From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy

I loved talking to Erin Alderson because I think we have a similar mission that we go about in different ways, and that mission is to just get people to eat more vegetables. (Her recipe-driven way might work a bit better, if her 134K Instagram followers are any indication.)It’s also fascinating to me to hear about those folks who came up in the heyday of food blogging about how self-publishing both has and hasn’t changed. Alderson didn’t approach blogging the standard way, though, by making herself into the main character and putting food second, and that’s why it’s not so surprising that she’s quit that world to put out a recipe zine instead, guided by seasonality and inspired by dinner parties, called Cook Casual.

We talked about how she came to the decision to launch a zine, how she came to be vegetarian, and why she reminds animal-rights vegans about farmworkers. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Erin. Thank you so much for being here, 

Erin: Thanks for having me. 

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

Erin: Yeah.

So, I am originally from the Midwest, I grew up in Illinois, Central Illinois, and was there until I was about 27. I was very surrounded by corn, soybeans, pretty much, was what we were surrounded by. 

And I did not eat the best. It's kind of funny, because I feel people in food are—have all of these rich histories, and they have family members who are really into food. And I ate McDonald's growing up.That was kind of my family. My mom cooked some, but it wasn't a huge part of our household. And so yeah, it was a lot of fast food. And we were always on the move. So it’s, I don't really have this rich childhood history with food. And then, it wasn't until I was really well into college that I started connecting more with food. 

Alicia: Right.

What made you connect more with food? 

Erin: My dad had a heart attack when he was 45. 

Alicia: Wow.

Erin: Yeah, so that was kind of a big wake-up call for our family. My mom's a nurse. And so she was really, already well into trying to bring in more fruits and vegetables into the house and everything. And then finally, when my dad had his heart attack, it was kind of like, ‘Oh, s**t.’ I was 20 at the time, I think? And so, it was definitely a big—’Ok, I need to start taking care of myself more.’ And so, I really dove into eating, just trying to figure out like, ‘Ok, what does my body need?’ It definitely was not always the healthiest path at times, but it's kind of what kickstarted up until now, really.

Alicia: Right. Right. 

And when and why did you become vegetarian?

Erin: So. it was all kind of tied up with that. I wasn't at the start of my journey. But then as I started trying to eat a little bit better, I was kind of realizing—I was like, ‘Oh, I really don’t like meat.’ And so, as I started eating more vegetarian—but being in the Midwest, rural Midwest, my options were really limited. We didn't always have the best produce. Going out to eat, I ate a lot of salad and french fries. [Laughter.] Or mushroom pasta. I feel like that was—it was either/or.

I'd been vegetarian off and on for various different reasons. Just because a lot of that where it was I didn't have access to everything. But when I got out to California, which was about eight years ago, it really started to kind of change even more my perspective on food that had already started in Illinois when I had joined a CSA, but it was a really unique one in that it was a u-pick. And so every week, you would go out and they’d have bags, and you could just really get your hands dirty. And the farmer who ran that was always around, always asking, available for questions. 

And so, that kind of really, again—that was the other push that I needed in a direction to really just fall in love with vegetables.

Alicia: Yeah.

And so, how did you get into writing about food and developing recipes?

Erin: Purely accidental.

I had a LiveJournal in high school. 

Alicia: Me too. 

Erin: Yeah, I think we're about the same age. 

And so, sharing your life online was already kind of ingrained a little bit. And so, when I started trying to eat a little bit better, I was just like, ‘I'm going to share my journey.’ I got a Blogspot. It was called Berry Delicious, right? I mean, really, nothing. 

And I had worked in restaurants. I had been both front of house and back of house. I knew that I really liked food. But I did not ever know that that was a path that I could take, just because I—growing in the rural Midwest, you didn't really know that that was something. 

So, I started the blog as just a way to share random stuff. And then I just kept going with it for whatever reason. I thought I wanted to open a bakery, ’cause, I mean, I feel like that's a lot of people's ambitions at some point in time in life. 

Alicia: Same. [Laughter.] 

Erin: And so, I was sharing a lot of baked goods. There's a group called Tuesdays with Dorie’s where we were baking through Dorie Greenspan's book, one of her books. And it made me realize, ‘Ok, this is kind of a cool community,’ even in 2008, I think it was. And so, I just kept kind of sharing what I was making. And it just continued to snowball. And for whatever reason, I stuck with it, just—I think it was just one of those things. It was my creative outlet during the rest of my college career.

And then when I started to work after college, then I decided that I was like, ‘No, I really want to try and pursue this bakery thing.’ So I started a job at a bakery, getting up at 3 o'clock in the morning to get to work by 4. And after a year of that, I said, ‘Oh, hell no. [Laughter.] This is not me.’ Although, the dream did not die then. 

So, I went back to grad school for music. I always oscillated between music and food. But the blog stayed with me for that whole time. At the end of grad school, I tried to buy a coffee shop and bakery and it was taking—the paperwork was kind of there. And then I got a job to teach college music. And the day after I got that job, the baker was like, ‘Ok, we're ready to move on.’ And so, I just kind of took it like, ‘Ok, this isn't where I'm supposed to be in life.’ So I taught college for two years, but was still writing about food. 

And then at the end of that time, was when I got my first cookbook deal to write about grinding your own flour at home. That was it. That was it for me. When I moved out to California, I was just in food at that point. 

Alicia: Yeah. 

What brought you to California from—

Erin: My husband's job.

Alicia: Oh, ok. 

Erin: We knew nothing. We had no family here. We knew nothing about the area. We just knew that we needed to change, and it was quite possibly the best thing to ever happen. 

Alicia: Awesome. 

When you began your blog in the aughts, it was a big time for lifestyle blogging. You've written two cookbooks, too, but it seems like you yourself, you keep yourself out of the spotlight a little bit. 

I was looking at the about page on your website. And it's about the blog. It's not about the person, which is like such a different thing, I think, with blogging. How did you kind of approach your—and how did it evolve over time, too?

Erin: Yeah, I mean, it was definitely really personal in the beginning. I mean, through many years, actually. Just, again, like you said, it was—that was what people did. 

I mean, there's a lot of conferences that revolve around how to do food blogging, and there's people who write food blogs or blogs about food blogging. And it's always like, ‘Make yourself a personality and make it about you and the food secondary.’ I would try that. I'd be like, ‘Ok, I'm gonna do this.’ You're told, ‘That's how you grow your audience. That's how you make money.’ And I tried it. And I was like, ‘I hate this.’ It made me deeply uncomfortable. 

It's been about the food first. It’s never really about me. And I like it like that. Because also, again, I don't feel I need to share my entire life on the internet. I like having kind of the dichotomy between who I am on the internet and who I'm—I'm the same person, but my lives are a little bit separate. 

It's interesting, because it's—again, things evolve over time. And when I started, it was just about sharing my journey. But then as time went on, it was like, ‘Oh, people can make money from this. Oh, people can make a lot of money from this.’ And that becomes the focus for so much of what you feel you're supposed to be doing, where it's like, ‘Ok, I'm creating content. I'm creating recipes to satisfy Google.’ That's how we end up with thousands of e—or thousands of recipes for basic cashew cream or something like that. Just things that ‘Do I need to reinvent the wheel?’ And I kept feeling this pressure to, just to make money. So, I didn’t like that, either.

Alicia: Yeah. 

And now you’ve—you took time off and now you are launching Cook Casual. Can you kind of tell me how that happened? You took a break, and you decided to launch a new vehicle. And it's really awesome, and people are really into it, it seems. But what kind of inspired this new trajectory?

Erin: So, a lot of it was kind of the burnout from blogging. I knew I wanted to quit for years, like three years ago. My husband had to talk me out of it all the time. I'm like, ‘I'm gonna burn it down. It's time to burn it down!’ It's a lot to run a website. Even just the tech behind it, it can be a little intense. And then on top of not really feeling I'm creating content for myself. I'm creating content to satisfy SEO results. 

And then the other thing that really kind of pushed me over the edge was the partnerships, sponsored content, which is a huge industry. It’s probably one of the main advertising industries at this point in time, because people, they see the benefit of having a personality online say, ‘No, this is the product I use.’ 

I tried to be the most conscious I could about the partnerships that I had. It just got to be over time that even the company was like, okay, no, I like working with you. But it really limits what I can talk about. So if I had a company that was selling grains and flours and all of that, all of a sudden, I felt I couldn't talk about the local products that I was using. Just because then I worried like, ‘Are they going to be mad at me that I'm saying, ‘No, you should also buy flour from this other place?’’ 

And so, it kind of just really got to me where I didn't know what to do. And how to make money anymore, which is not always—I mean, unfortunately, the society we live in is—it’s a little necessary. So it's like, ‘How do I still do what I love?’ At least, I thought I loved, which was really trying just to excite people about eating vegetables, right? 

I don't care if people go vegetarian, right? I want people to eat less meat. I don't want to do it through fear. We're told, like, ‘You have to eat less meat because of climate change. You're all gonna die.’ It just seems very fear-driven. And I mean, I have a 6-year-old. He won't do anything through fear or stuff like that. Positive reinforcement essentially. 

So I stopped the blog, because I was like, ‘This is not sustainable for me. I hate it.’ And so, I just let it be for a while because I was gonna take it offline. But then I realized—I was like, ‘I still use a lot of the recipes on that website.’ So I'm still trying to figure out what—it just sits there. 

And so, I took time off. I wasn't even sure I wanted to come back or do anything, because I was with my son for the past year and a half. 

Alicia: One second. [The mailman came.]

Erin: ‘Kay.

Trying to remember where I was now. I was at home. Yeah, I was at home for the pandemic. Because my son wasn't at school. And so, I was just trying to figure out what comes next. What kind of career do I want? But what I kept doing was just sharing what we were eating pretty much every day, because I was still cooking a lot. I actually feel like I was cooking more during this time. And so, I just kept sharing what I was doing on Instagram. And of course, people on Instagram are always like, ‘Recipes!!!’

I was like, ‘No, I really love being in this space. I love creating food.’ It always comes back to I love creating food that inspires people to eat more vegetables, right? I do want it to be something that is really positive, that's really, that I want people to engage. I want someone to eat something that I've made and say, ‘Oh, this is delicious’ and then go ‘Oh, wait, is this—this is vegan, right?’ To have that realization that you don't need to eat meat to have this beautiful food. 

And so, I kind of kept just trying to figure out like, ‘Do I go back to a blog?’ I tried Patreon for a while. And it just felt like a really weird platform for me. I kind of felt in debt a little bit because it felt like, ‘What do people expect from me on this platform?’ And I could never get a hang on what I wanted everything to feel like on that platform. So, that lasted maybe four months, and I was like, ‘This isn’t for me.’

Ok, so then I decided that I really—I missed print. I've done the two cookbooks. I've experienced what that is, and it's a lot. I know you're writing a book right now. So I feel like any books are a lot. I am a very tactile person, and so I love the idea of holding something in my hands. But the idea of doing another cookbook was just, I don't—for various reasons, didn't really seem what I wanted to be doing. And so I was like, ‘Ok, well what can I do?’ 

And that's how I kind of came to the zine format. because it allowed me to do something tactile that people can hold, but also still give people the digital option. But then using that as a way to support all of the information that I share on Instagram, whether that is kind of off-the-cuff meals. I like to share a lot of articles, because I do think that to be really informed about what we're eating, you need to know what goes into that food. 

Moving to California, that's kind of what changed my entire perspective on everything. ’Cause,

we’re living through climate change right now here. There's a fire that’s right up the road that's destroyed tens of thousands of acres. Every day, we have to check our air quality, because I don't know if I can open our windows or not driving from north to south along the 101. You see all, so much of the food that is grown in California for the rest of the country. And you start to question like, ‘Ok, well, what about those workers?’ Just being in California is being at the heart of a lot of food issues. And to me, it's unacceptable to separate what we eat from those issues. The zine allows kind of my ability to share some of that. 

I think that's—[Laughter.] Sorry, think I went on a tangent there. 

Alicia: No, no, it's really useful to hear that, because I think—it's funny, I'm actually talking to a class at Penn State this Friday that's going to be—it's literally a class about, I think, independent creation. They're now teaching the journalism students how to be their own, I guess, business because everything is so broken. 

And it's really interesting to hear about how someone recovers from burnout, having a successful blog, it becoming not what you want anymore, and how do you go, move on from there? That is a huge question. And I think, I mean, people will think of this work that I would say we both do around food as maybe not as significant as food policy or something like that, where it's—we are talking to people about how to live in your daily life about food. And I think that that's such a significant thing, but it also takes so much out of—it's so much work. It really is so much work. [Laughs.] 

Cause you just started doing reels and stuff, right? Yeah, I hate it. I hate it. I mean, I'm finding a little bit of a creative—I'm finding my own way in it I suppose, but I only am doing it to make Instagram happy. My feed is unrecognizable to me at this point, which I shouldn't have—I shouldn't care about anyway. My engagement is so low, even though I'm doing these stupid reels and they take forever. And so, it's like, ‘Why? What am I supposed to do?’

Instagram doesn't matter as much, I guess. I do recipes, but it's not my bread and butter. And it's more of a bonus thing. And then, people get my essays and interviews in their inbox. So I don't—and that's where I need people to engage, not necessarily on Instagram. But at the same time, I'm not an idiot. I have to be extremely curated on all social media. On Twitter, I'm—I say whatever the hell I want. But on Instagram, it's like—it's just such a weird platform, I think. 

It started out so easy and fun. Now it's just like, ‘Why is this?’ I'll never make it part of my real work. It's bonus content, I guess. I don't have the capacity, nor the interest, to make a slideshow in Canva about different things. But also, I just see it as so ephemeral. And they can change anything at any time. There's no reason for me to invest that much in it.

But yeah, I mean, it's interesting. 

Yeah. Go, go. 

Erin: I kind of felt the same way with the blog, too. Google Search would do updates, and all of a sudden you'd go from getting 100,000 hits from Google Search a month to 50,000 And people would lose lots of money over this, and it was just always this—in Facebook groups I was in, people would be freaking out. Or Pinterest. People drive a lot of traffic from Pinterest, too. I hated the reliance on one platform to do that. 

It's interesting, because I remember being, I think, at IACP, the culinary professional conference a few years back. And people were just bashing food bloggers, right? Because they were like, ‘Well, they're not real food media people,’ and all this stuff. People try to really say, ‘Well, they're not professionals.’ And what I come back to is that, you know, bloggers are meeting people in their home. They're connecting with the people who are cooking meals every day. They have extreme influence. 

And that's one of the reasons, too, that I felt that I needed to start sharing more as well, was because I have people's ears. People trust me. I think that it's important to take that, to not take that responsibility lightly. And so to just move away from all of that—I mean, as much as you can, ’cause obviously social media is still a huge part of any self-promotion. 

Alicia: No, it's really difficult to walk—I don't know, to be a person on social media. 

I noticed you did this. You created a different account for Cook Casual, and—instead of kind of folding it into your own—your account. Was there a reason you made that choice?

Erin: I couldn't change my username. [Laughs.]

Alicia: Ok. [Laughs.]

Erin: Yeah, so once you're verified on Instagram, unless you have an inactive Instagram. 

So, it's funny. So, it's my initials. Ella is my initials. And I regret that every single day. Primarily because there's Deliciously Ella. I'm not sure if you're familiar with her, but yeah, huge, right. And so, I cannot count the amount of times I would get invited to events in the UK because people—I would get confused with her a lot. 

To start fresh, to build something from scratch, I wanted to completely divorce myself from what I was doing, because it—people on the outside probably were like, ‘What is she doing?’ But to me, it felt like such a difference. I needed that switch, I needed to say, ‘No, this is something new. It's something that is not what I was doing before. It's not just a food blog.’ I want to create something that really engages people.

Alicia: Right, right. 

And how did you kind of get to your style? Because people think of vegetarian food—and I think that this is even in contrast to how people think of vegan food—but people think of vegetarian food as like a very 1970s thing. Macrobiotics and just tons of cheese. And not a lot of nuance and freshness. But hopefully that's changing.

But your style is super fresh and vibrant. You share so much about your own garden, that your gar—what you're growing. How did you kind of develop that style not just in recipes, but in photography? How did you develop your gardening skill as well? [Laughter.]

Erin: Full disclosure, this is my first year having an actual garden. I used to do pots. I'd have a bunch of pots in the backyard. 

So it started with that CSA, just because it got me to have my hands in the dirt. It was just something about being able to go out every week and connect with the soil plants and be like, ‘I know where my food is coming from. I'm picking it.’

And then moving to California, I remember the first time I walked into the co-op here. Honestly, I just froze because the produce section was unlike anything I had ever seen before. Anything you could possibly want was in that produce section, and all of a sudden it was like, ‘What is this magic?’ Where I'm at there's, you can pretty much go in any direction and there's the farmers’ market almost every day. And so, just having that proximity to all of this beautiful fresh produce. 

It's kind of like, ‘Ok, well, I'm not going to layer it with a bunch of cheese.’ I don't want to hide it. I don't want to act like I'm trying to hide it from a 5-year-old. I have probably overused the word beautiful too much, but I am just completely inspired by the produce that I want to really showcase it the best I can. And then having that added layer this year of being able to grow my own and really—I’m like, ‘Ok, I need eggplant for this?’ Just walk out to the garden. It's a really freeing feeling to just have that. 

And so, I am really inspired. I love cookbooks. I mean, as you can see, that's pretty much that entire shelf behind me. And I think that one of the—trying to think the right word, access to cultural cookbooks. I think that that is also one of the other things that really pushed my cooking over the edge was that there are so many other cultures that do vegetarian cooking amazingly well. Using different spices and flavors and, or just vegetables in general. So many cultures treat them with such respect and have such great flavor behind them, that it started to really inspire me to kind of blend what I've been doing up until—I really started diving more into cookbooks, and in bringing a lot of that knowledge into cooking. 

And then just, it's odd to think of some positives to come out of the past year and a half. But cooking three meals a day of just stuff that I wanted to cook. Just being like, ‘Ok, what sounds good? What can I make today,’ I think, has really pushed me over into this territory that I can really make my cooking my own and run with it.

Alicia: And what can people kind of expect from Cook Casual that might be different from what they got from Naturally Ella?

Erin: So really, the inspiration behind the zine, it's not—the zine is pretty much purely recipes. Because again, I just wanted that tactile experience. But the way I structured the recipes, I really wanted it to be as though people were coming over for a meal. One of the things I love doing is that when I have people over for dinner, I really make sure to try and balance the meal out. 

I have a really specific memory of when I was at this fancy restaurant downtown and I was going on this farmers’ market tour with the chef, and they brought us back and they had prepared a meal and everyone else got this beautiful fish with beans under it. And I literally just got the pile of beans. And I'm not complaining, I love beans. But it was literally just beans and oil was my main course. And I was like, ‘Really, dude, you couldn't have done-’

It always felt to me that being a bit like the vegetarian meal was always the second thought, right? It was always the like, ‘Oh, what can we shove on a plate for the vegetarian? I'm so sorry, what was the question? 

Alicia: Oh, no, what can people expect from Cook Casual that’s different? 

Erin: And so really how I build out the recipes is it's like I go with a main course and two sides. And I'm always trying to balance texture, flavor, protein, ’cause that was another thing that I always felt lacking in vegetarian meals, right? How am I having a balanced meal? 

And so, I really orient the recipes. There's four sets of three recipes that are meant to—people can make them as a meal. It's how I would serve them. Because I do really try to keep in mind—if I have a rich dish, I want to balance it with something fresh and maybe a bit acidic, and then something that maybe has a little bit of heat to it. And so, the recipes are kind of oriented towards that. But at the same time, they don't have to be prepared like that. 

And then I just try my best to make sure that—because the way I cook is very component based, right? I constantly have all these sauces and other things in my refrigerator. So I want to inspire people to be like, ‘Ok, well, you can make this one thing, but then you can make it five different ways. Using this one thing five different ways and create completely different awesome meals from it.’

Everything I feel like I've been doing comes back to this inspiration side of things, just to be like, ‘It's awesome.’ I want to look at eating less meat as a glass half-full kind of thing, right? We don't need to compare it to the meat dishes, right? It can be its own thing. It doesn't need to be compared to anything. It's completely just live like this. 

My son and I have conversations about the idea of eating meat. So, we're primarily a vegetarian household. My husband was not. I remember the first time I made him breakfast with whole-grain pancake mix and made my own maple syrup. He was like, ‘What is this? What is this weird stuff?’ And so, over time, though, we, as a family, have grown into eating this style, to the point of—my son, the other day, he's like, ‘Wait, there are people who eat meat every day? What?’ And I looked at him and I was like, ‘Yeah, dude. Society.’

To realize, though, that change can happen. My husband's like, ‘You can use me as an example that we can eat less meat. And it doesn't have to be a bad experience.’

Alicia: No, for sure. Yeah. 

I mean, I've had that impact on my fiancé as well, I guess, where he doesn't really eat any meat unless someone is eating something he would like in front of him. Then, he’ll share with people. If my family was eating lamb chops, and he loves lamb. And of course, I'm like ‘Uch’ about that. But I can't tell him what to do. 

Of course, the occasional meat, I guess, makes people realize that it's like, ‘Why would I do this every day?’ I think once you make that consciousness shift to ‘I don't eat meat every day of my life,’ when you do eat meat a couple of times a year: Why would I need to do this every day? This is enough.

Erin: And you know, too, I think that it really helps with the idea that when you do eat meat, it should be something that is special. 

Alicia: Special, yeah.

Erin: Yeah. And it should be treated as such. And you should source it as such.

I have a lot of respect for people who buy whole animals and—if you're going to eat meat, do it well. And I have a lot of respect for that. Because again, I'm not naive to think that we're gonna be a planet who doesn't eat meat. 

Alicia: Same. [Laughs.]

Erin: Yeah, right. 

And so, I actually really love seeing when people talk about that. And there's a dairy that I get some yogurt and halloumi-like cheese from. And they're very much trying to steward the land. They talk about that. You can tour. I want to see more transparency, and more support of farms that are doing that, whether that's meat or dairy or eggs or any animal product. Just because I think that that's really the key forward or the path forward. 

Alicia: Yeah, yeah. 

And I've noticed that you use your platform a lot to talk about different political and social justice matters. I saw you respond in real time to some criticism, that was—it was really interesting. And it's funny, because I think I talked to my friends about when that happened. And we were like, ‘Oh, wow, she's really cool’ about you. 

The food world is really conservative, and really, sometimes sort of anti-political in some ways, or apolitical. And people really try to keep those things quiet, despite how much these things are tied to our foodways and our ways of cooking and our ways of talking about cuisines.

And so, how did food and politics become connected for you? And how did you decide to kind of be open and transparent on your platform about your own politics and concerns around social justice?

Erin: I think again, moving to California really played a key role in that. Just because, again, I feel to be here, it's really hard. You can't ignore it. I mean, you can. People do. 

There's many different facets to why I've chosen to do that. The other one was, I know that this tends to be something that people get really frustrated with me about. When I say I actually have a problem with people who are really, really on the vegan train, animal-rights style. Because I'm like, ‘Ok, great. I'm all for animal rights. But what about the farmworkers?’

It just seems to me we throw away a lot of other things that are really important. Because  without farm workers, we don't have our food. We're in a huge drought right now in California. Many of the reservoirs are at the lowest they've ever been. Groundwater is drying up. There's communities that don't know how much longer they're going to have water. 

And agriculture here in California, I think, accounts for something like 40 percent. I like throwing out statistics, but not always know the exact amounts. I think it's around 40 percent of water usage on a given year. And so people are always talking about like, ‘Well, agriculture needs to use less water,’ but at the same time, it's—we're feeding people. What is happening here?

And so, for me to be living here, it just kind of felt wrong to not share about it. Because I know when I lived in Illinois, I didn't really pay attention. When you're not in a space, it's much easier to ignore what's happening, for better or worse. 

I already had this audience that in some way already does care about food, right? They follow me because they're either trying to eat less meat. They just want to eat more vegetables. Any of this stuff, right? They are people who are already looking at the way they're eating. And so, I felt like I could continue to provide more information to really get people to think more about ‘ok, well, so you're thinking about what you're eating. Now, let's talk about where it comes from, the transparency behind that.’ I think that's such a big thing, because it's so easy to just assume we're always going to have these things. But that's not necessarily the case for many reasons. 

So yeah, I think that it's really important to talk about that stuff. And yeah, it's not always popular. Because people don't really want to be challenged. A lot of people don't want to have to think about it. They have the privilege to not to not have to think about it. And that's tough. Because I think pretty soon we're all going to have to think about this, as climate change continues to change how we view the world. How we grow things. I know that there's a lot of farmers right now who are struggling. I've just read, I think, an article recently about almond orchards. They just walk away from the land. There's no water to do anything. 

I think that as we go forward, it's only going to be more important to know about these things and what's going to happen and any ways that we can kind of help to maybe mitigate that.

Alicia: Sure. 

And this is wildly different topic. But I wanted to ask you about pizza and how you got into making pizza, because you make the most gorgeous pizzas. And I really want to get one of those ovens. But I haven't taken the plunge yet. [Laughs.]

Erin: I love cooking with fire. And that's one of those things that I feel I wasn't always—it's not something that I would have just randomly picked up. Especially, I feel anytime anyone sees a woman cooking over fire, they're like, ‘What is happening here?’

And so, I had already kind of started really getting into making pizza. It's something that we eat weekly. There wasn't really not a great pizza place near us. And so, it was kind of a necessity to try and figure out like, ‘Can I make something delicious here?’ And then I started researching the oven, and I was like, ‘I'm just gonna do it. I'm just gonna do it. It sounds like fun.’

And I regretted it for about six months. Because I was like, ‘This is horrible. I can't figure this out at all.’ Since it’s something that we do week after week, I just kept figuring it out. And now, it's my favorite thing that I look forward to every week, just ’cause there's something really fun about throwing wood in the back of an oven and churning out a pizza. 

People love pizza. And so, it's a really easy way to also show people creativity in vegetarian cooking. My pizzas are not traditional. I will throw that out there. My pizzas are not traditional. But I think that it can be really fun to play around with toppings and ingredients and the seasonality behind it. 

It's an easy way to show cooking in a seasonal setting, and kind of get people excited. Because people—it's so funny. I feel I should just become a pizza account, because those were the most engaged posts on my Instagram because people love pizza. And so I found it a really easy way to showcase kind of, again, more inspiration for eating vegetables. 

I'm like, ‘Do you need the oven? No, you don't. You can make great pizza in your regular oven. Is it a lot of fun? Hell yes, it is a lot of fun.’ [Laughter.]

Alicia: Well, I think you've sort of answered it, but I'll ask anyway. For you, is cooking a political act?

Erin: So, it's so funny. When I read that question, I just kind of chuckled because I know over the past year and a half in food media, it seems like people are like, ‘Well, duh. Why would you need to say that?’

But it's interesting, because anytime—it kind of goes back to what you talked about, what you asked about earlier, where it's anytime I post stuff that's not necessarily directly related to food. It could be something like immigration, right? People are like, ‘Why are you talking about this? Stay in your lane. Stick to food. Yeah, yada.’

But at the end of the day, so much comes back to food. Obviously, immigration is tied to food. And so, yes, food is extremely political, I think, because of where we're at across the board. And I think that's why it's important to keep talking about it as such. I think a lot of people in food media know it is, but to the average person who is just a home cook, they haven't made that mental switch yet, necessarily. They haven't looked at something that they're cooking and been like, ‘Ok, what all goes into this?’ 

And so, I think it's really important to continue talking about food through that lens. Because I think the more we do, the more we can change, kind of potentially have impact, essentially, because demand drives supply. And so, the conglomerate food companies aren't going to change until people demand it. And so, I think the more that we can get just the average home cook to be thinking about this stuff, I think the better chance we have at some sort of impact. 

Alicia: Yeah. 

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat today. 

Erin: Yeah, thank you for having me.

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

I was wildly excited to get to chat with Dr. Hanna Garth, professor of anthropology at Princeton University, when I had just finished reading her brilliant book Food in Cuba: In Pursuit of a Decent Meal, which has already seeped deeply into my thinking. It reframes what we consider adequacy versus cultural identity and social needs, and shows precisely how deep our human need for not just having our nutritional but our cultural needs met goes. It’s simply fabulous, and Garth’s empathy and rigor make for a really riveting read.

The intersection of food’s political and pleasurable role has been a point of her life and research for years. In this conversation, we talk about how food media could better address nutrition, how Cuba came to rely on imported food, and more. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Hanna. Thank you so much for being here today. 

Hanna: Hi, thank you for having me. 

Alicia: First of all, I just wanted to say, Food in Cuba has been such a great book to read for a million reasons. Academic writing can be so difficult, as we all know, and you really create characters and scenes. And you draw the reader in, and you do that work to bring the reader into a place where they can really engage with what you're saying. And I just wanted to say thank you for that. [Laughs.]

Hanna: Thank you for saying that. That's so nice to hear. That was one of my goals with this book, was to be able to have non-academic people feel that they could be pulled into the book and get a lot out of it, even if they don't care at all about the nitty-gritty or the academic concepts.

Alicia: Right, right. 

No, you really do a great job. And I've been reading so much academic work ’cause I'm working on my own book. And I've had to read so many books about meat that are just very, very dry.

And I’m like, ‘Just give me something.’

But anyway. [Laughs.] Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Hanna: Yes. 

So I grew up in a relatively small town in Wisconsin. So, I'm from the Midwest. And I lived in town, but it was kind of a rural community. So a lot of farmers in the area. 

And in my household, we ate what I thought of and probably still think of as standard American lower middle to middle class fare. So for lunches, we would have Kraft mac and cheese, grilled cheese sandwiches with Campbell's tomato soup, ham and cheese sandwiches, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. My dad always made lunches ’cause he was—he worked nights and he was at home with me during the day. So he would always include carrot slices and apple slices next to those things to have a little variety. 

And dinners, we would have probably more traditional Midwestern stuff. So I don't know if you know about tater tot hotdish or hotdish. So it's basically just cans of a bunch of stuff poured together into a casserole dish, and then put tater tots on top of it and cheese and bake it. So it's really bad for you. But it's pretty delicious. 

So yeah, we would have stuff like that. And I remember both of my parents making fried chicken. They made it in different ways. My dad would make a beef stew. We would have tuna casserole, a lot of casseroles. Spaghetti with Bolognese sauce 

And we mostly ate at home. And we didn't really go out to eat very much. And when we did, it was to the same three or four local restaurants. That was basically what I ate growing up.

Alicia: I love hearing about casseroles, because I don't—I grew up on Long Island. So it was more Irish, Italian, Greek people. And so, I didn't grow up with a casserole. So I'm always like, baked ziti is the closest thing I understand to being a casserole. But I love to hear about them, because it's like this fascinating world that I never got to experience. [Laughs.]

But what made you interested in food as an area of study?

Hanna: Yeah.

Well, so it's something that has been kind of always a part of my life. So like I said, I grew up in a town that although we lived in town, it was surrounded by rural farming communities. And for instance, there on the local news every night, there's a farm and agricultural report. And it was common for people to be talking about things like the price of milk or the price that a farmer could get for selling milk and the price of a gallon of milk in the store. Or for people to talk about, like, ‘How is the corn crop doing this year? Is it too short or too high? Is there going to be a flood that's gonna ruin the crop?’

So those kinds of conversations and that kind of thinking was always part of my life growing up. And although we lived in a town we, for instance, I purchased my — my parents bought my clothes when I was a kid at a store that also sold tractors. So, an idea of how farming was an integral part of my life. 

And then also my mother and my grandmother were really into gardening. My grandmother gardened for subsistence, so she was hardcore about making sure that she took care of her garden all summer long so that she could have enough food to last through the winter. And I experienced helping her a little bit with the garden. I wasn't that active in it, but sort of thinking about connections between food cultivation and what we eat. 

I became interested in thinking about it more intellectually, kind of more as a personal interest. I started reading these food books that were coming out in the 2000s. So books by Michael Pollan, his book, Omnivore's Dilemma was really influential for me. This book calledAnimal, Vegetable, Miraclewas also really influential. I also started reading chef's biographies at the time. So I was particularly interested in women chefs and how women were sort of breaking into this masculine space to sort of take over in a different way. 

It wasn't really until I started graduate school that I realized that these things that I was personally interested in and passionate about could be the thing that I studied for my doctoral work. And once that all clicked together, I was like, ‘I want to pursue a PhD. And I want to study food and study how people sort of integrate food into their lives.’

But then also, I was really interested in food access and food inequality. There were times when I was growing up when my family went through periods where we didn't have a lot of money. Sometimes we would have no money, and he would go to the change pile and count the, count out coins. And then we would go to the day-old bread store and buy—you could buy a loaf of bread there for like 50 cents or 25 cents, and then go somewhere else and buy a pack of bologna. And he knew where you could find a pack of baloney for like $1, $1.25. And that would be our household’s lunch for the day. 

And as a kid, I was like, ‘That was just kind of a normal thing.’ And it wasn't until I got older that I was like, ‘Oh, wow, that was kind of intense. That's food insecurity.’ But also, I was always really impressed with how resourceful my dad was in sort of getting it together and making sure we had something to eat. That's the kind of question that I became interested in studying.

Alicia: Right.

And your writing really balances the frustrations of various food systems, but also that joy that people need to take in food in order to have a full life. And I noticed in your Twitter bio, you identify as a foodie. How do you personally balance your—that need for personal pleasure in food, that joy in food, and the way food has such a strong political and economic status and role?

Hanna: Yeah.

One thing that I've found in my own life, and it—with the families that I've worked with in Cuba and the families that I'm now working with in Los Angeles is that food across those settings is really important for people to connect with other people. So to connect with their family, whether that's their immediate family, people who live in their household, or to connect with their ancestors, their grandparents, great-grandparents, to connect with what, how they understand their ethnicity, their race, their nationality. 

And so what I argue in basically all of my work is that food is never just about caloric intake and nutrients, but it's always inflected with some kind of social and cultural meaning and importance. So for me, I understand that the ways that I connect to food are—so food’s political role is about my ability to be able to access the food that I connect to in this social way. And so, I take a lot of pleasure in making my grandmother's fried chicken recipe, but also making slight variations on it to make it my own and to make it more suited to the taste of my family. So this is the kind of thing that I feel balances this food as political and my identity as a foodie. 

I’ll also say that one of the things we did growing up was, I—although I lived in this small town, every once in a while, I don't know, maybe four or five times a year, we would go into Minneapolis, which was the closest city. And for my family, one of the really important things we did on those trips was to eat at restaurants that had foods that were unavailable in my town. So we would eat at Greek restaurants, Ethiopian restaurants, all kinds of Asian restaurants that we didn't have like Korean, Vietnamese, Thai. And for me, food then became this sort of vehicle of global connection, of cross-cultural appreciation of other kinds of ways of eating, other flavors on your palate that you don't experience in the food that you eat every day. 

And so, that's part of my foodieness. I'm always seeking out delicious food and delicious flavors, no matter where those things come from.

Alicia: Right, right. 

And you have a master's in public health I read, as well as your PhD in anthropology. And this gives you that, what you were just expressing, such a unique and multifaceted perspective on food. 

And in food media, in particular, we often shy away from discussing nutrition, despite how it's very significant when we're also discussing access, discussing systemic discrimination, food system inequities. Because there's this concern that if we talk about anything about nutrition, we're going to get into fatphobia. We're going to get into classism. I've been struggling myself with figuring out, ‘How do I address these sorts of things that are so significant without falling into getting criticism on that level?’ And I mean, I think it's possible, obviously.

But how, in your work, have you been able to address nutrition as an important matter around social equity and food when health is so personal for people?

Hanna: Yeah, I think that's a really good question. And I appreciate your vulnerability, how, it just—it opens you up to a particular kind of scrutiny. 

So, ok, people think of nutrition as a ‘real science.’ But nutrition science actually is something that's constantly evolving and constantly changing. If we look back in the past just a little bit, we can see how wrong we were just like 20, 30, 50 years ago, about food consumption. 

And we can also see how much the food industry has influenced nutrition as a science. So we have early nutritional studies that were funded, paid for by food lobbying groups. So they might have been paid for by the dairy industry, they might have been paid for by meat producers. Those early studies really, really influenced the ways that we went for nutrition. So something as simple as thinking that red meat consumption would cause heart disease. That's something that's being torn apart right now. And it's something that we're starting to see that the science really was not very clear on. Or dietary fat consumption, for instance. 

I think about nutrition as something that is ever evolving and changing and that we're learning more and more about it. And that it's actually really important to understand the settings of people's everyday lives and what people are actually consuming, and how that contributes sort of back to our understanding of nutrition. 

So, I think it's just cool or tragic, depending on how you think of it, to see that nutrition is actually open to scrutiny. It's not this ‘you must follow the food pyramid’ or ‘the food plate,’ whatever the USDA is telling people now. 

But at the same time, I think it's also really important to have to be empowered with a little bit of basic nutritional knowledge. So to understand what our basic macronutrients are. So, what is a protein? What is a fat? What is a carbohydrate? And to think about the building blocks that we need in order to function on a daily basis. If I'm sort of assessing what someone's eating, I might make note that this—someone's eating a lot of carbohydrates, and they're maybe not getting enough dietary fat or protein in their everyday food consumption. 

Those are the kinds of things that then I can connect that with social equity issues and access issues related to health. Most of us know that eating refined carbohydrates is the cheapest and quickest way to fill ourselves up. But often, refined carbohydrates don't provide us with all of the nutrients that we need for basic functioning from anything from the ability to use our muscles to the ability to use our brains properly. 

So when I start to see families that have, that are unable to purchase the variety of macronutrients that they really should be having in order to be able to function, then I can talk about how the syst—the structural systems are in place that are making it so that they can only afford to subsist on and barely function on the cheapest foods that are available in our system. And that is linked to a whole long history of lobbying in our federal government, the way that our farming and price supports are structured, as well as what people are calling food apartheid, so a separate and unequal type of food system. 

Alicia: Right. 

That's so great to have that. [Laughs.] And to kind of switch gears towards your books, specifically Food In Cuba, specifically Food and Identity in the Caribbean, which you edited. To start off, why did you choose to focus on Cuba as the site of your field research?

Hanna: Yeah. 

So, there's two prongs to the answer to that. One is personal and one is academic. The personal part is that Cuba was the first place that I traveled to outside of the United States. I traveled there the summer after I graduated from high school. I went there. I had become sort of enamored with socialism and the idea that this was a wonderful place where people had access to free education and low cost housing and free food. 

And then when I got there, and I started talking to people, people were like, ‘No, it's terrible here. We wish we were in the United States, where you have these other opportunities.’ And I, as a young person, was just very perplexed by that. It was confusing to me. And so, I kept sort of pursuing this question of why people who have access to all of these things that I didn't have free access to, and they—why they focused on the difficulties and the complexities of those systems and why they sort of wish that they had something else. So, that's the personal pull for why I kept doing the research. 

And then, the academic reason is that it's fascinating that Cuba is the only place in the world that still has a food rationing system for every single resident. So they provide a basic amount of food for everyone, regardless of your status as a wage earner. You don't have to qualify for food stamps or EBT,. You just are given basic, what you would basic—what we would call a basic breadbasket. And so that, in and of itself, is an interesting question. It's the only place that still does that. And it does a lot to prevent severe forms of malnutrition and hunger. And so, that was what drew me to doing research there.

Alicia: Right. 

And you've also worked more broadly on food and identity in the Caribbean and Latin America. Why are these places of particular interest? I know, you're going to be coming to Puerto Rico soon, too. [Laughs.]

Hanna: Yeah.

Well, I mean, I think I'm interested in particular sets of colonial histories that have impacted the region. So a shared problem of being the location of extractive capitalism for European colonialism, and then for American occupation. That's a very long history, but that long history has a really complicated and ongoing impact on basic things like food access across the region. So that shared historical foundation has led to both these complexities in food access, but also similarities in terms of cuisine. 

So I'm fascinated by little nuances between the islands of different things that have become the traditional dish or more widely consumed, even if it's something as just the different way that a plantain is prepared. So it's that kind of cross between the foodie in me and the social scientist in me is what makes me interested in the whole region.

Alicia: I love the idea of looking at it more gastronomically, and those impacts too, obviously. 

And in reading your book, Food in Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal, it gave me so much to think about. Because I had this—of course, so many other people on the left—this idealized vision of what Cuba, what eating and being in Cuba would be like. And living in Puerto Rico, we—there's so much writing about how 85% of food is imported. And I've done this writing, too, but before I lived here, and then when I live here, I experience so much abundance of foods and just so much sharing and generosity in food. And whether people have just their own garden, or they have a farm, there's just—there's so much food here, grown here. It's just really that contrast between the official kind of line and the actual lived experience has been such an interesting thing to understand. 

And because Cuba, as you wrote, is so dependent on imports. I really was shocked by that. Yeah, I just, I thought it would be this—a similar sort of situation to Puerto Rico, at least in terms of smaller farming. Because there's that poem from the 1800s, two wings of the same bird. 

So, can you explain sort of why Cuba has been dependent on imports and what agriculture does look like on the island? And how that shapes what people eat? What is agriculture like? Is their agriculture outside of state control? 

Hanna: Yeah. 

What is it, two wings on the same bird?

Alicia: Of the same bird? 

Hanna: Ok. two wings of the same bird. 

I think it's true. There's so many similarities between Puerto Rico and Cuba. And one thing, right, were that they both started as these sugar growing plantations, societies based on chattel slavery of enslaved Africans. And that they were seen as places that were producing sugar, producing sweetness for the rest of the world. 

Then sugar brought a lot of money. So it made sense to build an economic system off of sugar, but also that whole economic system was supported by free enslaved labor. So Cuba continued to heavily produce sugar, basically, all the way until really now. 

Between the late 1800s and the 1950s, Cuba had sort of preferential trade agreements with the United States. They produced a lot of sugar that was exported to the United States. And then when Cuba became socialist and the United States embargoed trade, shortly thereafter, they made geopolitical agreements with the Soviet Union. And so, they were able to preferentially trade sugar for all kinds of goods, anywhere from weapons to canned foods. 

And when I say preferential trade, I mean that the Soviet Union gave them a better price than the price on the market. So that reliance, because the early socialist system was built on that reliance, and it really was not until the collapse of the Soviet Union, or a little bit in the 1980s, that Cuba started to try to develop a more robust agricultural system. 

People in Cuba and elsewhere say that it's really because of that reliance, that Cuba's domestic agricultural production system was never fully developed. And then the problem was that when they tried to develop the agricultural system, it was the 1990s. It was their worst—possibly now, their second worst—economic crisis. And so, there were no inputs. There was no fuel. There were not tractors there. It was too difficult to develop domestic agriculture at that time.

Between the 1990s, and now, there have been all kinds of efforts to increase domestic agricultural production. And a lot of those things have happened. But they haven't happened maybe in the way that we might imagine. 

So one example is that Cuba has increased their ability to process food on the island. So instead of importing fully processed goods, they import raw goods and then process them themselves. Instead of buying pasta, they buy wheat, and they turn it into pasta. Or instead of buying oil, they buy soy and they process it into oil. So that's been a huge form of development, domestic development that they've done for themselves to decrease the cost of their imports. 

And then they've also developed a domestic poultry industry. More of the eggs that are consumed in Cuba come from Cuban chickens, and more of the chicken that's consumed in Cuba comes from Cuba. Meat is still heavily imported, actually. 

So when they give you the numbers of what the imports are in Cuba, it does fluctuate anywhere between 65 percent to 85 percent of what's consumed on the island is imported. And that's mostly staples and meat. But all the foods that we think of as the sort of tropical abundance foods like fruit, certain vegetables, tubers, which are viandas, really very important to Cuban cuisine. Those are produced domestically. Those are also abundant. 

So when people talk about ‘There is no food in Cuba’ or ‘There's not enough food.’ They're not talking about a lack of mangoes or plantains. Those things are all over the place. They're seasonal, though. So you can’t get a mango when it's not mango season, of course. Or you can't get an avocado if it’s not avocado season. But all those kinds of things are produced domestically. 

The state agricultural production system has fluctuated a lot over the last 20 to 30 years in terms of whether farmers are allowed to—So farmers have to sell a certain amount of food to the government. And then once they meet that quota, sometimes at different historical periods, they're allowed to sell that food directly to consumers. Or other times, they've sort of clamped down on this and not allowed farmers to sell directly to consumers. 

And part of that has to do with whether or not the farmers are asking—whether or not the farmers are using a supply and demand sale system. And then the price of those foods goes up. So Cuba systematically wants to prevent this sort of capitalist forms of price inflation. Usually, with selling surplus agricultural products, that doesn't happen, because everything is so seasonal. 

So, it's hard. If you're selling avocados during avocado season on a supply and demand price system, they're not going to be overpriced, right? But if you've got the first avocados of the season, or the last avocados of the season, you can get really good prices for those if you're using supply and demand system. 

And they've done all kinds of other things to sort of shift how people are able to access food depending on the political moment that Cuba’s in and depending on the abundance of food that they're able to buy on the global market. 

Alicia: Right, right. Interesting. [Laughs.]

Hanna: Sorry, that might be too-

Alicia: No, I loved it. No, I love it. No, that's really useful to understand. 

[Laughs.] I was just curious, reading your book where I was, I guess I was curious about the viandas. [Laughs.]

Hanna: Viandas are generally produced domestically. There are a lot of fluctuations seasonally that people will find really frustrating. So there will be periods where there's only one, there's only malanga and you can't find any other kind of tuber. And people get really frustrated. Potatoes and sweet potatoes are kind of—they're kind of luxury goods. They're a little bit more rare. And sometimes, the season of potato and sweet potato is very short. And people get very few in the year, and they find that really frustrating. 

Alicia: Oh, wow. Wow. 

It's interesting, ‘cause yucca is definitely all year here. There are things that are seasonal, but also it's funny, because there's so many—obviously, probably the same in Cuba. I'm not as familiar with the terrain.

But the microclimates here mean that one farmer who's a little higher up will have kale for only a little while and then one farmer who's more in another microclimate will have kale all year, and it's just you have to know where to go to get the, which thing that is all—it's just really interesting how the the microclimates create that sort of situation of like, ‘This might be overabundant all year, but this thing you're going to have to grab one week that it's available.’ And people don't think of the tropics as having really climates. They're just like, ‘Pineapple and mango all the time. [Laughs.]

Hanna: Yeah, there's definitely microclimates and seasons in Cuba as well.

There's been climate change effects on agriculture. So in eastern Cuba, where I work, it's been in a drought for the last five or six years, although recently there was more rain. So that drought really did affect agricultural production, because there aren't—there are not robust systems of irrigation, right, because there hasn't historically been drought. So, it has a really big impact.

Alicia: No, for sure. 

And I wanted to ask, because I think it's such a significant framework, about the decent meal. Can you explain that concept a little bit to people who haven't read your book yet?

Hanna: Yeah. 

So, I'll tell a story, I guess. One of the families that I was trying to work with early in my research was explaining to me, they kept saying, ‘There is no food in Cuba. We don't have any food. We don't eat food in this household.’ I was visiting them, and I was seeing them eating food. So I was like, ‘I'm confused. Why are you telling me there's no food when you're literally eating food?’ The woman from the household was like, ‘No, no, no, no, this isn't food. I'm eating spaghetti with some marinara sauce on it to fill myself up. But that's not food. I have some rice that I just put a fried egg on top of, but that's not a meal.’

And so it took a while for people to explain this to me over and over again, that when they said they didn't need any food, or they hadn't had food in a long time, what they meant was that they hadn't had what they consider to be a decent meal or real food. So that, for them, means a full meal that has all of the categories of different nutrients and different types of food that they're, that they believe they're supposed to have, based on historical, familial, social understandings of what is appropriate to eat. 

So in the case of where I work, a decent meal would always have rice, beans—the beans can be any kind of beans—some kind of meat. Preferably, a lot of meat. [Laughter.] Tubers or viendas prepared in any way, but they just need to be present. And then, some kind of salad or vegetable, could just be like a couple tomatoes, some avocado, a little bit of lettuce, whatever. But it has to have some sort of vegetable accompaniment. And then, to eat all of those things in a particular way and make sure that they're sort of plated in this particular way.

So in Cuba when people eat not real food, they call it sancocho, which here means like dog food. Means like pig slop. So your food should not look like sancocho.

Alicia: Oh, wow. 

Hanna: I know that's very different from other places,

Alicia: Yeah. [Laughs.] No, that's so interesting. Yeah. 

Hanna: It became really important for me to understand that, because if I didn't understand what it was that people thought of as a real meal or a decent meal, I might have just taken them in the literal sense that there was no food or they hadn't eaten any food. And I might have assumed that they were starving or having nutritional deficiencies. They might be having nutritional deficiencies, but they're definitely not starving. So, there's other stuff to eat that's available, but they just don't consider that to be real food. 

Alicia: Right, right.

That is interesting, especially the sancocho because that's so different from my understanding of sancocho is this really hearty and a sign of love. That's interesting. 

So what are you working on now? What's next for you in your work and research?

Hanna: Well, yeah, so I'm really excited about my next projects. I'm starting two new projects right now. 

One is building off of the work that I've been doing in Los Angeles. And it will be looking at families that used emergency food programming during the pandemic. And after those programs have been taken away, how those families are readjusting to having to purchase food, when maybe their home economic situation hasn't changed but the emergency food supply has gone away. So I'm just putting in, getting the permission to start doing the interviews for that work. And I'll be doing that over the next couple of years. 

And then I'm also going to be starting a project that will be based in Puerto Rico, but will be multi-sided throughout the Caribbean, which will be looking at fish. So local fish consumption, and local artisan, fisher people. 

So, one of the things that constantly comes up when I talk about my research in Cuba, audience members always ask, ‘Well, it's an island. It's surrounded by water. Why don't they just eat more fish?’ And there's multiple reasons for the answer of that question. But I just really want to dig deeper into histories of fish consumption, culturally appropriate fish consumption, and then some of the really climate change and environmental impacts that have caused a reduction in the availability of edible fish in the region.

Alicia: Oh, that's so great. That's really fascinating. And that's gonna—because it's true. People here are like, ‘Where's the seafood?’ And it's there. And there are a lot of chefs preparing whole fish and everything that's local. People assume a culture of just abundant fish everywhere, and shellfish and everything. And it's like, ‘Well, there's like-’ There's so many reasons why that is not the case. 

One thing that's really indirect because I don't eat fish, but I eat oysters. And so the local oysters here, it's a very interesting case of the microclimates in the ocean itself, where it's in this—in the southwest, the oysters are really small, but really good and high salinity. And if you get them in the northeast, they're bigger, but they taste, to me, terrible. [Laughs.] Because there's no salinity, and it's just—oh, it's just the pure texture of an oyster. It really needs a lot of pique and everything. I'm going to be fascinated to watch what your work is in that. 

And today, you're going to be the first person to get a new final question for these interviews. [Laughs.] So I wanted to ask, how do you define, for yourself, abundance?

Hanna: Abundance? 

For me personally, abundance would mean never having to worry or fear that it’s, it won't be there. So just always knowing that something is there. And so, I think that could be applied to material things, but also, sentiments, or time, which obviously, time is not going to be abundant for forever. [Laughter.]

Alicia: Awesome. 

Well, thank you so much, Hanna. This has been really great. 

Hanna: Yeah, thanks. This has been great.

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Listen now | Talking to the author of 'Food in Cuba' about how agriculture works on the island, what makes for "a decent meal," and more.

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People assume I’ve interviewed Tunde Wey—the artist, writer, and cook whose work has been the subject of other people’s award-winning profiles—before because I’m a big public fan of his work, but I hadn’t felt myself properly prepared. His work touches on everything from racism to immigration to colonialism to capitalist extraction, and I didn’t really know my way into a focused interview. I was nervous, basically. But I think we had a good conversation, one that gets at a lot of issues with food as a lens toward bigger systems and problems.

In many cases—most cases, if I’m honest—I’m doing an interview in order to work out a problem I’ve been thinking about, and this one was no different. We waded into whether food can really be an agent of change in a capitalist world, because I’ve been wavering on that idea myself, and Wey has the economic knowledge to discuss why it isn’t so in depth. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Tunde. Thank you so much for taking the time. 

Tunde: Thank you. 

(:07) Alicia: And I know you are in Lagos, now. Can you tell us about how that's going, what you're doing there?

Tunde: Oh, I'm actually not in Lagos. [Laughs.] I was supposed to fly two weeks ago, and my COVID result didn’t come in time. So I just pushed for my flight till a couple of months from now. Next month or something.

Alicia: Ok, cool. 

Well, can you tell us about where you grew up and what you ate?

Tunde: Yeah.

I grew up in Lagos. I ate regional Western Nigerian food, I guess. So I'm Yoruba, so I ate Yoruba food. My mom is Edo, so I ate that food as well. My dad is also part Efik, so I ate that as well. So I'd Yoruba, Efik, and sort of the Delta region food, so Edo, Itsekiri food. And then we ate, I guess, white food too.

Alicia: Which white food? 

Tunde: When we were growing up, we used to call it breakfast things. But when I came here, then it was lunch meats and s**t like that. So sausages and hams and stuff like that. So, we ate that. So it was a mix. 

We usually would eat that on Sundays. My dad would cook, and we'd go out to this store. My data would buy a whole bunch of things, and then he'll cook. Pasta. My mom would mix s**t like beef stroganoff, just random s**t. She went to school in England, so she came back with certain notions around food. So, we have those kinds of things. 

And growing up in Nigeria, I came from a middle-class background. It wasn't out of the norm for folks to eat that kind of stuff. So cereals and pancakes, stuff like that. Plus, we also watched a lot of American television with that kind of stuff on the TV.

Alicia: Right, right. Yeah. 

And you self-identify as an artist, a cook and a writer. And I wanted to ask, which were you first and how did the rest come? [Laughter.] 

Tunde: Which was up first? [Laughs.] 

Alicia: Yeah, yeah. Which identity? Or which came to you first, in terms of your work? 

Tunde: Right. 

I don't know how to answer that question. I feel like it just depends on who I'm, who I am talking to. I think I say I'm an artist because it's just easier to convey what I'm trying to do. I remember, I was trying to raise money for a restaurant. And I was telling people that this restaurant is not going to make any money. And they couldn't understand that. They were like, ‘Huh, what does this mean?’ But then if I was talking to, say, a curator, and I'm like, ‘Well, this project is this and I need this amount of money,’ then they get it. So it just depends on who I'm talking to. 

So I guess in the chronology of what is on public records? Artist came last, and it's probably still not on record. So, maybe that’s the first time.

Alicia: Well, it is difficult, I think, for multi-disciplinary people to use that word, to make themselves legible, I suppose, in a world where you have to make everything legible to obtain what you need to do your work at all. You have to be very, very strict about what you are. That is really funny that saying artist allowed you to get the capital for the projects that you needed, that you wanted to do. [Laughs.]

Tunde: Yeah, I have a friend who's a curator. She's a friend, but she's also a colleague. She's based in Pittsburgh, Chenoa, and she was the first person—I did a dinner in New Orleans, and she happened to be there ’cause she was there for the opening of some hotel or something. And she had read about it. She just came through. And then, that's how we became friends. But she saw it as art. And then she gave me sort of the words to be able to describe myself to myself and to other people. And then she sponsored the project as art. So I'm like, ‘All right, I f**k with this.’

Alicia: Right. 

And your work focuses on power, colonialism, capitalism, racism. You've written for food sections and food outlets. But lately, you've been self-publishing, I wanted to ask if that was a conscious decision to move out of traditional media, or whether this is something that—if you're just not finding the space in food media.

Tunde: Yeah. 

So I'm not sure how it is for you. But I never pitched anything, just because that's not—I didn't grow up. I mean, I wasn't a journalist or anything so I didn't understand pitching. And the way I got my writing gig with the Chronicle was through a relationship. All that to say is if I want to publish something, I don't know who to contact. And I also don't like rejection. 

And then also, I'm not necessarily interested—because this has happened a couple of times, when people will reach out to me and then I’ll propose something and they have a different idea of what I should do, which is fine. But I just tend to want to write what I want to write. So I think that the medium of posting on Instagram or using my newsletter just seems to make more sense. And I have been recently fortunate where I'm not reliant on my writing to bring in an income. So it's fine to just release it on Instagram.

I remember when I put it out, when I put out—when I started putting out my essays on Instagram, a friend told me, she was like, ‘This is very difficult to read.’ [Laughter.] I think it was this awkward, ‘I can't read your 75-post essay on food.’ And I was like, ‘All right, f**k it.’ And I kept doing it.

But I think there's something about, interesting about playing with the medium, at least, on the ‘Gram, which making the posts be these essays that nobody wants to read. 

Alicia: Yeah. [Laughs.]

Well, I mean, you've been written about a lot, interviewed a lot . People kind of set you up one way as sort of a provocateur in food. Do you feel that that gets your work right? It's funny to ask you this while interviewing you, but when you're—when people interview you and write about you, do you—How does that feel? Do you see yourself when someone actually is writing about you?

Tunde: I mean, I guess it depends on what was written or, you know? 

Yeah, I don't know. I think sometimes I step into—and I think you get this too—people writing about you, too, right?

Alicia: Not really. [Laughs.]

Tunde: Then you do more of the writing?

Alicia: I mean, I do want to understand this because it is—I have a book coming out and everything. And I know it's going to be a weird position to be in.

Tunde: Oh, right. To be quizzed. 

Alicia: Yeah. [Laughs.]

Tunde: Yeah.

I guess it just depends on who was writing and what they’re writing about. I think this is not because of anything that I've done but just just who I am, that when I read something about me, I'm interested. So I separate myself from whoever—from the person who's reading it, me, from the person who is being portrayed in whatever the piece. And I'm just looking at it interestingly. So if it's interesting, I'm interested. If it's not interesting, then I'm not interested. 

But then all these labels too, they all find it—they all find use for me in context. If somebody is calling me provacautour, depending on the context, that's true. Other times, that's not true. Depending on how I feel, too, that's true. So yeah, it's just all those things. 

How would you describe me to yourself?

Alicia: I think of you as a writer and an artist. And I don't think of you necessarily as a provocateur. I think of you as someone who bends the narrative in different ways than we are accustomed to seeing in food especially, which is a very, very boring cultural field. [Laughs.] It's a young cultural field, I suppose, in terms of cultural criticism. And so, I do think that anyone who says anything somewhat outside the norm of the narratives we get gets labeled an activist. A provocateur. 

Tunde: Yeah. 

I imagine that, depending on who is talking about your work, they are saying the same thing. So again, the context is everything. To a lot of folks, I am—people have told me this to my face—I'm not radical at all.

Alicia: Yeah, no, I feel that way, too. Just by doing anything for money, I am ultimately a bad person and not radical enough. And that's fine with me. I've really made peace with that. I think in the last year or so, it's like, ‘I'm sorry, I have to live.’ [Laughs.]

Tunde: Did you make more peace as you made more money? Is that how it happened? 

Alicia: Exactly. Yeah. [Laughter.] 

I was like, ‘You know what, there's no use for—I'm of better use to people this way. [Laughs.] I'm of better use to people when I'm not broke and worried and have to go work in a bar, or do whatever the f**k to to keep myself going. I'm a better writer when I don't have to worry about those things.’

Tunde: Yeah.

I think having resources, whether you want to call them money or whatever, that is pretty pertinent to survival. 

Alicia: Yeah. 

No, you can't do good work if you're not—if you're worried about survival, and so it is what it is.

Tunde: Some people don't worry about money, and so their resources are different. But most of us need it.

Alicia: Yeah. [Laughs.]

Well, I wanted to ask you about last year’s ‘Let It Die’ essay was a big hit. Was it the first time we wrote an essay on Instagram? Or maybe it was just it really took off. People were obsessed with it. 

Tunde: Right. I don't know if it was the first time. I don't remember. 

Oh, sorry. Was that a question?

Alicia: Yeah. Tell me about ‘Let It Die,’ yeah. [Laughs.]

unde: Oh. Yeah, well, I do want to correct one thing, but transgression is just part of how I see the media landscape, which is I don't know how much it took off until Helen Rosner wrote about it. I'm pretty sure it didn't take off until Helen Rosner wrote about it. [Laughs.] So yeah, so that was it. It just happens to be the essay that Helen Rosner decided to write about. Not to say that the essay is not strong. But to say that for it to get to a certain critical mass of people, it needs a lever, and the New Yorker was the lever.

Alicia: Right. 

And around that time, though, you did tell WBUR ‘What is important to us is not necessarily how it tastes. It's more about the theater around the thing.’ And I think this is what I was talking about when I was saying you've been bending narratives that we're not used to seeing. 

And that most people take things very literally, I think, ’cause I wrote something about the death of the chef and people were totally up in arms about, I want to put the guillotine on chefs or something. And it's like, ‘No, that's not the idea. The idea is like, ‘What does this idea mean to us? What does this narrative mean to us? How can we change that narrative so that we create different systems that are better for people?’ But food media at large, I think, is extremely literal in its thinking.

And so, I wanted to ask you what do you expect as a result of your work? Do you have an expectation around anything concrete, or do you have an expectation more around changing ideas and changing narratives?

Tunde: Yeah, so I think that I'm interested in really big things. To be very specific, I'm interested in changing the material conditions of people who are disenfranchised, specifically people in Nigeria, West Africa, Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa. That is my interest. 

So, do I think writing is gonna do that? No. Do I even think that any of the work that I do affects the material conditions of folks in such a way as to change them permanently, or even temporarily? No. But then maybe people impacted by some of the work to think differently, to act differently on an individual scale, and depending on their sphere of influence, have that different action influence other people? I think, possibly. Yeah, that's what I think.

Alicia: Yeah.

No, and in your recent essay about returning to your home of Nigeria, you write, ‘All these convoluted numbers to say that Nigeria is fucked, and it is this ‘fuckedness’ that is termed underdevelopment.’ And I love this essay. It was such an immediate—it was just really good. The writing was really good. 

And so, there are so many types of food system futures that are discussed from the global north perspective. And I saw connections between this piece and your piece, ‘what is profit, and how is it made,’ where you wrote, ‘for capitalist food production to flourish it has to eliminate indigenous food production, and one important way this dismantling occurs is through displacement.’ 

And these are connected by the idea that Indigenous food production, the ‘underdeveloped country’ , requires change by colonialist entities by capitalist production, which we already know is unsustainable. And so much of what I get stuck on right now in my writing is that one of the only ways we've created concrete responses to these problems and to these structures developed by colonialism is that we have fair-trade food. And we have these other food projects working in the global south. You've worked with Burlap & Barrel. And it's kind of just a re-tinkering of the old systems where the capital is still concentrated somewhere else. It's just through these sort of really pined means that we are kind of trying to make more equity there. 

And so, you know, I guess I wanted to ask you what do you think of these kinds of food projects? What are the limits of working with them, and what are the possibilities of working with them?

Tunde: Yeah, wow. 

Yeah, I think the problem is big, obvious. Ok, the problem that I'm talking about, which is a racist problem, talking about Nigeria, which is kind of getting to West Africa and the continent as a whole, because Nigeria is the biggest country on the continent in terms of population size, and GDP. Fair trade doesn't solve that problem. By fair trade, I mean this—engaging in global capitalist trade, we're trying to do it with sort of fair, more ‘fair terms.’ That doesn't solve our problem. 

Yeah, that problem is historic. It’s contemporary. So I don't know, I know that that is its own problem. I know that. What solves the problem? I don't quite know yet. I'm still thinking about it. 

And I also know that there’s a solution. So it's not the end of my thoughts, and after it’s going to emerge. I think that whatever people are terming radical, whoever is talking about that, that sort of radical progress happens in stages. 

We're not going to end capitalism tomorrow, or in 10 years. At least, the people who I f**k with who think about this kind of stuff think about it in in terms of transitions and long periods of time and a continuum. I don't think of our economic system or capitalism as this system that holds everything that is bad. I think that what is true to all the different economic systems possible is—as humans, we are the constant. What is inherent in us is to a certain extent to be selfish and to—not selfish, but to have differences in wants and needs and perspectives.

Anyway, all that to say is we can move from a capitalist mode of production to, I don't know, socialist or communist, and we could still experience the same, or some of the same things that are happening with the degradation of the planet with exploitation and other things. So, fair trade is not the answer. That's what I’m saying. [Laughter.] 

Alicia: Yeah, no.

I was writing a piece about sugar, and I just had this moment of being like, ‘Everything—there is no way to fix this at all.’ I mean, there are ways to fix it, but it's so historically rotten at its core that it is—the whole world would have to change for our relationship to sugar to not be something completely extractive and completely—Just to take one thing, one foodstuff and look at it. The whole system would have to change for this to not be an absolutely terrible product for us to use every single day. When we think about equitable trade, it's just such a limited idea. 

Tunde: Well, just to be just to be specific, when we talk—I'm assuming that when we're talking about fair trade, we're talking about the stickers they put on products. Not talking about global trade, which is a completely different thing, which—that will change everything if it was actually fair trade between countries.

I'm reading this book, and the writer talks about—or at least so far has referenced this idea of comparative advantage, which, when I was in school, in primary school in Nigeria, so—or secondary school—I learned that comparative advantage is how you grow your economy. It’s you find out what you're really good at, and then you develop that and you sell it to other people and people buy them. Then you have this trade. 

But the way the global system is what happens to be what, say, Nigeria is good at is what Nigeria has been shaped to be good at to benefit the West. So Nigeria happens to be good at having mineral resources in the ground. Then it has a, an overdeveloped extractive sector to the detriment of everything else. 

So all of that to say is that real fair trade doesn't happen on a product by product basis.To your point about sugar, the whole ship needs to change.

Alicia: Change. Yeah, exactly. 

No, and as you mentioned before, your project is about getting resources to those who have historically lacked access to resources. And whether that's you charge white people more for food, or you price an issue of Sandwich that you get started at $100, or the salt that was $100. 

And I think about these things constantly. There's a literal law where Americans from the U.S. get, can pay 4% in their taxes. But Puerto Ricans aren't able to get that same break. And then now, there's this problem with the bitcoin people buying up all the property. The tourists have made where I live, Old San Juan, so unlivable that basically anyone who owns property is looking to sell it to the highest bidder, which is going to basically just mean displacement by bitcoin bros ‘cause they have the capital In cash to buy it. 

And I think, of course, in terms of food about everything. So I'm like, ‘All right, how if we-’ I think we just talked about this, but if you—if we saw those real changes on a fundamental global level, what would the food world look like? What would change in the way we have a relationship to food? 

Tunde: Yeah.

Full disclosure, I'm invested in Bitcoin. Not on that scale. 

Ok, so maybe I’ll say something controversial. I think that there's a difference between fault and responsibility. So we're all responsible, but—and responsibility has their degrees of responsibility. So I think as long as you're born and you participate in the system, you're responsible. But depending on your power and your sort of subjective position, that responsibility either grows or shrinks. But then there's sort of people at fault, but even that is a very complicated thing, too. 

So I feel it’s maybe a little disingenuous to complain about the effects of the economic system if you are actively participating in the economic system. And by that I mean that what—the sort of speculative nature of Bitcoin is the same, is not the exact same thing, but it's connected to, say, the continuous production of vehicles every year. Last year, Ford produced 1.5 million vehicles. Tesla produced 500, or manufactured 500,000 vehicles. That sort of investment in consumption goods, and the proliferation of credit and debt and all that s**t. That s**t is connected to Bitcoin. That s**t is connected to the housing market soaring. That s**t is connected to everything. 

So we can pick and choose. We can pick and choose if we want to, but the truth is that it's all connected. So, of course, that's what's gonna happen in certain communities, because that's what money does in this economic system. That is not to say that it's right, or it's going. I'm just saying that. 

And I feel if maybe a lot more people were talking about the, were actively trying in little ways and big ways to address the economic reality, in general, as opposed to specifically when it makes them uncomfortable, then things would be—I don't know about better, but things would maybe be different. 

I'm also just not very interested in the food system as a lens to experience transformation, just because it's connected to everything else. I don't necessarily think that it is the lever that could change things. I’m sure it’s one of the many levers, but I think that it's probably not the first lever, if that makes sense. Did that make sense or not? 

Alicia: That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. [Laughs.]

Tunde: Just be more specific. I think that monetary policy, fiscal policy, reining in, say, the financial industry, financial services. That drives the economy. And addressing that probably has a greater impact than working on, working directly on food policy. But they're all connected.

Alicia: Well, do you feel that you're getting away from food as a lens then to look at the world and politics?

Tunde: No, I don't think so. 

Food is a lens to appreciate all the politics. I think that when you're talking about policy and changing things on a global scale—if you're talking about sugar, for example. Changing how sugar is produced is just a, maybe a really difficult way to change the system if the whole system needs to change. But focusing on, say, the global mechanics of fair trade is a better way to do that. But if you look at sugar production and consumption, then you see the global mechanics of trade, and these other aspects of the system that are kind of fucked up. But when it comes to actualizing change, I'm not sure that food is the place that we start from.

Alicia: No, that makes complete sense. Yeah. [Laughs.] We don't maybe acknowledge that enough. When I say we, I say food writers, that we're not enough engaged with all the other aspects of the world and the reasons these problems ultimately exist. It’s all about—Yeah, these small things that maybe allow you to see the bigger picture, but don't give you the tools to necessarily engage on a deep intellectual level with those issues. If that makes sense. [Laughs.]

Tunde: Yeah, that makes sense. 

Alicia: But well, actually, to get back to food, because you have—I know that you worked with the Beard Foundation. And then also on the Sandwich Magazine you worked with—I think, Sir Kensington's owns that, which is owned by Unilever. So you've worked with these big organizations that have a lot of kind of power. But you also have written that ‘And in all spaces, food and society, we see the faithful and continuous reproduction of this social control, which reinforces the idea that white domination is the natural order of things.’

Tunde: I’ve said some s**t, huh?

Alicia: I'm sorry, I read, re-read everything you've written, obviously, to talk to you. I know, it's weird to have your stuff read back to you. 

What do you see the role of interacting with these kinds of—the Beard Foundation with, a magazine owned by a company, what is the purpose of this engagement? 

Tunde: I do want to shout out my partner Ruth on the magazine. 

So, I guess it just depends. So, what did I work with the Beard Foundation on? I don’t remember.

Alicia: Did you edit some pieces, I think, for the blog? I know Mayukh wrote a piece for you. 

Tunde: Yeah, I wrote a piece. Yes. I just wrote a piece about the work that I was doing. At the time, Mitchell was the VP. Yeah, he reached out and I wrote a piece. 

Yeah, it just depends. But if we're talking about money and capitalism. This is how I feel about money. Nobody owns money. That s**t is for everybody. Like they say, money belongs to the game. I don't care. I don't have a problem taking money. I think there's certain monies that I wouldn't take, not because I think the money is ‘bad.’ It’s just that it’d make me look crazy. Yeah. And I don't want to look crazy. 

Money’s so not real. And it has such real consequences. And nobody owns it in my mind. It belongs to everybody, or it should. So I'll take money. All that to say, organizations and just the way our economy or the global system is structured is that capital accumulates in certain places. It accumulates in the states and accumulates in corporations and organizations and individuals. It is unevenly distributed. So I don't care who you are. If you're looking for some sort of sustenance, you're not printing dollars or mining gold by yourself. You have to go to the deposits where they are. And huge corporations—they have the money. The state has the money. By the state, I mean, the nation state’s structure. 

Sir Kensington, specifically, and Unilever, the kind of work that we were trying to do at the time, Ruth and I, was to talk about certain global systems. It was fantastic that it was Unilever, because Unilever is an antagonist in our story. And we had conversations with them about that. Ruth and I were interested in the possibility of extracting just something so small from them, something tiny relative to how much they've taken from Africa, from Nigeria, in particular for me. So to me, that made sense to work with them on that. 

So, yeah, it depends on the opportunity. But I think when we're talking about money and resources, the folks who have that money are the ones who are distributing that money. And so if you want it, whether you get it directly or indirectly from them, you're getting it from the same source. So, that’s how I think about that.

Alicia: No, it's a really useful way of thinking about things. [Laughs.] ’Cause I think if you're very online, and you're sort of on the left, all of this becomes a very, very personal responsibility issue rather than an issue of taking the money from who has it when you need it. And every move you make is sort of either an endorsement or a rejection of massive things, when actually it's really none of that. It's a useful way of thinking about things that I think isn't—it doesn't get enough attention, to talk about it in that way.

Tunde: Yeah.

There's obviously money that comes with caveats. And most money does, soif  the caveat sort of infringes on certain things for me, then I won’t take that money. But if it's relatively chill—for example, with the magazine, I think they told us that we couldn't specifically—we couldn't make the whole magazine about Unilever as an evil corporation. That would be a little too much, right? And then we're like, ‘Sure.’ It doesn't mean that we didn't critique what Unilever's stands for? Whatever. So there's that. 

But I think more about now, more about how—I just think about how I'm hoarding money, as opposed to where I'm getting money? So, if I get money, I think about like, ‘Okay, this money that I have now, what am I going to do with this money? How can I use money to further my mission?’ And then I think in that way, I think of my stewardship of resources as opposed to wondering about the optics, which is like, ‘How do I get it?’ Which is I do, but I'm less interested in the optics and more interested in how the money that I have can maybe do something different. But it's such a small number that—

Alicia: [Laughs.] That's extremely useful. Thank you for that. 

—film projects. 

Tunde: I'm sorry, I lost the first part of that question. 

Alicia: Are you working more in film now?

Tunde: Yeah. 

So my production partner and I, Ruth and I, we got a grant. And we're working on a docu—series on food, using food to explore the sort of larger questions. So yeah, that's sort of what we're doing. 

Alicia: That's exciting. Yeah. 

Tunde: And speaking of money, and—sorry, just one thing and the grant. We got money from a couple of foundations. So you have people who maybe take money from foundations, but then criticize how other people make their money off foundations. A lot of them are invested in the stock market. I don't care if you're invested in ESG or whatever. You're invested in a very speculative medium. And that sort of speculation, that sort of idle capital that is sitting in bank accounts, or what do you call them? In ledgers? That is money that is, or that is a system that is deeply exploitative. 

So, we don't get to pick and choose. I try not to, especially, even with money. And I just think about how the money that I have, again, to what I say, can be used differently. 

Alicia: Right. 

And for you, is cooking a political act? 

Tunde: Just at home, just chilling and cooking?

Alicia: Cooking in general. 

I ask this question to everyone. It's usually just a kind of a Rorschach test of what they think of the word ‘cooking’ and the word ‘political.’ [Laughs.]

Tunde: I don't know. I mean, if I'm just cooking by myself, no. If I'm doing a dinner series, or something, then possibly. I could be wrong, but I don't think of cooking—I think identity is political. So, sometimes just being is political. But all of this is contextual. Your identity in a particular place is political. But I don't think of cooking as an identity. I think of cooking as—yeah, it's an act. I don't think of necessarily actions as inherently political. Most things are contextual. I think it’s not everything. So, just depends on the context. 

Alicia: Yeah, yeah. 

Well, thank you so much for taking the time today. 

Tunde: Yeah, I have a question for you, actually.

Alicia: Ok. [Laughs.]

Do you want to ask me while we're recording, or–

Tunde: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alicia: Ok.

Tunde: So something that is just fascinating about—to me—about your work is, and I could be wrong, because I get your newsletter, but I don't read it every week. But I read enough to know that you talk about the same things. By that I mean, your perspective is the same, which is anti-capitalist. I want to say anti-racist, but I'm not sure how you describe yourself.

But you have this perspective. And you keep writing like every week, right? Every week you’re writing, every week. And just, how haven't you exhausted? No, really, I'm so serious, ’cause I feel I—when I wrote for the Chronicle, I wrote four essays. And I'm like, ‘The next four are going to be about the same thing. And the next eight after that.’ And so I'm just curious about how you keep the s**t fresh.

Alicia: Right.

No, I mean, I think a lot of people would say I don't keep it fresh, that I have a shtick, that I’m just always saying, ‘Capitalism is bad. Climate change is bad. We have to stop climate change. We have to eat less meat,’ like that. I just bang the same drums over and over again, which is valid. I think I have a beat, so to speak, as a writer. These are the things I cover, is how our cultural relationships to food are part of these larger systems—of economy, policy, white supremacy, all a part of larger systems that control our everyday ways of being and thinking. And that is my beat. That is what I write about. 

But I do think, obviously, within that there is so much to write about. There is so much to think about. I don't know. I think during the more peak of the pandemic, I really exhausted everything that I had to say for years, but no one ever let me say as a food writer. And then I think now, I'm interacting more with the world again and finding more ways into the things I have always written about and thought about, but they're more rooted in my interactions with other people. 

I don't know. I've always been a compulsive writer. So it's not hard for me. This is the natural way in which I communicate. It's easier for me to write something down then it is to say it. Yeah, just to communicate in writing. That's my way of communicating. Yeah, I'm happy to talk to you, but I find it is—I'm going to feel tired after I do this, because I—it's a less natural way for me to communicate, you know?

Tunde: Yeah, no, I dig it. I think that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, if that's easier for you, then it makes sense that you do that. Because most people say the same thing, anyway, over and over again with their mouth. But you’re just writing it. 

Another thing that I want to tell you is I met a man through you. Mr. Byrne.

Alicia: Mark Byrne. 

Tunde: Yeah, from Good Vodka. I was in Lagos. So this is a super short story. We're filming for the docu series in Lagos in Kogi State, which is central Nigeria. And we had this really delicious local drink. I was blown away by it. And I just kept thinking, ‘F**k, this is so delicious. I need to f*****g bottle this and sell it or something.’

And then I was in Lagos a couple of—a month after.I had read the interview that you did with him. And then I'm like, ‘I need to call this man or email this man and see if he'll work with me.’ So I emailed him, and he agreed to work with me. So I don't know, sometime in some soon future we will be releasing a Nigerian palm spirit. 

Alicia: Oh, that's amazing!

Tunde: Yeah. It's not a commercially viable product. I guess it's a project about exploitation again. 

Alicia: Yeah. [Laughs.]

Well, Good Vodka is basically that as well. I mean, it's a product and it's a commercial product. But it's also more about how spirits exist and are made. The history of spirits is, it's usually made from waste rather than growing things to make spirits, which is a bad way of doing it. [Laughs.]

But that's amazing. I love that. I love talking about—and maybe when it comes out, we'll talk again, but I love talking about spirits. [Laughs.] I love talking about alcohol. Because I do think people have a really weird and complicated relationship to it, obviously. But it's nice to talk about it on a level of appreciation rather than the very, very American perspective on alcohol, which is wildly problematic. [Laughs.]

Tunde: I don't know much about spirits. I just know to the point, earlier point about seeing all the systems and everything, I just know that just a really small thing, the Indigenous production of alcohol at scale. That s**t is happening. Folks in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria servicing half the country with this s**t. And you're doing it from these small, small camps, all these different small camps by the water. And so just thinking about thinking about what that means, and thinking about how the disparities that exist between, say, African production and European production is what inspires me to do this kind of thing as opposed to like the actual food product or beverage product. So yeah, I’m excited about it. 

Alicia: That's awesome. Yeah. [Laughs.]

Well, thank you again, I'm so excited about that, and everything else. 

Tunde: Absolutely. Thank you.

Alicia: Thank you.

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People assume I’ve interviewed Tunde Wey—the artist, writer, and cook whose work has been the subject of other people’s award-winning profiles—before because I’m a big public fan of his work, but I hadn’t felt myself properly prepared. His work touches on everything from racism to immigration to colonialism to capitalist extraction, and I didn’t really know my way into a focused interview. I was nervous, basically. But I think we had a good conversation, one that gets at a lot of issues with food as a lens toward bigger systems and problems.

In many cases—most cases, if I’m honest—I’m doing an interview in order to work out a problem I’ve been thinking about, and this one was no different. We waded into whether food can really be an agent of change in a capitalist world, because I’ve been wavering on that idea myself, and Wey has the economic knowledge to discuss why it isn’t so in depth. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Tunde. Thank you so much for taking the time. 

Tunde: Thank you. 

(:07) Alicia: And I know you are in Lagos, now. Can you tell us about how that's going, what you're doing there?

Tunde: Oh, I'm actually not in Lagos. [Laughs.] I was supposed to fly two weeks ago, and my COVID result didn’t come in time. So I just pushed for my flight till a couple of months from now. Next month or something.

Alicia: Ok, cool. 

Well, can you tell us about where you grew up and what you ate?

Tunde: Yeah.

I grew up in Lagos. I ate regional Western Nigerian food, I guess. So I'm Yoruba, so I ate Yoruba food. My mom is Edo, so I ate that food as well. My dad is also part Efik, so I ate that as well. So I'd Yoruba, Efik, and sort of the Delta region food, so Edo, Itsekiri food. And then we ate, I guess, white food too.

Alicia: Which white food? 

Tunde: When we were growing up, we used to call it breakfast things. But when I came here, then it was lunch meats and s**t like that. So sausages and hams and stuff like that. So, we ate that. So it was a mix. 

We usually would eat that on Sundays. My dad would cook, and we'd go out to this store. My data would buy a whole bunch of things, and then he'll cook. Pasta. My mom would mix s**t like beef stroganoff, just random s**t. She went to school in England, so she came back with certain notions around food. So, we have those kinds of things. 

And growing up in Nigeria, I came from a middle-class background. It wasn't out of the norm for folks to eat that kind of stuff. So cereals and pancakes, stuff like that. Plus, we also watched a lot of American television with that kind of stuff on the TV.

Alicia: Right, right. Yeah. 

And you self-identify as an artist, a cook and a writer. And I wanted to ask, which were you first and how did the rest come? [Laughter.] 

Tunde: Which was up first? [Laughs.] 

Alicia: Yeah, yeah. Which identity? Or which came to you first, in terms of your work? 

Tunde: Right. 

I don't know how to answer that question. I feel like it just depends on who I'm, who I am talking to. I think I say I'm an artist because it's just easier to convey what I'm trying to do. I remember, I was trying to raise money for a restaurant. And I was telling people that this restaurant is not going to make any money. And they couldn't understand that. They were like, ‘Huh, what does this mean?’ But then if I was talking to, say, a curator, and I'm like, ‘Well, this project is this and I need this amount of money,’ then they get it. So it just depends on who I'm talking to. 

So I guess in the chronology of what is on public records? Artist came last, and it's probably still not on record. So, maybe that’s the first time.

Alicia: Well, it is difficult, I think, for multi-disciplinary people to use that word, to make themselves legible, I suppose, in a world where you have to make everything legible to obtain what you need to do your work at all. You have to be very, very strict about what you are. That is really funny that saying artist allowed you to get the capital for the projects that you needed, that you wanted to do. [Laughs.]

Tunde: Yeah, I have a friend who's a curator. She's a friend, but she's also a colleague. She's based in Pittsburgh, Chenoa, and she was the first person—I did a dinner in New Orleans, and she happened to be there ’cause she was there for the opening of some hotel or something. And she had read about it. She just came through. And then, that's how we became friends. But she saw it as art. And then she gave me sort of the words to be able to describe myself to myself and to other people. And then she sponsored the project as art. So I'm like, ‘All right, I f**k with this.’

Alicia: Right. 

And your work focuses on power, colonialism, capitalism, racism. You've written for food sections and food outlets. But lately, you've been self-publishing, I wanted to ask if that was a conscious decision to move out of traditional media, or whether this is something that—if you're just not finding the space in food media.

Tunde: Yeah. 

So I'm not sure how it is for you. But I never pitched anything, just because that's not—I didn't grow up. I mean, I wasn't a journalist or anything so I didn't understand pitching. And the way I got my writing gig with the Chronicle was through a relationship. All that to say is if I want to publish something, I don't know who to contact. And I also don't like rejection. 

And then also, I'm not necessarily interested—because this has happened a couple of times, when people will reach out to me and then I’ll propose something and they have a different idea of what I should do, which is fine. But I just tend to want to write what I want to write. So I think that the medium of posting on Instagram or using my newsletter just seems to make more sense. And I have been recently fortunate where I'm not reliant on my writing to bring in an income. So it's fine to just release it on Instagram.

I remember when I put it out, when I put out—when I started putting out my essays on Instagram, a friend told me, she was like, ‘This is very difficult to read.’ [Laughter.] I think it was this awkward, ‘I can't read your 75-post essay on food.’ And I was like, ‘All right, f**k it.’ And I kept doing it.

But I think there's something about, interesting about playing with the medium, at least, on the ‘Gram, which making the posts be these essays that nobody wants to read. 

Alicia: Yeah. [Laughs.]

Well, I mean, you've been written about a lot, interviewed a lot . People kind of set you up one way as sort of a provocateur in food. Do you feel that that gets your work right? It's funny to ask you this while interviewing you, but when you're—when people interview you and write about you, do you—How does that feel? Do you see yourself when someone actually is writing about you?

Tunde: I mean, I guess it depends on what was written or, you know? 

Yeah, I don't know. I think sometimes I step into—and I think you get this too—people writing about you, too, right?

Alicia: Not really. [Laughs.]

Tunde: Then you do more of the writing?

Alicia: I mean, I do want to understand this because it is—I have a book coming out and everything. And I know it's going to be a weird position to be in.

Tunde: Oh, right. To be quizzed. 

Alicia: Yeah. [Laughs.]

Tunde: Yeah.

I guess it just depends on who was writing and what they’re writing about. I think this is not because of anything that I've done but just just who I am, that when I read something about me, I'm interested. So I separate myself from whoever—from the person who's reading it, me, from the person who is being portrayed in whatever the piece. And I'm just looking at it interestingly. So if it's interesting, I'm interested. If it's not interesting, then I'm not interested. 

But then all these labels too, they all find it—they all find use for me in context. If somebody is calling me provacautour, depending on the context, that's true. Other times, that's not true. Depending on how I feel, too, that's true. So yeah, it's just all those things. 

How would you describe me to yourself?

Alicia: I think of you as a writer and an artist. And I don't think of you necessarily as a provocateur. I think of you as someone who bends the narrative in different ways than we are accustomed to seeing in food especially, which is a very, very boring cultural field. [Laughs.] It's a young cultural field, I suppose, in terms of cultural criticism. And so, I do think that anyone who says anything somewhat outside the norm of the narratives we get gets labeled an activist. A provocateur. 

Tunde: Yeah. 

I imagine that, depending on who is talking about your work, they are saying the same thing. So again, the context is everything. To a lot of folks, I am—people have told me this to my face—I'm not radical at all.

Alicia: Yeah, no, I feel that way, too. Just by doing anything for money, I am ultimately a bad person and not radical enough. And that's fine with me. I've really made peace with that. I think in the last year or so, it's like, ‘I'm sorry, I have to live.’ [Laughs.]

Tunde: Did you make more peace as you made more money? Is that how it happened? 

Alicia: Exactly. Yeah. [Laughter.] 

I was like, ‘You know what, there's no use for—I'm of better use to people this way. [Laughs.] I'm of better use to people when I'm not broke and worried and have to go work in a bar, or do whatever the f**k to to keep myself going. I'm a better writer when I don't have to worry about those things.’

Tunde: Yeah.

I think having resources, whether you want to call them money or whatever, that is pretty pertinent to survival. 

Alicia: Yeah. 

No, you can't do good work if you're not—if you're worried about survival, and so it is what it is.

Tunde: Some people don't worry about money, and so their resources are different. But most of us need it.

Alicia: Yeah. [Laughs.]

Well, I wanted to ask you about last year’s ‘Let It Die’ essay was a big hit. Was it the first time we wrote an essay on Instagram? Or maybe it was just it really took off. People were obsessed with it. 

Tunde: Right. I don't know if it was the first time. I don't remember. 

Oh, sorry. Was that a question?

Alicia: Yeah. Tell me about ‘Let It Die,’ yeah. [Laughs.]

unde: Oh. Yeah, well, I do want to correct one thing, but transgression is just part of how I see the media landscape, which is I don't know how much it took off until Helen Rosner wrote about it. I'm pretty sure it didn't take off until Helen Rosner wrote about it. [Laughs.] So yeah, so that was it. It just happens to be the essay that Helen Rosner decided to write about. Not to say that the essay is not strong. But to say that for it to get to a certain critical mass of people, it needs a lever, and the New Yorker was the lever.

Alicia: Right. 

And around that time, though, you did tell WBUR ‘What is important to us is not necessarily how it tastes. It's more about the theater around the thing.’ And I think this is what I was talking about when I was saying you've been bending narratives that we're not used to seeing. 

And that most people take things very literally, I think, ’cause I wrote something about the death of the chef and people were totally up in arms about, I want to put the guillotine on chefs or something. And it's like, ‘No, that's not the idea. The idea is like, ‘What does this idea mean to us? What does this narrative mean to us? How can we change that narrative so that we create different systems that are better for people?’ But food media at large, I think, is extremely literal in its thinking.

And so, I wanted to ask you what do you expect as a result of your work? Do you have an expectation around anything concrete, or do you have an expectation more around changing ideas and changing narratives?

Tunde: Yeah, so I think that I'm interested in really big things. To be very specific, I'm interested in changing the material conditions of people who are disenfranchised, specifically people in Nigeria, West Africa, Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa. That is my interest. 

So, do I think writing is gonna do that? No. Do I even think that any of the work that I do affects the material conditions of folks in such a way as to change them permanently, or even temporarily? No. But then maybe people impacted by some of the work to think differently, to act differently on an individual scale, and depending on their sphere of influence, have that different action influence other people? I think, possibly. Yeah, that's what I think.

Alicia: Yeah.

No, and in your recent essay about returning to your home of Nigeria, you write, ‘All these convoluted numbers to say that Nigeria is fucked, and it is this ‘fuckedness’ that is termed underdevelopment.’ And I love this essay. It was such an immediate—it was just really good. The writing was really good. 

And so, there are so many types of food system futures that are discussed from the global north perspective. And I saw connections between this piece and your piece, ‘what is profit, and how is it made,’ where you wrote, ‘for capitalist food production to flourish it has to eliminate indigenous food production, and one important way this dismantling occurs is through displacement.’ 

And these are connected by the idea that Indigenous food production, the ‘underdeveloped country’ , requires change by colonialist entities by capitalist production, which we already know is unsustainable. And so much of what I get stuck on right now in my writing is that one of the only ways we've created concrete responses to these problems and to these structures developed by colonialism is that we have fair-trade food. And we have these other food projects working in the global south. You've worked with Burlap & Barrel. And it's kind of just a re-tinkering of the old systems where the capital is still concentrated somewhere else. It's just through these sort of really pined means that we are kind of trying to make more equity there. 

And so, you know, I guess I wanted to ask you what do you think of these kinds of food projects? What are the limits of working with them, and what are the possibilities of working with them?

Tunde: Yeah, wow. 

Yeah, I think the problem is big, obvious. Ok, the problem that I'm talking about, which is a racist problem, talking about Nigeria, which is kind of getting to West Africa and the continent as a whole, because Nigeria is the biggest country on the continent in terms of population size, and GDP. Fair trade doesn't solve that problem. By fair trade, I mean this—engaging in global capitalist trade, we're trying to do it with sort of fair, more ‘fair terms.’ That doesn't solve our problem. 

Yeah, that problem is historic. It’s contemporary. So I don't know, I know that that is its own problem. I know that. What solves the problem? I don't quite know yet. I'm still thinking about it. 

And I also know that there’s a solution. So it's not the end of my thoughts, and after it’s going to emerge. I think that whatever people are terming radical, whoever is talking about that, that sort of radical progress happens in stages. 

We're not going to end capitalism tomorrow, or in 10 years. At least, the people who I f**k with who think about this kind of stuff think about it in in terms of transitions and long periods of time and a continuum. I don't think of our economic system or capitalism as this system that holds everything that is bad. I think that what is true to all the different economic systems possible is—as humans, we are the constant. What is inherent in us is to a certain extent to be selfish and to—not selfish, but to have differences in wants and needs and perspectives.

Anyway, all that to say is we can move from a capitalist mode of production to, I don't know, socialist or communist, and we could still experience the same, or some of the same things that are happening with the degradation of the planet with exploitation and other things. So, fair trade is not the answer. That's what I’m saying. [Laughter.] 

Alicia: Yeah, no.

I was writing a piece about sugar, and I just had this moment of being like, ‘Everything—there is no way to fix this at all.’ I mean, there are ways to fix it, but it's so historically rotten at its core that it is—the whole world would have to change for our relationship to sugar to not be something completely extractive and completely—Just to take one thing, one foodstuff and look at it. The whole system would have to change for this to not be an absolutely terrible product for us to use every single day. When we think about equitable trade, it's just such a limited idea. 

Tunde: Well, just to be just to be specific, when we talk—I'm assuming that when we're talking about fair trade, we're talking about the stickers they put on products. Not talking about global trade, which is a completely different thing, which—that will change everything if it was actually fair trade between countries.

I'm reading this book, and the writer talks about—or at least so far has referenced this idea of comparative advantage, which, when I was in school, in primary school in Nigeria, so—or secondary school—I learned that comparative advantage is how you grow your economy. It’s you find out what you're really good at, and then you develop that and you sell it to other people and people buy them. Then you have this trade. 

But the way the global system is what happens to be what, say, Nigeria is good at is what Nigeria has been shaped to be good at to benefit the West. So Nigeria happens to be good at having mineral resources in the ground. Then it has a, an overdeveloped extractive sector to the detriment of everything else. 

So all of that to say is that real fair trade doesn't happen on a product by product basis.To your point about sugar, the whole ship needs to change.

Alicia: Change. Yeah, exactly. 

No, and as you mentioned before, your project is about getting resources to those who have historically lacked access to resources. And whether that's you charge white people more for food, or you price an issue of Sandwich that you get started at $100, or the salt that was $100. 

And I think about these things constantly. There's a literal law where Americans from the U.S. get, can pay 4% in their taxes. But Puerto Ricans aren't able to get that same break. And then now, there's this problem with the bitcoin people buying up all the property. The tourists have made where I live, Old San Juan, so unlivable that basically anyone who owns property is looking to sell it to the highest bidder, which is going to basically just mean displacement by bitcoin bros ‘cause they have the capital In cash to buy it. 

And I think, of course, in terms of food about everything. So I'm like, ‘All right, how if we-’ I think we just talked about this, but if you—if we saw those real changes on a fundamental global level, what would the food world look like? What would change in the way we have a relationship to food? 

Tunde: Yeah.

Full disclosure, I'm invested in Bitcoin. Not on that scale. 

Ok, so maybe I’ll say something controversial. I think that there's a difference between fault and responsibility. So we're all responsible, but—and responsibility has their degrees of responsibility. So I think as long as you're born and you participate in the system, you're responsible. But depending on your power and your sort of subjective position, that responsibility either grows or shrinks. But then there's sort of people at fault, but even that is a very complicated thing, too. 

So I feel it’s maybe a little disingenuous to complain about the effects of the economic system if you are actively participating in the economic system. And by that I mean that what—the sort of speculative nature of Bitcoin is the same, is not the exact same thing, but it's connected to, say, the continuous production of vehicles every year. Last year, Ford produced 1.5 million vehicles. Tesla produced 500, or manufactured 500,000 vehicles. That sort of investment in consumption goods, and the proliferation of credit and debt and all that s**t. That s**t is connected to Bitcoin. That s**t is connected to the housing market soaring. That s**t is connected to everything. 

So we can pick and choose. We can pick and choose if we want to, but the truth is that it's all connected. So, of course, that's what's gonna happen in certain communities, because that's what money does in this economic system. That is not to say that it's right, or it's going. I'm just saying that. 

And I feel if maybe a lot more people were talking about the, were actively trying in little ways and big ways to address the economic reality, in general, as opposed to specifically when it makes them uncomfortable, then things would be—I don't know about better, but things would maybe be different. 

I'm also just not very interested in the food system as a lens to experience transformation, just because it's connected to everything else. I don't necessarily think that it is the lever that could change things. I’m sure it’s one of the many levers, but I think that it's probably not the first lever, if that makes sense. Did that make sense or not? 

Alicia: That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. [Laughs.]

Tunde: Just be more specific. I think that monetary policy, fiscal policy, reining in, say, the financial industry, financial services. That drives the economy. And addressing that probably has a greater impact than working on, working directly on food policy. But they're all connected.

Alicia: Well, do you feel that you're getting away from food as a lens then to look at the world and politics?

Tunde: No, I don't think so. 

Food is a lens to appreciate all the politics. I think that when you're talking about policy and changing things on a global scale—if you're talking about sugar, for example. Changing how sugar is produced is just a, maybe a really difficult way to change the system if the whole system needs to change. But focusing on, say, the global mechanics of fair trade is a better way to do that. But if you look at sugar production and consumption, then you see the global mechanics of trade, and these other aspects of the system that are kind of fucked up. But when it comes to actualizing change, I'm not sure that food is the place that we start from.

Alicia: No, that makes complete sense. Yeah. [Laughs.] We don't maybe acknowledge that enough. When I say we, I say food writers, that we're not enough engaged with all the other aspects of the world and the reasons these problems ultimately exist. It’s all about—Yeah, these small things that maybe allow you to see the bigger picture, but don't give you the tools to necessarily engage on a deep intellectual level with those issues. If that makes sense. [Laughs.]

Tunde: Yeah, that makes sense. 

Alicia: But well, actually, to get back to food, because you have—I know that you worked with the Beard Foundation. And then also on the Sandwich Magazine you worked with—I think, Sir Kensington's owns that, which is owned by Unilever. So you've worked with these big organizations that have a lot of kind of power. But you also have written that ‘And in all spaces, food and society, we see the faithful and continuous reproduction of this social control, which reinforces the idea that white domination is the natural order of things.’

Tunde: I’ve said some s**t, huh?

Alicia: I'm sorry, I read, re-read everything you've written, obviously, to talk to you. I know, it's weird to have your stuff read back to you. 

What do you see the role of interacting with these kinds of—the Beard Foundation with, a magazine owned by a company, what is the purpose of this engagement? 

Tunde: I do want to shout out my partner Ruth on the magazine. 

So, I guess it just depends. So, what did I work with the Beard Foundation on? I don’t remember.

Alicia: Did you edit some pieces, I think, for the blog? I know Mayukh wrote a piece for you. 

Tunde: Yeah, I wrote a piece. Yes. I just wrote a piece about the work that I was doing. At the time, Mitchell was the VP. Yeah, he reached out and I wrote a piece. 

Yeah, it just depends. But if we're talking about money and capitalism. This is how I feel about money. Nobody owns money. That s**t is for everybody. Like they say, money belongs to the game. I don't care. I don't have a problem taking money. I think there's certain monies that I wouldn't take, not because I think the money is ‘bad.’ It’s just that it’d make me look crazy. Yeah. And I don't want to look crazy. 

Money’s so not real. And it has such real consequences. And nobody owns it in my mind. It belongs to everybody, or it should. So I'll take money. All that to say, organizations and just the way our economy or the global system is structured is that capital accumulates in certain places. It accumulates in the states and accumulates in corporations and organizations and individuals. It is unevenly distributed. So I don't care who you are. If you're looking for some sort of sustenance, you're not printing dollars or mining gold by yourself. You have to go to the deposits where they are. And huge corporations—they have the money. The state has the money. By the state, I mean, the nation state’s structure. 

Sir Kensington, specifically, and Unilever, the kind of work that we were trying to do at the time, Ruth and I, was to talk about certain global systems. It was fantastic that it was Unilever, because Unilever is an antagonist in our story. And we had conversations with them about that. Ruth and I were interested in the possibility of extracting just something so small from them, something tiny relative to how much they've taken from Africa, from Nigeria, in particular for me. So to me, that made sense to work with them on that. 

So, yeah, it depends on the opportunity. But I think when we're talking about money and resources, the folks who have that money are the ones who are distributing that money. And so if you want it, whether you get it directly or indirectly from them, you're getting it from the same source. So, that’s how I think about that.

Alicia: No, it's a really useful way of thinking about things. [Laughs.] ’Cause I think if you're very online, and you're sort of on the left, all of this becomes a very, very personal responsibility issue rather than an issue of taking the money from who has it when you need it. And every move you make is sort of either an endorsement or a rejection of massive things, when actually it's really none of that. It's a useful way of thinking about things that I think isn't—it doesn't get enough attention, to talk about it in that way.

Tunde: Yeah.

There's obviously money that comes with caveats. And most money does, soif  the caveat sort of infringes on certain things for me, then I won’t take that money. But if it's relatively chill—for example, with the magazine, I think they told us that we couldn't specifically—we couldn't make the whole magazine about Unilever as an evil corporation. That would be a little too much, right? And then we're like, ‘Sure.’ It doesn't mean that we didn't critique what Unilever's stands for? Whatever. So there's that. 

But I think more about now, more about how—I just think about how I'm hoarding money, as opposed to where I'm getting money? So, if I get money, I think about like, ‘Okay, this money that I have now, what am I going to do with this money? How can I use money to further my mission?’ And then I think in that way, I think of my stewardship of resources as opposed to wondering about the optics, which is like, ‘How do I get it?’ Which is I do, but I'm less interested in the optics and more interested in how the money that I have can maybe do something different. But it's such a small number that—

Alicia: [Laughs.] That's extremely useful. Thank you for that. 

—film projects. 

Tunde: I'm sorry, I lost the first part of that question. 

Alicia: Are you working more in film now?

Tunde: Yeah. 

So my production partner and I, Ruth and I, we got a grant. And we're working on a docu—series on food, using food to explore the sort of larger questions. So yeah, that's sort of what we're doing. 

Alicia: That's exciting. Yeah. 

Tunde: And speaking of money, and—sorry, just one thing and the grant. We got money from a couple of foundations. So you have people who maybe take money from foundations, but then criticize how other people make their money off foundations. A lot of them are invested in the stock market. I don't care if you're invested in ESG or whatever. You're invested in a very speculative medium. And that sort of speculation, that sort of idle capital that is sitting in bank accounts, or what do you call them? In ledgers? That is money that is, or that is a system that is deeply exploitative. 

So, we don't get to pick and choose. I try not to, especially, even with money. And I just think about how the money that I have, again, to what I say, can be used differently. 

Alicia: Right. 

And for you, is cooking a political act? 

Tunde: Just at home, just chilling and cooking?

Alicia: Cooking in general. 

I ask this question to everyone. It's usually just a kind of a Rorschach test of what they think of the word ‘cooking’ and the word ‘political.’ [Laughs.]

Tunde: I don't know. I mean, if I'm just cooking by myself, no. If I'm doing a dinner series, or something, then possibly. I could be wrong, but I don't think of cooking—I think identity is political. So, sometimes just being is political. But all of this is contextual. Your identity in a particular place is political. But I don't think of cooking as an identity. I think of cooking as—yeah, it's an act. I don't think of necessarily actions as inherently political. Most things are contextual. I think it’s not everything. So, just depends on the context. 

Alicia: Yeah, yeah. 

Well, thank you so much for taking the time today. 

Tunde: Yeah, I have a question for you, actually.

Alicia: Ok. [Laughs.]

Do you want to ask me while we're recording, or–

Tunde: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alicia: Ok.

Tunde: So something that is just fascinating about—to me—about your work is, and I could be wrong, because I get your newsletter, but I don't read it every week. But I read enough to know that you talk about the same things. By that I mean, your perspective is the same, which is anti-capitalist. I want to say anti-racist, but I'm not sure how you describe yourself.

But you have this perspective. And you keep writing like every week, right? Every week you’re writing, every week. And just, how haven't you exhausted? No, really, I'm so serious, ’cause I feel I—when I wrote for the Chronicle, I wrote four essays. And I'm like, ‘The next four are going to be about the same thing. And the next eight after that.’ And so I'm just curious about how you keep the s**t fresh.

Alicia: Right.

No, I mean, I think a lot of people would say I don't keep it fresh, that I have a shtick, that I’m just always saying, ‘Capitalism is bad. Climate change is bad. We have to stop climate change. We have to eat less meat,’ like that. I just bang the same drums over and over again, which is valid. I think I have a beat, so to speak, as a writer. These are the things I cover, is how our cultural relationships to food are part of these larger systems—of economy, policy, white supremacy, all a part of larger systems that control our everyday ways of being and thinking. And that is my beat. That is what I write about. 

But I do think, obviously, within that there is so much to write about. There is so much to think about. I don't know. I think during the more peak of the pandemic, I really exhausted everything that I had to say for years, but no one ever let me say as a food writer. And then I think now, I'm interacting more with the world again and finding more ways into the things I have always written about and thought about, but they're more rooted in my interactions with other people. 

I don't know. I've always been a compulsive writer. So it's not hard for me. This is the natural way in which I communicate. It's easier for me to write something down then it is to say it. Yeah, just to communicate in writing. That's my way of communicating. Yeah, I'm happy to talk to you, but I find it is—I'm going to feel tired after I do this, because I—it's a less natural way for me to communicate, you know?

Tunde: Yeah, no, I dig it. I think that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, if that's easier for you, then it makes sense that you do that. Because most people say the same thing, anyway, over and over again with their mouth. But you’re just writing it. 

Another thing that I want to tell you is I met a man through you. Mr. Byrne.

Alicia: Mark Byrne. 

Tunde: Yeah, from Good Vodka. I was in Lagos. So this is a super short story. We're filming for the docu series in Lagos in Kogi State, which is central Nigeria. And we had this really delicious local drink. I was blown away by it. And I just kept thinking, ‘F**k, this is so delicious. I need to f*****g bottle this and sell it or something.’

And then I was in Lagos a couple of—a month after.I had read the interview that you did with him. And then I'm like, ‘I need to call this man or email this man and see if he'll work with me.’ So I emailed him, and he agreed to work with me. So I don't know, sometime in some soon future we will be releasing a Nigerian palm spirit. 

Alicia: Oh, that's amazing!

Tunde: Yeah. It's not a commercially viable product. I guess it's a project about exploitation again. 

Alicia: Yeah. [Laughs.]

Well, Good Vodka is basically that as well. I mean, it's a product and it's a commercial product. But it's also more about how spirits exist and are made. The history of spirits is, it's usually made from waste rather than growing things to make spirits, which is a bad way of doing it. [Laughs.]

But that's amazing. I love that. I love talking about—and maybe when it comes out, we'll talk again, but I love talking about spirits. [Laughs.] I love talking about alcohol. Because I do think people have a really weird and complicated relationship to it, obviously. But it's nice to talk about it on a level of appreciation rather than the very, very American perspective on alcohol, which is wildly problematic. [Laughs.]

Tunde: I don't know much about spirits. I just know to the point, earlier point about seeing all the systems and everything, I just know that just a really small thing, the Indigenous production of alcohol at scale. That s**t is happening. Folks in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria servicing half the country with this s**t. And you're doing it from these small, small camps, all these different small camps by the water. And so just thinking about thinking about what that means, and thinking about how the disparities that exist between, say, African production and European production is what inspires me to do this kind of thing as opposed to like the actual food product or beverage product. So yeah, I’m excited about it. 

Alicia: That's awesome. Yeah. [Laughs.]

Well, thank you again, I'm so excited about that, and everything else. 

Tunde: Absolutely. Thank you.

Alicia: Thank you. 

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Hannah Howard, author of the memoirs Feast: True Love In and Out of the Kitchen and the forthcoming Plenty: A Memoir of Food and Family, is a wildly generous writer. She gives of herself and her experiences with such vulnerability and verve, to the point that I wanted to ask her if she is holding something back for herself. The new memoir chronicles becoming a wife and a mother, as well as leaving the restaurant and food retail world for writing. She spends time with women in food that have influenced her life and work, but haven’t yet gotten their major accolades. It’s a beautiful testament to the complications of a life of food and words. We talked about why she’s drawn to memoir, how becoming a mother has changed her writing, and the differences between writing and working in restaurants. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Hannah. Thank you so much for being here. 

Hannah: Thank you so much for having me, Alicia. I'm a big fan, so I’m very excited that you asked me. 

Alicia: Well, can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate? 

Hannah: Absolutely. 

I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, with a food loving mom who loved to cook and try new recipes for new cookbooks. So we didn't often have the same thing for dinner twice, which was kind of disappointing when I loved something. 

But one of my best childhood memories is just our Saturday morning grocery procuring pilgrimages, where we would go to our local farmers market. And we'd go to Ma Stallone's, which was this tiny Italian grocery store owned by Mrs. Ma Stallone, who would be making fresh mozzarella in her arm. She had these big arms that would be flapping along, and she would give me a taste. And we would go to this little Egyptian grocery store and stock up on olives and halva, and just just go home with all these goodies. And it was so exciting to see what my mom would concoct from them.

Alicia: [Laughs.] That's really an exciting way to grow up, I think. Wow. 

Hannah: I feel really lucky. 

Alicia: Yeah, yeah.

I was thinking recently about my mom, how on Long Island we didn't have that kind of abundant diversity of things, and when-one day my mom was obsessed with cooking with bulgur wheat, and we went to a million stores and no one had it. 

But yeah. [Laughs.] And then you went on to study creative writing and anthropology at Columbia. So, how did food become such a major force in your life?

Hannah: I really have always loved food. Hanging out in my mom's kitchen always felt like a great place to be. I loved restaurants. I felt the kitchen was at the heart of where the action was. 

And in college, I wanted to have a job. And I was reading Kitchen Confidentialat the time, and I thought that I wanted to work in a restaurant. And I found a job on Craigslist as a hostess for a very old school Michelin-starred French restaurant on the Upper West Side called Picholine. 

And I just fell in love. I fell in love with this whole world that felt both kind of familiar and foreign to me, familiar because that excitement about food and ingredients and what they could become, and that felt so innate to what I cared about. But this whole world of fine dining in New York City was a new territory for me. And it was intimidating and fascinating and very alluring to my 18-year-old self, for sure. So much so that I really dove in and worked in restaurant jobs throughout college and thought that I wanted to have my own restaurant until I spent a bunch of years managing restaurants, and realized that I wanted to be close to restaurants but that maybe the day-to-day operations weren't the best fit for me.

Alicia: Right. It's a hard life for sure. 

And so, you really got super into cheese. There's so much cheese in your books, and you have a very deep expertise about it. What is it about cheese that keeps you excited, engaged, and just really obsessed?

Hannah: There's so many things about cheese that I keep coming back to. One is just that whenever I tell people that I work with cheese, or—people really love it. There is something about cheese that just has a power to make people happy. I don’t know what it is, but there’s that. And I mean, I'm one of them. 

But I think there's also something cool that there's this whole history and tradition and world of cheese, and you—mostly from Europe. Cheese only has a few ingredients. It’s milk, salts, culture, and rennet. And from those ingredients, you can make a creamy brie. Or you could make a super-aged gouda that tastes like butterscotch, or you could make a really nutty cheddar. I think it's kind of this magical alchemy that you just can milk and you can get so much from it. 

And then, I've also really gotten fascinated by learning about how cheese has played a part in humanity and how an-alpine cheeses kept people in the mountains basically alive through these long brutal winters. In Greece, it's the fresh cheese and feta. It's such an integral part of all these cuisines. 

And then in today's world, there is also something about cheese that just seems to attract some really quirky and really amazing people. So I've just loved getting to know the cheese-makers and mongers that I've gotten to connect with.

Alicia: Right. 

And your forthcoming memoir, Plenty, is about forging a career and a community around food. And when did you know that you wanted to move from the restaurant and retail side of food to food media, and how did you make that happen?

Hannah: It's funny that you say that. I just had this kind of pep talk with my husband, because I still work in a way in the retail side of food. I do a lot of food copywriting, which is kind of how I pay my bills. But it's very true that my love is more, is, I write memoirs. My next book is coming out. And I love writing personal essays, and I love writing some journalism as well. 

It's kind of been slow, because I think there's a part of me like, ‘This is the big dream.’ And it feels too good to be true, or it feels intimidating. Definitely not the easiest way in the world to make money. It's definitely a slow-burn book. I know you're in the process, so you know what a long haul it is. 

Alicia: It sucks. [Laughs.]

Hannah: It sucks. It sucks.

It's like this low-hanging fruit of things that I can do and get paid for is much more instantly gratifying. So, there's a lot of reasons that I've been kind of reluctant to dive in. But the more I have, the more I’ve felt happy. So I’ve really tried to kind of find that balance between work that pays the bills and work that brings me creative, juicy joy.

Alicia: [Laughs.] Right. 

And why do you think you’ve focused on memoir? ’Cause this is your second.

Hannah: [Sighs.] [Laughter.] I don't know. And people ask, I think totally rightfully so, they ask-I'm relatively young. I'm 30. I’m almost 34. But that's relatively young. I was 30 when my first book came out. Like, ‘Right, who are you to be sharing your life story?’ 

Alicia: No, I'm not asking that question. No, I'm saying, ‘Yeah, what is as a genre—what about memoir engages you so much?’

Hannah: I feel that I've always had this kind of compulsion to share, maybe to transform things that happened in my life into something, to make something of them. When I was in middle school, I wrote a zine about me and my friends. I just love telling these stories.

For me, it does help me make meaning of things, make sense of things to turn them into stories and share them with people. And I do think some of the memoir—my first one was a lot about my eating, struggling with an eating disorder. And I think too, that whole situation just felt incredibly lonely and difficult and really shameful. Not that it was easy, but being able to take those, even the really embarrassing things, and then turn them into something that I could share with other people. It made it feel a little bit worthwhile, and my hope was that some people would feel less alone. 

And I think that has happened. And now it feels like another really cool sort of alchemy, is to take something really shitty and make something good come of it.

Alicia: Right.

And have you found in food writing the same kind of community that you find when you work in a restaurant or in a store that sells—because I think that those places, when working in a magazine versus working at a bar. It's much more communal. It's a real sense of being in a fight together. And I think that, yeah, writing, it's harder to come by. But you do talk in the book about finding a little bit of that.

Hannah: Yeah.

I think that's one of the biggest things I miss from working in restaurants, for sure. And I think I even mention in the book, one of the women, Tammy, who I wrote about, who has this beautiful restaurant, invited me just to her pre-staff meeting. And just being a part of that, I remembered what I-

Yeah, I really felt oftentimes when I worked in a restaurant, it was a sort of a family. And I don't really get that sense from writing. I think writing can be incredibly lonely. It's you and your laptop. 

But yes, I think in the book I spent a little bit more time with the women I wrote about then just if I was writing something quick and I would talk to someone for an hour, and then write it and then that would be that. But I tried to spend days, multiple days and multiple experiences with these people. And that did feel much more rewarding and satisfying in that kind of connection realm, which I think, ultimately I find, is what I care about and is one of the things I keep coming back to about food, is that it provides that. 

But that's been one of the biggest challenges of being a full-time writer for me. It can be really lonely, especially during the pandemic.

Alicia: Yeah, of course. Yeah. Usually, we would be able to drink and complain together. [Laughs.]

Hannah: Yeah, my days would be—even just these people that I am writing a quick story about, it was so cool to get to spend an hour with them at their kitchen, an hour with them in their olive grove, instead of an hour with them on Zoom. 

Alicia: Zoom, yeah. [Laughs.]

Well, and the book is also a love letter to women in food. And it brought to mind Skirt Steak by Charlotte Druckman. I'm not sure if you've read that. But it's really, I think still, even though we're in the year 2021, such a new thing to still talk about women in food and in the kitchen in a way that really captures all the nuance of what gender has meant in food for so long, where women have always been cooking but it's the men who have gotten the credit for it. And that continues still. 

And so, I wanted to know why you wanted to write the book about the women you've worked with in food. Do you think that women in food are getting more attention? What is kind of your perspective on how things have changed, or how they've stayed the same in terms of the ways we talk about gender and food?

Hannah: Yeah, it's kind of astonishing how far we still have to go, I think. Although women have been cooking and feeding people forever, when men do so it seems to automatically get taken more seriously and garner more respect and more rewards, rewards and awards and all of that. 

But I do feel really hopeful. And one of my reasons for writing about women in food was kind of selfish. I was kind of answering for myself why I've had so many food jobs, and men have almost always been my mentors and my bosses and oftentimes my co-workers. And just like, ‘Why was that?’

And the book started out when I was just in that really early idea stage I had—I was thinking a little bit more about sort of profiles of more prominent, big deal women in the food worlds. But then I kind of was more interested in people in the trenches doing this work every day. And I did find myself completely inspired and impressed. And it just made me feel like if these women's stories are in any way representative, which I think they are, that there's going to be a much more-

And I think, too, in these last few years, people are paying a little bit more attention to the voices they're listening to and caring more about where their food is coming from. And I’m hopeful. I'm optimistic.

Alicia: [Laughs.] Yeah.

And you write so candidly and vividly about your experiences with an eating disorder, a miscarriage, pregnancy. Why has it been so significant to your work to document those vulnerable aspects of womanhood? And how do you decide—because I think every writer is always making these choices, how do you decide what to tell people and what to keep to yourself? How do you walk that line?

Hannah: Yeah.

I mean, I think for me, these kind of personal things are, do occupy such a big part of my headspace and heart space. And so, not sharing about them would feel like I was missing such a big part of the story. 

Same thing about how eating disorders to me felt so secretive and so shameful, and then getting to share really shifted something about that. I think that was a similar situation with having a miscarriage, which I did—I was kind of surprised, because I hadn't really thought much about the whole thing until until I experienced it. And then I started to realize that I knew—Why didn't people talk about this? And I was almost hungry for these stories. 

I watched on YouTube about Beyoncé’s miscarriage. And I was so heartened to read about Michelle Obama's miscarriage. Of course not because this happened to these people, but just to be like, ‘Ok, this is a part of life. And I'm not alone.’ So being able to kind of pass that along and diminish some of the weird stigma in silence, I think, is really important to me. 

I think that is such a fine line, hard question, as someone who writes about personal things, is how personal, how much. One of my writing teachers that I really admire kind of reminded me that we also get to decide what we don't share. I think that's just as important, right, as what we do. And I share a lot. I do open my heart to the page. But I think of it just as kind of one part of me and one part of the story. And then sometimes, you look—I look back on it. And I cringe. But I think that's life too.

Alicia: I think that's definitely life as a writer, where you put things out there and you see what lands. I mean, so much of understanding writing comes from how people interact with it, I think, even more so than what we think we're doing when we write. [Laughs.] 

But one thing I wanted to ask you is because I don't think we hear enough about what it's like to be a writer and a mother. And when people do write memoirs about this, I'm thinking of Rachel Cusk’s A Life's Work, people are wildly critical. You are just not supposed to talk about being a mother and being a writer, because—I don't know why. 

But as a freelance writer, especially, you write, it's about—we have a life of constant anxiety, where it's like, ‘When is our next work coming? When is this check coming? Do I have the stamina today to write anything at all?’ And so, how has motherhood changed your relationship both to writing and to food, if it has?

Hannah: So, I've been a mother—also, I became a mother right as the pandemic started, in April of 2020. So everything changed in the world and everything changed in my little world. And sometimes it's hard for me to separate out which was which. And I feel like I'm still a new—so my daughter is six, about 16 months old. So I'm still, feel I'm still very much figuring it out, for sure. 

And I don't have it figured out. I have found the whole—I don't think I've ever been so challenged creatively as in this last year and a half. I have found it enormously—being a mom has been so consuming and relentless. And it just really requires a huge amount of, such a different part of your brain than writing, but some—one part, and then it's hard to find sometimes that energy with the other part. 

But I've also surprised myself in how the process of being, becoming a mom has made me value writing in my creative work more in a way. I think it just feels almost more sacred than it did before. I don't know if that's just the kind of silver lining of having such time constraints. The time I do have feels magical. In April 2020, like so many people, my life shrunk in such a way that it was this tiny world of me and my little family, that was something about writing and getting to—and being a freelancer in a way, just doing work that felt valuable to someone, where I got to connect with other people. And it just felt really rewarding in a way that being a new mom didn't, because it was just so thankless, rote tasks over and over again.

So it's been interesting. But I think it keeps changing for me, right? Yeah, definitely. And I'm pregnant again. I'm expecting another in, around Thanksgiving. That's one of my biggest fears, because I feel like I'm barely managing with one. But I'm really excited, and I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't also find it such a amazing challenge,

Alicia: Right. Of course, of course. 

And for you, is cooking a political act?

Hannah: I think cooking is always a politi—I thought about this question a lot. And I know it's very much at the heart of your work. Yeah. I think it has to be. I think that there's, like so many—I think there's a part of me that would like it not to be, because after a long day, cooking can feel, for someone who loves to cook, it can feel like an escape. And I think it can be that, and it can still be political because it's part of who is—who creates, produces, makes, feeds our world, is a political thing. So, yes.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much, Hannah. for taking the time. Good luck to you with your book launch and everything, and also having another baby, which is so exciting. 

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Cathy Erway came to food writing through home cooking and that’s also how she has maintained her career. It’s a pathway that is rarely tread anymore, as restaurants have become so central to how we talk about and think about food.

But Erway has stuck to her guns and somehow carved out a space for herself as someone who cares about where food comes from, both in terms of the actual land it was grown in and hands that tended to it, as well as with regards to cultural significance. We discussed how she came to create her food-writing niche, the way she framed her cookbook The Food of Taiwan, and how she told readers to use the entire chicken in Sheet Pan Chicken. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Cathy. Thank you so much for being here.

Well, can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Cathy: Yeah.

So my parents were living in Brooklyn Heights when I was born, and then they moved to a town in New Jersey in Essex County called Maplewood. So that's when I was a baby, like 2. So, that's where I grew up. 

And I remember—well, my parents always cooked a lot. But if we did go out to eat, I remember in the earlier sort of part of my childhood, we would go into the city. And sometimes we would go to Chinatown or something like that. But then over the years gradually, my parents became more attuned to where some other Chinese—not some other because there was no, not really much of a Chinese American community were in our town. So they figured out where some of these spots were and where some of these good restaurants that they wanted to go to were, and had more of a Chinese American sort of community of families that they would go to. And for a while there, we were going to like dim sum every weekend with this sort of clan of just Chinese American families that were sort of eating buddies. Very important to have. 

And then we would also get-there's tons of great pizza and Italian food where we lived. Great bagels. The kind of New York stuff. We would try everything. There's a new Ethiopian place, we would try it. There was a Malaysian place, we would try it. 

So yeah, I mean, I'm pretty blessed in that sense. [Laughs.]

Alicia: For sure, for sure. 

And you don't have formal culinary training, but from your blog, Not Eating Out in New York, which you turned into a book, to your cookbook,The Food of Taiwan, and then your latest cookbook, Sheet Pan Chicken, you've made food and cooking your life. So how did that happen, and was it what you intended to do?

Cathy: Oh, gosh. I mean, I guess, yeah, I have no full formal culinary training. But I've always sort of tried to focus on home cooking, and try to show my real practical home cooking, like through my blog, Not Eating Out in New York. So just kind of keep it, kept it real, sometimes mistakes and all. Share some of those failures. But yeah, so I hope that that's helpful for home cooks. 

Yeah, I mean, I think I wanted to be a writer always. I studied literature and creative writing. And after school, I was just sort of trying to do some journalism. And I never really thought of food as something—I guess before that, it wasn't something I thought of that you could study, food writing or something like that. 

But I guess sometime in the—oops. That's my phone. 

Alicia: That’s ok. [Laughs.]

Cathy: Yeah, sometime in the mid-2000s when blogs were blowing up, I started a food blog in 2006 because I couldn't get published elsewhere. I would write these horrible pitches.

I actually took a class in food writing that was taught by an organization that no longer—it's called Mediabistro. And then for a while, they had food writing courses. And my course was taught by Ramin Ganeshram, who was an amazing food writer. And I actually just caught up with her recently. What I was taught was that you had to identify editors at these glossy magazines, write them a pitch. And then I would do that and crickets, of course.

So, I just started a food blog and said, ‘To heck with it.’ And I think everything just happened from there. People were reading my food blog, and then they—I got a, an offer to write a cookbook, right? I was approached by an agent. And actually, two years later, I finally kind of wrapped my head around what a proposal would look like for that cookbook, ’cause at first I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ 

And so, everything kind of just fell from doing the blog. And so, I've been-—yeah, I just kind of been doing freelance writing and cookbook writing. The Food of—

Alicia: Yeah, my question was, how did you come to make food writing your life, which you—is what you’ve done? And you had another book come out last year, another cookbook.

I think you answered the question, which was that you did your blog and you just kept kind of going at it. Which is, I think, when people ask, ‘How do you do—how do you become a freelance writer?’ The answer really is being persistent and consistent, and a lot—just taking more risks than you would think you would want to do.

Cathy: I also like to create community, and I threw a lot of events when I was starting out. Especially when I was doing my blog, I would throw a lot of kickoffs, and other potlucks and stuff like that. And it was just a great way to meet people and just form a community around it. 

In terms of how I make a living today, yeah, it is also—it has actually always been sort of a mixed bag, where I did a lot of freelance copywriting sort of on the side all along. And now, I do that full-time. And sort of the freelance food writing is my sort of night happening. [Laughter.]

Alicia: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Well, you in your blog—which you don't have, you don't update anymore, right? 

Cathy: Yeah, yeah.

I only write about things for money now, instead of—I spent a lot of time and effort on the blog. So it's just like, ‘Ok, I'm gonna try to move those projects into a different and more visible field.’

Alicia: Yeah.

But you maintain your focus really on home cooking. And what is your advice, and how is that kind of changed? Has your approach to cooking changed since you had the blog to now? I know you were always about local and seasonal and no waste cooking. How has your cooking changed since you were starting out as a blogger?

Cathy: Oh, that's a great question. 

I think that I always like to sort of learn something new from every season of vegetables that crops up in my CSA or at my farmers’ markets. And you do see trends come and go. You do see new ingredients all the time. So I think that that just experience and working with all different kinds of stuff that—

And joining a CSA is a great way to have this, because you get all these things that you didn’t intentionally set forth to buy. And so, it's kind of great. So I think that it just, it's only enriched my cooking. 

I've also been really interested in learning about all every cuisine in the world, basically, I want to learn more about. So, I've been collecting cookbooks along the way. And yeah, so I hope that it's just kind of enriched my awareness of—and it's also led to a lot of clutter in my pantry of random, not random, but just a lot of spices and stuff. [Laughs.]

Alicia: Yeah, yeah. The spices and the vinegars really take up a lot of space when you get going. Yeah. 

But yeah, with that focus on home cooking, you have a James Beard award for writing about home cooking. So what is your relationship to eating out these days, since you built your career on cooking at home?

Cathy: Oh my god.

I've always sort of thought of eating out as the special treat, rather than—I know a lot of people who are not used to cooking, they see cooking as a kind of big to-do. And it's a little bit nerve-racking. And so that was always sort of the reverse for me. So I've always treated going out as like a special occasion, whether it's to try something I could never make at home like dim sum or to celebrate somebody's birthday. 

I feel the last year—I usually don't get takeout in my local neighborhood, but in the last year I've been doing a lot just to support my local restaurants. So, the last year has really changed my relationship in a big way in that sense. 

Alicia: Yeah, that's interesting. 

And there has been so much conversation about the ethics of restaurants and hospitality in the last year. And I was going to ask you, how did the pandemic kind of change your approach to food? And how did it other—obviously, a little more takeout. But what was it like for you?

Cathy: I mean, it didn't really change my day to day terribly much. And I'm so fortunate and I'm so privileged to say that, because I always sort of cooked—I always sort of had a stocked pantry of things that I could whip together if I needed to with rice, or some nice sauces and an egg and I'm happy. So it didn't really change my cooking routine too much in that sense.

So I was really looking around and seeing what other people were doing, what other businesses were doing to stay afloat. And I saw so many of them started pantries and grocery stores, weird kind of pop-up thing—or not pop-up, but delivery things. I got some partially cooked stuff and then threw it together as a meal cooked from one local restaurant. And all these kind of solutions and pivots that folks were doing, I really wanted to support that. 

And I really wanted to support by buying gift cards. So I've just used a few of the gift cards I bought a year ago by eating out. I think that it's just really important to show up for your community. And a lot of restaurants are really struggling, and I tried to hear them out and wrote about some of them as well.

Alicia: Yeah.

And you're also well-known as a podcaster, for Eat Your Words and Why We Eat What We Eat. And how did you get into podcasting, and how did it kind of open up different creative avenues for you versus writing?

Cathy: Yeah.

I think it happened really organically through Heritage Radio Network, which was a project from Heritage Foods USA, which is a heritage meat distributor. And I was friendly with the folks who ran it, and they just started this radio-back then, they called it a radio station, they still do-outside of this little shipping container at Roberta's Pizza in Brooklyn. 

So, I was friendly with some of those folks. And they invited me on a show, on my friend’s show Snacky Tunes. And I was a guest, and then they, the producers, asked if I wanted to come up with a show. And they were creating a show about—their show was like food and music. There was Anne Saxelby’s cheese show. And so, I created a show about home cooking. And then, it evolved into being about books and food of all kinds, books about food basically, whether it's a cookbook or a food memoir.

So, it just was totally organic. And it was a great way to again form community and meet people that I wanted to talk with and kind of support their work and showcase it however I can, without having to sit down and write a whole long profile about somebody. It's just like, ‘Hey, let's have an organic conversation.’ And so, that was a lot of fun. 

And then from there, yeah, I guess, Gimlet Creative reached out to me when they were looking for a host for their food show, what was Why We Eat What We Eat. And a longtime friend of mine who used to be a food blogger, James Boo, decided to start Self-Evident, which is a community-based podcast that's exploring Asian American experiences. I had experience as a-being a host. And I was really dedicated to the mission, so that's how I became the host of Self-Evident.

Alicia: [Laughs.] Nice. 

Well, something I love about your book, The Food of Taiwan, is that it starts by giving a cultural, political, agricultural background on the island, which you would say or think is necessary to understanding any cuisine. I think a lot of cookbooks don't necessarily start with all of that background, which is something interesting about yours.

Have you always considered those factors important when talking about food? And if so, how did you kind of develop your consciousness around food, politics and agriculture? Because it's not always a significant angle for a lot of food writers, especially talking about home cooking.

Cathy: Right.

Yeah, I definitely think it's essential to understanding the food of a certain place to understand ‘What are some of the people that have emigrated here over the years? What is the climate? What is the agriculture situation?’ I mean, that's how cuisine is formed. Cuisine is just a totally social construct that is formed with, from people and the land. 

Especially in the case of Taiwan, where I think it was really hard for me when I was shopping this book around 10 years ago or so, to explain without getting into a long history lesson about what Taiwan is. It's still like a kind of a long winded thing to—its political situation is a little bit tricky, right now, and it has been for quite a while. I felt like it was really important for that book. 

But that said, I really enjoy cookbooks that give you that really thorough glimpse into the people who have created the cuisine. So I definitely think that that's important to understanding any, any cuisine. 

Alicia: Yeah, yeah.

And have you always been interested in food politics and how agriculture works in that way? I know you said you have a CSA, so you're obviously supporting local farmers. But was that always part of your kind of food consciousness?

Cathy: Oh, definitely. Yeah, I mean, just from the very first sort of-I think when I was in high school, or maybe it was during college is when I read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. And I also read a book called Grub by Bryant Terry and Anna Lappé . And it just really just that that book, I think, in particular, really just changed my consciousness. And I always felt food was intertwined with politics. And we all have an ability to enact change with every decision we make around food and how we interact with it and how we talk about it, especially if we're going to be a writer of some sort. [Laughter.]

Alicia: Right.

Well, what are you working on now as a food writer?

Cathy: Right now, I’m working on a story about sugar. [Laughs.]

Alicia: Oh, I just filed a story about sugar. [Laughter.]

Cathy: I hope you figured it out, because I can't figure out my story. I can't wait to see yours. 

Basically, I've been working on this story. And it turned into a much bigger story than I was initially thinking it was, and much thornier, and much more difficult. So I don't know how it's gonna turn out right now. [Laughter.]

Alicia: Well, it's interesting, because I do think that you do—you tackle thorny topics in food with, in a very accessible way. You do take thorny things and make them easy for people, not easy as in digestible, but you make it understandable and approachable. 

And one thing I did want to ask you, especially talking about politics and agriculture is you have written vegetarian recipes. You've written about the Buddhist history of mock meat, which I love that piece and reference it in the manuscript of my book I'm working on. 

But you did a book called Sheet Pan Chicken. And obviously, I'm a vegetarian. [Laughter.] And so, I wanted—

Cathy: I wanted to add you to the press list, but I was like, ‘Wait a minute. No, no, wait.’ [Laughter.]

Alicia: No, no.

But what I wanted to ask, because how did you regard that? The politics of chicken, the sourcing of chicken, the impact of its production? How did you kind of deal with that? Because you are a writer who asks those questions.

Cathy: Thanks. Yeah. 

There's a section in the introduction where I talk about how to shop for chicken. I sort of run you through some of the labels you'll find on chicken nowadays, and what they mean and why they're important. And I encourage people to be curious and look beyond the grocery store and hit up their local farmers’ market, if they're going to buy meat. And they can ask even more questions.

But I think beyond that, I hope that the book demonstrates the type of cooking that I really like to emphasize, which is just using every little piece of meat and just maximizing the full value of all the flavors that you can get out of it and have it carry through other ingredients. And that's just the way I tend to cook is, if I'm using meat, it's a small amount that just lends their drippings and flavors to vegetables or starch or tofu. And then, I think something kind of magical happens with that synthesis of both things.

I tried to kind of emphasize that in this book. The worst thing I think you can do is cook a chicken all alone with nothing to catch its fat or juices. So chicken should always be cooked on top of or with some vegetables around them to absorb and kind of trade off one another's flavors and benefits and whatever. 

So that's what I hope people get out of the book, ’cause I have you do things like scrape the brown bits from the pan and make a sauce out of that reuse. I have them use bone and chicken with the skin on and then say, ‘You can make stock with it afterwards, or like keep the fat.’ And I don't know, in my fridge I have jars of duck fat or bacon fat from whenever I've cooked these things. So, suggesting you can use them next time you're cooking vegetables. 

That just feels very harmonious to me if you are going to eat animal meat, even more than using olive oil that was grown in a Mediterranean climate that is very far from New York City. But I still buy olive oil, because I love it, but keeping fat also just makes a lot of sense to me.

Alicia: Yeah, for sure. 

And for you is cooking a political act?

Cathy: Yes, definitely. 

I mean, I don’t have a great answer for that. [Laughter.] But I think that, again, every day, you choose what you put into your mouth to eat and to nourish yourself. And I think that it's a very important decision. It’s more important than what color nail polish and what the hell my hair looks like today, or how I present myself to the world. To me, that's reflected in what I'm cooking and eating and talking about with regards to cooking, and eating and shopping for food. So these are all decisions that are made on an everyday basis three times a day. And I think that's a huge opportunity. 

Alicia: Yeah. Thank you so much for taking the time today. 

Cathy: Thank you so much, Alicia. That was fun.

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

It’s almost funny that I haven’t had Mayukh Sen on my podcast yet. But the truth is, I’ve been waiting for his book, Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America (out November 2—preorder it!), to be available so that we could discuss it in all the glory I knew it would achieve.

Here, he presents what we discuss is an Almodóvar-esque constellation of women who all moved to the United States and made their mark on its cuisine—to various ends. Their stories are rendered cinematically, richly. It’s a book you can’t put down until you finish. It’s an absolute triumph that challenges popular and dull liberal assimilationist narratives.

In full disclosure, Mayukh and I are good friends. But I think that only enriches this discussion of his work and especially this text. We discussed how food media has and hasn’t changed over 100-plus years, what it’s like to receive Establishment accolades at a young age, and how teaching food writing at NYU has influenced his work. (I didn’t end up quizzing him on Best Actress winners since 1960, but I trust he’s still got that knowledge.) Paid subscribers can listen and access the full transcript.

Alicia: Hi, Mayukh. Thank you so much for being here. 

Mayukh: Thank you for having me, Alicia. [Laughter.] 

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

Mayukh: No, I can't.

Yeah, so I grew up in suburban New Jersey, two towns: Edison and North Brunswick. So most of my food memories from my childhood revolve around my mother's home cooking. 

So my mother is an immigrant from the Indian state of West Bengal, just like my late father was. And so, every night for dinner, she would cook some sort of Bengali meal that had rice and dal, some sort of vegetable preparation, and then a non-veg protein. So those were most of my memories, kind of just her home cooking.

We didn't really go out to eat at restaurants very much. I grew up comfortably middle class, I'd say. But I don’t know, there's something about the etiquettes of going out to eat at restaurants that just seemed very foreign to our family. So what we considered luxury, when I was growing up at least in the ’90s and the aughts, was places like P.F. Changs and Cheesecake Factory. Bertucci's was a really big event in our family to go there, but that was kind of the extent of our restaurant-going experiences. So I didn't really grow up with a sense of what it was like to go out to eat at restaurants and partake in the culture in that way.

Alicia: Do you maintain the kind of eating at home that you grew up with, that your mom gave you?

Mayukh: I am such a bad cook in general that I find that a lot of those kinds of dishes are probably too involved for me to pull off as well as she could and still can. Sorry, she's not deceased or anything. [Laughter.] She's still with us. And she's still cooking this stuff really nicely. 

The stuff that I cook at home now, over in—Brooklyn is where I live—is just staple stuff that is enough for me to survive on. I purely just only cook well enough to feed myself and exist in this world. [Laughter.]

Alicia: Well, and I mean, that brings me to my next question, which is that you didn't come to food writing out of a passion for food, which is what so many of us do. And that also is why you're such a unique voice in the field. You're not interested in why people cook well, that's not an interesting thing to do in your work. I mean, maybe it is interesting to you. That's sort of the least interesting part of why people cook and why food is interesting. And you're not kind of dazzled by that. [Laughs.]

Mayukh: Totally.

Alicia: Yeah, how did you come to write about food and how did you kind of find your way to create your voice in this field?

Mayukh: For sure. 

First of all, I just want to say thank you for even regarding my initial lack of passion for food as a qualification, because I think that a lot of people who we call colleagues and peers in this industry would consider that a demerit or disqualification for me existing in the space at all, but whatever. So, thank you for that. 

But in terms of how I came to food, so I have been a professional food writer for five years now. Can you hear the exhaustion in my voice? [Laughter.] I never imagined that I'd be doing this with my life for this long. 

But what happened was, so I grew up wanting to be a film critic. And I was the kind of kid who devoured Entertainment Weekly. I memorized everything about the Oscars in high school. I could name every Best Actress nominee from 1960 onward. Now I'm a little rusty, but we can end the conversation today with some tests and see how good I still am. But I was very hell-bent on becoming a film critic in the vein of Pauline Kael. And that didn't quite happen just yet, even though I still do write about film.

But basically, I graduated from college in 2014. And in 2015, when I was living in New York, I started to freelance a lot about topics like film and television and music. Everything but food, basically. I had only written one food piece, and it was for the RIP Village Voice. The OG Village Voice. And that piece was held indefinitely. And I think that the editor just didn't have the heart to actually kill it, you know? So, maybe that was a sign that I actually don't belong here.

But regardless, fast forward to summer 2016. I got an email from an editor at a site called Food52, which many listeners, readers may know. And they were just like, ‘Yeah, we're hiring for a staff writer position right now, someone who is not necessarily a food person in terms of home cooking or going out to eat at restaurants.’ And that’s like, ‘I'm your guy. ‘And someone who is going to be able to write about food to a broader cultural lens, and perhaps tap into a segment of the audience we haven't quite reached just yet.’

And initially when I got that email, I was like, ‘This is hilarious. Please. Absolutely not.’ But I took the meeting, because back then I was 24 years old. I was a freelancer. I wanted to write more ambitious, deeply reported stories. That was back when I still equated the length of a story with narrative strength in some way. I was like, ‘I want to write long stories,’ which I've now kind of moved away from. But we can talk about that later. 

But anyway, so I took the meeting. And I really wanted the trust of an editor to allow me to write those kinds of stories that I just did not get as a young freelancer. And the fact that this was a salary job with benefits, those were hard to come by in 2016 just like they are today. A salary culture writing job with benefits? Excuse me. It’s a rarity. 

So I kept interviewing for it, and then I got the job. But I just remember in the days leading up to me realizing that I was going to accept this offer, I was kind of laughing to myself. And I was just like, ‘Wow, I'm going to be a food writer. That's hilarious.’ 

Because I had grown up—and I'm not sure what kind of cultural depiction is responsible for this. But I'd grown up thinking that food writing was very much the domain of straight, white, affluent men. And I was one of those things. I was a man. But otherwise, I was a queer person of color and child of immigrants. I grew up speaking two first languages. It just seemed so not an option for me career wise, and so I never even considered it. So, I just thought that the whole little ride was kind of hilarious. So just like, ‘Strap in, Mayukh. See what's in store for you here.’

So, it was definitely a challenge in those first few months. It remains a challenge, of course, to be in this industry coming from marginalized communities and having leftist points of view. But back in late 2016 when I started that job at Food52, I had to struggle for a few months to really find my footing in that site because I was the only person of color on an editorial team of white women—wonderful white women. A great collection. [Laughter.] But I was just writing from a different center of gravity than everyone else. And it was quite apparent that I was a new voice to the site in the sorts of comments that I got that were just so allergic to my point of view, and the way that I expressed that point of view. 

So it was tough, but the way I started to kind of ease into the job was writing a lot of personal essays, because throughout my life I had never really considered what food meant to me beyond providing me mere sustenance. I was always like, ‘Ok, cool, this is something I need to do. I need to eat, and then I'm going to go to sleep and wake up and do this over again the next day.’

But being in the job at first really asked me to consider like, ‘What does food mean to you, especially as a queer Bengali person?’ All that stuff. And so I wrote a lot about my identity and how food is tied to it, and how I'd never really considered all these things and how food had shaped me in ways that I just was not aware of, so early on in my life. 

And after I got all those personal essays out of my system, I started to grow extremely bored with myself as a character. I was like, ‘I've exhausted every story that lives inside me, so let me move on and turn my gaze outwards.’ So what I started to do was write a lot of profiles of figures who were like me, kind of on the margins of the food industry, were not from the dominant, over-represented populations within this industry and really made an impact with their food or their writing or both in some way. 

So often, these figures tended to be people of color, women of color, immigrants, immigrants of color, queer people of color like myself, etc. And I found a lot of comfort in exploring these stories, because they made me understand my place in this industry a bit better because I just felt so alone and so confused and those first few months had me be just like, ‘What am I doing? How did I get here on this planet?’ And I still feel the same way, but just less intensely now. 

And it was also kind of a way of me educating myself, because there's so much about culinary history in America that I was just so unaware of when I stepped into that job. You think that that's kind of a prerequisite for taking on a food staff writing job, but I was just like, ‘I'm an idiot. I've seen Julie and Julia.’ That was kind of the extent of my culinary history education. So, writing these stories as a way of schooling myself in a very public manner. I was learning on the job, in that sense. 

Alicia: Yeah. 

I mean, it's funny because I think still, the picture of food writers in movies is so far from what it actually is. [Laughs.] Well, it's funny that you thought food writers were straight dudes, because I was—I think restaurant critics have always been straight, white men generally. And then, the people writing about lifestyle like Craig Claiborne or James Beard or—it's always been women or gay white men. It's always been such a segregated field where—and maybe now we're getting better. I don't know. 

Mayukh: Oh, I don’t know. [Laughter.] 

Alicia: I mean, there is a movie I really like because it's one of those—one of the last middlebrow adult movies, which I hope are making a comeback. But it has Toni Collette and Greg Kinnear. And they go to dinner at a friend's house, and I can't remember—is it Dinner with Friends? 

Mayukh: Little Miss Sunshine? I don't remember that scene. 

Alicia: Wait, there's a different movie where it's them, I think. 

But anyway, the people whose house they go to are writers for Saveur. And they're just going on glamorous trips, and they have kids and they have a huge house. And it's like, ‘Wow, I did think that that's what it would be like to be a magazine writer.’ I was like, ‘Oh, my life is going to be so glamorous. And I'll have money.’ I had no conception of how difficult and poorly paid this job was. 

Mayukh: What are you talking about? It pays so well. 

Alicia: It pays so well!

Mayukh: Scrooge McDuck over here just swimming in money, you know? 

Yeah, I'm trying to think of what film kind of made me think of food writers in that way. You're definitely correct that I equated food writing with restaurant criticism. Maybe it was Mystic Pizza. I don't know. But I remember—

Alicia: Oooooh.

Mayukh: Yeah, ’cause I remember—there's that scene near the end where the restaurant critic comes in. 

But yeah, I can't think of what else. [Laughter.] But anyway, my point stands, which is that however you cut it, whether food writing was the domain of those white straight rich dudes or gay white men or white women, there—there's not a place to me there at the table, so to speak. 

Alicia: No, yeah, we could go on forever about that. 

But in your book, Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America, you profile seven women. You put them in there chronologically, which I think tells a really great story and really kind of contextualizes an evolution of food in the United States in the 20th century. And you kind of vary your selections between popular people like Marcella Hazan and also the less obvious choice like Julie Sahni. The obvious choice, if you wanted to talk about a woman immigrant in America who did Indian food, you talk about Madhur Jaffrey, right? 

But by making these choices, you get to present some really interesting contrast between reception of how people were received and how people really change things. And even what kinds of books were successful, like I—so much about what someone's book would look like versus someone else's book, and how that also influences the reception. 

And so I wanted to ask how you decided on those women? I know you write about it a little bit in the afterword, but how were your—what was your process for deciding?

Mayukh: Yeah, that's a wonderful question. 

It took me many months. And it even changed after the proposal writing process, because the women who were in my—whom I had selected for my proposal were not the ones who ended up in the book, which is funny. In terms of selecting people like Marcella Hazan, I realized that I needed to provide some sort of entry point or way in to readers who might be scanning books at a bookstore or online and be like, ‘Oh, this sounds kind of interesting. Is there anyone I know here?’ And Marcella Hazan is close to a household name for people who are home cooks. 

And actually once I selected her, it really illuminated why certain other women were kind of in that book as well, because Marcella Hazan is someone who I obviously have great affection for. And I have even more affection for after reading about her. Yet throughout her career, she was dogged by so many accusations of being a ‘difficult woman.’ We now recognize that as a sexist dog whistle to call a woman difficult when she stands up for what she believes and fights for the integrity of her work. 

But it's interesting how those sorts of criticisms, you could say, did not torpedo her career in the same way it may have for other women who didn't possess the same advantages of her, that she did, you know. 

And so, that's why I selected someone like Madeleine Kamman, who is from France, who was so brilliant, had just an incredible sense of French technique and how to apply it to different styles or—cuisines rather, excuse me, like American cuisine. Throughout her career, however, her brilliance was overshadowed by the fact that she was very openly critical about Julia Child and Julia Child's position as a white American woman being this ambassador for French cooking in the United States. And as a result, throughout her life and career, Madeleine Kamman faced all these accusations that she was just this bitter woman who could not stand to see other people succeed, etc. 

And so I start to wonder, ‘Why is it that someone like Marcella Hazan did become a big name in spite of these perceived difficulties versus someone like Madeleine Kamman, her road to recognition was so much more rocky.’

And in terms of selecting other women—so, I initially did not set out to write about Julie Sahni, because I did go for the obvious choice, Madhur Jaffrey. This didn't have much to do—Sorry, how do I say this? This had a lot to do with the fact that she was a film actress, in addition to a food writer. And of course, my whole topical passion and interest is in film. So I was like, ‘Oh, this is gonna be fun for me.’

But then I realized, in spending more time with Julie’s work, I realized that there has not been the kind of deep appraisal of her work that she certainly merits and—A. And then B, I think that her whole philosophy in general is just so admirable to me. She is someone who truly focuses on the strength of the work. She puts her head down, lets the work speak for itself. She's not always out there and trying to grab eyes or attention. Which is okay, if she were to. No judgment there. 

But that's just such a fascinating way to live as a creative. And it's really aspirational, to be honest. And I think that there's something to say in his story about the kinds of—what it's like to live as a creative person under American capitalism and how to survive in public memory through that. And so that's why I was like, ‘Julie Sahni might actually be a more interesting challenge to me.’ Also, I had written about Madhur Jaffrey before, back at Food52. So I was like, ‘This is kind of worn territory for me. I want to tackle a fresh story.’

So, those were the kinds of considerations I had when I was curating this list, let's say—cast of characters rather. It’s a more diplomatic way to put it. 

And then in terms of my last story subject. Surely you know, she was from Jamaica. The way I landed upon her actually was, I googled ‘the Julia Child of.’ Just that phrase, literally. And so many hits for people like Marcella Hazan and Julie Sahni. They've been called respectively, Julia Child of Italy, Julia Child of India. 

But Norma Shirley is a name that came up as well in one article. And she was from Jamaica, and I thought that her story was so fascinating because she did live in America for a few decades, from the ‘60s ‘til the ‘80s. But then she went back home to Jamaica, and she became a star there. And I think that her story had so much to say regarding the hurdles that Black immigrant women from the Caribbean had to face in terms of getting enough capital to make their creative dreams a reality in this country, in culinary terms. 

Alicia: Yeah. No, I love that. 

Have you written about the phrase, ‘the Julia Child of’? [Laughs.]

Mayukh: I would love to. There's an op-ed in there. 

Alicia: There is definitely an op-ed. [Laughs.]

Mayukh: I have a little spiel about it in the Norma Shirley chapter. But originally, it was this long thing, super blown out. But then, I had to cut in subsequent drafts. But yeah, it was there originally. So yeah, thanks for the reminder.

Alicia: ‘Cause I want to read about it. There's a cookbook author from Puerto Rico, who's been referred to as the Julia Child of Puerto Rico. I actually have to open her cookbook today. 

Mayukh: What's her name? Do you know?

Alicia: Her name is Carmen, and I can't remember the rest of her name. [Laughters.] But she wrote Caribbean Cookery, I believe. Oh, no, Cocina Criolla.

Mayukh:, Right. Ok. Ok, that’s what I figured. 

Alicia: Yeah. 

Your appreciation for the difficult women is maybe part of—And you also mentioned this earlier that you knew the Best Actress since 1960, was the winner of the Best—You have a love of women and drama and glamour. And I think that you bring that to the book with how you write about them. You really bring them to life, and you see all sides of them. And you just appreciate them in such a way that is—I don't know, it's just so alive and vivid and cinematic. 

And so, did you think about that while you were writing the book? Did your love of film and of actresses influence your appreciation of these women and your ability to render them so vividly? 

Mayukh: First of all, thank you for saying that. That’s a huge compliment, because the last thing I want anyone to say about my book is like, ‘Oh, this is boring as s**t,’ you know? That's my big fear. And that's what I asked myself when I'm self editing is like, ‘Is this boring me to tears? Does this feel like homework?’

Yeah, I would absolutely say that my love of cinema, and actresses in particular, influenced the way that I approached these stories. When people ask me what my favorite films are, of course, I have a list. The conversation almost immediately pivots to, what are my favorite film performances? I have that running list. And my favorite performances in the film are ones by actresses who just dominate a whole movie and their performance just overtakes the entire film. 

So I'm thinking of, like Jane Fonda in Klute. That was one performance that when I first saw it in high school, I just—it completely expanded my notion of what a movie performance could be. Because her skills such that you are able to understand what this woman, who is a sex worker and actress in the movie—it's a wonderful movie. You should watch it if you haven’t yet. You're able to understand what she is feeling at any given moment in time, without the need for dialogue or narration. First-person narration, excuse me. 

And so many of my other favorite performances in film operate along those same lines, like Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas and the Indian actress Sridevi in English Vinglish. They don't need dialogue to tell you what they're feeling. And I wanted to bring something similar to these chapters. 

And that's why I took the approach that I did, which is that I don't necessarily—I did a lot of reporting for this book. Of course, yeah. I don't directly quote those people. It's like ‘Julie Sahni’s friend said this to me about—’ The kind of journalistic gaze there just feels so apparent in a way that feels antithetical to the kind of book that I want to offer, a book experience that I want to offer, excuse me, to readers. And so, I decided to instead just kind of write this book in a way that would allow readers to kind of step through these women's lives as this woman lived those lives.

So that's why it was really important for me to find women who had memoirs or were still alive, like Julie Sahni, Najmieh Batmanglij, whom I could speak to about what it was like to experience all of these different things at different junctures in your life. So that's one way in which performances, the performances that I love really influenced the way that I approached these chapters. I wanted readers to feel what these women were feeling at any given moment in time, as intimately as possible. 

And you might appreciate this because I know you're a fan of his as well. But the filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar really influenced my work so much and my writing, because he is someone who, like me, is a queer man who has tremendous affection for female stories and renders them with—sorry, not to compare myself to him in saying that I've done—He, not myself, does such a wonderful job of rendering these stories with such love and care. 

In my favorite movies of his, he really works in such a broad canvas. I'm thinking about All About My Mother and Volver, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. All of those movies have so many characters and so many vivid women who are interacting with one another. And I want to do something similar with this book as well. That was kind of my approach because, of course, the question that was hanging over me as I was writing is how will people react to the fact that I am someone who presents the world as a man writing these stories? And so he was kind of a very helpful model for me to follow in terms of what sensitivity looks like in that regard.

Alicia: Right. 

And I think you really achieved that sort of—what would be the adjective form of Almodóvar? [Laughs.]

Mayukh: Almodovarian? I don't know. Sure.

Alicia: Yes. [Laughs.] No, but your book is Almodovarian. 

Mayukh: Or esque. Yeah.

Alicia: Almodovarian-esque. [Laughs.]

But I mean, I was thinking—when I was writing, when I was reading the book, when I was writing these questions, I was thinking about that because I know it's been a criticism that you've anticipated that you’d sort of superficially maybe received. 

It never would have occurred to me because I do love Almodóvar. Another of my favorite writers, Reinaldo Arenas, is a queer man who wrote a lot about women. I think most women love being seen and—by queer men. I'm going on a weird tangent now. It really is when you see Almodóvar films, when you read your book, when you read Arenas, when you like Manuel Puig, too. And so much honesty and humor and affection and warmth. It's not the male gaze or something. It's not the same thing. That criticism is completely off the wall. If it does come, it's off the wall. And I'll head that off at the pass right now. [Laughs.]

Mayukh: Thank you. Thank you for going to bat for me prematurely. 

And I think that what's difficult for me, that I didn't have words for until I was kind of done writing this book and I write this in the intro in the book itself, but as a queer person, I, like many other queer-identifying people, have a very complicated relationship to gender and gender expression that my appearance might not necessarily reflect. And so I wish that more people who would come for me in that regard would understand that about me, and not try to erase my queerness and all its attendant complications. And it's really hurtful. And we live in a very inhospitable world for queer people. And so, it's not easy to kind of live with this. 

So yeah, whatever. If that comes for me, I'll go to bat for myself. Well, whatever.

Alicia: Well, and the book’s introduction also takes aim at the kind of milquetoast nature of food media, which is where you might see this kind of baseline really banal criticism that doesn't engage with people in their entirety. 

And that's also expressed in the text. Craig Claiborne comes up so much from the New York Times, how he named Elena Zelayeta the definitive voice of Mexican cooking, then later switched it, made it Diana Kennedy. And the contrast between how Madhur Jaffrey was received against how Julie Sahni was, despite the fact that Sahni has restaurant experience, which would later be erased, which we can talk about. 

And that is a constant theme in the book, how women were pitted against each other, how being white and/or American allowed you to have authority where lived experience did not. It tells these stories, but it's also a critique of how narratives about women in food have been constructed. 

And so, what do you think is the contemporary significance of the food media narratives that you portray in the book itself?

Mayukh: Yeah, that is a wonderful question. 

I would definitely say that a lot of these sorts of patterns still persist. I think that food media, regardless of what lies it wants to tell itself, is still infatuated with stars and stardom. And as a result, that creates a culture in which there's a hyperfixation on one specific person as a sort of representative of a movement or cuisine or whatever, and that can sometimes blot out other figures who are doing equally commendable mark—work, excuse me. So, that definitely is still a thing. 

In terms of who gets to be assigned authority, this kind of dovetails with my answer to your last question, but—the previous question, excuse me—But it is interesting how there's maybe a bit more scrutiny regarding white folks with material power, and how they get to ascend to positions of authority on cuisines or cultures that are not necessarily the ones that are inherent to them, or the ones that they grew up with, etc. Yet, I don't know that those kinds of questions are asked as urgently as they should be, at least by the people in power. 

Just speaking from my own perspective and position, I think that I have gotten so much blowback from people in power about being a queer man of color writing stories primarily about women in a way that does not feel equal to the sorts of questions that, I don't know, a white woman writing a cookbook about Mexican food does, a white woman who is not native to Mexico, excuse me. And it just feels like there might be an imbalance.

I definitely think that, well, everyone should be asking those questions about who benefits materially from telling what stories based on their position. That's what diligence looks like. That's what accountability looks like, etc. Yet, I do find that whiteness is still quite powerful in this industry, and it goes unquestioned. And there's usually more scrutiny reserved for people from marginalized communities telling stories that people perceive to not be their own. 

Alicia: No, I mean, it's really incredible how the power structures don't change at all. Yeah, we would still rather Diana Kennedy than a woman who appears and is indigenous to Mexico. And when I say indigenous, I mean actually. 

We would rather have it filtered through Diana Kennedy who does learn things from people. I mean, nothing against her. I think she's actually pretty wonderful and a real spitfire, and that's great. But the narrative really hasn't changed from a sort of pre-feminism idea of how hard a white woman has to work to be equal to white men. And the narrative hasn't adjusted from that. We still are like, ‘Women have to work so hard to be the same as white men.’ It's like, ‘Well, that shouldn't be our goal. Our goal should be a bit more nuanced than that.’

Mayukh: Yeah, it should be in terms of equity for a lot of other people who are quite oppressed, you know? Yeah, so that's certainly true. 

I also will just add that this is probably stating the obvious, but there's this presumption of objectivity, that dirty word, when it comes to folks like Diana Kennedy—and who I agree is she's really put in the work. And in spite of some troubling things that she said in the past, I have a lot of respect for her labor. I'm so sorry to put her in the hot seat. 

But yeah, there's still this presumption of kind of like, ‘Oh, this person is coming to this culture, this cuisine from a very even-keeled place. And they're going to be able to be the interlocutor for this presumed white affluent audience.’ And so, I think that presumption of the reader remains the same, as well, on food media, it's still kind of, at least in the mainstream food media, you see stories that are kind of written with white rich audiences in mind. 

Alicia: Exactly. Yeah. 

And one thing I noticed also throughout the book was how teaching was a really essential part of many of these women coming into their own in food. Julia Child was teaching before she was writing a cookbook. I think Marcella was cooking, I mean, teaching before she was really writing a cookbook. And also, you are teaching food journalism at NYU. How has teaching complemented or not your writing practice? How did it work with the book?

Mayukh: Well, I love teaching. So I've been teaching at NYU since 2019. That was the same year I was working on the first draft of the book. And I teach two classes there at the journalism school. First is an introductory class to food writing, and the second is advanced reporting food journalism class. 

And so, that first semester I was teaching, it was the introductory class. And so, I was dealing with a lot of students who were not necessarily used to writing in any sort of journalistic capacity. So I had to really revisit the basics and figure out how to communicate those basics to students who really wanted to learn. And so, I talked about story structure. I talked about sentence structure. I talked about varying your sentence length, and resisting cliche when you describe food as an object. All these kinds of one on one things that were incredibly helpful for me, as I was writing.

One lesson that I impart upon my students, for example, I kind of said earlier, which is that if this is boring for you to write, chances are it's going to be boring as hell for the reader to absorb. And they’re gonna put the book down. You don't want to lose the reader in any way. And that is something that I really tried to tell myself as well, as I was going through multiple drafts of this book. It's like, ‘Are you bored as s**t? Let's go back to the drawing board here.’ 

Yeah, so it was immensely helpful. I will say this. Teaching is a lot of work. Grading is so much work. And I was definitely a disaster trying to balance book writing against the demands of teaching. But ultimately, I do hope that it served this book well, because it really asked me after years of just kind of feeling as though I had gotten into my little groove as a writer, really asked me to take a step back and be like, ‘Ok, are you being as disciplined as you can?’

The flip side of that, of course, is that when you do kind of have that rigorous self editor in you, you risk kind of, I don't know, losing a sense of play or whimsy in your writing. And that's something that I worry about with my own self. I'm not fishing here for compliments. Please don't reassure me being like, ‘Oh, yeah, no, no, it's so playful. I’m really into it.’ I'm not looking for that. No pressure there. 

But when I revisit my early writing, I'm like, ‘Damn, this is so overwritten.’ But there's also a sense of kind of throwing s**t at the wall and seeing what sticks. And I don't quite have that anymore. And so, that's something I'm trying to get back. And trying to have more flexibility with what I teach my students as well. I encourage them to kind of experiment a little bit rather than hew to some sort of trusted format. 

Alicia: Right. 

Do you write for yourself? Do you journal or anything?

Mayukh: I don't. I really fear just writing something that I'm going to revisit a few weeks, months, years down the line and being like, ‘Oh, my goodness, this is just this incredibly mortifying time capsule. And I don't want to revisit what, these raw thoughts in my mind.’ It takes me a long time to write something these days. I like to give myself that time, so I don't. I know so many writers who do. Just never worked for me because I'm so, so repulsed by myself.

Alicia: Oh, no. [Laughs.] 

Well, I mean, it helps with the editor and the—and shutting yourself down, I think. If you do the stream of consciousness thing a little bit. I think this isThe Artist's Way, this is what The Artist's Way teaches you. [Laughs.] I've never done it. I think I have a natural inclination toward whatever it tells you you're supposed to do, which is write indulgently and take yourself on dates. That's easy for me to do. I can do that. [Laughs.]

Mayukh: Yeah. 

I will say this. I reread my first draft of this book. It's a total vomit draft. I don’t love that phrase, but it's just like, damn. I had to do so much culling after that point. But yeah, yeah, no, I did kind of indulge my worst tendencies as a writer in the first draft. I got it out of my system. 

Alicia: I think it's important. It's important to do.

And in the book—this is jumping into a different area. But many narratives about cuisine in the U.S. are all about assimilation. I wrote about this when I wrote about Taste the Nation. And I wanted to ask how did you resist that easy pull about how they were only significant in terms of what they taught and brought to whiteness and to Americanness?

Mayukh: Yeah, that is a wonderful question. Because you're right, in that assimilation has been kind of the dominant narrative when it comes to talking about immigrants and cooking and cuisine in America. And I am no longer interested in assimilation just as a concept when it comes to immigrant cuisine, ‘immigrant cooking,’ because it is in service of white supremacy. 

One of the things that's so troubling about a lot of these texts, including one of the ones that you just mentioned, being very diplomatic, is that it doesn't quite question the idea of the nation itself. And I personally, as a leftist, I am troubled by these alleged notions of America being predicated upon ideals of inclusivity and being a melting pot and everything like that. 

And that's what I want to trouble with this book. And I want to show that there's so much struggle involved in creating that picture of America, and it can be really unsustainable for the people who are making that happen because they have to survive under capitalism. 

So, I know that there have been books over the past few years where writers are writing about cuisines from the Global South or adopted from the Global South, they try to assert, ‘X food is American food. My mother's cuisine and what it represents is American food.’ With all due respect to those writers, that's ok that that is their prerogative, but it's not mine. Because ultimately, it centers the comfort of a white affluent reader, which is what food media has done for decades. And it's just useless. Why seek approval from white institutions?

And I think that it's easier for me to say this and come to this realization now, because I was very fortunate to get that approval, those crumbs of attention, let's say, from white institutions that gave me access to opportunities and capital that I would not have had otherwise. And I understand what that kind of recognition is useful for now. And I realized that that's not necessarily the world that I want to be a part of. And it's more gratifying to write for your own communities, or people from typically underseen—underseen by whom? Underrepresented communities, let's say. I think that's a little more careful. Yeah, it's more gratifying work to do than just seeking the approval of white institutions in any way. 

And so, that's why I ended the book, excuse me, on the story of Norma Shirley, because it's kind of an indictment of people's conception of how wonderful America is because you can get a taco down the street and then you can get saag paneer on the next block or something. This was a woman who is a Black immigrant woman from Jamaica who tried to get her concept and vision of Jamaican cuisine filtered through French technique, tried to get it off the ground in New York in the ‘80s but it was incredibly difficult for her because she could not secure the capital to make that happen. So she literally had to return to Jamaica to make those possibilities and dreams come true. And it was only then that the American food media started to pay attention to her and her enormous talent. Yet, she literally had to leave America to make her creative dreams a reality. And that should embarrass readers, I hope, especially readers who are like, ‘Oh, America’s great, you know?’

Yeah. I'm not interested in assimilation. 

Alicia: I'm really interested to see how people engage with that, or if people ignore that. That they ignore that there is an anti-assimilationist, anti-obsession with the nation state as a significant cultural force. And I hope that people do engage with that.

Mayukh: Yeah. I mean, I hope they engage in positive terms, because I'm sure that some people will be like, ‘What is this trash? I was expecting some heartwarming story of American food or whatever.’ 

Yeah, I do hope that point is not lost on the readers who need to absorb it. 

Alicia: Well, has the experience of writing the book, as well as your experiences in food media, changed how you consider the ways in which white supremacy and capitalism kind of use identity? You really resist in the text that simplicity that—the circa 2019, 2016 response to Trump where it's like, ‘Immigrant restaurant, immigrants feeding America.’ This really patronizing perspective that does continue. People say that food media from 2016 really learned a lesson about something. I don't think it did.

But anyway, you in this text really resist that. How have you responded to that? I think you answered this, but also how do you perceive that sort of tendency in food writing?

Mayukh: Totally.

Well, I actually am so glad you brought this up because those 2016, 2017 conversations, those talking points that were so pervasive in food media, that was what kind of animated me to start working on the proposal for this book. Because I just found it so, as you say, patronizing, so condescending. It's almost always white liberal gatekeepers, both men and women, talking about immigrants as the other immigrants, as people who only exist to serve the white, affluent consumer. And it's just plainly dehumanizing. 

And it also rests on all these assumptions about what America is and what it represents, of course. And I really, really wanted to disturb that notion, and actually put those voices and stories of these actual immigrants who are treated like abstractions by these white liberal gatekeepers. I wanted to put their stories first. 

So, I don't think that whole attitude has gone away in food media, at least from my observation. It's still quite pervasive, and I wanted to write against that. I think that's through writing this book, and also experiencing just a comical level of racism and homophobia in this industry. Comical, to me, at least. Also traumatizing. But made me realize that a lot of people who posture as being down with the cause or whatever, their politics are not fundamentally rooted in care. And that sometimes comes out in really ugly ways. 

I think of people who in 2017, 2018, would say things like, ‘Screw Trump. Immigrants are great,’ in front of a stage of hundreds of people. They're the same people who turn around, and they look at my queer brown ass. And they're like, ‘Oh, you're too loud. You're too obsessed with ‘political correctness.’’’ Talking to me like they're a Fox News commentator or something. And it's just so plainly discriminatory. 

And those sorts of moments just reveal how hollow a lot of these talking points are for a lot of these people because they don't see people from marginalized communities as actual humans. They don't treat them with care. And I wanted to restore some of that dignity in writing this book, and I definitely wrote through a lot of my anger at what I had experienced from people who were quite powerful people I very naively trusted because I got Establishment approval early on in my career. So that's definitely a thing. 

I think also, I came to become aware through experiences like that, and also writing the book about how white supremacy and capitalism, these twin terrors, let's say, they commodify people based on their identity. 

I think that there are probably a lot of people throughout my career who have aligned with me, because they see me as this queer brown young writer who they perceive to be someone they should publicly support in some way. Yet, how often do those people actually engage with my work? Do they read the substance of what I have to say? And do they realize that my politics are very far left? They're not kind of just stroking liberal preconceptions of the world. They usually don't. They just see me as this little toy. 

And so, I became cruelly aware of all this as I was writing the book, and dealing with various episodes that exposed just how racist some people in this industry are. And it's very scary when those people who are very racist, very homophobic also have a lot of material power, and you do not. But I hope that has resulted in a richer, more sensitive book. 

Alicia: Yes, and it has. [Laughs.]

Mayukh: Thank you.

Alicia: No, it's interesting. There are so many people who, yeah, will be kind, so to speak, to your face, or your virtual face. And then once there's some sort of upheaval or something, they're always looking for a reason to discount the people who are critical of the Establishment. And it's a really delicate balance to strike how outspoken and how—yeah, just how outspoken to be, because they do not actually want to reward anyone who is critical. 

Mayukh: Totally.

I mean, everyone loves an underdog until they stop becoming an underdog, A. And B, I think, when—at least this is something that I felt, and maybe it's totally bogus, or whatever. Just my own kind of paranoia. 

But as someone who did get Establishment recognition when I think I was like 26, I think that there may have been a perception in some corners of food media, especially in its highest ranks, that I was being a brat and getting all this stuff handed to me, as if I didn't have to work for it. Getting all this stuff handed to me, and then having the audacity to bite the hand that feeds him. [Laughs.] No pun intended. Yeah, that stuff. 

And that's why I think in the past year, really reevaluated just how much of myself I put out into the world because I realized that no matter how righteous I felt in what I was articulating and broadcasting to the world, my mental health was suffering and my work was also suffering, because I was giving these uncharitable, ungenerous readers a reason to discredit me before they actually care to engage my work.

Alicia: Yeah. No, it's such a lesson that everyone needs to learn. [Laughs.] 

Mayukh: Yeah, sometimes it comes in a really hard way. But whatever. That’s therapy. Therapy’s the answer. [Laughter.] Gotta do it.

Alicia: And since you are teaching food journalism, are you optimistic about the future of food media?

Mayukh: Yeah. Oh, sorry. I did not mean to say, ‘Yes, I am.’ [Laughter.] I meant, ‘Yeah, that's a good question.’

I am a cynic by nature. But I will say that I see fewer students these days, at least the ones I teach at NYU, who see writing for Establishment publications and the dominant mainstream publications as the best path forward. There was a time—and certainly, this was true for myself, where writing a story for a very big newspaper in a metropolitan area was considered just the Holy Grail. And once you did that, you've arrived. 

And yet, I think that there are more students who do not see that as the only way to find success, in part because writing for those publications does not, is not always easy, especially when you have points of view that are a little more radical let's say than the left of center/center ideals that these papers champion. It's not easy to write about Palestinian food for a major newspaper. There's a lot that is compromised. 

And what I've tried to tell my students is that you don't necessarily want to put your name on things that you know are going to compromise your integrity or your sense of how you view the world. And so that, coupled with the rise of independent food media like Whetstone, for example, I think that has convinced a lot of my students that writing for these big name publications is not the only way to find success. 

So, I do hope that we see less fixation on those big publications. I'm cautiously optimistic. But I don't know, I'm not going to hold my breath. These institutions still have so much power and influence. And that's also where capital is concentrated. And I want my students to be able to eat. I want them to survive. Where's the good money? Where's the stable money? I don't know. [Laughter.] 

But yeah, so sure. Cautiously optimistic.

Alicia: Well, usually I ask people, is cooking a political act for them. But you cook for sustenance. And I respect that. And so I wanted to just ask you, for you is writing a political act?

Mayukh: Right. Is sustenance political? Yes.

No, writing is absolutely a political act. For me, I think it's the most meaningful form of political expression that I can think of for myself, because it's a way for me to distill my thoughts on who I am in this world as a person of color who has leftist politics in a way that is more direct than any other form of political engagement or action, you know? Yeah, it is absolutely a political act for me. 

But I hope others perceive it as that. I do worry sometimes that, like you said earlier, that some readers who want those more milquetoast narratives will pick up a book like mine and just be like, ‘Oh, how nice,’ and not truly absorb the more radical points of view that I have to offer. 

But, whatever, one reader at a time. That's all I can hope for. If I make a convert of one person, then I'm good. I’ll see.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much. 

Mayukh: Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

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There are eras of the recent culinary past that I was only able to experience through reading magazines and retroactively digging into cookbooks, and what I find most exciting was the development of farm-to-table “New American” cuisine in New York City. How chef and author of What’s Good? A Memoir in Fourteen Ingredients Peter Hoffman came to be a major figure in that development through his restaurants Savoy and Back Forty is an absolutely fascinating story, thanks to his candor and ability to self-critique. The book also explores the significance of certain ingredients, showing how local ecology and cuisine develop hand in hand.

Going back through the transcript to get this conversation ready for publication made me realize how deeply it dug into my psyche, that I have been thinking about its themes ever since we spoke in mid-July. This conversation forms the foundation of a lot of my forthcoming essays, because it is a rich and generous one that I know I will revisit again and again. We discussed the cultural significance of the embrace of olive oil in the U.S., why it’s important to name Palestinian cuisine, and how difficult it is to run a restaurant while maintaining one’s ideals. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Peter. Thank you so much for coming on today to chat. 

Peter: Yeah, it's wonderful to be taking this time with you, Alicia.

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

Peter: Yeah. 

So I grew up in Bergen County, New Jersey, a suburban town just over the George Washington Bridge from the city, where most parents commuted and traveled into the city. But my dad was a dentist. And so, he was locally based. My mom taught little pre-K, and then taught moms how to play with their kids in educational ways. And so, she did that locally as well. 

And our food, it was interesting, sort of what the food world was like there for us. My mom was born in Germany. She was an émigré from Hitler's Germany. And so, there were some strong European influences in some of the dishes, but clearly in the sensibility. And so, she was not one to embrace industrialized food for the most part, and really cooked with real ingredients and insisted on that in many ways. 

It's not like she was cooking German dishes. She was 10 when she left Germany, and actually got her culinary grounding from the Joy of Cooking, which her mother-in-law gave her when she married my dad, since she needed to know how to take care of her darling son. She was always grounded in good ingredients simply prepared. There was no Jolly Green Giant in our house. There was no Wonder Bread. When I was a young teenager, health food stores started to pop up. And she was packing me rice cakes and little gorp combos as part of my lunch. 

So my parents also brought us into the city a lot to experience the diversity of life and culture, whether it was art or cuisines. I was exposed as a young person to Middle Eastern food and Hungarian food. And an important sort of dining experience for me was when I got taken to a Brazilian spot and I ate feijoada.

The world is diverse. And it's exciting, and food is part of that discovery of difference. And whatever homogeneity was part of my experience in the suburbs, or deadening about being in the suburbs, they counteracted that with a lot of exposure to the world. So, grateful to them for that.

Alicia: And in the book, you write about this very food-centric upbringing. But was it different from how your peers were growing up, this no Jolly Green Giant, no Wonder Bread, and going into the city a lot? Did you have a sense that this was in contrast to kind of the dominant ways of eating?

Peter: I mean, we had other friends that ate good food. But my mom, if I think about my peers at the time, we definitely stood out as not completely outliers, but definitely on the good food edge of things. But in the dominant culture, in the school cafeteria, where lots of people were buying what the cafeteria ladies were preparing, I always brought my lunch. And so, that was always an expression of my mom's values. 

And so yeah, I had to explain lunch to people. [Laughs.] What are those rice cakes? But I don't remember it being a source of too much embarrassment. But it definitely was a shift there to say that I didn't look like everybody else. But there were lots of ways that I didn't look like everybody else.

Alicia: [Laughs.] And I've read a lot of memoirs of farm-to-table chefs that really aren't grappling with kind of economics or restaurant realities in the way that yours does. You write that your first jobs in French restaurants, you saw them as serving rich foods for rich people, but you kind of came around to the idea that a restaurant could have a bigger purpose through reading Wendell Berry. How did you establish your own politics, and how did they evolve while you went from working in restaurants to owning restaurants?

Peter: I mean, my politics — it's about how did I realize that food had a political side to it? Because my politics were always liberal. I mean, my parents were lefties, and so that kind of thing was always in the household looking through a leftist lens of politics. I don't think they had much awareness of what the cultural politics were. And a lot of people didn't. And some of that's only coming into conversation now. It's just what paintings hang at the Met or in MoMA is a conversation that nobody was really having about whether that was just white guys, or were looking at objects that were stolen from peoples who lived in other lands. And there was sort of the discussion about the Elgin Marbles being stolen from Greece, but that whole larger conversation about colonialism and wasn't one that was being had until very recently. 

So in the world of food, once I said and expressed the idea that I was interested in becoming a chef, it was well, ‘Go for the best.’ And so the best was defined as what's at the top of the pyramid, which is old cuisine, French old cuisine. 

And so, I tried to pursue that. And I got a job in a, what I say in the book, is sort of a second-level French restaurant, the holy trinity of Le Cirque, not La Cremaillere—Le Grenouille, and Le Pavillon. Those restaurants weren't interested in taking me, and—La Côte Basque, that's actually the three. And they sent me somewhere else. And so they needed some help. And I found it a completely oppressive kind of cooking and bogus in this sort of wonderful chapter. 

Speaking about your latest thing about wounds, I write the chapter about how I burned myself terribly in trying to hold on to my job. We were opening cans of escargot that were—that came from Taiwan and stuffing them in little shells and plugging them with herb butter. And the specials would be developed by the chef when he came back and was just kind of this interchangeability of this garnish mixed with that garnish, therefore, it has this name that Escoffier created 100 years ago. And it had no relationship to ingredients, to freshness, to anything inspirational. And I was like, ‘I hate this place.’ And I got fired. But I got fired because I didn't belong in that culture. 

And so, I found my way to—I mean, there probably were some other jobs. But I found my way to a job at La Colombe d'Or, which was cooking the food of Provence. And so, that was my first entry into regional food as opposed to old cuisine. And with that comes a very different approach to ingredients. It's not about making it richer and adding lots of butter and making it so refined that you didn't need a fork and a knife. You could eat it with one hand, or that you're attenuating the taste by adding all this butter to it. 

Regional food is much more direct. I worked unsuccessfully. I tried to get into the old cuisine world of Midtown, high-end French restaurants. It was a culture that I didn't belong in. And I also realized it wasn't food that was exciting me in any way. And slowly, I found my way to a job at La Colombe d'Or, pretty much the first Provençal restaurant in New York City, and certainly one to put it out there in a modern way for diners at that time. 

And what I realized in being there was that regional foods, and the cuisine of Provence in particular, was really diametrically opposed to what old cuisine, which was always trying to make things richer and more delicate and more attenuated as opposed to cooking directly with the ingredients. Maybe keeping the animal on the bone, but also that the vegetables were less adulterated. Not to say that we didn't chop things in brunoise or wanting it to look orderly, but that power and punch and zest and sort of explosions of flavor were goals in that cooking as opposed to delicacy. And that started to really change my head, and I never looked back from that and never really tried to get into the world of old cuisine again. 

But with it, there was also this conversation. I remember having a conversation with a fellow cook. And he was talking about, ‘Well, let's study the cuisines of the poor people of the world.’ And I was like, ‘Why?’ And I started to realize that this whole notion of old cuisine was wrapped up in a kind of colonialism and exploitation of cultures, in terms of trying to go out and conquer the globe. 

So then it sort of started to morph into ‘Well, who's in the dining room? And are these fat cats people that I want to cook for?’ And so there's always sort of that balance between what are we cooking and who are we cooking for? In a certain way, that was a choice that I made in terms of what kind of a restaurant that Susan and I opened, that it was never trying to be a high-end restaurant. It was not priced that way, because I didn't want to cook for those people and just be surrounded by that. It's not like it was cheap, or it—I mean, it was still a mid-priced or higher price restaurant, but I never wanted to develop a milieu in the restaurant, that this is food for the wealthy and what comes with that.

And I write about this a little bit as well, is that those restaurants are trying to sell—they're still selling you the idea that they have access to something that nobody else has access to. It's not just that the diners have more money in their wallet or on their credit card than other people. But it's this mythical notion of selling the idea that the chef, as the gatekeeper, has access to ingredients that nobody else has access to. And that's why you should come eat in my restaurant. 

And I've always sort of hated that notion. I want to be a good cook. I want people to like my cooking or appreciate what I'm doing, because I do it well and I deal with technique. And I make it delicious, or I make it beautiful. But I'm working with the same ingredients that everybody else is, has access to. And we can build the cuisine and a reputation based on abundance, not on scarcity. 

Alicia: Absolutely.

And I mean, how do you think about the role of a chef? In the book, you write about trying to have a non-hierarchical kitchen and trying to—and how that didn't work. Having an egalitarian kitchen didn't necessarily work. But we've been having these conversations now about how do we create an egalitarian, equitable kitchen space. And how did you take these ideas that you learned from what you didn't want and apply them in a way that actually made sense when you opened Savoy?

Peter: Well, we can only ever work with where we're at, historically, in a certain way. What might feel like standard practice today wasn't then, which was the idea that the front of the house was all pooled tips. And that was a way that I wanted to encourage cooperation and teamwork, now people have—

I mean, we understand even more acutely what's wrong with tipping today than we did then. But the idea that you were going to give a territorial section to somebody that they controlled the flow of dollars that came and went in that section. I mean, it's just absurd, right? 

So that was a change that we made and with it, the completely expressed values that we're going to work together. And we're also going to work together between the front and the back of the house. And so, that was always a challenge. Certain people came into the restaurant having had different life experiences or work experiences, and didn't always treat—cooks didn't always treat the front of the house with full respect and in the other direction as well. And so that was always a teaching moment, always an opportunity to continue to model for people that we need to treat people with respect. And so, that was an ongoing project. 

I opened the restaurant where we didn't have any prep cooks. Everybody did their own mise en place. And I was really dedicated to that idea, because I wanted people to take responsibility for how they—for what their mise en place was. Was it cut nicely? Was it clean? Was it fresh? It's not just sort of, like, ‘What is this product? Who did this?’ 

But people—It didn't always have efficiency to it. And there's this sort of a division of responsibility that is part of the manufacturing industrial model that people tried to convince me was more efficient, meaning more financially lucrative, that I needed to embrace. And they were right. I mean, they were right, because it's so hard to make any money in the restaurant business. And so, you look to what compromises can you make that still feel ok? That they're compromises, but they're not detrimental to the product? That's a whole project to, to say, ‘What am I comfortable with? What am I not comfortable with? And how do I continue to find that balance?’ 

I don't know. Without going deeply into the whole thing around the burger, there were compromises that then got made in the restaurants that then—I ended up going like, ‘This isn't the restaurant that I started out with, and that, that fed my soul. And I don't know how to get back to what I once was. And maybe I can't.’ And that sort of led to some discouragement, and ultimately to closing the restaurants.

Alicia: Yeah. 

In a similar vein, you write about butter, and you just spoke about butter as kind of representative of cuisine and of this French dominance of what good cooking is in the minds of people who both worked in restaurants but also went to restaurants, and how the rise of olive oil led to this kind of understanding that there were other cuisines in the world beyond continental European cuisine. 

And that was really interesting to me, because I think I remember the moment when everyone was, started to use olive oil. But I never, I think, thought about it in this way necessarily. And I wanted to ask, can you kind of expand more on that moment? 

And also, you, when you talk about other cuisines, you do talk about Palestinian cuisine. And that really made an impression on me, because usually, that's not something people in food media say. Palestinian cuisine goes a little bit under the radar. 

And so yeah, those I guess, are two questions. [Laughs.]

Peter: Yeah, those are two topics. But let's talk about them. 

So the butter chapter is really, to me, a very interesting chapter. In some ways, it really reflects some of the complexity of the book. I'm not just writing a memoir; I'm also sort of telling stories about ingredients and our relationship to those ingredients. And some of that's botanical stuff. And in the butter chapter, it's really historical and cultural. 

And I open that chapter by talking about the fact that there was only margarine in my house when I was little, and sort of what that, I think that grew out of rationing food, and specifically butter being rationed during World War II. And that my parents experienced that and got used to margarine and sort of—you come to like what you have around you because that's what it is. And then it was our Black housekeeper who introduced me to butter and showed me what a far superior cooking fat and tasting fat it was. And it wasn't long before there were two butter dishes sort of side by side that—there was this half-stick leftover that she hadn't finished when she cooked food for us next to the margarine. And then soon I was buttering my toast with butter instead of margarine. 

And so that part of the chapter is sort of about a Black cook who came out of the South and came—made the Great Migration to the north for better opportunity. Used a great skill set that she had, which was that she cooked with skill and flavor, and that was part of what she did in our family and that we cherished her for, all of us. But I took that with me going forward, and so I have some gratitude there for introducing me to that world. 

But what butter was doing in French cuisine was that they were always looking—the French cuisine is sort of looking for homogeneity, right? They want a sauce that is, whether it's a cream sauce, or a butter sauce or bordelaise, it kind of lays over the—whatever you're saucing and completely envelops it. So, the idea of emulsification, it's sort of going into this, the poetry or the philosophy of pursuing emulsification as opposed to the unemulsified. 

And so, Italian food and cooking with olive oil tends to be about unemulsified sauces, that is showing the different ingredients and that something is broken or not brought together, or we see the diverse and varied ingredients. And so, there's something kind of deep in that, that we're not trying to bring everything together. We're saying that herbs are herbs and oil is oil, and here's some chopped up capers, and some bits of olive. And that there's beauty in unemulsified life. And I think that that's part of what olive oil did. 

It's the beginning of shifting away from France as the center of old cuisine and beginning to look to, well, who else cooks with olive oil? And what did they do with it? And so that took me into the Mediterranean, and being excited by the foods of North Africa or the eastern Mediterranean. Turkey, Greece, Lebanon, all of that. And all of those are such exciting flavors. 

I mentioned the Palestinian cuisine in the book, because I think it's important. I'm Jewish, and I write about some aspects of that. There's a chapter about Passover in the book, and then I used Passover to explore the world of Sephardic foods, that is the Jews who were expelled from Spain. And those are not my people. And my people are kind of the Northern European Jews, what are known as Ashkenazi Jews. And that was matzah ball soup and pot roast. And it had been served at my Passover table for decades. 

And I was like, ‘Oh, I'm so sick of this.’ All the jokes that people sometimes make about Jewish food not being very interesting, or just a hunk of meat on the plate kind of thing. And well, we've then over the last 20, 30 years, people have started to say, ‘Well, Jewish food can be really exciting. And it's really diverse.’ And so for me, I use Passover as a way of exploring all of that, and looking into ‘What are the Jews of Morocco eating? Tunisia, Greece, Turkey?’ All of that. 

And so with that, then you start to go ‘Well, many times those foods reflected the cuisine of the place itself. Where were Jews living? And is the food, really all that—aside from following the kosher rules, kashrut rules—is the food all that different from the people who were living there, around them, who were not Jewish?’ So a lot of those foods are similar, or the same. 

And so it led me to be able to then sort of say, ‘Ok, what is going on in Israel today?’ And specifically, sort of, at the same time that we have this rise of Israeli expansionism and Israeli exploitation of the Palestinian people and the conflict not moving any closer to any resolution in—it's been going on all my life, that there's this rise of interest and excitement in the food media around Israeli food and Israeli cuisine. 

And so, it immediately begs the question of what is this food? Where did it come from? What is—Not where did it come from, but I mean. It sounds like it's coming from outer space. It’s like, ‘What is this food about? What stories does it reflect and part of?’ Not all of what's being talked about in terms of Israeli cuisine, because there are many cultures and many Jews who have come to Israel. And so those dishes are diverse. 

But a lot of that is the food of the region, which is the food of the Palestinians. And what is that? And why isn't that something that we are really celebrating and paying attention to? And using that moment, to go, ‘How does this whole culinary story feed into the political story, and—or vice versa? Is the food story being used to color the political story that somebody wants to tell?’ And then, history is always told by the victor, right? One of the phrases that I think is important to look at, is like, ‘What is this history? Who's telling the story?’ And so, this is a good moment for us—a really important moment for us—to be looking at that, in terms of the cuisine as well. 

And so, yeah, our food is always has a political aspect to it and is always worth looking at and thinking about and—

I guess a while ago, you said something about Wendell Berry and all of that. It's just that moment of finding that essay, and that changed my whole outlook and my lens. So, it is expressive of our culture and our root values. And we need to be looking at that. 

One of the things that I, that I'm using as a signature and inscription in my book when I'm signing it for people who I don't necessarily know is ‘Our food is a self-portrait. Keep painting masterpieces.’ So, the part of the self-portrait is that what is it—

What is our food saying about who we are and what our culture is and what our values are? And so, we need to keep thinking about that and keep making choices and shaping that so that it really reflects what our values are.

Alicia: Right, right.

Well, you mentioned here also food media, where it was telling the story of Israeli food, and what does tha—what did that really mean? And what did it really reflect? And one of the first mentions, maybe the only mention of food journalists in the book, refers to complaints about ramps, about how they're trendy, they're not actually that great. The kind of stuff that food writers who have to write five things a day and put it out there do to just get people's attention. 

But I wanted to ask, what is your perspective on food media generally? Has it changed when you had a restaurant to when you don't have a restaurant? Do you really consume a lot of food media?

Peter: Big topic, Alicia. 

The world of the food media was a lot smaller when we opened the restaurant in 1990. But we still understood at the time that they had to generate content all the time. And so, that was both good and bad for us. We saw that if we could figure out that the reason people came around and were looking for things or that we could suggest ideas to them was that they needed content. But you also start to see where that's hollow. 

I also think that we’re in a moment where, independent of the food media, I think we've come to realize that reporters are not just innocent bystanders but they are actual participants in this story, in the shaping of the story and the framing of the way we think about things and how fraught that is in terms of the politics. And for a long time, I don't think we understood what that looked like in the food world. But now we do. We understand that in certain ways that as the gatekeepers, that certain people who write at certain publications, they are the tastemakers. And so, they tell you where to go or what to think about food experiences.

It’s fraught. And again, some of it gets shaped as white, elitist, sometimes male people being the ones who are anointed. And partly, they continue to reward the people who were part of the club that they're in. That gets back to the old cuisine thing, and it gets back to what paintings are hanging at the—in MoMA or at the Met, right? What is blue chip art, and what is blue chip food?

But we're starting to shake that up a lot, and in ways that are very, very profound and significant. And I think, still, where I'm most disturbed by where the food media hasn't really come to terms with their own role is that over and over again, we see that these chefs who are running toxic environments, whether it's sexual harassment or just a toxic workplace that is abusive of people's humanity in order to get the ultimate finest product of the night. Or the idea of that tough love is actually a valuable way of running a company culture. All of that the food media still hasn't moved off of that. 

And so that over and over again, we see all these James Beard winners or highly touted restaurants, then turns out the chef is a creep, or—I don't mean like a sexual creep, necessarily—but possibly—but not a good person. Not fostering good culture. I don't think the food media has come to terms with their own role in that. And we're still seeing it over and over again, that somebody gets called out and you go, ‘Well, how did they get here? How did that person rise to the level that they were at?’ And that's the story.

And even though some of the food writers have written, done deep research and gotten people to talk about it, it's like, ‘How did they get there in the beginning, and what is food media's role in that?’

And I have, I guess, I have some bad feelings about where and why I wasn't always considered part of the in crowd, whether it was the in crowd by other chefs or the in crowd by the food media themselves. And a lot of that had to do in its time, or in that time, had to do with that I didn't carouse in the way that was, what was the dominant social force in the food world at the time. And that was exciting, that people were living large, staying up all night and drinking hard and expensive—eating excessively and doing blowouts. I didn't want to live that way. 

So that's not as good a story as people who are living large. Still on my path and feel better about it. And my body feels better about it too.

Alicia: [Laughs.] 

Well, it is interesting, because I think that I've also wanted to see that sort of internal media criticism where when there's a great piece, maybe, at Grub Street, about—Mission Chinese Food was supposed to be this good restaurant to work at, but actually, it was terrible and toxic, the same as all these other ones. And you want to say like, ‘Well, where is the criticism of how this place was built up? It didn't come out of nowhere. Part of the fostering of the toxicity comes from the hype that we give to restaurants.’

But it's true. There hasn't been a real moment of looking inside and saying, ‘Well, what is our role in this, really?’ it's kind of just this vague correction, of course, that, you know—and I'm guilty of it, too, because I don't know how else to do my job, where we just kind of take chefs for their words on whether they're good people or not now. And we're not really still necessarily doing the real inquiry into how things really are in their kitchen. 

And now, Food & Wine changed its thing so that it was like 25 people doing good in the food and beverage industry. Why don't we just stop putting people on pedestals? Why don't we just tell stories? And it really is upsetting to me that we don't have a real reckoning because it's still trying to sell in the same old way, just kind of put it in new packaging.

Peter: Yeah, I agree with all of that, Alicia. And there's a way that as people, as individuals, that we still succumb to even if we are trying to get our politics right or we understand the stories that came before, there's a way that we are excited—or actually, maybe, I want to say titillated. I mean, that's part of it, too, is just like, ‘Where did it go wrong?’

Food is sensual, right? When we have great food experiences, it makes us feel great to be alive. It makes us thrilled. And what makes it tilt into sexual, right? 

And that's why I use the word titillate, right, because there are certain chefs who crossed that boundary. I don't mean with their workers or with customers. I mean, in their—in the way that they talked about food, that it crossed over into a sexual place. I mean, look what we called it. We called it food porn. Right? I mean, I was horrified when I first heard that term. I mean, it's like, ‘I love photographs of beautiful food, but food porn?’ 

All of a sudden, we've taken it to a place that is the debasement of one of the most glorious things that that our body has sensitivity to. And food is right there with it. It's such a debasement of people's beautiful cooking to call a photograph of their dish ‘food porn.’ And so, we continue to support that way of thinking about it through travel films, and what—

Look, I love travel. And I love food travel. It's been part of how I've expanded my mind and experience my understanding of what it means to be human and the glory of diversity on the planet, both in terms of what grows here and who lives here and what people have done with it. 

Alicia: Yeah.

And I mean, in the book too, you talk about Anthony Bourdain in a way that I think most people—I don't know. [Laughs.] We've kind of deified him in a way. And you write about how the early bravado, the devil-may-care attitude, and then the later coming to focus on land, labor, culture. For you, what was his influence when you were in the restaurant? And how do you perceive things now? What is, do you think, of his lasting influence?

Peter: Well, I think he gave license to a lot of the bad behaviors. And so, I hold him. I mean, it was there. But he romanticized that. And I think that was really detrimental to the restaurant world, to us, culturally. 

He moved off of that, and people really came to love his travel pieces and his exploration, that—and felt he had compassion and was able to connect to all kinds of people. There's truth there. I mean, he certainly was no longer following the old cuisine that he started out following in the same way that I was following that 30 or 40 years ago.

I think that what he moved on to certainly opened people's eyes to the wonders of the world and in different food and different cultures. But he still loved being outrageous, and got attention for that. And so, he continued to be a controversial speaker. And people love that. They love extremities. What we have politically going on in this country now to that, that we don't have real conversation, we have people who are at the extremities and saying outrageous things. And some people get behind it and vote for those people and other people are offended by it and vote against that person. So, he's complicated. 

Alicia: Yeah, no, very much.

[Laughs.] Well, to talk about kind of another sort of passing mention in the book, but it's actually—you're going to talk to Amanda Cohen of Dirt Candy tomorrow for MOFAD. And she emailed me while she was reading the book to say that you mentioned working at Hubert’s, because we're—we had a conversation at the end of last year where she was like, ‘You're the only person I've ever heard talk about The Vegetarian Compass.’ 

So, we are both the only people who've ever talked about this book and this person together. So when you write in the book about working for her, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ If you could tell me more about that experience, because it seems there's not a lot of information because she passed away so young and before her cookbook even came out. And you mentioned that it was where you were introduced to going to the Union Square Greenmarket. And so, can you tell me more about what she was like, what the restaurant was like, and how a vegetable-kind of focused restaurant was operating in that time?

Peter: So Hubert's was a fundamental restaurant in my development and in my life for many reasons. One is, I met Susan, my wife, there. But there was a group of people who were cooking there. And maybe this is true for lots of people that they have sort of, they're coming-of-age restaurant, or they're still connected to those people. And Hubert’s was that coming-of-age for me in many respects. 

So after sort of doing my attempts at old cuisine, and then finding regional food by working at La Colombe d'Or, then I ended up at another restaurant that was sort of trying to do old cuisine but from an American point of view. And that was the Quilted Giraffe. I had a lot of problems with what that food was. But I learned a lot there. And at least it was being run by Americans. And so that, there was a culture there and an excitement about food that was different than what was happening, or my perception of what was happening in the French world at the time of Midtown French. 

Then I went to France and I studied with Madeleine Kamman, and she was all about the regional cuisines of France and Italy. And so, she really pointed me towards not just cooking with the seasons, but that all these cuisines, all these regional foods grow out of what was indigenous to the region. And these wonderful dishes are classics, because everybody cooks them, because that's what everybody has on hand. And so, I was very excited by that notion and exploring the world of food through that. 

And so, after riding my bicycle around France and Italy and a little bit of Spain, following my time with her, I came back to the United States. And I landed at Hubert’s. And what they were realizing that they were interested in, and we were part of shaping that, but it was this idea of new American cuisine, that is the historical foods of this land, and the different peoples who came to live here from different places, but also what grows here. What's great that we can work with instead of flying things in from Europe. And so, that's the beginning of the whole farm-to-table movement. 

And so Len and Karen, Len Allison, Karen Hubert, a couple. They married while we were working together, but they had been a couple for a long time. They weren't cooks, really. I mean, they weren't professional cooks. They came to it from the world of philosophy and filmmaking, and they kind of had this idea of a group project. And so, Len saw himself as an auteur that he was. He was a film director without knowing anything about film. He was a chef director without knowing anything about food. 

And so, he gathered interesting people together and threw them into the lab of the kitchen and said, ‘Let's see what comes out of it. And it'll be interesting, and we'll serve it to people.’ And that was an incredibly exciting and liberating experience to be part of it. It wasn't necessarily a good way to run a restaurant, but there was some very exciting food that came out of that. 

And people that we got to meet, one of them being my friend Romy Dorotan, who now has Purple Yam out in Ditmas Park and had Cendrillon in Soho for many years. Masami Kawata, who I met through—we did an exchange program with Omen restaurant, the Japanese restaurant on Thompson street in Soho ‘cause it was across the street from where I lived. And I was so excited by that Japanese food, which was again, kind of regional food of Kyoto. Not just trying to be a sushi restaurant, but cook with all these interesting ingredients. And so, we did an exchange, and Masami taught me all kinds of things about food and technique and Japanese approach to cooking. 

And so, Len and Karen provided the environment in which all of that exploration could take place and that was supportive to so many people. It was interesting, Len kind of ran the show because he was the bulldog or more dominant person in their relationship. But she was the one with the real food sensitivity. When she tasted something, that was a more important critique than when he tasted something. 

And I'm sorry to disappoint you, at least in this moment in her evolution or her involvement in the restaurant, she wasn't a very important culinary force. She had a vision, but she was letting him run the show in many ways. And then, of course, we were this force of all these food artists doing our thing. So I wouldn't say that I really learned much from her in terms of being vegetable focused. 

I think it's there in certain respects, some—I've always known that what was most exciting about flavor on the plate was not the protein, as in the animal protein, but rather the vegetables, what the garnishes were and what that—what those flavor combinations were. Len and Karen were very close with Evan and Judith Jones. They ate at the restaurant regularly, and they socialized with them. And I think that as they moved into the world, the professional food world, that they looked to Evan and Judith as mentors to them. I don't think that they always had their own voice yet. Again, that was to our advantage as a group of cooks who were looking to find their own voice. There was a structure, but not necessarily a dominant culinary voice there. 

I don't know. It's interesting. So she wrote a book. It's funny, Alicia, because I don't—I didn't even remember that she had, that this book came out. First of all, it came out after she died. It was sad for us that she passed away. Len and Karen had moved to Hawaii, had left New York, partly to be in an environment where they could deal with her illness better and try and treat her in some more holistic ways. We didn't end well. Mostly, again, my relationship with Len more than my relationship with Karen, but that was sort of—she came along for the ride. 

She wrote a book that was a thinly veiled, fictional version of life at Hubert’s. And she was completely ungenerous in depiction of me, and I was very angry about that. And I felt that I had given everything to them. It was the most important thing in my life at that point, and it was so ungenerous. Not to say that I didn't have faults and things to learn and ways to grow, but I—they depended on me. And I gave them everything I had, and all my good spirit. Not just hard work, but I gave them my spirit. 

And none of that, other than that—she called me a workhorse. It was in this way that she was just like, ‘We're going to exploit this workhorse, because that's what he's good for.’ And it felt so debased. And I remember telling Len after she died, that that hurt me. And he said, ‘Well, that was fiction.’ He was deflecting, because it was barely fiction. 

So, I didn't realize that she put out a cookbook. But when you sent me that on Friday or Saturday, I went online and bought a copy to have a look at it and read his foreword. And so, I'll see what it is he was thinking about.

One of the things I just thought of, ‘cause of your interest, they were also very good friends with Anna Thomas.

Alicia: Oh, right. From the Vegetarian Epicure.

Peter: The Vegetarian Epicure. 

And they were filmmakers as well. And so, I don't know what's in Karen's book in terms of recipes or whatever, but she would bring dishes to us that came out of there or the things that she was eating. 

And I want to tip my hat to Len and Karen was that they had—they, in realizing that they didn't really know anything about food, they brought in guest chefs. This is before my time, when they were in Brooklyn. And so they had developed relationships with, among other people, Madhur Jaffrey and Edna Lewis. And so I got to know those women, because they came around to the restaurant. Again, I don't know what's in the book. But Madhur was an important influence for them, as well as a respected cook. 

And Edna as well, who we—those of us who were in the restaurant on the times that she came to eat and came into the kitchen and discovering her book, which is about—and Judith Jones was her editor. And that book was about seasonal cooking, right? I mean, sort of, she's telling you, from the community, the free Black community that she was raised in about pig killing in November. All of that was a revelation to me, in terms of that the industrialized food supply has evolved to try to be ubiquitous, to be manufactured, that you can have this item any time of the year anywhere that you are. And that that's not what food has been traditionally, and rather to explore a way of living in the moment and responding to what's in season. 

And so, that isn't just a fancy, elitist project that I can do because I drift in and out of Union Square Farmers Market. But it's really the way people have lived, and is economical because we're not shipping things all over the planet so that we can have them all the time and burning fossil fuels in order to do that, causing climate change. What does it mean to try to have animal protein, or even perishable vegetables on a year-round basis? And what does that do to the flavor? What does that do to the people who are producing that food, and to be much more—that local is political in that way? 

It's not to say that local doesn't have issues of labor exploitation involved in it as well, because it does. But when we eat locally, there are fundamental societal changes that can come with that. And they have implications that are, as I said, about climate change, as well as just what's—enjoying what's here. And realizing that life is transient, and we can't have it just because we want it or because we have money all the time.

Alicia: Right, right. 

Well, related to that, there have been so many stories lately about fake claims of local seasonal food, on restaurant menus. There’s the Willows Inn thing where they were serving people Costco chicken and stuff. And in the book, you write about hiring a chef who wanted to put spring peas on a menu before they would have been available, and how that's a—that was a constant struggle to maintain integrity in that way. 

Why do you think that this has become kind of a thing? There was the big exposé in Florida also a few years ago about farm-to-table restaurants lying about being farm-to-table. Why is this something that people have, don't allow themselves to be honest about or to pursue nuance with or maybe explain why something couldn't be local or available, or that sort of thing? What is your take on that?

Peter: Yeah.

Well, it's complicated. Alicia, I'm not going to excuse any of it, right? Economics drives people at times to make decisions where you cheat or you fudge it. But the idea that this guy was buying Costco organic chickens when he was saying that he was sourcing food completely from the island, obviously is filled with deceit. 

I never maintained that everything that we cooked with and sourced was local, but some people thought that that's what I was doing and went after me for having a lemon tart on the menu or something. The extent to which people are interested in having the conversation about where our food comes from and how we source it is over dinner, or on the menu, is limited. People, on a certain level, lots of people just want dinner. And they don't really want to know the backstory.

But plenty of our customers were interested in the backstory. And that's why they came to us, but there's still plenty of people who aren't interested in it and have yet to embrace that or change with that. 

So farm-to-table was both political, but it was also the fashion, the food fashion of the moment. And in many ways, the food fashion has shifted away from that. And the political struggle, or the food awareness, has shifted away from farm-to-table in many ways. We're talking about labor a lot more than we are about how the food was produced or where it comes from. And we're talking about what are the conditions in the restaurant itself, whereas that wasn't something that we had a whole lot of awareness around when we were writing on our menu that the carrots came from Guy Jones's farm, or that it was Maytag blue cheese or whatever. 

I don't know whether that's the pendulum swinging in another, in the other direction. But it certainly is a shift of focus. It's a good shift to focus. I worry sometimes that some of the restaurants that are now all about identity have stopped sourcing in the way that is still thinking about the sustainability issues. Because, again, the financial pressures to run a financially viable restaurant remain. It's really, really hard. And to do both, that is to buy sustainably sourced ingredients good for the environment and good for people and run a restaurant that's good for the people that are there, it is a huge challenge. 

But it's where we're at, right? It's sort of what we face here and now today. And so, I think it's a great moment, an important moment to try and say, ‘We can do both. We must do both. And what does that look like?’ 

And most importantly, is in that part of the whole equation is, what is the—what then is the cost of going out for dinner? And are we really prepared to pay the full cost of food, of dining out? And I think people still want to buy their fancy cars and their fancy watches and restore certain ways of travel post-pandemic and aren't necessarily ready to say, ‘Well, yeah, I'm good with a 30 percent increase in the cost of dining out. And what that will mean for me, which might mean I eat out 30 percent less but I'm doing it in ways and in support of companies that are doing it in ways that reflect my values.’

Alicia: Awesome. 

Well, thank you so much for the time today.

Peter: Yeah!

It’s wonderful to have the opportunity to talk with you in this way, Alicia, and the fact that you read into those parts of the book is exciting to me. In that same way, that our food is a self-portrait, I mean people find things in the book that resonate for them. And there's lots there. There's lots of nuggets to be had in What's Good?And I'm so glad that you found nuggets that are really important to me and are there for people to think about. So, I'm glad you thought about them.

Alicia: [Laughs.] Well, I'm glad to have read the book and to have had this chat with you. So, thank you so much. 

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I’ve been thinking a lot about waves of interest in biodiversity and decolonization of various ingredients, and so it was the perfect time to talk to baker and co-owner of L.A. restaurant Friends & Family Roxana Jullapat about her book Mother Grains: Recipes for the Grain Revolution. Because who is really experiencing the grain revolution? And when will we revolutionize and decolonize global food systems, instead of just providing more artisanal choice to those with money?

Jullapat, who came up in some of the most influential farm-to-table restaurants on the West Coast, understands these issues better than most. We discussed how she came to bake with artisan grains, how we can think about flour differently, and how she managed to write a cookbook while still working in the bakery. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Roxana. Thank you so much for taking the time today to chat. 

Roxana: Hi, Alicia. Thank you so much for inviting me. 

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

Roxana: So I was born here in the States, in California, to be more precise. But I actually moved to Costa Rica, where my dad was from, when I was just two. So my foods were just the foods of any typical Latin American kid, starting with tons of tortillas made with nixtamalized corn, of course. Tamales, tropical fruits like the ones you probably eat every day. And we actually start drinking coffee at an early age also. 

And then, of course, normal kids stuff, like, a spaghetti with tomato sauce and rotisserie chicken and all the things that kids like. But for sure, there were a lot more vegetables than you would imagine because there's just that access to produce everywhere year round. 

Alicia: And what was it about bread and pastry that drew you into working with them?

Roxana: When I decided to take a break from schooling, after I got my bachelor's degree, and before I commit—I was supposed to go to grad school. I was like, ‘Ok, let's do something manual. I need to use my hands and not study all day.’

And I went to cooking school, and I thought I was just gonna cook like any normal cook. At the time, I was vegetarian. And I had a real hard time in cooking school working with animal products. Really, really tough. I'm like, ‘Wow, this is so much blood.’

I remember having my first bite of steak that I had in a long, long time, like years probably, in cooking school. And so, bread and pastries seem so natural, right? These are ingredients that I’m not defensive about, ingredients that I use all the time even though there's a lot of dairy. But I was a vegetarian. 

And also my family, starting with my great-grandmother and my mom even, there's a lot of baking. So it didn't sound foreign. There were a lot of terms in Spanish and in French, which I was familiar with. So it seemed very approachable. 

Plus, by the time I graduated cooking school, having gone through the entire program, including all the savory food and all kinds of butchery and charcuterie, I was getting all these jobs in small restaurants. And I had been sent to the pastry station to plate desserts or make garnishes, etc. So I was like, ‘Ok, I guess this is it.’

And if once you know you like it, and you're kind of good at it. I found a really good job, which was working under Nancy Silverton. I was like, ‘Ok, let's go work at a great place that does this really well.’

Alicia: Well, what made you vegetarian and what made you stop being vegetarian?

Roxana: I was always not very—as a child, I was not super into meat. I thought it was really chewy and really hard and you needed a knife. And the flavors were really, really strong. Also I'm sure you're familiar outside of the United States, beef tends to be grass-fed rather than grain-fed, and it's not always confined so the texture and the flavor of the meat is very different. It's very forward, very meaty, very beefy. Almost barnyard. So I felt that was a—really hard for me as a child. 

I don't know what my parents were thinking. There were instances when we were very young. And in September we'd go pick the pig that we would sacrifice for Christmas. So, we’d go to a farm outside of San José, the capitol, and go visit the pig farmer and say, ‘Ok, this is ours.’ I mean, that's so cruel. Come Christmas, you don't want to touch that ham. So, I definitely felt like I couldn't separate the face of that animal with the meat on my plate. 

When I was allowed to say what I wanted to eat, in a family of five kids, you're—there's no menu to choose from. You eat what's in front of you. Once I had more freedom to say ‘I would rather eat this,’ I was a vegetarian. 

Alicia: And are you still vegetarian or no?

Roxana: I am very vegetarian-heavy in my house. I mean, we seldom purchase meat or fish. I mean, I think we have a can of tuna in the house, maybe in the pantry. So even though my husband is a chef, and we work in a restaurant that serves an omnivore diet, and we go to restaurants where we might enjoy the gamut of foods available to us, we eat very vegetarian, if not vegan-ish in my house.

Alicia: Oh, nice. Awesome. 

And I wanted to ask also how you developed your specific style of baking. You mentioned working under Nancy Silverton. You went to one of these—this really grand dame of baking. And how did you emerge from that and develop yourself?

Roxana: I think that the one thing that I felt very attracted to working in California, but also having come from a seasonal place, [where you] use what's available in front of you; there's not a huge amount of imports. I always found it very compelling and appealing to just go with that flow. Follow that seasonal rhythm. And that's what Campanile did so great, and why it was so important to me to work at a place like that. 

I'm very tomboyish in my baking, so I'm not into very intricate or meticulous technique. I want things to feel handmade and small batch–y. And that the ingredients are identifiable, that they didn't come in a jar or that they were in vacuum seal. I just want to feel that the process is more organic. It just unfolds unto itself, and you coax the ingredients just to do their thing rather than  impose on them your vision of the world. 

Alicia: Yeah. [Laughs.]

Well, you just had a book come out called Mother Grains. What was the process like—because I'm struggling to write a book right now—of being in a bakery and writing a book? What was your process for writing it, and how did you find that time?

Roxana: It’s really funny, interesting, and dramatic, you know? And I'm sure you feel all of those things, because when we—by the time my agent and I sat down and said, ‘Ok, this is a book proposal,’ I had a table of contents with a vast number of recipes. 

Now, these recipes are probably—were in a large format. This is for a bakery that makes more than a couple dozen at a time. So the first and the most challenging thing, when to just to downscale all those things. And then you think that you're explaining things very well until people say like, ‘What is ‘Add water to wet sand?’’ That doesn't sound that clear after all.

So, I would say that it took me a while to figure it out. And if I were to write another cookbook, I would do this process, which is we work—I work every day. I'm on the schedule; I work a station. I managed one of the ovens, or today, for example, I'm doing all the lamination for tomorrow. 

And I don't want to stop doing that. 

So I want to come in, do my work at three in the morning, whenever it is, and then spend one to two hours testing recipes or looking at them, getting familiarized with them. If it's downscaling, do that. Which is what I did last year, only I was disorganized about it. And then you take one day to write, and that's the day that you're in your house with your cat, pot of coffee, and just go for it. 

Impossible. Impossible. And I've seen I work with people that have done this, and I have no idea how they do it, but it’s impossible to just go, ‘Ok, I have an hour left. Let's go write.’ Ah-ah, that's not gonna happen. That’s not how it works. But I remember when Suzanne Goin was writing the Lucques cookbook. That's how she did it. She would be in between orders, go punch in a recipe. 

But yeah, it's incredibly challenging. Your entire staff is involved in the process. I was lucky enough to have journalists and English majors among my staff. I even have a—had a biologist. So I had a lot of resources. And then eventually, you're gonna have to—I don't know if this is for you also, but I did have to look for help. Look to those professional recipe testers and copy editors and have them help you out, because it takes a village. 

Alicia: Right, right. 

And so in the book, you write about how you came up in these very formative farm-to-table restaurants on the west coast, like Campanile. But it was local farmers getting into grains. There were new mills out there in Los Angeles that you visited. The Washington State University bread lab, that was what really got you interested in grain as a seasonal ingredient. Why do you think grain hadn't been more deeply considered by chefs, even the ones who were actively interested in sustainable and local sourcing?

Roxana: That is such an important question, and really the gist of why Mother Grains came to be. Because at some point, somewhere in our recent history—where we were pushing forward towards food security and industrializing processes to ensure that we could all eat—at some point we lost connection with the fact that this flour comes from a plant. It actually grows in the ground, literally in the ground. And there's several steps that can be mechanized and sort of divorce us from that connection to the land where the actual seed comes from. 

Even for a person like myself. I'm a baker, I know stuff. We all know, chocolate grows in a tree, but we see it in a bar pretty much always. So to actually really slow down and say, ‘Wait a minute. This is important. This was alive. It isn't anymore. Why isn't it anymore full of all these things, just like the fruit that I purchased at the farmers’ market?’

So for us farm-to-table people, which is a lot of us, right? And we kind of have a chip on our shoulder about how we work with our farmers, and we have a personal relationships with them and how we are really pushing for sustainability in an industry that is not known for it. We're making no effort to connect this important, humongous food group under that umbrella. Why are we not looking at it with that lens? And I think I think it was just part of a conversation that happened among many of us. 

But it really is kind of you have to see it with your own eyes to believe it and really, really feel the—that sort of fire in your belly, that ‘Oh, god, what have we done? What did we do to ourselves? How did we forget this? Why did we neglect all of this biodiversity?’

Alicia: No, I mean, talking about biodiversity is so important. And I feel that this is why your book is important and this conversation is important, because, it—We seem to be getting back to biodiversity ingredient by ingredient rather than—it hasn't been kind of a wholesale revolution of our food system. It's been a few people realizing, ‘Hey, we actually could have a lot of different types of grain and work with them,’ and that sort of thing. 

And I was talking to a bread baker friend, because I'm writing about sugar right now, and we were talking about how grain has had this moment. Of course, it hasn't had this moment necessarily for everybody or everywhere, but it's had this moment, and like sugar hasn't had this moment. 

And so here in Puerto Rico, which used to be—sugar carries a significant—You see the abandoned sugar mills everywhere. And now, I was talking to a farmer at the market, and she had some sugarcane. And she's like, ‘Oh, yeah, we have two varieties. But for us, it's a weed.’ One person is cultivating it to make rum here now, recultivating it, but for the most part it's either made for pitorro, which is a kind of a crude rum that people make in the mountains. And then there's just farmers with sugar who just are like, ‘Oh, sometimes we cut it up and eat it. But it's not for sale. But we were talking about, when is the moment going to come for sugar? 

And so—

Roxana: Right.

And it’s fascinating. It’s amazing. I'm sure that you're looking at ‘Ok, well now brown sugar? And turbinados and muscovados.’ And it is so incredibly flavorful, right? And it's hard for us to say like, ‘It's flavorful. It's not just sweetness, right?’

Alicia: No, I can't wait for more sugar.

In your baking, how do you bring your commitment to artisan grains to the rest of what you cook? Obviously, you come from farm-to-table restaurants. But how does the commitment to grains influence the rest of the restaurant?

Roxana: To be a seasonal baker with fruits could not be easier. You go to a farmers’ market, you visit a farm. It's very obvious when the fruit is organic or even when it's not certified. You know when a farmer is following sustainable practices. It’s obvious in the fruit; it’s obvious in their orchards. So easy to understand. I know how to work with this fruit. I know it needs very little sugar. I can do it in my sleep. Not to be arrogant, but it's been 20 years of this. So, it comes easily. 

But the thing about grain is that you really have to do your homework, because we don't—can we tell from a bag of flour that it is good or not? No. We can smell it. I mean, it takes a little bit of getting accustomed to the feeling, the feel of it and the smell of it, to really just know at first sight. And also you will find yourself picking your battles, because it's a huge battlefield. So how are we going to win this war? 

And for sure, there's a lot of confusion too, right? Because there's a sustainable aspect, but then there's also the health aspect. So the health folks, health advocates are pushing for quinoa, right? But we're like, ‘Hold on a minute. Quinoa comes from way far over there. And can we guarantee that those farmers are getting a fair share? I don't know. And why are we adding all this eco-footprint to this grain?’ And it's also not ours in a sense. We appropriated and became the food of white chicks from Santa Monica here in LA. It’s so multifaceted that you really have to just be like, ‘Ok, let's slow down and pick up our battles.’

So my first goal, which was relatively easy to achieve and is the reason I like to say that it’s easy because I want to see other people commit to it, is my first goal when we open the bakery, which was only four years ago, was every single thing we make has to have an amount of whole grain flour in it. We even committed to a percentage, which was 20%. And that was sort of imitating a policy that the California Weed Commission was trying to set up for local farmers markets here in California. 

So once you have that wind in your arsenal, you get more ballsy. And you want to do more. So now you see a lot of recipes that are increasing their percentages of whole grain flour. And now we're getting so good at it. Now, we understand like, ‘Ok, no, you really have to add a little fat if you want that effect. Or you really have to hydrate more if you want to produce this other thing, or build acidity, etc.’

So, it really is sort of a process. And I want to call it a journey or an adventure so that people are incentivized to jump in, because it really is sort of a road that will take many, many different directions depending on how you choose—what do you choose to down the road. 

And it’s interesting because the—because grain is so regional. We all have different experiences. No two bakers have the same journey. And I feel like that's fun. Here in California, we all buy sonora wheat because it's so drug resistant and so multi-purpose.

But I really hope everybody finds their thing, you know? 

Alicia: Yeah, yeah.

And I mean, that's so important and something that really has to—I'm really obsessed with people who write recipes and still maintain their originality and specificity. And I think there is still a point where you can still learn from a recipe even if you don't necessarily have those ingredients. You think about how you can approach this with what you have. 

And I think that we need more of that. We need more very specific, hyper-local and flexibility and originality and seeing originality as a good thing, because it promotes biodiversity and we definitely really need biodiversity. 

But at the same time, local grains, when you don't have that access—when I lived in New York, I would go to the farmers’ market and they would have the New York grain. Yeah, beautiful, and it's great. Lots of people are just going to the supermarket or just their—their local market hasn't caught up with that. So what do you think would be great steps toward making artisan grains more available and accessible to all bakers? 

Roxana: Thank you so much for asking this question, ’cause this is totally true. At the end of the day, I don't want to sound elitist and be like, ‘Go to your specialty mill, and buy a variety of wheat that has been rescued by this awesome woman.’ This is all true, by the way. This does happen. And those are conversations that I do have with people.

But we do have to meet each other where we're at, right? And at the end of the day, is it more important that you bake with the one bag of spelt that you can find in your local grocery store or is it more important for you to go and spend an outrageous amount in shipping flour from, say, Arizona or Pasadena, California, all the way to you?

So I think that we just have to kind of keep being realistic, and know that the market does—is a pushing force. And the more we ask for these products, the more we are telling the market, ‘This is what we want. We want to see more of this flour in the world and in our cooking. And this is the stuff we want to put in our body.’

I was just very recently in Costa Rica, visiting a baker friend who I met recently, actually, through social media. And I'm talking to him about the challenges of not—he does not work in a country that produces wheat. So he is actually having a completely different conversation. He is actually reaching out to the bread lab and saying, ‘Which wheat will thrive in the tropicals, tropicals region? What should we be doing to make this feasible?’ And he finds himself getting a bag of khorasan all the way from Oregon to Costa Rica. Just let me see what this is and what can we do?

So the thing about grains is that they are grains. And another friend that wants me to use the pejibaye flour, which is a fruit from a palm that grows in many Costa Rica—in Central American countries. Probably grows around you, and they all have different names depending on the country, right? 

But then we are changing the composition. A grain’s a grain and a root vegetable’s a root vegetable and fruit from a palm tree is fruit from a palm tree. Which means that at the end of the day, there's a lot to learn. And how do we build equivalences and become more adept at changing flour that comes from grain to be—how do we use those principles with flour that comes from our root vegetables like yuca, for example?

Alicia: Right. 

Yeah, no, that's the thing. Here in Puerto Rico, it's—we're not growing wheat, and we probably should be. That moment has to come where we have someone here who is interested and ask the folks like, ‘What is the grain that—’ 

I mean, we have seven different microclimates here. There's somewhere that grain could grow, and we could mill it and everything. But there is someone here at least who is getting wheat and milling it themselves. So we're getting closer, I think, to that. 

Roxana: Let’s not forget that wheat is an enormous multi-billion dollar business, right? There are forces at play here that are not interested in smaller groups making, adapting their own microsphere to their microclimate. It’s not important to them, it’s not—there's no revenue to be had. 

But this happened once before. We came from Europe only 500 years ago. And it adapted to the Americas, and now we're the top producers in the world between Canada and the United States. So this can happen. These are now heritage varietals that we consider precious.

Alicia: Right.

No, and it's just a mind-set change. Wheat is one of those things where there are big agribusiness lobbies behind the choices there. And I think it's kind of taken for granted. People are like, ‘Well, yeah, corn, there's a big lobby. Soy, there's a big lobby. Meat, dairy, big lobbies.’  But wheat is also one of those things. And yeah, we use it so much in everything we do. We should definitely be thinking more about that.

Roxana: When you mention corn, it's like, ‘We are the children of the corn.’ Yes, we are. Yeah. Let's not forget, it is literally our lineage, my very ancestors who tamed corn and actually made a flour out of it—a mush out of it. Now we can dehydrate and make, use almost as a flour. But there's also cornmeal, which is just that same kernel just dried up. 

So I mean, seriously, Mother Grains could have been Mother Corn. Corn is another mega-grain, another—is another juggernaut that is everything.

Alicia: No, I'm excited. There's folks growing corn here that I haven't tried yet, but I'm very excited about.

And for you, is baking a political act?

Roxana: 100%. Because everything is.

And I have to say that the last two years of social change, starting with even a little bit before the George Floyd assassination and the sort of reclaiming who we are and what belongs to us and the right to turn tell our own stories and the right to cook our own recipes. Leches be seis leches and all those things we were getting fights about, I always had this sense of advocacy. You really have to fight that good fight. And sometimes I have not been really good at finding my voice in the whole process, and let anger be the tone rather than persuasion, which is what we're—I'm leaning a little bit more. 

But yeah, it is a political act. But it's also an act of mindfulness. We talk so much about being in the moment and being present and ‘Let's meditate,’ but also what about that sort of moment in which you can make these decisions with calm—pure calm and are able to say, ‘This is the flour that I can see, that I can feel, that I can smell, is going to be different.’ So your whole senses are engaged, and you're going to taste something that is familiar but different. Your entire system is involved in that sole moment of producing a baked good.

I hope. I hope you're not that checked out, that you're like, ‘Oh, look at that cookie.’ It really pulls you in, and in doing so, you're 100% present. 

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

Roxana: Thank you so much for having me.

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