their diet, even though I just changed like the week before. And that was a great lesson. I really carry that period with me, because it just showed me that the least effective way to help people think about changing their habits and attitudes and politics regarding food is yelling at them and screaming at them and making them feel wrong for the way that they're, you know, just living their lives. And so as someone who's worked with young people for the better part of two decades—and specifically starting this work around food justice activism—working with young people, I realized that there are more effective ways to help young people think more deeply about their relationship with animals in the natural environment, and for me that was actually cooking. When you hear about these types of dietary practices and political positions, I think a lot of people default towards people like Peter Singer and John Robbins and Frances Moore Lappé, and, you know, they certainly are important thinkers and activists and have inspired a lot of my work—two of them being personal mentors. But I just always have to pivot back to: my early teachers were all Black folks. I mean, we could talk about just me hearing this song by KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions, and the way in which that just totally transformed my relationship with food, and then starting to spend a lot of time at the health food store in downtown Memphis and I connected with this community of Black folks who had been vegans for decades. It was interesting, because it was such a diverse group of folks. I mean, the people I felt drawn to the most initially were Rastafarians, and there were a number of Rastas who would shop there and who would hold court in the little prepared eating section, and so I would talk to them and just learn more about the ital diet, but, you know, it's pretty much parallel to what we think of as an ethical vegan diet. But I also met older Black folks who, for whatever reason, had shifted from a standard American diet to plant-based diets and learning about their journeys and not just around consumption but also, you know, these are folks who had agrarian roots. That's where I started to get interested in gardening, because they would talk to me about the importance of growing food and contributing to local food systems.I think it is vitally important for me to really name and claim these Black elders and thinkers and writers and activists and uplift this thread of Black-led food activism throughout the 20th century, whether we're talking about the, you know, theologically based health ministry of the Seventh-Day Adventists or we could look at the Nation of Islam and Elijah Muhammad's health ministry. I mean, he wrote two books, How to Eat to Live, and was very focused on how food can both heal and hurt Black communities. We can talk about Dick Gregory, who was a major inspiration, and reading his book Cookin’ with Mother Nature in high school and listening to his lectures. These were the people that I would say deeply inspired me to feel like I can contribute to this conversation through my activism and, eventually, writing.

Alicia: And how do you define food activism and food justice? And can you give a picture of how your work has manifested in those areas?

Bryant: I'll focus on food justice activism. Food justice activism—it moves beyond advocacy and direct service, and I think it calls on organized responses by the people who are living in these historically impacted communities, the people who are most impacted by food injustice. And, as you know, there's often been—well, I don't know if, I'm sure, yes, you do know about this—but having been in it for like two decades, it would frustrate me to go to these national gatherings around improving our food systems, you know, helping to create more healthy, sustainable food systems or whatever language they use. And so often, or I would say most of the time, at least back in the early 2000s when I first started doing this work, the people who are most impacted by these issues, whether it's migrant farm laborers, or folks who are living in these historically marginalized communities that are often described as food deserts—I have problems with that term; we can talk about that—or young people, who are the victims of our industrialized food system, being just so aggressively marketed to, eating the worst foods and drinking the worst beverages, and so I just felt like, Look, we need to think differently about that. I think, for me, food justice activism is about the people who are being impacted leading and driving the change, and that means that there needs to be a shift in power and resources towards those communities, because folks know when things are awry and people have creative solutions, and they're implementing those solutions on the ground in communities. What's needed is more resources to actually scale those projects, pay people for their labor, and really empower people to continue to improve these communities in the ways that they best think that those communities need to be improved.

Alicia: And you mentioned the term “food desert” and it being problematic. I know it's been kind of discredited in food studies, and no one is supposed to use it anymore. But from your perspective, what is the—because it's become such a common term. It's so commonly trot out. And we think we know what people mean by that, but yeah—what are the problems with the term food desert?

Bryant: Well, I think my mentor Karen Washington, the farmer in New York City slash State, is so articulate in describing the issues with that term and how if we're talking about power, if we're talking about historical structures that have prevented people from having access to healthy, affordable, and fresh food, I think the term that's in parlance among a lot of the far-left activists now is food apartheid. I think with food desert—I've always felt like it's a weird term, because it's almost natural. We think about deserts: it's kind of like this natural environment. First of all, I mean, deserts are these thriving ecosystems, but that's a whole other thing. The problem is that that term erases the historical process in which many communities, which were once thriving local food systems, then became these quote unquote food deserts. 

When I talk about my grandparents’ neighborhood, I mean, these are working-class Black folks living in South Memphis, Tennessee, and their neighborhood, their community was a thriving local food system that was driven by just the people who live there. We could talk about my grandfather's urban farm in his backyard; we could talk about many of the neighbors who also had gardens and farms or mini-orchards or who were just growing tomatoes on their front porch in pots. It saddens me when I go back to that same community now and it's like a shell of itself. I'm like, What happened to all the stone fruit trees? It used to seem like every house had some peach trees, nectarines, pear trees. And then statistically, we know that that community has some of the highest rates of preventable diet-related illnesses. And so when I think about deindustrialization; I think about the defunding of programs of public schools in these communities; it's very clear the process that prevented them from continuing to be the thriving or having these thriving local food systems. I think food apartheid kind of squarely helps people get straight to the point and understand the ways in which power and privilege play into how people can access healthy, affordable food.

Alicia: Well, right now, during the pandemic, there's so much discussion about how the cruelty of specifically the factory farming industry will move people toward plant-based eating but I mean, from my perspective, and I'm sure from yours, none of this was a secret—the reality of the conditions for the workers, the reality of the treatment of animals, etc., etc. But from your perspective, do you think that this moment might actually inspire real change around people's consumption habits or around their mindfulness around food issues?

Bryant: I don't know. I think it depends on where you are. I mean, I think about the stories that my parents are sharing about the region that they live in, which is the southeast—they live in Alabama—and just how quickly folks are reverting back to whatever they imagined the norm would be. And, you know, it's just like the same type of patterns of over-consuming and—whatever. My mom was saying that, throughout this, when she ventures out, the lines at drive-throughs and fast-food restaurants are down the street. I hope that a lot of people are thinking more deeply about these issues. I know, in somewhere like the Bay Area, of course people are, because it's so pervasive, and you have many institutions that are helping bring the type of food that might have been going to restaurants to consumers, and all these CSAs have been popping up. The farmers’ markets have been making more accommodations to, you know, allow people to shop because they're just frustrated by waiting two hours in a long line to go to the conventional supermarket or whatever. But I think I'm more interested in if this moment will inspire people to think more deeply about— maybe this is a stretch if we can't even think about eating differently—but I'm thinking about the ecological context for this and other pandemics and really understanding that if we don't get to the root causes of why we're in this moment, we're just going to continue to see this happening over and over again, and the problem is going to be much worse as we move forward and climate chaos continues to have its effect. I think people need to understand that this current ecological crisis—well, this pandemic is connected to an ecological crisis that is rooted in an economic crisis, which is capitalism, right? If we don't get a grip on all that, and I think there needs to be more awareness about how, as humans, our relationship with animals, whether they're wild or domestic, they're the core of the majority of these epidemics and our current industrialized food system will continue to put us in position where we're going to be dealing with these types of global pandemics and wildfires and climate chaos, and everything that we've been seeing over the past several years. I want to see people in communities self-organizing to meet their needs right now. I want to see us thinking about ways that we can remake our economy towards a just and livable future. If we get to the root of those things, I think these kinds of crises will be much easier to control or capture—they won't get as bad as it's gotten over the past couple months.

Alicia: I think the media in the beginning was talking a little bit about the ecological roots of the pandemic crisis, and now it's moved into this full-on, back to the individual and the consumption choices rather than focusing on more macro issues that are the reason that we are in this problem anyway. But that brings me to another question I had for you, which is I've talked to a lot of people about how kind of the last most recent wave of this push to farm-to-table and seasonal eating and locality didn't really work. And so in terms of really changing broadly, at least American people’s, in the United States, relationship to the food system, do you have any concrete political visions for how the food system and even how food media can become more justice-oriented in how it grapples with various issues?

Bryant: Well, when this all jumped off I was really hopeful that a historical moment such as this would push more people to be a little more justice-oriented when it comes to thinking about food. And, you know, as I said, I think we're already seeing the signs that a lot of people, once they get back to whatever they think of as normal, they're just going to revert to many of the same consumer habits they had pre-shelter-in-place. I think any movements promoting farm-to-table and seasonal eating, I mean—they're just empty and selfish, frankly, if they don't focus on the people growing and harvesting and transporting and cooking our food. Especially when we know that globally, the people most impacted by hunger and food insecurity are the people who are producing the food that we eat. I think I read that up to 80% of the world's chronically hungry are farmers.

I've been doing this work for like two decades. I've seen most of the people and organizations who aggressively promote this shallow farm-to-table movement without a justice lens. I think a lot of them are the same folks who emphasize consumer action as the best way to improve our food system, right? You just go to the farmers’ market or if you buy organic and fair trade, that's what's gonna change our food system, if everybody just does that. And I think that, going back to your question around how do I define food justice or the food justice movement, I think that this movement understands that social and economic justice are central to this project. 

I really recognize that when we talk about lack of access to healthy, fresh, affordable food or whatever, that's simply one—and I’ve saying this for the longest time—that's one indicator of material deprivation. In these communities, most often the most food-insecure communities and the most food injust communities dealing with food apartheid are the ones who are also dealing with environmental racism, crumbling infrastructure, underfunded, segregated public schools, lack of green space to even be physically active so you can improve your overall health, and so if we don't get to the root of all these issues, then it's kind of like spinning our wheels. 

I think people—just like the media, everyday eaters, consumers, politicians—I think people need to care about the most vulnerable people in our society. We know that so many of the elected officials who are making policies, they're beholden to the wealthy donors or corporations that are lining their pockets. I can't say I have concrete steps for improving our food system, because I think those type of steps we've taken in community. I think they need to be localized. I think they need to be about communities coming together and determining what's the best pathway forward for creating parallel systems outside of capitalism, for showing love and care for communities. And to be honest with you, I've realized some of the organizations who are doing this in the most effective ways, in my opinion, they aren't even food-justice-focused organizations. 

I think about two of the most prominent or two of the most inspiring examples for me, are the Movement for Black Lives and Movement Generation, which is a Bay Area–based collective that is doing some amazing work around really getting to the core of, you know, the root of this ecological crisis and how it's impacting all these natural systems and economies and everything. If you look at their platforms and position papers, they’re certainly addressing food apartheid and see that as a primary issue that we can focus on when improving our communities, but they're also talking about ending climate chaos, really helping us to reimagine how we can form new relationships to nature and energy; they’re talking about reparations. Literally creative ways of repair communities, but also ensuring that Black Americans are compensated when we recognize that modern capitalism was fueled by the institution of slavery and all the aftereffects: Jim Crow, the prison industrial complex, like these reinventions of systems that continue to oppress and marginalize Black folks. I look to them. Those are the groups that I study.Movement Generation has been doing this brilliant—they just started this whole four-week series, where they're doing these Zoom sessions to really help people understand the roots of this pandemic, the connection between our ecological crisis and capitalism. 

I also think that we should be looking towards the Global South and some of the amazing organizing I've learned about from mentors like Raj Patel and others who are seeing peasant farming and farmer organizing and really understanding how communities who control their own labor and are able to self-organize to meet their community needs while pushing for structural change is the kind of model that we need to be adapting to as we think about imagining what this world looks like post-whatever this moment is. As of late, some of the people who've inspired me, I've been revisiting Leah Penniman’s book, Farming While Black. You know, I’m certainly excited about what she's brought to the conversation in terms of economic empowerment, and really ensuring that some of the most vulnerable people in our communities, namely women of color, can have these economically sustainable businesses and feed their families. I love the way that Tunde Wey has been pushing us to think about these larger issues, like using food as a way to talk about things such as the racial wealth gap or whatever issues he's focusing on at the time. Sorry for being a little verbose.

Alicia: Tunde has been the man of the hour lately, which has been amazing to watch because he's really pushing people in food media especially to talk in ways that they have been so incapable of talking before, and I think that he put out fermented locust beans—I forget the actual name of them; it's escaping me right now [Note: It’s Iru.]—but with Burlap and Barrel. I don't know if you're familiar with their spices, but they're wonderful, and it sold out basically immediately. I saw the announcement, I went to buy them, and they were gone. And I was like, Wow. I'm excited about that. But your most recent book isVegetable Kingdom. And for me, I mean, I'm not a big person to cook recipes specifically, especially right now, because I'm just basing out things on what I have and what's around, but I've been opening your book so much just to find some inspiration for flavors for anything, for ingredients. What are you going to in terms of cooking for inspiration lately, if anything?

Bryant: Well, first of all, I'm really happy to hear that you've been finding some inspiration in the book. I certainly don't expect that everyone will be cooking from it, and that's one of the reasons that my approach has been kind of creating this multilayered book with beautiful images with obviously the recipes, the music, and then slipping in some sociopolitical head notes. And I just see it at the end of the day, I see writing books as my act of love and care for our community. So whether people are just flipping through inspired by the images or listening to the playlist on Spotify or actually making the meals, I'm just glad people are engaging with it, because I have a similar way that I engage with my cookbooks.In terms of what I've been actually cooking from—I would say I was really going when it was a little cooler, it might be a little too hot for that, I need to revisit it—but I was cooking a lot from Season by Nik Sharma. Lately I've been going back to one of my favorites, kind of like my little cooking bible, Eat by Nigel Slater, in terms of just simple, ingredient-driven, mostly quick meals. Jubilee by Toni Tipton-Martin is amazing. It's been great just kind of exploring, revisiting a lot of these histories and modifying the recipes to suit my family's needs. The We Are La Cocina book is super dope and amazing and—not so much now, but I would say hardcore for the first month of the shelter in place, I was really going hard with Cool Beans by Joe Yonan and Steve Sando’s Heirloom Bean Guide. I don't know if you've seen that one—it’s a beauty. Those have been some of the books that I removed from my workspace and brought in the house so that they're handy, though I would say those are like some of the top ones.

Alicia: For you, is cooking a political act?

Bryant: Most certainly. I would say my understanding of cooking being a political act is what

really moved me to engage in food justice activism. Before I got into the food world, I was actually a doctoral student at NYU, and my advisor was a brilliant historian named Robin D.G. Kelley. His second scholarly monograph—I don't know if he wrote any books between his first one—but his second monograph is called Race Rebels. Basically what he does is, he's kind of looking at methods of resistance adopted by Black working-class folks in the 20th century to resist capitalism and white supremacy. He talks about things like slow-downs, quitting on the spot, leaving work early—really the subversive acts that were the unorganized ways that many people would resist these systems of oppression. There's also more organized labor unions and things like that. That book helped me to develop this kind of bifocal approach where I'm thinking about larger systems and structures but also acknowledging and uplifting these kind of everyday acts of resistance. When I think about something like cooking or gardening or, you know, building community with family around the table, I think a lot of people might see these as apolitical. I would argue in our industrialized world that's controlled by a handful of multinational corporations that are invested in you shopping at these corporate-owned supermarkets or eating at fast-food restaurants or stuffing your face really quickly so you can get back to work, I would argue that making meals from scratch, growing your own food, gathering around the table are highly political and, dare I say, radical. In and of themselves, they're not enough to continue to transform our food system, but I think they need to be uplifted alongside more organized forms of radical resistance to these oppressive systems.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much, Bryant, for taking the time out to chat today.

Bryant. My pleasure, thanks for having me.

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I didn’t expect to spend this installment asking James Hansen, of Eater London and the In Digestion newsletter, to be a representative of his nation, but as a recovered Anglophile—who, in high school, had a Union Jack cover on her first Nokia cell phone—I got a bit in the weeds asking for the scoop on why UK food writing, as perceived from the other side of the Atlantic, is so stratified and filled with social media beefs. There are the newspaper critics, who, as he explains, have a combined 125 years of tenure at their jobs between them, and there are the new wave, like James himself, Jonathan Nunn, Anna Sulan Masing, and Ruby Tandoh, who have sought to broaden the landscape of what is considered food writing and worthy of coverage in their country. How does it all play out in reality?The only thing I can hope is that this sort of thing is interesting to anyone but me. Please read on, or listen, and excuse the moment where I leap in to find out just how he got into this food thing at all.

Alicia: Thanks so much for coming on, James. How is it over there today?

James: Thanks for having me. It's okay. The UK government's response to all this has certainly been suboptimal, but I think that people are increasingly acknowledging that this is going to be with us for quite some time and reacting accordingly. Despite the many concocted horror stories about parks being flooded with people not socially distancing and such. Yeah. How is it in Puerto Rico? 

Alicia: Well, we have some tourists who are here not wearing face coverings. It's pretty cheap to get here right now and pretty cheap to stay, so people are taking that opportunity to visit for some reason, even though there's nowhere to go and nothing to do—just stand in the street. I guess sometimes it's fun to have a different setting for your isolation, but it would be nice if they wore their masks.

People are—I've been trying to figure out a way to say this and get an answer from a scientist—but the information that has been shared that it's okay to ride your bike or to run without a mask basically makes it so that no one wears one, because everyone acts as though they're out exercising and they're not, necessarily, and also if everyone is out exercising and not wearing a mask then it kind of defeats the whole purpose of trying to keep this under control.

But we've been in very, like, severe lockdown with a curfew for over two months now, without a lot of good information or tracing, which is the issue in the entirety of the United States, so… it's been a journey, as it has been for everyone. And luckily, you know, on the good side of it, I’m not sick; no one I know is sick. So for now, I'm, you know, one of the lucky ones in the situation. Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

James: Yeah. So I grew up in a small town in the UK called Cheltenham, which I'm certain no one listening to this podcast will have heard of before. It's famous for two main things, which are a horse-racing festival, which has been this year—not the Cheltenham one, but it was one of the main reasons that the UK has possibly suffered such a bad Coronavirus crisis, is that they didn't cancel a leading horse racing festival which had many tens of thousands of people attending just as things were starting to become clearly bad. Another thing is famous for is that it's a spa town, so in the sort of Edwardian Georgian 1800 times, people who were wealthy enough to do so would come to take the waters in the belief that it would cure them of all ailments and also make them virtuous and excellent, which is probably a very strange precursor to the wellness industry.

Neither of my parents are particularly invested in cooking. They both obviously cooked meals for me and my sister and I think did a very good job of that. But I wouldn't credit my like, interest in food to them, so to speak. I was always given the task of doing the “magic stir” at dinner, which was a single stir that would make whatever was being cooked perfect.

Alicia: How did you end up getting into food then?

James: I mean, I read a lot of cookbooks when I was quite young. And I think the first one I got given was a book by Nigel Slater who was a UK food writer who I admire a lot called Real Food, which was divided into chapters based on individual foodstuffs. So I think the main ones were garlic, cheese, chocolate, potatoes, sausages, and I think chicken—all of which are quite appealing categories to someone who's 10 and is interested in cooking. And then I think it mostly started when I finished university and I moved to London and was working in theater and needed to get a job to pay the bills because I was doing an unpaid thing assessing scripts for a new writing theatre. And that got me interested in coffee and coffee culture, and I think the food thing kind of spiraled from there.Alicia: And you mentioned Nigel Slater—he's one of the British food writers who have kind of crossed over into the American consciousness somewhat. But for the most part, there's not a lot of dialogue back and forth between the UK and the U.S. on matters of food, it seems that that's changing now with some folks such as yourself who are involved with Eater London, who are a bit more engaged with folks in the U.S. on social media and such. Why do you think that is? Why do you think that food writing that originates in the United Kingdom is so different from the food writing that comes out of the States?

James: That's a really good question. And one that I try to reconcile on a regular basis. I think that one of the key reasons is that Eater, despite being in the U.S. since 2005, only launched in London in 2017. I think that's a pretty good kind of precursor to understanding why the food media in the two countries is so different. In the UK, aside from publications, which are very much focused on London rather than being focused on—nominally, at least—an entire country, so in America places like Eater, Saveur, Gourmet when it was still around, publications that may have seen themselves in that vein, are focused entirely on London. And obviously Eater London is the same. 

Food writing has mostly been the preserve of national newspapers, and food writing in national newspapers is largely confined to two strands, both of which fall under lifestyle and those are restaurant criticism and recipe writing. So I think that's the key difference, is that I think if you asked someone in the street in the UK what they thought food writing was they probably default to it being either reviewing restaurants or cookbooks, both of which are interesting mediums in their own right, but certainly aren't representative of all the things that food writing can be. And that is very keenly demonstrated in the range of material you can find in the U.S. and that's not so true in the UK. It’s starting to be true, certainly opening out, which I think is very welcome. And I'm glad that Eater seems to be in some small way a part of that. But I mean, the five leading restaurant critics in the UK have a combined tenure of about 125 years.

The arena in which you're working—as in my personal case, I want to speak for myself as a newish food writer, but also for Eater London as a newish publication—is very entrenched in a certain way of thinking about restaurant writing and food writing and what those things are for and the forms they should take and who they should serve. And I think there's not the plurality of form that there at least appears to be in the U.S. I hope that changes in the next five to 10 years because it would be very disappointing, boring if it didn't.

Alicia: So how has Eater London and and the people in this kind of newer wave of food writing, what steps have you all taken to create that sort of plurality, and what has the reaction been to that?

James: The reaction has mostly been this perception that, I think because Eater London is a new site, and because I think barring the very early days, when we had a couple of current restaurant critics write guest pieces for the site, everyone who has written for us is not tied to a newspaper, which is like I said, the provenance of the food writing in the UK. So the reaction has been that it's a sort of, you know, new wave of generational upstarts coming in to steal away everything that we hold dear. And that's untrue for a number of reasons. And the main one is that there are people in the UK who have been doing that similar kind of writing and were doing that similar kind of writing long before Eater London existed and long before I was even out of school, let alone doing food writing.

But those publications either closed or changed their angle or the people doing it were never able to break into the very rarefied and closed-off kind of newspaper circle of writing. And so the reaction has been one of factionalism.

Like, for example, one of the steps we've taken would be Jonathan Nunn's best value restaurant project, which was twofold. It was designed to work against the sort of entrenched idea of the cheap eat, which I think is, you know, baked into both American and UK food writing culture and is something that needs redressing, and is almost always designed to counter the fact that restaurants reviewed in newspapers in the UK are almost all in London; they're largely at a certain quite expensive price point; and they're largely run by white male chefs. A lot of the response to it has been this sort of, like, why are you doing this? This isn't the way that food writing is in the UK. This isn't what food writing is supposed to be.

And I think it's been strange to experience that, because the perception seems to be that we're trying to kind of, like, stage a coup of some kind. And we're not, we just want to like exist as an alternative alongside what already exists. But that's not how we’ve been met in some quarters of the UK food writing circle, I suppose.

Alicia: UK food writing also kind of hit the States recently when there was that—I guess it's always when there's a bit of a kerfuffle, like when, when this one editor, you know, wrote back to a vegan pitch, saying something like vegans should die. And then he came out with a book that, by all accounts is not very good and was reviewed in Grub Street and kind of just destroyed.

His name is failing me right now. But it really it's very interesting to watch from the outside, because like that perspective is kind of, I mean—it's sort of like a jokey, outsider perspective of what a British person is from, from the U.S., like, so of course we like to make fun of him, and pay attention to him because for us it's a caricature. But it does do a disservice, it seems, to how people perceive food in the UK because if we're only going to talk about these very like upper-class type writers who never want to see any change, then we continue to kind of view food in the UK as a very stuffy affair, and from all accounts it is not necessarily that. How does that play out in terms of what you decide to cover at Eater London, do you take more risks because you want to push back against this very staid idea, or is someone like that kind of a joke even to you guys?James: I think there is that element of stuffiness still. I think it's probably even in the book by the critic you're talking about, William Sitwell. I think it's overstated in terms of its actual impact on the way that restaurants in the UK kind of operate and think about food. It does definitely still exist. Probably the most prominent food TV program in the UK is probably MasterChef, and that definitely still exists in this kind of like space where the pinnacle of food is like Eurocentric, white tablecloth, all the vegetables are in little cubes kind of dining. And I think that does have an impact on other restaurants in the country, but I think—and this is a hypothetical, but I think it's mostly true—I think that has more of an impact in restaurants outside London, particularly those recognized by the Michelin Guide, and particularly those recognized in places that aren't cities.

And in terms of London, I mean, the thing is, is that I think that we don't see the places that we cover as taking a risk. Like, I think one of the most dangerous things that food critics can do, and I think that it happens a lot in UK food writing in particular, is to write for this imaginary audience that you kind of patronize by assuming that they won't be into or won't understand the risk that you're taking, and therefore you just never take the risk.

I think that's been proven by the fact that lots of people read our site and lots of people want to read about the restaurants that we cover that we don't perceive as risky at all, but I think other critics in the UK certainly do. Or they want to handle it with kid gloves and talk about it in the sort of like, “Oh, isn't this a nice restaurant project run by, oh, someone who doesn't look like me,” and then we'll leave it alone and then go back to the same old thing, which is probably where the staid perception comes from. The second strand to it is that because the London restaurant scene, if you were to put restaurant scene in, like air quotes, is quite a newish invention. I think it's still—and I don't mean this in a derogatory way; I mean this in a developmental way—I think it's still relatively immature. And I think that it has this air of like, this is a group of people at a party, and they love all the food and they love all the drink, and they love all the guests, and they love the hosts. And then someone turns up, and they say, “Oh, the food's great, and the drink’s great, and you're quite nice people, but maybe the host is actually not such a good person.” And even though the thing being criticized is like the superstructure, the guests feel criticized for being there. And I think that's kind of part of the problem is that when we try to address larger issues, they're often taken as personal attacks, like raining on someone's parade or stopping people from having fun in restaurants. That's not the purpose of this. The purpose isn't to drag individuals or say that people are making bad individual choices, necessarily. It's just to ask, Sure, this is the way things are, but why are they the way they are? And who are they actually good for? And I think that's a pretty good summation of how we try and guide what we cover.

Alicia: And you are doing so much reading for your new newsletter In Digestion. How does that happen? Like, how do you how do you put that together? What are you following and how are you making sure you know, to read outside the sort of, you know, well-trodden, well-tweeted, I should say, types of voices and publications that are, you know, used to attention. I mean, I know you've linked to Granta couple of times, which is more well known as a literary journal, so can you give us some of your methodology?

James: I started doing it as a project for another publication, The Gannett, which was the first food writing thing I did. It was a free, kind of passion project that mostly interviewed chefs, restaurateurs and food writers, but we wanted to kind of collate an interesting range of perspectives on what food writing was doing and what all the different ways in which food writing—and I think more broadly, food media, because I try and look at podcasts and videos and photographs and zines and all other formats, as I possibly can. In terms of In Digestion, I'm sort of relying on a very large network of publications and publications that I built while doing that, but I mean, a lot of it honestly is using Google; a lot of it is following up on links in stories that those kinds of stories you're talking about, that maybe do get shared a lot, because quite often in the branches have a story, they get informed by links to other publications that can unearth more interesting things that probably could have been given airtime or their own have been just in publications or places that maybe don't necessarily get as much airtime as a sort of what you might call the usual suspects.

And, I don't know, I think just looking around. I mean, it takes time, but you know, it can be done and I think it's hard to—I just read a lot and try to not look at mainstream publications as the starting point, I guess.

Alicia: And so are you looking, when you are creating your weekly anthology, for food writing that is making up for what you see as missing in the mainstream or for conversations that are lacking in the mainstream? And I mean—but even if that's not your aim, that is what you end up doing. And so what do you think is lacking in mainstream food conversations, not necessarily just in the UK, but in this kind of global conversation that we all are having all day?James: I think that the key thing that's lacking is a recognition of the fact that restaurants and food don't just appear. I think that it comes from this. The thing that spurred it for me in the UK was definitely that there wasn't enough writing that even considered why a food cost the amount it did or why ingredients came from certain places, or—when I was working in the coffee industry, like, why the term speciality coffee even came to be and what what does it mean and what can it be translated as? I think that’s the main thing. I think there's a lot of assumption baked in a lot of food writing about—yeah, I mean, we've thought about it. I think your line in your newsletter about “the coffee always comes from somewhere” is kind of the thing I think is missing, like an awareness that the single thing that you're writing about being a dish or a restaurant or a whole restaurant, or a chef who is at the head of a kitchen, or a restaurateur who is at the head of a large restaurant organization or even a small one, is part of a chain that doesn't start or stop with them. I think the most interesting, vital food writing addresses that and treats food as something which intersects with being essential to life and something that can be treated as a luxury or a pleasure. And I think often, particularly in the UK, those two things don't really meet.

And you just have this sort of very glossy, lovely impression of a restaurant world and like a restaurant culture, which is full of wonderful people and does wonderful things and has so many wonderful aspects to it, but also, you can't just stop at the surface; you can't just take all of that at face value and say, there's nothing behind this. There is, and you need to ask what that is and also whether it's actually good or not.

Alicia: It does make reporting much harder to ask this question. But it's so necessary. You reminded me by tweeting the other day about some sort of bug food, food made from bugs, worms, I think. This is a kind of, sort of utilitarian perspective on food that has been driving me nuts for a while, where, you know, the things that you're saying about sourcing and that the food always has a longer lifespan than one can imagine from when it appears on your plate. But there's been this strain of not caring about that for the sake of efficiency and for the sake of greenwashing items to make them seem as though they are saviors of the planet and saviors from climate change when, you know, there's a lot of questions that can be asked about their sourcing and that sort of thing. And I'm talking, yes, about heavily marketed products made from insects where people aren't considering how insects can also be monocrops and thus susceptible to disease, but also things like the Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat. And how are those things manifesting in the UK? Are people talking about these things? Are they writing about them? You know, what is the temperature on these things right now? I know that it's kind of taking a back burner, to the fact that we're living in a global pandemic, but these things still exist. And I'm still wondering how it's being perceived over there. As someone who, you know, in the U.S., we're always looking toward Europe and saying, “They do better things with food, they care a little bit more.” And so it's been, you know, troubling to see that these things could take hold there in a similar way. But, you know, basically what's the status on the situation regarding, you know, efficiency things like Soylent or tech food like Impossible Burgers and that sort of thing?James: Interestingly, one of the kind of prominent—I guess you'd call it a trend, even though I’m loath to do so, in UK restaurants that the majority of people who are covering London restaurant media will consider to be good—is this focus on meat and fish and vegetables which are produced using the mind-set of regenerative agriculture. There's a big debate in the UK environment media, which has had its entrails spilled into restaurants, whereby a lot of prominent environmentalists are arguing for extensive rewilding, so allowing the landscape to kind of just do its own thing, and the kind of strongest opposition to that in terms of mind-set would come from people who are supporting regenerative agriculture who would say that allowing cattle and pigs, particularly, to graze on kind of, I guess, quasi-rewilded landscapes, which aren't planted as monocultures. The theory is that it allows more carbon to be sequestered into the soil and is therefore better for the environment than standard livestock production. I have my doubts about whether that is a viable long-term solution, particularly at scale, but what it's led to is a series of prominent London restaurants focusing on using meat and fish from sources like that, particularly pork and beef. So you have this one strand, which is supporting small-scale farming and restaurant critics and restaurant writers love to write about that and love to give it praise and rightly so, because a lot of the product they produce extremely good. But at the same time, you have people eulogizing about the Impossible Burger—not the Impossible Burger because it's not even the UK yet because it hasn't been regulated as a foodstuff—but the Beyond Burger has and it has been, yeah, widely praised as an ethical, environmental, and tasty solution to me without even a moment's consideration to asking why the main people taking it up are fast food chains. There's a Formula One driver in the UK called Lewis Hamilton, who is known for having gone vegan a few years ago and he's backing a fast food chain called Neat Burger, which has designs on being a rollout, basically. So you have a guy who makes millions of pounds by driving a car around on a track for 70 laps also hawking a burger that purports to save the environment. And it's like, the cognitive dissonance or what there is staggering.

I've been thinking about this for a while, I think it's not so much that people don't want to have these kinds of conversations. It's more what I was talking about at the beginning. But food writing in the UK is so entrenched in, basically, if it's not a restaurant review or a recipe, I'm not really sure what it is. Outlets with the necessary kind of reach and impact to disseminate alternative ideas in a way that might even have a hope of penetrating the mainstream is just not really viable in the current media ecosystem. I think things like Vittles, that’s the key example in London, is providing like a plurality in UK food media, but it's also really sobering to think that it needed both a pandemic and an entirely new publication to present its ideas. Right, if that makes sense, like a shame that it’s perceived there is no room for the things that the largest publications in the country. There’s an essential parochialism there which I think is slowly kind of drifting by.

Alicia: And for you, is cooking a political act?

James: I think it always is. I don't like the BuzzFeed piece about Guy Fieri that said he was unproblematic because his food is apolitical like, I think it always is, I think, like, whatever choice you make about the food you buy, what you cook with, and all the other things that go into cooking, I think, are all political choices. And I think as well as that, being mindful of the things that control what those choices consist of is also important.

No individual person can make the same choices for the same kind of available roster of choices as anybody else, and I think that trying to think of cooking as not political is—yeah, it's not admissible to me personally.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much for coming on, James.

James: Thank you for having me.

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The wine world is a very complicated one, with its own language and its own rules. While that’s being challenged, invigorated, and misunderstood in equal measure with the big cultural emergence of natural wine, it can still feel far too difficult and far too vast to navigate as a newcomer. Writers and editors like Layla Schlack—associate managing editor for print at Wine Enthusiast—challenge that narrative. With her own soothing, clear-eyed voice and her ability to spot and nurture new writing talent in what’s understood as a fussy space, she’s been key to opening up this world with her work. “Racism, misogyny and ableism are alive in the wine world,” she told me when I brought up how snobbery manifests in the world as a possible topic for conversation. “These things aren't the same as snobbishness, to me, but they are adjacent, and they are a form of gatekeeping that turns a lot of people off from learning about wine. Change is happening, and ironically, I think the construct of snobbery, enacted by people like me, with power and privilege, toward those who look to exclude people who don't look like them, is probably one of the more useful tools.”Below (and above, in audio form) is our conversation on how she built her career, the media landscape, and the actual definition of natural wine—if there can be one.

Alicia: Hi, Layla—thank you so much for coming on with me today.

Layla: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be in your very famous newsletter. Alicia: Oh, God. So we’ve known each other—I guess for like a few years now. We've both edited and written for each other at different—well, you always at Wine Enthusiast, but we’ve worked together at Edible [Manhattan], too, and we have organized, along with Emily Stephenson, the Food Writers’ Workshop. And also, I made your wedding cake. So we know each other and I just think it’s important to have that disclosure upfront.I'm gonna ask you to give me a little bit more background on your food writing career and how you ended up at Wine Enthusiast, but for starters, can you give us like a little bit of a bio for you?

Layla: So I grew up in the Boston area, I got into journalism, largely because my dad worked in media. Both my parents are writers, you know; it was predetermined that I'd be a writer in some sense. My dad worked in b2b publishing my whole life. He retired a couple years ago, but he was in it for most of that time. And I believe plastics, before it was a thing. So I used to go to his office, and see how it worked. And I think it always really appealed to me that not only was there the writing side, but there was this design side and there was this kind of organizational, administrative managerial side that spoke deeply to my soul. So I went to journalism school at UCONN and it was a very newspaper-oriented, very kind of like, “you're all going to get jobs at your local newspapers and come town hall meetings” kind of program, which is really helpful background, and I did in fact get a job at a local newspaper right out of college copyediting.

From there, I moved to New York to work in magazines. I loved the format of magazines, and you know, I think I thought it was going to be very glamorous and very cool like a lot of people do, I'm sure. So I got a job at a publishing company that does all in-flight magazines, and I was there for about four years and I worked my way up. Around 2011, I started getting very into food personally and decided that I wanted to get into food writing—at a time when a lot of people were deciding they wanted to get into food writing. And so I quit that job. I went freelance. I was freelance for a little under a year; I very quickly realized that it was not for me, that I still like doing all of these other tasks of being an editor and that I am not great at nor do I particularly enjoy marketing myself.

I got a job at Fine Cooking, which was really kind of like a crash course and cooking technique as well and I was there again for about four years. They started having a lot of layoffs—not Fine Cooking specifically but the publisher. And with that came this extreme caution in what we were publishing that everything had to kind of appeal to our core readership and be fairly conservative. That's when I started looking for other jobs. And, you know, when Wine Enthusiast came along—I've always been interested in wine, but it really was sort of a fit in that I would get to keep learning about this kind of new to me thing. They wanted someone who knew how to make print magazines. And you know, it's a very lifestyle-oriented magazine, so the fact that I had this food and travel background really kind of worked for them. I've been there now about four years, and obviously, I've learned a lot about wine. Sorry, that's my dog. But that's how I ended up there.

Alicia: Awesome. So can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Layla: Yes, I can. So I grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is, among other things, where Harvard University is, but more locally, it has a reputation as the People's Republic of Cambridge. It's a place that is increasingly very wealthy, but also very concerned with, you know, diversity and political correctness and these sorts of ideas. If I would, I would equate it to like Park Slope.

And what did I grow up eating? So I have a sister who's five years older than me and when I was maybe seven or eight and she was 12 or 13, she became vegetarian. So I decided I was vegetarian now too, so we ate a lot of Morningstar Farms products.

Neither of my parents was a great cook, but they were very dedicated to cooking our meals and, you know, and cooking whole foods and we shopped at a food coop and things like that. I wasn't allowed any cereal with marshmallows in it. So, you know, I think in terms of like, meals in my house, there were a lot of stir-fries, a lot of pasta which was, you know, mostly a decision by myself my sister. It was the ’90s, so as a lot of margarine and skim milk and low-fat and reduced calories stuff, which looking back runs totally counter to this like “we're going to eat vegetables and cook” kind of ethos that we generally had my house, but I guess, you know, I guess that's just what I did then. And so I really didn't learn a whole lot about cooking until I was an adult. My parents taught me to make stir-fry; my dad taught me to make an omelet and scrambled eggs. But it was really pretty bare-bones.Alicia: And how do you think that affected learning how to cook later? Like, did it feel different? Did it feel kind of like separate from the way you grew up? Did it feel like this big change?

Layla: Yeah, so I mean, I think before I learned how to cook, I just kind of lumped it in with all domestic labor which, to some extent was something I was always interested in, like, you know, I would organize the pantry on a Saturday afternoon as a child for fun and things like that. But I did have this kind of complicated relationship when I was learning to cook in my 20s as someone who's dating and cooking for boyfriends of like, “Is this what my role is going to be?” But in general, honestly, I think it was really kind of liberating. Like I didn't, I didn't have any rules for myself about what I could or couldn't cook. It was really just this kind of uncharted territory, and completely unstructured in a way that not a lot of things in my life have been. And at the time I was learning to cook and mostly teaching myself, I was extremely broke, so it also felt like

finally, I'm learning how to be self-sufficient. And finally, I'm, you know, learning this really valuable skill and I can feed myself and other people really affordably and it tastes okay.

So there weren't really many negatives to learning to cook for me.

Alicia: And so, what were the resources you used when you were trying to teach yourself how to cook?Layla: The internet was a big one. You know, again, growing up, we really didn't even have many cookbooks. We had The Settlement Cookbook, which I've written about. And we had the Joy of Cooking and we had Moosewood. So you know, but I was working in media already when I was learning to cook, so I got free cookbooks. I'd look at those. I was at the time, like, reading and reporting a lot about restaurants. So I'd get you know, chef recipes and be looking at what they were doing and kind of figure out how to dumb that down for myself. But honestly, a lot of it was pure instinct. And then right before I started working at Fine Cooking, I took a series of classic technique classes at at ICE, the Institute for Culinary Education, and then, you know, working at Fine Cooking, where we had a test kitchen, and it's a teaching magazine; I learned a lot, a lot, a lot on the job.

Alicia: And so when you started at Wine Enthusiast, what was your wine background like?

Layla: At Fine Cooking, we would often recommend wine pairings with the recipes and I worked on those. I worked with a writer who provided them, but we'd also get wine samples. And you know, we were pretty good about distributing them evenly and everyone would write tasting notes and so I kind of knew a little bit about how to taste wine.

And I think my, you know, for my 21st or my 22nd birthday, my dad had taken me out and bought me a case of wine and was very sort of like, well, “Pinot Grigio is a lighter white and you want it from Italy and Chardonnay is a heavier whiteand you want from California.” And so I had some of that in my head, but more than that, I was just a really adventurous drinker. You know, if I was in a restaurant and they had a wine I'd never heard of before, I'd say, can you tell me about this wine, I'd like to try it so and I traveled a fair amount for work—more so when I was doing travel stuff than at Fine Cooking. I'd been to Italy and I'd been to France and so I had tried wine in those places. So I have been to wineries and knew a little bit about how wine was made.

But I didn't know a whole lot, I had a good sense of, if I tasted wine, I could pair it well. And that's still probably my greatest strength in the wine world. 

Obviously, I've, you know, again, kind of picked up on the job because I've had to learn a lot of these distinctions about grapes and regions and blends and wine structure, which is something you don't hear a ton about until you're in the wine world, but it's kind of the most important thing.

Alicia: And so, yeah, what are the ways in which people learn about wine? Like I mean, in this, you're obviously at a magazine. So it's a little bit structured, but like when someone starts out wanting to learn about wine, what are the kinds of things you recommend they do? I don't know if there's necessarily really good books on it to start with. But yeah, what's your recommendation?

Layla: My recommendation is honestly just find a store in your area where the staff are friendly and where they have tastings a lot. Most wine shops have tastings pretty frequently, often because of their, from their distributors. They'll just set up a little table and pour wine, but they'll talk to you about where the grapes come from and how the wine is made. And it's free and you get a little free taste of wine. And you know, then you can go to the friendly professional who works in the store and say, I really liked this wine and ideally, you'll say, “I really like this wine because…” and they'll be able to kind of direct you toward other wines that you might like for the same reasons.

But I think the two most important things are to taste a lot and to figure out what it is you like and how to express that. And I only recommend doing store tastings for that because it's free and you know, wine can get pricey. But if you if you have access to a lot of wine some other way, whether it's, you're in a position where you can buy a lot of wine without knowing if you like it or if you work in a restaurant and they'll let you taste samples or anything like that, just taste as widely as you can and learn how to put into words what you like, and then find people more knowledgeable than you who are going to be nice about it and say, “I had this one and I really liked it because I liked these characteristics” and and you know, kind of impose on them to recommend things to you. I mean, obviously magazines are very helpful because we give you that context. Wine Enthusiast specifically will give you that context about, you know how a certain wine is going to pair with food or if the story’s very important, because it can help you

form an emotional connection to what you're drinking. And we certainly give you that. And it's just kind of a way to get comfortable with the language of it, which is also pretty huge because it's not like the language of food and it's not even like the language of beer or spirits or

Cocktails. So, you know, magazines are a good way to just kind of learn the lingo, but the most important thing is just to taste everything you can taste.

Alicia: Right. And so, the idea of snobbery maybe is so unfairly present with how people perceive wine and you how do you deal with that—or how do you like process that like, and you know, even specifically in an editorial role, how do you kind of chip away at the idea that caring about why is elitist, snobbish concept?

Layla: As someone who works in the wine industry, obviously I have people from outside the industry asked me all the time, like, is this wine good? And, you know, it's important to note that,

yes, there are technical characteristics that can make some wines better than others. But what we do at Wine Enthusiast, what I do personally in my day-to-day life is kind of say, well, it doesn't matter if it's good if you like it. I think in food and wine both we have this idea that if I like something, that means it's good. And if I don't like something, that means it's bad, and there are just a lot of ways to kind of measure good versus bad that have nothing to do with personal preference. So, you know, I think it's a huge way to kind of work around any perceived snobbery is to get over the idea of “good” pretty quickly. I haven't encountered a whole lot of snobbery from people actually in the industry, I think, because wine can be very expensive. Like that's true. There's no talking around that. A lot of wine is very expensive and a lot of wine is medium expensive. So to have it as a hobby and to have it as something that you drink widely and passionately and collect costs money. I haven't encountered a whole lot of people who, you know, say “Oh, what do you mean you've never tried Domain Romany Conti?” which is a very prestigious and expensive and rare wine. I have not had that experience. I've had a lot more experience with people who know a lot and want to make sure everyone knows that they know a lot. And so you know, if you say I tried this one and I like it, they'll say, Well, what vintage was it? And which, and you know, was it? Was it a single vineyard? Which single vineyard was it, because I had this one.

And so I think if you recognize that this is enthusiasm and maybe a little bit of kind of know-it-all-ness, rather than snobbishness, you just kind of have to, you just have to tell yourself that you just have to say this person is excited, and they want to show me how much they know, and it has nothing to do with where I'm at, which can be a tough pill to swallow. But it's also

easy enough to just say, I don't know, you know, just say, I'm not that deep into it. Tell me why you like the thing that you liked, because that's what those people are looking for, is an in to tell you all the things that they loved about a wine that’s rare. There are the people who are collectors for the sake of collecting and one of the rarest and the fanciest and the most expensive; I don't come across them much at all—they tend to travel in different circles than

people who are just really into wine. So I don't have any words of wisdom there and you know, and working at a wine magazine like they are also our readers and we speak to them and

like I guess I just kind of feel like, Well, that's cool if that's what you want to do. You know, I mean, there are certainly worse ways to spend your money and a lot of wines that are very rare and are very expensive, more so than with other consumer goods, like there's good reason for it. You know, it's because they're grown and produced in ways that lead to scarcity but also take a lot of skill. And you know, most expensive wine is also really simple, because they want to keep making expensive wine forever and it's you know, at heart, it's an agricultural product, so you can't do that if you destroy where it's grown. I think it's just kind of maintaining a perspective that if someone tries to tell you that they know more than you, it's more likely that they just are excited about what they want to talk about.

Alicia: Right, nothing to do with you. I think that's such a general misconception about food and beverage people, is that their enthusiasm is snobbery. Instead of just like, yeah, being excited when you've seen an entire process many times and enjoyed something widely, it's often that you're just—you just want to talk about it. You just want to share that piece. Things about food and drink are so personal with everybody that it often gets, you know, it feels confrontational sometimes to just be enthusiastic, which is interesting. That's been super-interesting to watch in the wine world, is how much people are talking about natural wine, especially in publications that have nothing to do with food or beverage. Like, there's been this generalist obsession with natural wine, which is a conversation that has been simplified and sort of universalized around like this perfect millennial caricature of an urban person with money to spend. So it goes like that. And so, like, what have you encountered around natural wine that is different from conventional wine, like how are these worlds different? How are they colliding? What are the mistakes people are making, in the way they talk about natural wine?

Layla: I want to state very clearly first upfront before I get into it that natural wine is a pretty broad term. Loosely speaking, it means kind of minimal human intervention in the winemaking process. It often also means from grapes that are organic and or biodynamically grown. There's a lot of controversy over whether or not sulfur is added as a preservative agent, so it's, you know, minimal to no sulfur. There's some back-and-forth over whether it should be filtered or fined, which means kind of just clearing out the sediment. And so oftentimes, you'll see natural wine that's cloudy, and usually it is wild fermented, so it's using ambient yeast in the air as opposed to commercially purchased yeast. That's, in a nutshell, what natural wine is when you hear people talking about that. It will still give you a hangover. It is often made, though, in lower alcohol styles. That's called the “glou-glou” style. It's a French word that just means “glug,” easy to drink. So it's lower alcohol, lighter in body. On the one hand, I think it's really exciting that natural wine is something that's speaking to so many people and people who might not otherwise care a whole lot about wine. Now they’re learning words like terroir, and they're learning about how wine is made and how it's grown and where and the people doing it. I think it has kind of, you know—I talked a little bit about structure and about these kinds of characteristics that wine should have to be classified as good. And, and to some extent, it is challenging that a little bit. I'm very interested in the palates of people who only ever drink natural wine, structured in line “acid tannins, alcohol body, complexity finish.” These are—these don't have a ton to do with what you think of when you think of wine tasting of, you know, notes of cherry and pine trees or whatever. They are their structural elements and, you know, in a good wine or in any wine, you're kind of looking at how those things interplay to figure out if the wine was well made. And so, in a natural wine, the rules are different, because the whole point is to let the grape express as it wants to. So if you know a grape is super tannic and doesn't have a whole lot else going on, but that's what this winemaker chose, and that's how it's expressing itsself, then that's considered a good wine in the natural wine world, not so much in the outside world, or in the outside wine world. I think that's where a lot of the conflict comes from: It's just these varying standards of what good is. But I think also, on both sides,  there's this idea of purity of, “I know the right way to drink wine and I

know the qualities that matter.”

That's where a lot of the conflict comes from. I'm someone who drinks both. I drink traditional wines and natural wines; I like both for different reasons, and I think there are probably more people like me then you really see or hear about. It's, I think, probably presented as more of a dichotomy than it really is. Because I think, again, most people who are in the wine world and love wine want to taste as many things as they can and generally enjoy drinking wine.

Alicia: For sure, I mean, I wish I could drink more natural wine here, but you know, it's not here.

In the same kind of way, the natural wine has opened up new people to the wine world—I'm going to try a segue you here that might not work—but how has food media, do you think, opened up to new voices? Like where are the new voices to be found? How are you trying to enable new voices as an editor? And, you know, how has the focus on big personalities and food media been kind of a hindrance to the conversation about food in the United States?

Layla: I think wine media is growing and changing, you know, seven to eight years behind food media, so we really have an opportunity to look at what worked, what didn't work in food media/ Obviously, the two are very related and there's a lot of overlap, including me. I also think it's important to remember that, like, there are a ton of people making food media who aren't the big personalities and, you know, and I get a little defensive about this because I'm one of them and have been my whole career. But like, you know, when you read a recipe that you find on online or in a magazine, chances are the person who developed it, the name on it is not one of these big personalities, if it's just like a, you know, weeknight dinner recipe. And it's fairly similar for wine. There are certainly kind of big names in the wine media world. A lot of them are people who have been around for a while so you know, they're slower to adopt or just kind of not as innately into the natural wine scene or that's been their whole career and they don't understand that they're not a fringe anymore but certainly less of the kind of big dominant personalities in wine media.

I think it's a lot easier for me at least to find people who write about wine and know about wine and oftentimes are coming from a wine sales or a wine retailer, wine marketing background and want to move over to the editorial side and say, Okay, well I work in, you know, one of the larger wine magazines, let's figure something out. And as an editor, it's really that simple to kind of bring new voices in as to, you know, be available to people who are interested and to

put yourself out there. There is someone who's available to people and, you know, to be active on smaller outlets and on social media and look for the people who have interesting things to say, and then reach out to them and say, I want to pay you to write about this, like, people like to hear people who are excited.It's probably easier to do because there's not this pressure to work with the biggest names in wine writing because they're, you know, because we want to bring in new voices anyway to keep expanding and growing.

In terms of what food media can do, I mean, I get it as an editor that it's really hard when you have found people who know how you work and do the thing that you need them to do. And, you know, and your bosses and the world at large is happy with the results. It's really hard to say, “Well, this was working, but I want to push myself and my readers, so I'm gonna find someone else.” But once you do it, you realize it's actually not that hard; it's just kind of getting over that hurdle of like, “All right, I'm gonna take a risk on this story and I'm gonna work with a writer who doesn't have as many clips and, you know, doesn't have as many social media followers, but is clearly smart as hell and has really interesting things to say.” I'm gonna do my job, essentially. And if their copy comes in rough because I haven't worked with them before, if it takes a little bit more upfront work, kind of giving them a more detailed assignment and explaining how I work, then that's what I'm gonna do. I will say that working in print makes that easier because we always have more time on everything. But I really think that's just kind of the key, is just an editor saying, I'm going to make the effort to do the work. You search and put in the time on the front end and the back end to work with a writer who's new to this and see what they have to say and then do that again and again and again.

Alicia: For you, are cooking—and drinking, in your case—political in any ways?

Layla: Anytime you're making choices about spending money and in food and in wine, it's such a long supply chain and it's such a big ripple effect of how you spend your money and, you know, who's hurt by it and who's helped by it that before you even, you know, pick up your tools to cook or pour your glass of wine, it's already a political decision. While you were eating or drinking, you have this further choice to reflect on it and to, you know, to tell people about it and, good or bad, and decide if you're going to do it differently next time or if you're happy and want to keep supporting these people you're supporting.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much for chatting with me today. Layla.

Layla: Thank you. This is fun. It's good to hear your voice.

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I don’t know how I made it this far without interviewing Stephen Satterfield, whom I’ve known and admired for a few years now. He launched Whetstone magazine, which has published five beautiful editions that look at food around the world—often from the point of view of those who actually live in and are connected to those places—and has been putting out the excellent “Points of Origin” podcast more recently, which shows food and beverage in their full context, with episodes talking to Palestinian restaurateur Reem Assil, exploring natural wine, discussing indigenous foodways, and much more. In this conversation, I wanted to specifically understand what led to his founding Whetstone and discuss the void that still exists in most food media, which fails to connect agriculture, justice, and joy to depict the food system in its fullness, without ignoring the cultural meanings of what we eat. Listen or read, then check out the podcast and follow him on social media, where his insights and poetry and cooking are always a bright spot.

Alicia: So, one, thank you so much for taking the time out to have a conversation with me for this newsletter.

Stephen: My pleasure.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate.

Stephen: I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, and I ate regional food, fast food, and food from boxes. My father and my maternal grandmother are and were, respectively, really excellent regional cooks, so my whole repertoire of Southern dishes, southeastern dishes, I guess, is really strong; I grew up eating excellent versions of things like fried catfish, fried chicken, cornbread, macaroni and cheese, coleslaw, braised greens, cakes—stuff like that.

But also, you know, I was a baby with a very, very working-class mom and dad, and we ate at drive-throughs, we ate Pop-Tarts, and, in elementary school, we ate Lunchables. It was like a confluence of all those things.

Alicia: And how did you end up working in food, and specifically in food media?

It's the only industry I've ever worked—I guess media second, but prior to media, I had only worked in food. My first real job, I was 15 and I worked at an ice cream shop for my summer job, scooping ice cream, and then the summer after that, I worked at a pretzel shop. And then when I went to college, my freshman year, I was at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon, and I had to get a job. I was working at a little café there, a vegetarian café that also had a little wine retail situation.

I ended up dropping out of college, sticking with that job, going to culinary school, and kind of transitioning my whole life. But I always loved food. I would say, like, starting in high school. For instance, when I was a senior in high school, I would skip school, smoke weed with my friends, watch Julia Child, or read one of their books, and do wild s**t like make soufflés. I vividly remember our idea of a good time was cooking and, when we could afford it, eating out at nice restaurants in Atlanta. It was always, even as a teenager, part of the theater of my life and entertainment and truth. After college—I mean, honestly, I couldn't afford to stay in college, is what happened. And I was like, for one year of college I could go to culinary school, and I already know I love food and I can make a career out of it. So I dropped out of college my freshman year, went to culinary school in Portland, studied hospitality and restaurant management. Lived in a 400-square-foot, $500 a month apartment next to a methadone clinic, two blocks away from my culinary school, worked two jobs, and interned or staged at a kitchen in a country club. So I was just constantly working, constantly immersing myself in all things eating and drinking. When I was 20, as part of that curriculum, we took a wine appreciation class, like an introduction to wine class, and I really, really got deeply into wine as a young person. I became a sommelier at 21 and that really unlocked a big worldview in my life, in terms of provenance and agriculture and the relationship of agriculture and provenance to our culture, society, and just who we are fundamentally as humans.

Alicia: I feel like that's so clear in Whetstone, both in the magazine and in the “Points of Origin” podcast, this recognition of these relationships between what we consume and what it means and where it comes from. Why did you launch Whetstone the magazine? What kind of void did you see in food writing or in food media that led to its creation? Stephen: It's funny, I thought you were gonna ask me that. My original Kickstarter, from 2016, for Whetstone. It was a failed campaign; we raised $17,000 out of $50,000. Where it was then is actually where it is now and I'm actually quite proud of how on target we are with the original vision. I'm paraphrasing the language, but it basically says, you know, we're in the midst of a global food revolution, but the media is only talking about the chefs. There's no mention of origin, there's no mention of farmers or agriculture. This is a massive void. Someone needs to fill the void. This is our vision for Whetstone, and really talking about origin as an opening for much more profound belief systems around environment, around racial justice, around, you know, building empathy. So, I think we've always looked through origin as the prism, especially food origin, as the prism, as the most meaningful way to engage with other humans, and to just engage with food. Alicia: By 2016, people would say that the farm-to-table movement had taken off and that farmers’ markets were huge, you know, at least in various urban and suburban areas; that they were a big discussion point in the food world. But how was that conversation that was already happening, how was it lacking to you?

Stephen: It was massively lacking and I feel and felt really qualified to speak on that movement that you're talking about, because I was working in the midst of it in San Francisco as a manager at Nopa restaurant, which is part of a lineage of the so-called farm-to-table movement as understood by the gospel of Alice Waters and disciples. I feel that the beginnings of that movement, sort of, back to the land, started off pretty purely and earnestly when you look at what was happening in the country socially at the time. The impulse to want to go back to the land and say f**k it all, let it burn was very understandable; I think we're in that moment again. But like all good things, it becomes co-opted and foremost, it becomes co-opted by power and privilege. It's usually a soft cooptation, at the beginning. And what I mean by that is a movement that is ideologically earnest about wanting to return to nature is pretty wholesome, but it does ignore those folks who have the ability and the privilege to return to nature, who is welcome in nature, and also who is able to afford to build a life to acquire a home to develop a home in nature. The same structural inequality that we talk about today of course existed three decades ago, four decades ago. So, the kinds of communities and the kinds of ideologies that are reverberated by these communities end up being just as harmful and just as damaging as the more overt forms of racism and exclusion, because it only ends up serving a small population of people who are connected through their own social identity—who are connected through their race, who are connected through their privilege, their access to power. And so while these people are in areas like Sonoma County and Napa, Alice Waters who herself had come from money had the privilege of traveling around Europe—these are possibilities for you to talk about an idealized world of returning to nature, eating locally, and, in that message, you know, food justice, food access is completely obliterated, and the opportunity for her to bring her disciples, from that same power and same joy that she experienced, the exhilaration of living on the land, eating on the land, being on the land totally ignores and undermines the fact that that privilege is not available to most. And so, to exalt that lifestyle without being honest about that joy and exhilaration and access not being equally available is disingenuous. And of course that is reflected in the media, and the composition of the news organizations who are covering these chefs, who are perpetuating their message, that are leading this crucial point. Basically what it looked like from me being both a part of the disciples, as a manager at a farm-to-table restaurant that was a descendant of Chez Panisse, and I covered it exhaustively: I mean, really the precursor to Whetstone was a project called Nopalize, that I to help our diners more deeply connect to the people who were growing their food, because there was a major disconnect. The ideology of what we were talking about at lineup and tasting—this is the farmer, it comes from this. I'd be like, Can anyone point out Yolo County on a map. They’re like, no. They're memorizing all the names and farms, all the names and the different entities and I'm like dude, you have no—there's still no relationship, really, to the land, there's no relationship to the politics of the land, there's no relationship to the people who are committed and the sacrifices of growing on the land. So, you know, I started kind of an in-house media company that was really committed to bringing people on trips, but also, you know, in content being made to try to close that gap. So I've always, you know, I guess in my own way been a product of trying to bridge social justice and food justice with my almost innate education around fine dining and hospitality standards.

Alicia: I've been thinking about this a lot, how—I mean, I'm always thinking about this a lot—but people view, you know, this disconnect between farmers and the land and not recognizing those connections... They don't view that as a justice issue, they don't view these things as connected to justice or to politics. They view these things as snobbery. How do you have the conversation? And I think you're very good at this, and I think Whetstone is good at this, and the podcast is good at this, at presenting these things, not as a point of elitism, but as a point of culture. How do you bridge those gaps and how do you think more writers or more people creating media can, you know, talk about where things come from and why that's important, without alienating people, and also why does it alienate people to talk about where food comes from? I think that was three questions.

Stephen: I think that it is alienating because it's frightening. The truth is very confrontational, and in the truth, people are implicated, and who wants to be implicated?

When you start talking about power and privilege, it completely sullies what you think is a pristine, liberal worldview of having a garden and living on the land, like excuse you talking to me about access issues and urban communities, you know, like no one wants to go there. But the problem is, the analysis completely falls apart from a justice perspective, the analysis falls apart if you ask the question, do you believe everyone has equal access to food? And if they say yes, it immediately undermines everything that they're purporting because what they should be purporting is actually equitable access to the same quality of food that they eat but that's not what they're purporting, that’s not the culture that the media—that's not the message that gets through. And so we end up talking about like, whatever, the f*****g egg spoon and whatever clips come from people like Alice Waters, and lost in all of that is like a—I mean, this isn’t a critique, I don't mean to critique her, I actually love Chez Panisse; I think of it as more of an institution. And honestly this woman is in her mid-70s and I don't feel comfortable really going that hard, you know. It’s not about her but because in a way her name and her legacy have become synonymous, because it is a really kind of clarifying example of the disassociation between the ideals of the farm-to-table movement and actually what's lacking in practice.And then around the question of origin, you know, we have been saying from day one that there's so much power in origin. We've been trying to shift our readership and other people in the media to think more critically about origin, because we feel like that is where our power lies and that gives us so much range to talk about food from a perspective of gastronomy and dining and pleasure and enjoyment, because we are connected to that history, just in the same way we're connected to the history that understands the politics of land, and in understanding land and agriculture that means that we understand that there has always been a disenfranchised class and always a ruling class associated with that land. Prior to that there were many different indigenous tribes, even precolonial, there's still, you know, intertribal politics, around land, you know, there's no dissociation. So for us, because, again, we kind of have this origin filter allows us to give the same berth, the same energy, the same scope when we're, you know, speaking in more I guess overtly political tones, or on subjects like natural wine or fine dining restaurants that might otherwise go out of context, without editors, people like Layla [Schlack], who helps us with a kind of editorial vision, making sure that we're consistent in our analysis and sharing the full spectrum of experience. And we think our connection to history and our appreciation for history allows us to do that better, and we think that if more people in the media did that food media on the whole would be a lot better. You’re really good at it. That's why people are paying attention to your work, because it holds the same analysis, which is that, yes, you can talk about how to properly make a drink, you can talk about proper bar etiquette and culture from the service side, from the consumer side, and obviously your entire platform being centered around veganism is intensely powerful for people, because it doesn't let you or anyone else off the hook in the analysis; they can't just show up for the, you know, Negroni commentary without understanding the connection to the food system as well. And that's the same system that we should all operate in.

Alicia: I would hope the current moment is forcing people to make better considerations. I hope. I hold little hope. But one of the things that I think Whetstone is so good at versus other magazines is being global. And so I wanted to ask how you achieve that and why that was a goal, as well. You know, to really have people from different places around the world writing about their own land, their own cultures, their own foods. Because you know, so many magazines act as if that is an impossibility to do, and you prove that it's not. But how did you go about achieving that?

Stephen: Well, we really wanted to do that, that’s something else that was in that original language and vision as well. Because the same kind of accountability that we're speaking on—I mean, we have a long way to go. I'm not saying that we have, by any means, arrived. Believe me, I'm poking more holes than anyone else on the work that we're making. But it didn't feel consistent for us to talk about food as part of a larger global human history and then have it be like focused on New York, the Bay Area, and a couple of cities in between. So we had to commit to a global platform and a global message to begin with, because we were already kind of on that, again, just in our connection to the kinds of stories that we were wanting to tell. So, more like, you know, I guess, behind the scenes what happened is we, you know, the first edition that we made, we reached out to people in different parts of the world that either we already had a relationship with or in some cases had just traveled there, and we created kind of stylistic standard and aesthetic for Whetstone, what we were trying to make in form but also in content.

And I think that once people saw the first edition of Whetstone, it became really evident what was missing and it kind of proved what our promise of being different would look like in real life. And I think more than like the public per se, the biggest, the most like enthusiastic response that we got was from other creative people who really appreciated the work that we put into sourcing and placing the photographs, who appreciated the original artwork that we commissioned, and really just like holding art at a really high standard alongside our messaging and alongside the content. So, once we created that first edition, slowly but surely we have been the beneficiary of mostly inbound pitches from people in other parts of the world, usually accompanied with a message that says, I'm so glad you exist. Like, I've been wanting to place this article, but I haven't found a magazine that would make it make sense. It's just like, people are expressing what we were feeling from the very beginning, you know, when we publish people in Iran or in Palestine in a way that doesn't make them feel tokenized but like part of a larger global fabric, that's what we were trying to do from the beginning. And I think people who recognize that, especially people who are holding stories that are dear to them, have offered us that that trust as we continue to grow and publish more people.

Alicia: I'm gonna ask you my final question. For you, is cooking a political act, and if so, in what ways?

Stephen: I mean, duh. Deeply. Of course. It's been a huge shift for me because the first couple of years of getting Whetstone off the ground, I had to spend so much time on the road meeting with contributors, speaking, selling the magazine, on and on. And so this is the most that I really have slowed down and been idle in, you know, years, and it's been so highly activating for me like, politically, because immediately, as I'm in Atlanta, I'm like connected to this amazing network of Black farmers who are growing food on rooftops, are growing food on the west side of Atlanta. I'm like, man, we have produce that tastes like it was grown in California out here being grown by beautiful Black women whose skin is, like, glistening, growing the best kale I’ve ever seen in my life. I'm like, this is f*****g glorious, you know, like this is the politics of food; this is almost the vision of food system that I hope for, where restaurants are thinking about how to serve frontline workers in medicine, you know, they're thinking about—I mean, not all of them, but like the beacons that we're talking about. They're looking at how they can serve as food hubs in a completely different way than just, you know, serving multi-course tasting menus that no one can afford and that have gentrified neighborhoods. You know, so like, everyone who's cooking at home right now who’s making supply chains more cumbersome. Everyone who listened to “The Daily” and heard a gross story about you know what's happening at the meat facilities, like, and they don't want to buy meat, like that is very political whether or not they are aware of the politics of that decision to not purchase based on the media that they consumed. Whether or not people are conscious of their eating or cooking being a political act, it's always that; it's always a vote for a more corporate food system, a more industrialized food system, a more harmful system, or it’s the opposite. And I don't mean to assign any moral judgment around that, because so much has been done to make a completely morally pure purchase impossible, but I'm just saying more matter of factly that, you know, every time we buy food, it's either one of those things or the other things. So, cooking for me has really centered the part of it that is political and a lot more deeply connected to Black folks growing food in Atlanta, and like, that's a community that really matters to me, that I'm happy to be back in touch with, and that would have never happened—or not never happened but I’m kind of in Atlanta unexpectedly cooking when I would have been God knows where. So I do feel really, like, politically connected in a way that I haven’t in a long time.

Alicia: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for chatting with me.

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Abra Berens, chef at Granor Farm in Three Oaks, Michigan, wrote a definitive vegetable cookbook, Ruffage: A Practical Guide to Vegetables, that came out last year. We sat down to have a chat in New York upon its release, and while I took some quotes from it to use in my coverage for Nylon, I never put it out, as I’d intended, as an episode of my podcast, “Meatless.” We covered a lot of ground in that conversation, from her upbringing that mixed food and medicine, what farming taught her about the labor that goes into even the most ubiquitous vegetables, and the importance of broad access to fresh ingredients.In these Friday paid-subscriber posts, “Meatless” is back, and I’ll be featuring my favorite people in food and beyond in chats about their lives and the food issues of the day. Below, a few questions I asked Berens in order to get an update on her life since the book came out and we had our talk. Then, a rough transcript of the audio in case you’d prefer to read rather than listen. Either way, I hope you enjoy.How has life changed for you, if at all, since the book came out last year?Setting aside the current global pandemic for a second—now that the whirlwind of touring on the book has slowed, day-to-day life isn’t that much different, which I’m grateful for. I was privileged to get to travel for the few months around the release of the book.There were big life events (meeting food and writing mentors, talking to larger groups of people than ever before, being on TV for the first time etc) almost every day, and so it was a real practice to absorb it all the way I would if there was one of those events a year.  

Now I hold those experiences and then get up and walk the dog etc. Plus, the dinners at Granor Farm didn’t change, which is wonderful. I went from being in a new city every few days to being anchored in my work kitchen, cooking from the farm, for the 24 person at a time meals we host. That juxtaposition is really wonderful. Plus, it still feels like an honor when someone who isn’t related to me buys Ruffage and cooks from it!

"Who cares about this book—the world is on fire!" is something you said at this time last year, and we're in quite a different condition now. What do you see as the role of cooking right now?Sheesh, if we had only known when we were talking last spring! In a weird way, Ruffage feels less frivolous to me now. Maybe frivolous isn’t the right word, but last spring it felt a bit like I was just another writer hocking a recipe. I always knew that Ruffage was more than just a collection of recipes, that it is a resource on how to select, store, and use ingredients. I wanted it to be something that would give readers permission to change out the type of cheese or whatever in a recipe to make it their own. Maybe I wasn’t sure that that actually mattered or if anyone would care. 

Now it feels like it really does. I’ve had a number of readers email me and say that they liked Ruffage before but now they really are using it. That has been heart-warming and makes me feel like it was worth the effort and worth their money that they spent on it. This cookbook still doesn’t solve the massive inequities in our society, but I still believe that every story/problem has a food angle and so caring about food means that we might shift the needle on some of the larger issues in our world. Might. Hope. We’ll see. 

How have you, personally, been cooking and shopping for groceries while in isolation?Instead of resolutions, I always do the year of something. Something to focus on or a habit to try to build. 2020 is the Year of the Pantry—to use up the things that have been on my shelves for over a year. I never expected a global catastrophe to aid me in my personal goals! All of this is to say that we haven’t gone to the store much except for fresh produce because I have a lot of dried staples as well as odds and ends into the freezer. It has been weirdly fun to have added purpose around finding a home for the random ball of dough or the pint of cooked lentils in the freezer. Let alone the things in the pantry. I’ve had a jar of teff flour on the shelf for over 3 years. I finally made a successful batch of injera and that felt very satisfying! 

Are there changes to the food system that could be made that you think this universal experience might be showing to a broader population than just those who are already concerned with food?I think people are seeing four things: what scarcity feels like, the issues of scale of our agricultural system, seeing the hidden, now essential, workers who get food from the field to their homes, and how being food insecure is not one’s fault and that being hungry doesn’t help you get a job. 

I also think that the rise in interest in CSAs and local food supplies shows that this might be a crystalizing moment for people who thought (not always inaccurately) that the desire for farm-to-table was elitist or only fancy. In a lot of ways, a resilient, local food system that keeps money in a regional economy, is as practical as it gets. I hope that the interest in that doesn’t go away. That we are more and more willing to cut out the noise of spending on stuff and instead spend on food. Does that make sense? 

What are you looking forward to about a world post-isolation?Ironically, after championing home cooking for so long, I’m looking forward to a bit of luxury of eating out. I was talking with a friend the other day about the day that we will get to eat together at our favorite restaurant, he said “doesn’t that sound luxurious?” And it does. The simple act of getting together and eating something I didn’t make and not washing the dishes sounds pretty great. 

Also weirdly, as I’m not much of a hugger, I’m really looking forward to hugging someone who doesn’t live in the same house as me. 

I’m also looking forward to trying to make large structural changes to our world. I hope no one can look at a grocery worker and say “nah, you don’t deserve $15 an hour” etc. The Great Depression led to the New Deal. I hope that we can make big changes to de-stratify our society. So first, dinner out and hugs, and then the real work! 

Alicia: Thank you so much for having a conversation with me. Abra: Thanks for asking. 

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up in what you ate?

Abra: Yeah, so I grew up in Hamilton, Michigan. Well, a little town called Bentheim, which is about—it's on the west side of Michigan, about halfway up the state or, you know, a third of the way up the state. And I grew up pretty rurally. My dad came from a family of pickle farmers, but both my parents were anesthesiologists, so we had this funny mix of farming and medicine in our house.My mom was a really tremendous cook, and so we ate most of our meals at home and it was a mixture of things—everything from a lot of pizza rolls and mini quiches from Sam's Club to, you know, these really amazing home-cooked meals of venison. My dad was a hunter, so we had a lot of game, and my mom went through this period where she got really fed up with having so much game meat in freezers and not eating it because we didn't really like it and so she put a moratorium on domesticated meat. It was kind of that funny mix of some very wild things and some very traditional, like Hamburger Helper, and then some things are straight-up candy.Alicia: So what does being a pickle farmer mean?

Abra: Where we live, it's very sandy soil, and so cucumbers grow really well because there's good drainage. We would grow pickling cucumbers, and pickling cucumbers are smaller—the size of the ones you'd see in the jar. They have a slightly thinner skin and a slightly drier interior, so it makes them easier to preserve. So when we had a good year, we would do like three crops. So we'd go in, you know, late May, this time of year, and then come to pick and harvest with a big combine and then redo that ideally three times through, and then in the fall you plant to a cover crop of like rye or wheat.

Alicia: And so when did you decide that food would be your career?

Abra: I don't know that I—I don't know that I guess I made the conscious decision when I decided to go to cooking school instead of joining the Peace Corps. So I had been cooking in restaurants since I was 16. Mostly because every farm kid wants to get a city job, so they don't have to keep doing that—or that’s my experience, and so, yeah, so I had always worked in restaurants and then through college, worked at Zingerman's Deli and had stayed on and cooked with them. And that's where I went from front of house to the back of the house. And I had always assumed I would go into the Peace Corps and then like I had lofty dreams of working for the UN or working with like, you know, all of those things still related to food and food security and health and things like that. And then I was like either Peace Corps or cooking school, and my chef at the time, Roger, said, you should check out Balleymaloe, which is in the south of Ireland. He had done his externship there. And he's like, “you don't need two and a half years of cooking school, but you need some fundamentals that we can't give you.” And so he sent me there.

Alicia: And that was from Zingerman's. Abra: Yeah. Alicia: How is it working at Zingerman's? I'm like a big fan. I have the anarchist business books.

Abra: I mean, I fully drank the Zingerman's Kool-Aid like well into working there. Working there is a dream and it still feels like home. And in fact, one of the benchmarks for success for Ruffage was like I want it to be good enough that Zingerman's would want to sell it, and not just out of personal relationship. And yeah, I mean, Paul Saginaw is maybe one of the most influential people in my life and he's less public-facing than Ari is, but his title’s like the chief spiritual officer, and just all of these ethos of servant leadership, community-based businesses, and I always tell people Zimmerman's was important for me, for a lot of reasons, but one of them was it showed me the why and the how, what I wanted to do, and that was also that transition between thinking like Peace Corps and maybe making a small difference for a lot of people. And what I saw at Zingerman's was making a large difference for a smaller number of people, you know, between paying a thriving wage as opposed to just a livable wage and treating everyone with respect and treating food with respect because it's someone's work, right? All that stuff.

Alicia: And so when did you start farming? Abra: I started farming in 2009. I had gone to cooking school and then moved. Eric [my husband] was living in Chicago; so we were in Ann Arbor at the same time, I went to cooking school, and he moved home to Chicago. And then I moved back and started working at restaurants in Chicago, but my cooking school was on a 100-acre farm, and so it was there that I started to toy with these ideas of making food that was of a place. And so I had kind of been kicking this idea around and then our mutual friends Jess had started farming for Zingerman's. And so he said, I think I want to have a farm, but I want there to be some sort of food component with it, so we started farming in 2009 to give it a go.

Alicia: And how did you find that?

Abra: Great. I mean, it changed my life. And also, I know that I don't want to be a farmer and I have so much respect for people who do because it's, it's a very thin margin work that's very hard and physical and very uncertain. But it fully changed the way that I cook and in a way that I'm endlessly grateful for. Alicia: How did it change your cooking?

Abra: Before farming, I was interested in vegetables but I was still in the, like, big rib-eyes and big things of pork, you know, and then I started realizing the sheer diversity of textures and flavors within the vegetable category. And I was just around it more, you know, so it's like the same thing that when you're in something every day, you get to know it in this other way. And so it gave me a lot of respect for how that food is produced. The onion seeds are some of the first seeds that go in. When you're starting sets to go outside, and they started in February, they go into the ground, you know, in May, or late April. They are in the ground until after the solstice, and then they cure, and so then they're ready to eat, like at the earliest, at least for us, like kind of July-ish, and then they'll last, ideally, until the next round of onions. Like that's an entire year for this vegetable that is like so ubiquitous that it's often like a throwaway thing. And then that's true for carrots and celery, like mirepoix is this thing that was like the baseline and those things take so long to grow. So it was that level of appreciation for it.

Alicia: And so much of your kind of style seems to be vegetable focused—was that a conscious choice or…?

Abra: No, I think it was a form following function and the way that because we were around vegetables and we wanted to tell the story of our farm, obviously, the vegetables were the primary thing on the plate. And then I just fell in love with them. And then also—and I have a story in the book where the first year farming was maybe the poorest I'd ever been because we had put, I put my savings into starting this farm, and I had taken a job at a winery just pouring in the tasting room for extra cash and they needed me to stay on for a couple of weeks before I went back to Chicago when my pie shop job started, because I always help bake pies over Thanksgiving. And so I was, like, eating—we had carrots and kale and some eggs left from our chickens. And so I was eating those three ingredients every night and each meal was different and like really, really comforting and homey but I was also dreaming of, like, all the things I thought that I loved in food like salamis and cheeses and you know, again, and coffee. And then I got home and started eating those things. I just felt like garbage. And then I realized like, Oh, this is how I'm different. Yeah, like, at least I'm appreciating. I don't want to say it because like, I don't ever want to be like, eating vegetables is better for you. Yeah. And like cinnamon rolls, like that's a trope that nobody really needs. Yes. But at the same time, I know that I personally always wake up craving a cinnamon roll. And if I eat one, I don't feel good. But if I have like, a big breakfast salad with some sort of protein in it, like, you know, then I feel good the rest of the day, so I don't know.

Alicia: I feel like I have this conversation on the podcast a lot where like, people are like, they don't want to say that this is better, like make a blanket statement, right? Because why? It's silly to make a blanket statement and we all, you know, eat the cinnamon roll or eat the pancakes and stuff but like that, like the idea that like it matters how you feel.

Abra: This whole, like, wellness movement or whatever. I feel like there's not a questioning of what people are trying to sell you when they're trying to tell you like this hot yellow thing is gonna make you feel better. But at the same time, it also requires people to be deliberate in their choices and to be honest with themselves. And I don't know, it seems very complicated and also like super classist and super like, you know, gender-tailored and all of those things. So, yeah, the shoulds of eating feels really laborious.

Alicia: I have been talking to people about CBD a lot and it plays into all these things that are bad in the way we talk about what we consume. And so there are people who just—there's no real scientific basis for its efficacy in certain things, like maybe in treating childhood epilepsy, maybe it'll help your muscles, but then people are just like, no, it's amazing. It's like an adaptogen. And then like, what is an adaptogen? I don't know, like, I haven't heard about this word yet, but everyone talks about it. It's like, well, it's like putting mushrooms—like people are drinking mushrooms and all these kinds of things. Like, I don't know, just all this stuff people just like, accept.Abra: There's part of me that's like, if it makes you feel better then do it, but that doesn't mean that it's gonna make someone else feel better. And it doesn't mean that it erases the hurdles that other people have to feeling good. Yeah, it's funny. I was just reading something about the placebo effect. And it's still the like, you know, the number one most effective pain reducer is a placebo. And so like, I don't know, there's something there that I haven't like fully thought through. Alicia: People are always looking for a solution to something that's not just eating vegetables. Like, I work at a wine bar and I see people eat, like they'll order these two arepas, and there's like a little arugula, like dressed arugula in the middle, and no one eats the arugula. But these might be the same people who are looking for something somewhere else, but then not eating that. I don't know. I mean, it's complicated to say that vegetables are better, but they are, you know.

Abra: And I do feel like there's, there's gotta be a middle line with that or a middle ground with that, too, where it's like, do what makes you feel good. But also, part of it is to me is like, Is it all just marketing? Alicia: Vegetables don’t have PR.Abra: They don't have a lobbying group. Like, you know, and part of that I think that gets into some of those issues with the larger food system, is that we spend significantly less of our disposable income on food than we ever have in the history of the planet. That’s part of why vegetable farming and dairy, why farming all over is having a harder time: Those raw ingredients, they don't have those marketing lobbies. I mean, there probably is a carrot-growing association, but it doesn't have the weight of a corn or soy. And so I don't know, all of that stuff is really hard. And so part of me says like, yes, buy vegetables because they are better and those farmers need your your dollars. Yeah, I don't know. It's,

there's a lot it's a lot. Alicia: I try and like walk that line of like not being classist about it, because it's difficult, but it's also like, you know, I'm not rich. So it's not like it's not like I'm like coming from some sort of high horse.

Abra: It’s funny how not being rich does put you in the minority in this world. You know, like one of the things I'm thinking about with all of the like, conversations about inclusion is we don't is that we don’t often talk about economic inclusion. And it felt very true to my experience but also notable to me that the entire like first bit of the book is about being like freaking poor. When people are like, “oh, Whole Foods, whole paycheck,” it's like, yeah not if you buy the produce. Though it might be a slightly more than, for us, we have a Dominic's as the grocery store and Mariano's. And it's maybe slightly more than that. But it's also almost all organic. And there's a price associated with that, or, I don't know all those things. And so part of me is like, well, is it actually more expensive? Or is just that the crackers are more expensive, or the toilet paper is more expensive? I don't know.

Alicia: The conversations about class and food are always so complicated, and recently I got into—well, now I'm not tweeting anymore. But someone was like, someone was talking about natural peanut butter, not liking it, and I was like, oh, but if you just turn it upside down like that, then the oil incorporates and they blocked me. And then someone else was like you were food shaming, because I said something about like palm oil being bad, like, I don't know. And it's like, but you know, palm oil, like, is terrible for the environment and for ecosystems and if you're, I think this person was vegan, it's like if you're vegan, like you have to think about these things, right? And like, it's, I'm frankly, like, Smuckers makes natural peanut butter. And it's like, you know, it's not much more expensive, it's totally good and it's more available.Abra: That was a big thing about the book too is like, what are the things that are available across all of these spectrums? Because yes, I love Koeze peanut butter, which is made in Grand Rapids, and it's like, my family always sent Koeze nuts at Christmas, you know, whatever. But it's not available everywhere, and so that excludes people. How for you, I'm curious about your sort of track with veganism and where does it come from for you Why are you passionate about it?

Alicia: I hardly identify strongly as vegan, okay? I vacillate so wildly on this and like, there, there's probably an interview with me six months ago where I was like, vegan vegan vegan. But I feel more strongly identified with vegetarianism right now just in terms of like, the relationship to the farm, like to farms, the relationship and the relationship to an ecosystem and like what needs to happen in order to feed ourselves and like, what's a more honest relationship with that? And I, you know, I do see like, animal-human or animal-farmer relationships as significant and like not always inherently exploitative, right. So it's difficult for me but my, the reason I'm into this is because I just I feel like it's the one way to, I don't know, to always talk about justice in the world, in the food system, and I think I mean spiritually I just can't eat meat; that's just where I am. I don't know what my track is with veganism; it's more of a way to talk about politics and food. It's a way to talk about economics and food. It's a way to talk about labor and the environment and that's what I found in it. And also, just culturally, I've always found it fascinating like even from when I was a teenager. I like many people found out

about veganism through like Moby's liner notes. But at the same time, I was like always, it always seemed like a subculture that was like fascinating and it always has political

ties and so I'm really obsessed with how veganism has evolved from being this hippie thing to be a punk thing to being like more of a wellness thing to be like that. So where veganism intersects with all sorts of different politics and different identities, that's, that's like my, I love that I'm, like, super fascinated by that. But like, in terms of—it's become extremely hard for me to say I'm vegan.

Abra: I am fascinated by that those challenges too, because as someone who's not vegan, you know, like, I, in some ways, you know, I used to, like do a couple days a week at a butcher shop where like, veganism was just made fun of like, so intensely. Yeah, I was like, I don't know. I mean, it seems like if you care about the environment or care about animals, taking that stance feels really brave. Yeah, because it's so—it seems very intense to me. And whereas, like, if people are like, Oh, I don't eat meat because like animals are so cute. And it's like, right, well, you drink milk, right, like they like take the calf from the mother. And then raise it for meat. Like, it's just the nature of it. And so I don't know, it feels like it feels like a very deliberate line in the sand. Yeah, that I really respect.  And then for me, I think that there's a part of being having spent so much time on a vegetable farm is realizing we had hogs and chickens and recognizing their role on our farm for soil tillage and fertility and also, and then also feeling like the exchange felt reasonable. Yeah, like they were safe, they're protected. They were well fed. They were photographed. And so that felt like a reasonable way—that was the exchange. But it's also why it's really hard for me to like—we don't bring feedlot meat into the house. But then like, I still go to mom and pop restaurants because I want to support business or because it's like protecting some of that sort of culture and I know that they're getting Tyson chicken, you know, so,

no, it's super complicated.

Alicia: But yeah, I mean, I just I see veganism as a, you know, a really strong political choice and like—I mean, it's a protest, you know, of exploitative systems. This is how I see veganism. But at the same time veganism has been used in awful ways by right-wing people. There are literally like Nazi wings of veganism.

There's really there's like conservatives who are like, maybe pro death penalty but then vegan and like, like anti abortion but vegan. Veganism can be used in so many insane ways, right? That it's complicated to say, vegan and so, but like I think in my work, what I'm trying to do is figure out the real thing, but I don't know if that even exists. So, but you know, it's like more of a philosophical question. Like, if you're making these choices, they have a logical conclusion

In other ways that you're living your life. And I don't think that that logical conclusion is the death penalty or like, I don't know, like, it makes it exciting but yeah, for me like right now, it's hard to say, especially because I travel a lot now. And so it's hard for me to go into somewhere else and like, make these demands on them, so I just don't anymore. I mean, my only demand when I'm abroad is I don't eat meat anymore, or fish. So yeah, but it’s complicated. 

Wait, so to actually talk about your book? It’s called Ruffage. And I love that word. But like—it's a word that I have always only heard my mom say when you, you were like constipated. I love it. But like, it's always like, for me, it's like you need roughage. Yeah, you're having stomach problems. You need to eat some roughage.

Abra: It's funny because one of the riffs that we had on that when I, our mutual friend, Tim and I were joking about the title or like, kind of going down that rabbit hole is he was like, what about the suffragette movement? He's like, wait, that sounds like a bowel movement.

That's funny that you have that association. Alicia: But so how did you come to that title?

Abra: So it is sort of multifaceted and one, it's just playful, and I feel like a lot of food stuff takes itself very, very seriously. And so it was meant to be sort of light-hearted. And then also it comes from the very first round of dinners that we did at Bare Knuckle farm. It was a friends and family dinner and I was like, my dad is sort of my favorite person to assess food because he's, you know, he's eaten at the French Laundry, he's eaten all these places. He loves food and like food is such a part of our lives. But he also is just like, not part of the food world. So it's a very, like, I like his perspective a lot. So I asked him, I was like, Dad, I'm really looking for critical feedback to make these dinners as good as they can be. And he's like, Well, you know, Abra, it was very good meal. It's a lot of vegetables. And I was like, well, we're a vegetable farm, dad. And he was like, yeah, it's just, it's a lot of roughage. Maybe you could serve some bread. Okay, duly noted. I'll take that into consideration. He's like, everything else is fine. So it's sort of a nod to this idea that vegetables are drudgery and or that it's like purely utilitarian so that you get the fiber or whatever. And so yeah, that was kind of where it came from. and wanting to play against that. I find vegetables very exciting and like fun and all of those things.Then for the spelling of it: Sometimes I feel like I'm like a little bit dim in the world because I always whenever I read that ROUGHAGE I read it as RU-HAGE, even though like I know how to spell rough and like I don't pronounce that weird. But in my mind it never like sounded right so then I looked up with FF and it was like, Oh, this is also an accepted spelling of this word. So I thought it was like, you know how you can spell gray like with an a or an e? I thought it was just like that. And then I didn't realize that it was like, not exactly an equal acceptance.

And so yeah, in my head, this is the spelling.

That's okay. I'm glad to hear that because so many people were like, Can we talk about the spelling of this and like, all of these things. I was just like, I don't know why. And then but also spellcheck kept underlining it like the entire book, and I was like, well spellcheck is wrong

side of the spell check.

The real dirty secret of the title is that we got a dog and my dog like was obsessively eating grass one day at the park and I made a joke. I like oh, the dog is just like me, he needs to eat a lot of grass, ruff-age And he was like, cool. We're going home. And so then it just stuck

in my mind possible that all of this came from like a very bad dog pun. 

Alicia: So how did you decide to do a book?

Abra: So I started writing a food column for the local paper in Traverse City, Michigan, about five years ago, and that was because we were going to the farmers market on Wednesday, which is also when the food section came out. So it seems it was I had always been interested in writing as an English major and enjoy writing and enjoy, like having a different creative part of the food world and not just something you do with your hand. So I pitched it to them and started doing it. And that's part of why the format for the book is what it is. And that that column really allowed me to work through some of these ideas. So it was every week, I would take a vegetable or an ingredient, it didn't have to be a vegetable ingredient, and then talk about like either different preparation techniques, but the same flavor profiles to show like, how is poached asparagus different from roasted asparagus? And what are you trying to achieve out of those two things, or take the same ingredient and the same preparation technique and then change the flavor profiles. So the best example I think it's like the beet salads that are in the book. You know, I always steam roast beets. And so I take those and then whatever you put with them can be as different as you know, something that's very Northern Michigan, Eastern European of smoke, whitefish and beets, and caraway and sour cream, or something that's like apples and walnuts and dairy, fall-ish, or something that's like a, you know, like a curry spice yogurt and chickpeas or something like that, like all of those things that can kind of travel that spectrum. And so that's how it started.

Alicia: And the book is, like, divided by vegetable, which is really cool. How did you kind of decide which vegetables would make it into—like the book is, it's like a tome. It's huge. And like, which is great, and it's like, so beautiful. But um, yeah, how did you decide what vegetables?

Abra: I mostly used the ones that we grew. And so it wasn't, I knew that it was gonna be a Midwestern-based book, so there were things that we don't grow like, at that point. We weren't growing sweet potatoes. Granor Farm where I work now does grow sweet potatoes and so I'm sort of like ruling the fact that there isn’t a sweet potato chapter, but also then it's 465 pages. So Chronicle was like, you cannot. Like there's a whole Brussel sprout chapter that I like, didn't really finish and kind of forgot about it. And I didn't put it into the manuscript. So then I was like, maybe I can just like, sneak that chapter. And they were like, absolutely not. So there's more to come. But yeah, all stuff that we were growing and wanting to really showcase even the most—like things that are usually just a component in something else like garlic, onions, ramps, celery, stuff like that. And so that's how the selection came.

Alicia: And you also have kind of a big pantry section in the book. So what is the significance of the pantry? Like, especially when you're focusing on vegetables?

Abra: Yeah, so I think for me, the pantry serves a couple of different functions. One, it's the ease of preparation. So if you have these, it's sort of like solving an algebraic equation like if you have one variable, which is the vegetable, but everything else stays consistent, it's really easy to get to solve for that. And so having certain things on hand meant that like whatever vegetables you have in the fridge, you can turn it into something pretty quickly. And then also thinking about—I felt really important to me for this book to be inclusive for anybody across class lines, regional lines, and just like access lines, and so I wanted the pantry to be something that you could always get in a small-town grocery store or at like a corner store. ideally, I mean, some things are like wild ric;, I don't know if like your corner store has wild rice or not. But it's a part of all small-town grocery stores where I am. And so wanting to be sure that that list was sort of circumscribed so that it didn't feel like you had to go out and buy a bunch of stuff that you might not use again, or that you didn't have access to. I saw somebody flipping through a book. And they're like, Oh, this looks really good, Calabrian Chilies like no thanks, you know, Calabrian chilies are delicious and beautiful things. And you can also use like crushed pepper from a pizza place, you know. And so wanting to really hone that part of it down and it felt like that needed some explanation.

Alicia: So in your mind what is the biggest misconception that people have when it comes to vegetables? Like you talked about your dad's joke about the roughage, but when people are like cooking vegetables.

Abra: I feel like people still think that they're the work that you have to go through to get to the prize, right? And I wonder sometimes if that's because maybe they're harder to season because there's more nooks and crannies or something like that. Or like they change more with the salt? I don't know exactly, but it seems like often people, I feel like they're not doing it quite right. And so there's like a little bit of a weird resentment there, or just sort of a trepidation about it. So I would say that people feeling confident cooking them, or being excited by them. Alicia: And so how, I mean, you've touched on this, I think before but like, working as a farmer and like, still like being very involved in a farm. How has that kind of influenced your thinking on people who choose not to eat animal products?

Abra: I think it makes me want to be a resource for them. And because I think that there's a natural alignment between people who are growing, you know, plant-based food and people who have consumed that like, so it’s a pretty normal thing but, it is also interesting because I think, and someone asked me recently about like, what do you think being a farmer teaches people about food, and I think part of it is those little acts of celebration and I really believe in that for food, that it's a true privilege to be able to eat three meals a day. And so that like excitement of pulling radishes out of the ground for me directly translates to being excited about having them at dinner. And oftentimes I think another misconception about vegetables is a lot of people will say meat is the star of the plate and I felt that way before I was growing vegetables. And I realized like it's a decentralization play which I really love. And so it's like being excited about the radishes with some sort of like thing to dip it in like you know, butter’s the classic or like something rich like that. And then something like a carrot that's really long roasted and has this like sweetness right out of it and it's a totally different texture than like a tomato and cucumber salad and all of those things can live together and you get to like eat all of them at one time feels so exciting and joyful. And so that also I think tempers like I think you're right about veganism and plant based eating—it has a element of a political act. And there's a joyfulness. Like part of me is like, who cares about this f*****g book; the world;s on fire? Yeah, you know, and I, but then there is this thing where it's like—food is such a balm for so many problems. And it causes a lot of problems too, but it's a way for people to connect and I don't know, that feels really powerful to me. And that's why at  Granor, when we do our dinners, they're all family style. I mean a couple of the courses are plated, but most are family style, and we live in a very purple area and I have heard a handful of times like very heated political conversations, like one end is like talking about Bernie Sanders and the other side is talking about Trump and they still have to pass the platter and that feels like something that we need right now. Absolutely. I don't know that anything was resolved that, like at least treat each other with dignity and that feels valuable. 

Alicia: It does feel valuable. And so what do you think that people who don't consume animal products might be missing from what the reality of a farmer is?

Abra: I mean, I think that there's—I don't know that there is a missing piece. I think that my argument for eating animal products or having animals involved in the agricultural system is that I think that they serve a very necessary purpose. You know, there is a natural fertilization when we had hogs; they did a ton of our tilling and land clearing, chickens, the same thing, pest management, all of that sort of stuff. So I think there is an element of going back to some of those integrated systems. But I also think that we are such a meat-focused and animal-product focused society that I don't, I think that you can be pro animals in agriculture and still not choose to not eat meat without missing out on that. And I do think there's some validity to that argument of if you want to save it, eat it, you know, and like some of these heritage breeds, especially of hogs and cattle, but you can support their production without eating it. I don't know. I think that there's less to be missed out on by avoiding meat products than there is to be very meat-centric.Alicia: I think that's a great distinction. I always have this complicated feeling because I recently interviewed someone who makes whiskey upstate and like, they have their own farm and they're raising like a heritage breed of hog. These pigs that you're raising, you're keeping that kind of breed alive. And also, they're part of the cultivation of the rye that you're using to make the whiskey and it's like this beautiful circle. And it's all about New York State terroir and blah, blah, and like, it's really great. But then I'm like, Oh, wait, but then they're eating the pigs. But yeah, no, but to find that compelling while still not wanting people to eat it. I don't know. It's complicated.

Abra: I think that too, it gets back to you know, making—it's a complicated line, like making choices for yourself and then advocating choices. Alicia: Advocating is the difficult part. Abra: But I don't think that there's I think that also too, one of the sort of on heralded benefits of veganism and also just being plant emphasizing more like, hippie dippie way to say it, but is that there's a care and deliberateness that goes into it, that thought is going to flow along the food chain, right. And I feel that way about farmers too, that like if you have a farmer that has separated their asparagus stocks by thickness, that's a level of attention to detail that is going to carry through to other systems on their farm, and probably means that they're gonna be growing beautiful things. And so if there is a level of care that you make in your food choices, and people see that even if they don't agree with it, it might make them think, Maybe I should be thinking about that. And if everyone ate less meat and better meat, and that was somehow an outcropping of a vegan mind-set, I think that's a great thing. Yeah. And I don't think all of that stuff can happen simultaneously.

Alicia: So for you is cooking a political act?

Abra: Yeah, I mean, I think that everything is. For me, that is mostly manifest around— I've been thinking about this a lot lately, about how do we reclaim the phrase pro-life, right? Because it's such a, like, black and white term. But for me the way that cooking is a political act is that I feel like I am truly pro-life in the sense that I think even the like, most losery lazy person who doesn't work, you know, a person that is like, has no moral compass, still deserves to eat and still deserves to be treated like a human being. And I think that wanting to make food and protect people along that. There's very few of those people quite honestly, I and, you know, the idea of cutting SNAP benefits and making people like prove that they are looking for a job like they're so poor, you know, like, and being hungry doesn't help you get a job and having to like spend, you know, three hours a week trying to upload proof that you're looking—it doesn't help you get a job and doesn't help you get food. And I don't know that stuff makes me like really, really—I'm not a very hot-headed person, and it makes me really angry. And I think about that a lot with rural life, too, because a larger, the larger percentage of the population of rural dwellers are on SNAP than in urban centers. And so the dollar amounts are true, but the percentages, and this idea that we would make it harder for anyone to get food. It is immoral to me. So I think that's how it manifests. And also just waiting to tell the stories of the people who are growing that food and respecting their labor. You know, like 100 years ago, 30% of our population were farmers. And now it's 3%. We have to replace 40,000 farm jobs every year just to maintain the level of farmers in this country. And some of that's because of automation and I get that and there's lots of good technology, technology that can be used. But if people don't understand what that lifestyle is, it feels harder to understand their products, right? I don't know. So those are sort of the ways that that that comes together for me.

Alicia: Thank you so much.

Abra: Thank you for having me. It's a true honor and and yeah, thanks for being interested.

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