From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy

Aja Barber and I have been following each other online for years, while we were both working various jobs and trying to get anyone to pay attention to our work. Contrary to how most people are taught these things work, we only got anyone to pay attention when we started our own independent ventures: for me, this newsletter; for Aja, her incredible Patreon. She also has a book coming out, called Consumed: On Colonialism, Climate Change, Consumerism & the Need for Collective Change.

Her work on the subject of mindless fashion consumption and waste has many parallels to mine on food, which is why I was so excited to discuss it with her: In both discussions, classism is used to defend cheap goods that rely on extraction from the Global South. In both discussions, personal feeling is made to be more significant than political and economic reality. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Aja. Thank you so much for taking the time out today.

Aja: Thank you for having me. It's nice to finally chat. We've been Twitter friends for close to a decade. But this is the first time we're talking.

Alicia: It's amazing, and I love it. 

How are things over there in the UK right now?

Aja: Well, you know what, everything's better when spring comes. That's the reality, is that the—there's more sunshine. It gets really dark here during the winter, and when you're already in a pandemic and you can't see friends and you don't really feel like going out, it just—it was a hard winter. 

So, things are feeling way more positive just because there's more sunshine. And  things tend to be sort of loosening up here. Of course, still being precautious. But it feels more hopeful. So you've caught me on one of my better days.

Alicia: [Laughs.] I'm so glad.

This week, I think we're switching from—to summer, basically. If you came to Puerto Rico from a temperate climate, you wouldn't notice the seasons. But since living here, I noticed the changes. And I think we got two weeks of winter, where I could sit and work and not be sweating all day. But we're back to that. From 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., it is definitely hot all day. [Laughs.]

Aja: My family's in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. So, I totally get-

Both: Yes. [Laughter.]

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

Aja: So I'm from Northern Virginia, right outside of D.C. I’d say it's like zone 6 on the tube, basically. So Northern Virginia, DC Metropolitan. And I grew up eating a lot of plants and fish, because my parents are actually pretty healthy and pretty progressive as far as food goes. And I was definitely the kid that got made fun of for having whole-wheat sandwiches, stuff like that. 

And we see all of these ideas that are popping up, and everybody's sort of talking about it like it's new, but my parents belonged to a food co-op when I was a kid. And it made them weird. [Laughter.] We would get really great, fresh vegetables. And my dad would buy things from the local farmers’ market. So the way I hear people talking about how we should be eating now, it's actually how I grew up, which in some ways is really privileged. And I totally recognize that, but as a kid, it made you a weirdo.

Alicia: [Laughs.] Well, and you have a book coming out called Consumed: On Colonialism, Climate Change, Consumerism and the need for Collective Change. I love the alliteration here. 

Aja: That was my editor. [Laughter.]

Alicia: And we're gonna get a little deeper into this, but hearing about that kind of upbringing in terms of food, what was your journey to understanding sustainable fashion?

Aja: So that's the entirety of the book basically, was talking about fashion and consumption, but also the fashion industry as a whole and how it really uplifts white and privileged voices and doesn't leave a lot of space for anyone else. But then when you look at the cycle of how things are produced, it makes sense because from start to finish, marginalized people are pretty heavily crapped upon by the system.

When we think about where the resources that go into our fashion comes from, it’s countries in the Global South. So we have these countries in the Global South that are resource rich, labor rich, but for some reason not incredibly economically wealthy. And the fact that we're not questioning that: We should be. You can look around my living room, and you probably can find a few things that are actually made in England. I live in London, even though I'm American. And I don't think that that's a—I don't think that that is an outrageous reality. I think that's the reality of the system, but nobody's really actually questioning that like we should. 

And so, with the fashion industry, your clothing is produced in the Global South. The cotton is grown in the Global South; the fabrics are made in the Global South. And it’s shipped to the Global North where it's consumed really rapidly, because we know that the multinational brands have really sped up the seasons and made us think that it's normal to buy 20 pieces every season, when in actuality, that's not normal at all. 

And then we go through our clothing so quickly that the resale market is booming, but charity shops are chock-a-block of fast fashion. And then, because we can't just recycle our way out of this, it gets dumped on the Global South, where, in our heads, we think that we're doing something charitable, but in actuality, we've created an ecological problem. And it's being left on countries like Kenya, Ghana, Rwanda to basically mitigate. 

And we've had this idea in our head because of colonialism, white saviorism, that sort of stuff that like, ‘Oh, if you donate it to a charity, somebody in a poor country will really want it.’ When in actuality, No, nobody wants crap clothing. If you bought something that didn't last five wears, there's a very good chance that that person in Ghana doesn't want it either. 

And it ends up being this disaster system where the government of Ghana, the municipal branch, has to really deal with all of these imports. And I, as an American, there's one thing that Americans hate the most, it's having to pay their tax dollars to sort out someone else's mess. But that's essentially what the clothing problem is doing to countries in the Global South. 

So I talk about my personal experience, as someone who's always sort of been on the outside of the fashion industry looking in. I use the analogy, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with all the little rich kids are singing and dancing with the Candy Man? That was me with the fashion industry. But sometimes not being invited in means that you take a really critical and shrewd eye to these systems. And as someone who felt I was always trying to be in the room, but never really let in the room, what I realized was that I don't actually want to be in that room because this is a problem and it needs to be sorted out.

Alicia: I mean, what did you like about fashion? What really attracted you to the fashion world, to begin with? 

Aja: So, the thing that attracted me most to the fashion world from the beginning was the need to fit in through material items. So I said my parents were sort of hippie-dippie for their time, but my mom has always been someone who did not understand the need to fit in through material items. She's always been a secondhand shopper, which I grew up in the ’80s, ’90s, that was not that cool. It was cool in the late ’90s. Kurt Cobain, God bless him, really sort of made the whole thrifting thing, grunge, that sort of thing. 

And even then, people still didn't get it. I remember in the eighth grade telling this guy that I had been friends with that I had bought something from a charity shop. And he said, ‘Oh, gross. You're wearing dead people's clothing.’ That was the response. So after that, I was like, ‘Ok, keep that s**t to yourself, Aja.’

And so in general, thrifting, secondhand shopping, wearing hand-me-downs has always been something where I didn't want people to look too closely at me because there were plenty of other reasons why I was socially ostracized. I didn't need it to be my clothes. But because I didn't have the right clothes, which when I was growing up, that was the Gap and the Limited, before the Limited Too started looking like a rainbow barfed inside of it. But at one point in time, the Limited Too was the s**t. 

And I didn't have that stuff. And so I became really obsessed with labels and wanting to have the right clothing. But then from that obsession for being socially ostracized came a genuine interest in the fashion industry. It became, ‘Oh, wait a minute, this is actually really cool. And I want to learn as much as possible about this.’ 

But I knew that I couldn't tell my parents, ‘I’m gonna go to fashion school!’ because they're Black. And they're going to be like, ‘No, you're going to get a degree where you can get a job.’ Because we know that there are certain industries that just were not welcoming to marginalized people. 

I mean, I feel like the time period where you and I met on Twitter, that was when I started to see a lot of my other Twitter friends who happen to be Black and brown women finally get booked deals and their books sold. I believe you and I met through a tweet that had mentioned Roxane Gay as someone you should pay attention to. Do you remember that? 

Alicia: I do. [Laughs.]

Aja: It was a friend who had said, ‘These are the people that I follow. These are the people you should pay attention to.’ This was before Roxane Gay’s groundbreaking success. She was also a person where people just really weren't paying attention, and that it just seemed like at some point the doors opened. And Ijeoma Oluo was publishing a book that would become a New York Times best-seller. My friend, Sam Irby was publishing her essays. And they're hilarious, they become best-sellers. So it just seemed like there was a moment where the world was like, ‘Oh, wait, maybe we should actually listen to Black and brown women.’

And, for me, I sort of had to take a roundabout path to getting to where I am. Because one, my parents were not going to encourage me to go to school to study fashion or to study writing. And two, I didn't feel like there was space for me in these worlds at all. So I threw stuff at the wall until it stuck. 

And eventually, I began to realize the fashion industry in its current iteration is actually a disaster, and all the things that we talk about whether it's racism, intersectional feminism—I was writing about these issues really separate from the fashion industry, ’cause they were important issues. For a lot of people, people saw, people like me saw the rise of Donald Trump. And I began to actually talk about race really honestly in a way I never had before, because I could tell what was happening. But I was talking about these issues very separate, in a silo. And what I began to realize was that actually all these issues apply to the fashion industry. So then, I began to talk about them together. And that's where my platform sort of came about from.

Alicia: And so much of what you say about fashion relates to food. And so it's sometimes, just this really mind-melding kind of thing to read. ‘Wait, this is also food.’ 

And we need to talk about these connections, too, because, I don't know, I feel these are both issues where people—it's feminized. People don't want to think about them very much. These are just things people have to do. They have to get up and dress themselves. They have to get up and eat something. And we're kind of taught not to make a big fuss necessarily about these things, because we're taught that they're frivolous.

Aja: Yeah. Frivolous, silly, you know? 

Alicia: Yes, exactly. 

And so it's such an uphill battle to get people to care about these things, and to talk about them in a serious manner. And one of the things that kind of really drives me nuts, and that you also talk about, is how people defend cheap prices out of class concerns without thinking about the exploitation of the worker at the beginning of the chain, as you discussed. We're exploiting the Global South for fashion. We're exploiting the Global South for food, too. 

And people defend cheap clothes and cheap food, and dismiss the relevance of individual choice. And I wanted to get your take on how do you see individual action as meaningful even as we seek systemic change?

Aja: So I think that there's a few myths that people love to peddle about fashion. And that's one of the things that I debunk, because it actually really annoys me. 

There's this idea that only poor people buy fast fashion. That is not true. Everybody buys fast fashion. One of the things that I did within my book was I talked about class. And the Resource Generation really helped me out big time with this, because they have some really great breakdowns of what class and wealth looks like. 

So one thing I learned in my book was in America, poor and working poor people account for —1% of America's wealth. And then the next class group is working class. And that group accounts for 3% of America's wealth. And then you start getting into middle class, managerial class, and then ruling class. 

We’ve just come out of this pandemic, and there were people lined around the block to buy from Primark, which is not an ethical or sustainable store. But when you critique it, people accuse you of classism. Here's the thing: The vast majority of people in that line probably are not the people that are within that 4% of net wealth. So if you look at the fact that all these major multinational companies that people claim are where poor people shop are actually billion-dollar companies, then it is not just poor people shopping from those places. It's literally everyone. 

And I find in our society, nobody wants to be poor and everybody wants to be poor when it comes to the system that they want to participate in. Does anyone actually want to be poor? No. Being poor f*****g blows, and it's systemic, and it's hard to climb out of. And we love a rags to riches story in America, where we talk about, ‘Oh, well, this person was poor and now they're not.’ Where the actual reality is, a person that comes from generations of poverty is really unlikely to be able to find their way out of it, because you—being poor is actually very expensive and very hard. 

And so, we have this system of fast fashion where literally everyone participates because our entire mind-set is that of a consumerist identity. And that is beat into our heads, that you're gonna become a consumer. And it's subtle. It's pernicious. It's in films. You name a film that we love that's a cult classic, that doesn't have a really great makeover scene, right? Where the main character gets this amazing makeover that involves buying loads of clothing, and all of a sudden they're a new person. Everyone treats them differently. That's a pernicious message that's really pushed pretty hard in media. 

And so we have a real consumer mind-set as a culture. And I want to unpick that basically, and get people to think about that mind-set. Because once you do, you begin to see the ways in which all of this consumption is sort of pushed on you whether or not you need to consume.

Alicia: I think that's where fashion and food diverge, because food is absolutely 100%, you need to consume it. So there's different levels of complication there. 

And I wanted to know how you feel about the way the fashion media covers sustainability and inclusivity? [Laughter.] I think I know the answer to this question. But how are these issues being addressed, if at all?

Aja: You're never going to get the honest truth about the scale and scope of the fashion industry's problem from magazines and publications that depend on those same multinational polluters in order to fill their pages with advertisements. If you say something bad about a brand, and you're a fashion editor, you'll get barred from things. 

And so, everybody's very much afraid of these brands. So why would someone who's dependent on a paycheck from that group of people who's polluting and harming the earth actually tell the honest truth about the reality? Why would they do that? There's no incentive there. And so, I think if people are looking for traditional media to be the one who stands up to the ills of the fashion industry, they're going to be looking for a very long amount of time. That's never going to happen.

I mean, one of the things I cover in my book, one of my favorite stylists, Lucinda Chambers did this interview after she was ousted from Vogue where she basically just lets it all out. And Vogue apparently tried to get the interview removed from the internet, British Vogue. But she talks about things. She remembers having to do a cover where she put Alexa Chung in this cheesy Michael Kors T-shirt. And she was like, ‘I didn't want to do it. It was a cheesy cover. But Michael Kors was a major advertiser.’

So, so much of what you see in the magazine is very much manipulated by the magazine's relationship to the brands. And so, you're never actually going to get accuracy with the scale and scope of the problem from traditional media. If there's any skin in the game, if there's any connection to the money. 

And I also say even for people that claim to be ethical rating scales, right? There's a few ethical rating scales that people keep trying to tag on my page saying, ‘Oh, yeah, I use this.’ Ok, so they rate brands, but they also email spam you every day with affiliate links from ethical and sustainable brands. So if consumption and scale is the problem, which it is, if someone is making their money and it's reliant off of you buying things, how trustworthy of a source can they be in the accuracy in which they’re reporting?

Alicia: And both of us are independent people, culture workers. And you use Patreon. Why did you decide to go that independent route?

Aja: Because my Instagram was growing really quickly, and I knew that the vast majority of funding that's available for people on Instagram is through selling people s**t they don't need. 

There's other things out there. But in general, I don't want to be an Instagram that's pushing you to buy stuff. I've done one advertisement on my Instagram, and it's literally with a sustana—with a resale platform, Vestiaire Collective, because we have so much clothing that I feel you can't go wrong by buying secondhand. The enormity of the clothing that's circulating our planet right now, we're all gonna have to start shopping secondhand. There's no way around it. If there's anything that I can push and not feel like I’m really, really cheapening out, it's definitely secondhand. 

But in general, you really can't be the person who's telling everyone why the industry’s s**t stinks, and then turn around and go, ‘Oh, by the way, buy this thing.’ It doesn't work. 

And also, I also know that brands love to hop on a social justice movement when it's the moment, but they do not like people talking about things like race before it's of the moment. And so five years ago, if you used the phrase white supremacy, the hysterics and the fragility you’d have to endure. When in actuality, today, people are kind of like, ‘Ok, I get what white supremacy means.’ But if the majority of white people are not comfortable with the things that you're saying, a brand's not going to want to sponsor your page.

Now that I have a six-figure following, now, everybody wants to throw stuff at me. But before that happened, nobody wanted to throw anything at me. And I had to do Patreon, because it wasn't one of those things where I could really monetize my Instagram in any way that felt good to me. And I wanted to create a space where you weren't having things pushed on you constantly, because so much of Instagram, now, it's advertisement. 

So I want it to be that account where you're scrolling and you see a dress on another account that you probably don't need. And then the next thing that you see is my post, which tells you that 60% of materials on this planet are petrochemicals, so polyester, which is essentially oil. And then I talk about the fashion industry’s links to oil. We all talk about how fossil fuels are ruining everything. Well, that's another way they're ruining things for people. People don't make that connection. 

And so, I basically want to be a counter argument to all the consuming that goes on through Instagram.

Alicia: I mean, that's amazing to me. 

I think this is maybe a selfish question. I don't use Instagram the way you use Instagram. How do you balance what you post on Patreon and what you post on Instagram?

Aja: The thing is the sustainable fashion conversation and basically the fashion industry getting its s**t together is moving so quickly that people can't keep up with it all. 

So I sort of run my Patreon as a sustainable and ethical fashion newswire. So one of the things I noticed is that I do get a lot of people who are journalists, are people within the industry, who follow me because they know first thing in the morning, I will have gone through the news stories that I see and pick something that's interesting and relevant to discuss on my Patreon. 

So I managed to basically become a newswire for this topic that I'm really interested in, but a topic that a lot of people don't know how to mitigate because once again, the fashion industry is also very closed off from people that might not know. It's one of those things where the fashion industry has always had an air of mystery. And I break things down in layman’s terms for people so that they can have a conversation about these topics with their friends.

Alicia: And as you use Instagram so much, you use your face, your body, yourself to promote your work. And I think I'm struggling with that a little bit. 

But how is your personal visibility a significant aspect of your work?

Aja: I feel really exposed now, to be honest. I didn't used to feel that way, but now it's when I'm out and about in London, I will bump into people that follow my work. And that's a really weird feeling. But everyone's really cool, but I do—I feel more exposed now than I felt before. 

And it's not bumping into people, I don't mind that. It's when you just tweet something benign and then it ends up in a major newspaper. That happens to me a lot now, and that's a bit like, ‘Mmaww.’ [Laughs.] You know what I mean?

So there's a part of me that sometimes just wants to just pull back from that space, because I don't think that there should be any one face of the movement. And I also feel this space still isn't diverse enough. I don't want to be the face of like, ‘We need a Black person to talk about the fashion industry and sustainability. Someone call Aja Barber.’ No, there's a lot of people you can call. It's not about there just being one of us, which sometimes I do worry that is the direction that sometimes things go in. I think there's room for many voices. 

But yeah, I think I worry about being overexposed. And sometimes, I'm sick of looking at my own face. And I think about boundaries as well. If I have a kid, for instance, I am never going to be the person that talks about my pregnancy on Instagram, because, one, I don't want to. It doesn't interest me. Two, social media can trigger people. You don't know who's experiencing infertility or having issues with that sort of stuff. And three, I don't want my Instagram to become parenting, ’cause there's plenty of good parenting Instagrams and I don't need to be one of them. So, I do think sometimes about just pulling back and doing more infographics and less style and less-

But at the same time, I also think my visibility as a Black plus-size body is also really important, because that has been so crucially missing from the conversation for so many years. So I go back and forth. 

Alicia: [Laughs.] No, it's very difficult, because to balance that and the ways in which people respond when you have a platform is just—it's horrible. I really struggle now with posting anything saying anything, because it is—

Aja: You get targeted.

I have an account that's like, ‘I am so sick of your b******t.’ And it's all about how the person hates me. And I'm just like, ‘Wow? What did I do?’ 

And they're mad because I called in a brand that they really liked who had been very disingenuous in the plus-size conversation, and then were trying to sort of present themselves like they were gonna lead the moment. When in actuality, myself and other plus-size people have been asking them for years to be inclusive with sizing.

’Cause this is a brand that makes one particular item. So it's not even that they roll out a new 16-piece collection every year. No, it's pretty much the same thing. And if you're only making one item, then you should be the first person to scale that item up in different sizes. But they just flat-out refused. And I'm just kind of like, ‘Just say you don't like fat people and go, but don't pretend it's rocket scientists or rocket science sacred geometry to scale up a pattern. It's hard, but it can be done because small brands do it every single day.’

So this brand had been very avoidant, ignorant, and negligent in the conversation. Particularly in private conversations they'd had with me, to the point where I stopped wearing their product on my grid, took down all of their photos. I still wear the clothing, ’cause you should wear the clothing that you buy regardless of whether it's fast fashion or a brand that leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Give it a good life. But I don't wear it on the grid and I don't promote it. 

So when they came out with, ‘We're going to do a podcast about plus-size inclusivity,’ I was just like, ‘Oh, go f**k yourself.’ So I said publicly, I talked about everything that happened and how for two years plus-size people had been asking them to be inclusive. And we'd have more respect for them if they just said, ‘Yeah, we really weren't doing a good job with this. And now we really want to do it, and we're really committed. And thank you everyone who pretty much tried to open our eyes and ears, and we didn't listen.’

Yeah, but instead they tried to present it like, ‘Oh, we're gonna do a podcast and we're so great.’ And I was just like, ‘No, we need an accountability moment here.’ And what I found was that that brand had some cult-like fans who raged against me for weeks. One of them is still holding a grudge. Why? Because I asked a brand to do better. Which, by the way, you are defending a corporation, not a person. Get your f*****g life. That's weird. I’d rather kick my own ass before I’d defend a corporation the way some of the fans of this brand have defended them. It's bizarre. 

Alicia: That's really ridiculous behavior. 

And it happens in food media as well, being someone who has been writing about vegan stuff, plant-based stuff, whatever you want to call it, for years. And then all of a sudden, everyone jumps on the bandwagon. And it's I get called to do an interview with someone who doesn't know anything about anything, but got assigned to write about it. This is really frustrating.

Aja: Yeah, yeah.

It's annoying when people really try and commodify stuff in really disingenuous ways. But one of the things that I just think is so bizarre about our society, and I think social media is a real impactful part of this, is the ways in which people try to humanize corporations. 

One of the assignments that I always give my readership is to watch the film, The Corporation. I watched that in the early 2000s when it came out, and it was life-changing for me because social media is one of these things where corporations are—they try to be in on the Twitter jokes. They try to use the lingo. And when they f**k up, they try to make it seem like they're an individual instead of a multinational company. 

And that's really dangerous, because what we know is that a corporation can only act in its own best interest. That's the only thing that can do, because it's not a human with emotions. And if a corporation were a person, it would be a psychopath. So when people get really overly invested in defending companies, I'm just like, ‘Nah, get your life.’

Alicia: Yeah, no, for sure. 

And how do your perspectives on fashion, if they do, influence how you consume in other kinds of arenas? Food, media, etc. 

I think I gave a quote recently. Someone was asking me for recommendations for a newsletter. And I was like, ‘Well, the thing I'm obsessed with now is making sure my—what I wear expresses my ethics that I talk about in terms of what I eat.’ I mean, obviously, I like clothes. [Laughs.] But also at the same time, it's really important for me that if I am visible in this space, talking about these things, that I'm not also promoting similarly exploitative chains in other industries.

And so, how does it—Yeah. [Laughs.]

Aja: Yeah, for me, totally. I think about it in everything. I don't have a Spotify account, because artists that I really like who happened to be musicians talk about how they don't make any money from Spotify. So even though everybody has Spotify, I'm just the person who’s buying all the music on Bandcamp because most of my music is locked away on several different computers. Thank you very much for that, Apple. That's so cool of you. And so I'm just basically rebuying music. 

And, yeah, I think about it a lot. I think about the food. Now, I also know that as a person who lives in London, I am so lucky we have access to so many different types of food. We have different markets nearby. We can buy from all sorts of different cultures. And so I know that I have a lot of access and privilege in that way. And that's part of why I can only stick to really fashion, because food is more complicated in that way. 

But yeah, I think about it in all areas of my life. But in general, I truly believe that most of us with significant privilege just need to do less. Do less. The excess that comes when you have a significant amount of privilege in our culture isn't normal to the rest of humans on this planet. 

One of the things that was crucial to everything was moving to London. When I moved over here, my partner and I had been dating long distance for three years. I had to get rid of so much stuff. I was in my 30s. So I had 30 years of a life in the States, and I'm still mitigating that stuff. Because as someone who does the work that I do, I know that just dumping it on a charity shop’s doorstep is actually really bad. That actually doesn't help anyone. 

And so from the time I knew that we were going to get engaged and I was going to move over here, I basically tasked myself to thoughtfully get rid of all of my items that I wasn't planning on taking with me. Some of it was clothing that had grown too small, because we have this weird thing in our society where we pretend it's natural that every person should stay the same shape, no matter what. That is not natural. I mean, some people do, and it's natural to some people. But it's not natural to every person. 

And so a lot of the clothing from my early 20s was too small, basically. I'm someone who has uterine fibroids, so things around the waist, it just—some of that stuff was, I wasn't going to get into it again. And so I basically tasked myself with shedding myself of the stuff that wasn't going with me in a thoughtful way. Which meant for clothing, picking up the things that can be resold, reselling the stuff that can be resold, putting up stuff in Facebook galleries for all of my friends and saying, ‘If you want it, just get the shipping and I'll send it to you.’ But really, really trying to be very thoughtful about how I was going to pare down essentially. 

And that is still a work in progress. Every time I go home to my parents’ house, I task myself with going through stuff and trying to rehome it in a way that's thoughtful and helpful. And I feel that will be my life chore. 

And then also, moving over stuff slowly. So I've got a bunch of really great coffee table books that I love, and I just have to bring them over one at a time because they're all so heavy. 

[Laughter.] 

If you have to do a big move and you do it in a way where you really, really shed stuff in a way that's impactful and thoughtful, and keeping as much stuff out of the landfill, that what you'll find is now that I'm here, I think about everything I bring into this flat. One, London doesn't have closets like the U.S., so that's something you got to grapple with. 

But before it comes home, I genuinely think, ‘Where is it gonna go?’ We're very limited in space. And that really helps me in how I consume stuff. 

But then also when you talk about the fashion industry every single day and read about what's happening and how it's impacting the environment, if you have to do that for a living, you're just like, ‘I don't want anything.’

Alicia: [Laughs.] No, it's real. It's real. 

And for you, is cooking a political act?

Aja: Mm-hmm.

Sorry, I just took a sip of my tea. 

Alicia: No, it's ok. [Laughs.] 

Aja: Clothing will always be political. You cannot separate politics from clothing. You can't separate labor practices from clothing. You can't separate exploitation from clothing. You can't separate outsourcing and things like NAFTA from clothing. 

You can't separate what clothing means to certain people. How it can be religious, how it can be political, how it can be cultural. People know the uniform of the Black Panthers, right? There's certain clothing items that are evocative of social movement eras. But where you tend to shop and buy is political as well. Absolutely. 

And one thing that people need to really step, take it a step farther, pull back the curtain of your favorite brand and see what politicians and what policies they're supporting. Because one thing that people really—I think some people know about it, but they ignore it. But Richard Hayne of Urban Outfitters used to give a lot of money to the right-wing. Yeah, and he owns Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, and Free People. So free, so hippie. Yay.

So it's about all of these things. It's about our world. And when you think about how many jobs the fashion industry provides for on the planet, it's political. When you think about the fact that 80% of garment workers are women, hence, intersectional feminism, it's political. It's all very political.

Alicia: My question is, is cooking a political act? But I think you answered it anyway. [Laughter.]

Aja: I thought you said clothing. I totally thought you said clothing. Sorry.

Alicia: You answered in the same way, I think.

Aja: Cooking is absolutely political. Too. Who grows your food, where it comes from. Cooking is cultural. Cooking is—yes.

And when you also think about appropriation in cooking, that's a whole ’nother kettle of fish. Which you see it all the time, where a restaurant run by people from a certain ethnicity doesn't survive. And then all of a sudden another shiny and new restaurant opens up, which is run by white people who are selling a watered-down version of the dish. And they're doing great and they're getting write-ups and everyone's saying, ‘This is delicious and amazing’ when in actuality, that's somebody else's culture and somebody is profiting and not even doing it in the right way. 

So yeah, it's all political.

Alicia: [Laughs.] Well, thank you, Aja, again for taking the time. And it was so wonderful to finally talk to you.

Aja: Oh, my goodness, we're done already? That went really quickly.

Alicia: Yeah. [Laughter.]

Aja: Thank you.

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

Irene Li is a hilarious writer on serious issues, which I discovered when she sent me her piece, “8 Totally Achievable Ways to Show Up for Racial Justice… When You’re White and Own an Asian Restaurant!” She’s also the chef of the former restaurant Mei Mei in Boston, which has become a packaged dumpling company, as well as a project manager at Commonwealth Kitchen, where she’s helping Black and Latinx restaurant owners make their businesses work better for them.

We discussed how her social justice work influences her cooking, and vice versa, as well as her new job. Listen above, or read below.

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

Irene: Thanks so much for having me.

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

Irene: Yeah.

So I grew up here in the city of Boston. And my family is Chinese American. And so, we ate lots of Chinese food at home and also all the other things that a kid can find to eat in Boston. So tons of grilled cheese and pizza and mozzarella sticks. Cheese was a big theme. And we ate kind of more classic Chinese homestyle food for dinner every night, like white rice and stir fry. And it was a while before I figured out that not everybody ate that at home every night. So I definitely remember some sort of consciousness around that developing at some point for me.

Alicia: Well, what did that consciousness kind of mean for you?

Irene: Well, I think there were the points where I started going over to friends’ houses and realizing that there was not always a rice cooker on the counter but always a microwave. 

But having a lot of fun with trying different foods, and bringing friends over to try food at my house, I feel like I was really lucky in that the friends who I had were always really interested in eating what was going on in the Lee house. Rice porridge, like shee fun or zhou, is a big feature of my childhood. So if you need to make a big pot of something and you only have a little bit of rice, that's how you do it. 

And one of my favorite memories is taking the turkey carcass after Thanksgiving, and making a big pot of rice porridge out of that. And I have some great memories of my friends and I just lying on the floor of my house on this really plush rug, because we had just eaten so much rice porridge and we couldn't bear to move. So there was a lot of that. [Laughter.]

Alicia: Well, you are now a chef. And you work at your family's restaurant. But you did a lot of other things before you decided to do that. Can you tell us kind of what you did before that and what made you want to get into the family business? 

Irene: Yeah, so it's actually kind of funny. 

The family business for my grandparents was owning and operating restaurants. So my paternal grandparents had one restaurant in New York City, and then one in White Plains, New York. But as is the sort of tale of so many immigrant families, they ran a restaurant so that their kids could pursue higher education. And so both my parents are actually doctors. We kind of joke that it skips a generation. But I'm fortunate in that my—where I fall in the sort of generational path is that I had pretty much all the things that I needed when I was growing up, and so I could sort of choose based on my sense of self-actualization to go into restaurants. 

And so my brother initially had been working in fine dining, and he had this idea to open a food truck. He was watching way too much Food Network, and he's definitely an ideas guy. And so it was his idea for us to open the food truck in 2012, and then we opened the restaurant in 2013. So in a way, it's kind of a full circle around the kind of immigrant restaurant owner story. 

And prior to opening the food truck, I was really interested in different social justice and food justice issues. I was going to school in upstate New York and getting really interested in farming and the kind of economics of farming, and just going to the market every weekend and buying a vegetable that I had never seen or heard of and then take it home and try to figure out what to do with it. And so all of those things kind of collided when I got the call from my brother.

Alicia: And so, how does that prior experience that you had influence how you work in a restaurant? 

Irene: Well, I think that for a while I thought of food as kind of an escape from the very sort of complicated political and social issues that I was interested in. When I was at Cornell, I worked in a men's maximum security prison facility as a college level course instructor. I was really interested in a lot of issues around the living wage and the One Fair Wage, and cooking on the weekends was kind of how I got away from that. 

But of course, things came full circle. And the more I got interested in food and the restaurant industry, the more I saw that a lot of these issues that are deeply rooted in our history of slavery in the U.S., in so many of the struggles of different immigrant groups—those are very much present in the restaurant industry to this day. And so I kind of feel I came all the way around this corner. And now that's what's most interesting and exciting to me about the restaurant industry, is addressing those issues.

Alicia: And how do you do that? Is it something that manifests only in your writing? Or is it something that really manifests in the day-to-day work in the kitchen and in the restaurant?

Irene: So I would say prior to COVID, we were trying to build Mei Mei Restaurant as a model for a fairer form of employment, as a business that really invested in its team. And there were a few different ways that we did that. 

We had a very, I would say, sort of positive culture overall. No yelling, no throwing things, which is—in a way, it's kind of wild that you have to say that. But of course, we're talking about restaurant kitchens. 

So we had a staff that was typically majority women-identifying, majority person of color-identifying, and with a very big LGBTQI group as well. And so in a lot of ways, we were able to kind of cultivate this space that for the most part, I hope and believe was safe for many people who may not have felt safe in other parts of the restaurant industry. 

We also did a lot of work to try to educate our staff and also our guests on how the industry really works, what's sort of going on under the hood. And so in early March of 2020, we hosted this public event where we showed everyone our profit and loss statement for 2019. And we really wanted to just kind of start a conversation about when you buy a $20 plate of pasta, where does that money go? 

And I think consumers are very narrowly focused on what's on the plate, because it's the most immediate thing. And so that's why you read so many Yelp reviews, where people say, ‘I could have gone to the grocery store and paid $4 and made this myself.’ And yeah, that's the secret of restaurants, is they’re scamming you and food costs are only 20 percent of the menu. 

And so, that financial transparency is something that we had been practicing internally with the staff for several years. And so, we really wanted to take that conversation kind of on the road and see what people would think about what the kind of realities are in the industry, where the average, independent mom and pop restaurant only clears about 4 to 6 percent profit in an—in a pretty good year. And then of course, days later the pandemic hit, and we were all in even sort of deeper water than we were before.

Alicia: And what was the response like to that event from the public?

Irene: The event was awesome. We also broadcasted on this thing called Zoom that I had never heard of before. It was wild.

We got such a great response, especially from the people who were able to attend in person. They asked tons of questions. And as a speaker, I tend to be a little bit more honest than maybe my partners or team would want me to be. But people asked about my salary. They asked about the ways that I still felt we had to improve. 

We did a feature with Eater, and that generated a lot of conversation on Facebook. And some of it was not entirely positive, but even that felt great. Yeah, if you think I'm a moron because of what my books say, let's talk about it. You can show me your books, or we can just have a conversation. And all of that felt really generative.

Alicia: And so, how did the pandemic kind of change the way you ran the restaurant and the business model? I know that a lot of restaurants that didn't have a tipping model, that had a kind of hospitality-included model and were more transparent around the business side of the restaurant and those tiny profit margins kind of weathered this switch a little bit better simply by the nature of their-how they ran their businesses and by how they—how much money was in the bank, because they knew they had a big payroll anyway.

But how did the pandemic kind of come hit your restaurant, and how has it been in the over a year since?

Irene: So initially, I will say going back to having two parents who are doctors, we were very conservative about closing down and not asking anyone to come into work. We really did our best to keep people employed as long as we could. So there were some restaurants that laid everyone off in March, and we kept almost all of the team employed through June. And then, we laid off about two thirds of the team at that time. And that is probably one of the worst things I've ever had to do in my life. 

And at that point, we were kind of looking around and saying, ‘Oh, ok. The pandemic’s not getting better. It's been a couple months. And it's actually getting worse,’ because we're seeing what's happening in other parts of the country that maybe we thought no one would be as hard hit as New York City, for instance. But things looked really bad. And so at that point, we made the decision—I guess I made the decision with the help of my partners and my team—that we weren't going to reopen Mei Mei as a restaurant. 

And that had to do with a lot of different things, including the timing of our lease, which we felt didn't really allow us the time that we would need to rebuild. And so that, in addition to the fact that there was just so much uncertainty, we decided we were going to take things in a different direction. And so now, we are evolving Mei Mei into a packaged dumpling company. It is a really exciting project. And I have partners now who are going to sort of carry that forward, which has been amazing for me because it's opened up the opportunity for me to work more on supporting other restaurants. 

So I joined CommonWealth Kitchen, which is a food business incubator here in Boston, as a program manager for an initiative called the Restaurant Resiliency Program. And I work with eight Black and Latinx business owners to strengthen and improve their restaurant businesses. Honestly, it's just my dream job. So much of it is about not teaching them basics or mechanics, but really being there with them and making sure they have the confidence to do what they need to get done. So I just ordered eight kitchen scales. And I'm so excited to visit the restaurant and do some costing and really kind of get up to my elbows with them. 

And so for me, that really feels like trying to take what I learned from Mei Mei and the mistakes that I made, the mistakes that I could afford to make as someone from a privileged background coming into the restaurant industry, and really trying to pay that forward to support an industry that I hope will be made up of really diverse restaurants run by really interesting people with a lot of different stories. 

It's funny. At the event last March, I said, ‘If Mei Mei doesn't exist in ten years, that's too bad for me. But if there aren’t any cool independent restaurants to eat at in tneen years, then I'm going to be really pissed.’ And so for me, it's always been more about the industry at large and the restaurants that I want to be able to eat at than my business specifically.

Alicia: I mean, we've talked a lot about the government inaction during the pandemic in order to help independent restaurants. What do you think in the future, either from what you've learned, running Mei Mei or now in your new position, to-what could be useful to small business owners in the food industry, from a governmental-from a policy standpoint, really?

Irene: Man, where to start? [Laughter.] There's so many different things that could be done. 

I guess, for me, having access to federal aid and even state aid. Getting assistance to fill out the Payroll Protection Program application. I am college educated, and I could barely get myself through that. So I can't imagine not speaking English as a first language, for example, and trying to wade through all of that. So I think offering the technical support is really key. 

I think the government, the federal government, learned a big lesson with the Payroll Protection Program in that there are going to be large companies that take advantage of opportunities because they are qualified on paper. So, if you're really looking to help small businesses, then you have to be targeting companies that are posting revenue below a million annually, for example. 

I have been so moved to be involved in different mutual aid efforts, whether it is a community fridge or a grocery program or just neighbors helping each other navigate government paperwork. And so honestly, it's hard for me to imagine what better government support looks like because this funnel of people just saying, ‘F**k it. We have to figure this out ourselves.’ That has been really exciting to me. 

I will say, I am really optimistic about the American Rescue Plan. I like the opportunities that are built in there for restaurants. I am very hopeful, cautiously optimistic, that that money will go to the restaurants who really need it. And I think what is exciting about the way that bill is formed is that if you didn't get any PPP money, you can get more money from this plan. So hopefully, that will address some of the barriers that especially immigrant restaurant owners and Black and Latinx restaurant owners are facing.

Alicia: And as you're kind of getting into this mode of helping other small business owners not make mistakes, do you have—what are the top three mistakes that people make when they're getting into the restaurant business and making all these decisions?

Irene: I think all of it ultimately comes down to how often they're looking at the numbers, and how the numbers are organized. 

So I mean, I've observed over the years that a lot of small businesses early on, they're not paying attention to the bills necessarily, or they're paying the bills but they're not organizing them. And maybe, every invoice just goes into a shoe box and then at the end of the year you give the shoe box to your accountant and say, ‘Here you go!’

But having a profit and loss statement that is organized in a way that actually helps you make decisions, that is a luxury that not all businesses have invested in or have the resources for. Because there's a version of your financials that's just for taxes, and everybody has to have those every year. But there's also a version that provides a readout on how your business is doing that is so valuable. 

I think restaurant owners are incredibly smart. And their instincts are usually pretty dead-on. But there are a lot of little kind of details and finer points like, ‘Should we close an hour earlier? Should we open on Mondays? Should I take this dish off the menu?’ Those are questions that they can rely on their gut to some extent, but it's not going to get them necessarily to the point where they're really thinking about growing the business if they don't have the data to rely on. 

And so, I'm so lucky that I had a team that was really invested in getting the financials to the point where they would be useful. We also had a grant from the state of Massachusetts to work with a consulting firm that helped us implement open book management. And I am now at the point where I am so excited to see the profit and loss statement every month, because it's like, ‘Yeah, I want to know how I did.’ I hope that every restaurant owner can experience that excitement, and not just sort of the stress around putting financials together and then trying to read them.

Alicia: Yeah, I think that that's probably a problem for a lot of independent workers, speaking for myself as well, is that you don't like to look at the money because you're afraid of looking at it. I've learned so much better to just be aware and kind of go full-on and try and really understand what you're doing. But it's easier said than done. [Laughter.]

Irene: One of the other challenges in there that I'm sure applies to a lot of people in different lines of work is that as a business owner, for a long time, I didn't really know what accountants and bookkeepers did. Right? 

Alicia: Right. 

Irene: So I didn't really have a way of telling like, ‘Are you doing a good job or not?’ It's kind of when I take my car to the mechanic, right? And I don't know anything about cars, and so I kind of just shrug my shoulders and say like, ‘Ok, yeah, sounds good.’

And so, I think some of what we're doing through this program is kind of teaching the restaurant owners how to speak accountant or how to speak bookkeeper and to give them confidence in those relationships. And I think for some of these folks, they do not have the confidence working with professional services to really say like, ‘Hey, this is what I need. This is how I want you to do it.’ And so, they're going with the flow but it's maybe not as useful as it could be.

Alicia: Before I ask specifically about a couple of the pieces you've recently published, I wanted to ask what inspired you to start writing about certain issues in the restaurant industry? Do you like writing, or is it more about something that you just feel there are things that need to be said? 

Irene: Yeah.

I will say, I love writing. I am so in awe of anyone who can do it on a schedule, ‘cause I really have to be in the right place with the right idea to produce anything. I did write for the local public radio station WBUR for a few months, and that was great experience just in terms of working with an editor and on deadline and all of that. And I think I figured out that it wasn't for me. 

But in this case, I usually write when I feel moved to. And usually that is when I feel there's a story that's not being told or a perspective that's not getting shared. So often, it comes from a place of wanting to tip the scales of a conversation, or make sure that things don't get left unsaid. 

Alicia: And one of those pieces that you wrote is the-a bit of satire called ‘8 Totally Achievable Ways to Show Up for Racial Justice… When You’re White and Own an Asian Restaurant!’ And I wanted to know, how did you arrive and feel inspired to tackle that subject from a satirical angle? I mean, this is a subject that's been written on. This is a subject that is just shockingly persistent in the white dudes owning Asian restaurants. That's very persistent. And so, I mean, I guess the reason you maybe wanted to approach it that way is because it is at this point such a joke and a trope, a cliché.

But yeah, what inspired you to go about it that way?

Irene: Yeah.

Well, one of the things I've said as I've talked a little bit more about the piece is, I've been writing this piece in my head for years. So it didn't come out of nowhere. But I guess it came out of my desire to engage on this topic that typically is not really engaged on. It's more an unstoppable force hits an immovable object, and where he says, ‘Hey, you can't cook that!’ And then that person says, ‘Yes, I can! I can cook whatever I want.’ And then the conversation goes nowhere. And actually, everyone leaves that discussion feeling angry or resentful. And then, I don't think we get anywhere productive out of that. 

And so, especially in getting involved in the restaurant industry myself, I felt these chefs are—they're not bad people. It's not about whether they're good or bad. And there's actually maybe some really important conversation and exploration that we can do here. 

And so my goal in writing the piece was, in part, to share my views without alienating anyone. And I don't think that's always necessarily the purpose of writing, but it felt like something that I could do pretty effectively. I went to prep school. And so, I feel I have been educated all my life in how to talk to well-meaning white people about how to be better. [Laughs.] 

And so I think that, I wanted to write a piece where by the end of it you couldn't really disagree with me. I mean, of course, a lot of people did, which is fine. But I wanted to sort of take the reader by the hand and be like, ‘Ok, let's go look at this thing together.’ 

And so, I didn't use the phrase cultural appropriation, which I didn’t notice until after I had written it. But I think that I wanted to accept that there is both something very complicated and uncomfortable about this topic. And at the same time, there's a lot of stuff that most of us just agree on, like, ‘Racism is bad, and taking credit for other people's stuff is bad.’ And so, how do you kind of weave those very simple truths in with this very complicated, scary territory? And so my hope was to kind of lead the reader through that space, so that they could come out on the other side feeling not like, ‘Oh, I am now bereft of my purpose. And everything I've created is for not.’ But to make them feel like, ‘Oh, there are some next steps I can take. And I can keep showing up to this conversation and be part of it.’

All of that being said, I did get a lot of calls from people who were like, ‘I read your article. It made me think so much. And I'm just wondering, what do you think I should do?’ And, well, I did write a list. So let's start there. And I think that that kind of response is about what I expected, and I think it's totally appropriate for someone who has never really engaged with these ideas to come right to me and say, ‘Help.’ And so, I welcome that. And I am glad that they wanted to call me and talk to me. 

But it's just so new to some people that even after reading a list of eight things that you can do, the question is like, ‘Wait, what? Sorry, now?’ How? Where do I—’ It's fascinating to watch.

Alicia: And as you mentioned, you did not mention, use the phrase cultural appropriation, which I think actually did serve the piece to make it a bit more powerful because you didn't-It was so straightforward. 

And cultural appropriation, as a phrase and as a concept, I think, has been—it's screwed over as an idea because of the right and the way that the right has taken it and suggested that its meaning is something that it's not. 

Irene: For sure.

Alicia: And that's just ruined it, because no one can say it anymore without being called—I don't know how the right talks. I just know that they like to take phrases and just be like, ‘Look at what they're saying. They're saying you can't cook a—if you're white, you can't make a burrito in your house.’ And it's like, ‘Dude, how dare you? That's not it.’

And so, how does that phrase play into your life right now or thinking at all about food?

Irene: I guess to me, the phrase invites a lot of argument because it is—it invites opinion and asks for nuance. And sometimes, those two things don't go hand in hand. And so, while part of me wanted to write ‘8 ways for cultural appropriators,’ I felt like, ‘Ok, if I really want to get the attention of the people I'm talking to, let me use phrases and facts that they can't argue with. Are you white, yes or no? Do you own an Asian restaurant, yes or no?’

And so yeah, my hope was to kind of get my foot in the door with that, and to not, to try not to make kind of value or moral judgments about them. And to just say, like, ‘Hey, you meet these qualifications so maybe we should talk about this thing.’ And I've had some really great conversations with white folks who own Asian restaurants. And I am hopeful that this conversation goes somewhere. 

My incredible friend, Tracy Chang, who is a restaurant owner in Cambridge, she said to me, ‘Just make sure they know it's not Monopoly, where you land on Community Chest and the card says like, ‘Ooh, mass shooting! Pay an Asian American organization $500, and then go on your way.’ And so, I think the longer term accountability is another really interesting piece of this that I'm hoping to be able to sort of keep up with.

Alicia: You also wrote about Raise The Wage. What is your involvement in that, and why did you decide to get into that?

Irene: Yeah.

Well, I've been working with the Restaurant Opportunity Center and high-road restaurants, which is their sort of employer-side organization, on the campaign around One Fair Wage. So in both wanting to raise the minimum wage, and abolish the sub-minimum wage, which is what servers are paid if they receive tips. So federally, the sub-minimum wage is $2.13 an hour. And locally in Massachusetts, I believe it's $5.55 an hour. 

And the piece that we wrote on Medium was from a group of Asian American women, talking about how these laws disproportionately affect women and people of color. And so in a way, there's kind of a similar message, which is like, ‘Do you like racial equity? And do you think that the way people are paid should support racial equity?’ And then, ‘If you do, which I'm sure you do, the only logical conclusion is that we have to change tipping policy in this country.’

Of course, it's not that simple. But I think that to me, the motivation for changing the way we do things is so clear. And so, I'm hoping to get more involved in that conversation. Even though I'm not a restaurant employer anymore, I actually feel like maybe I can play a different role in that community and in highlighting this issue.

Alicia: Right. 

And for you, is cooking a political act?

Irene: Oh, yeah. 

I mean, I think cooking is partially political. What really feels political is when I feed other people. So to kind of wrap that in, then I would say definitely. I think that we so undervalue food and everything that goes into it. I think that is deeply tied to the history of slavery in this country, and you know, the way that, that capitalism works now. 

But I think that, for me, cooking is a way to imbue food with the value of my time of my love and energy. And that you can literally bring people to the table and make them, or ask them to listen, or to experience your perspective. I think that, that's what the magic of food is for me. And working with a lot of immigrant restaurant owners in particular, I think that the storytelling that happens through food is 100 percent political.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much.

Irene: Thank you.

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

Ronna Welsh, owner of Purple Kale Kitchenworks in Brooklyn and author of The Nimble Cook, is an expert at using waste that others wouldn’t think twice about throwing in the garbage. I wrote about her cookbook when it came out in 2019 for Edible Brooklyn, and I was most taken with the recipe for garlic skin vinegar. This was a book in the vein of Abra Berens’s Ruffage and Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat that took an old-school approach to recipes: Here, you’re taught how to cook, how to use ingredients, rather than just how to make some specific dishes. It is invaluable.

We recorded at the end of 2020, but because of myriad technical difficulties, I’m running it now because it’s only just been stitched together. We discussed her path to being a teacher, her approach to food waste, and true sustainability. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Ronna. Thanks so much for taking the time. 

Ronna: Yeah. Hi. 

Alicia: Thanks so much.

Ronna: Thank you.

Alicia: Yeah, for those listening, we've had some technical snafus today. But we are getting through it. 

So, Ronna, can you tell me where you—about where you grew up and what you ate?

Ronna: I grew up outside of Philadelphia, in the suburbs. And I don't recall much about what I ate. 

Well, food was really important. We were really big eaters in my family. What I most remember is holidays and holiday food and Jewish holiday food in particular, and the stuff that my mom made for those holidays. 

But growing up, we ate a lot of convenience foods day to day. We relied on canned vegetables and powdered mashed potatoes. My mom worked. So for her, the luxury of getting dinner on the table in an instant was really valuable, was really important. High school years, we ate a ton of frozen meals and canned soup. So I grew up eating, really a voracious eater, but with very little experience cooking.

Alicia: Right.

And so, how did you end up as a professional cook?

Ronna: Almost by accident, because I was in my twenties and a graduate student in Texas at the University of Texas. And I was in a field that was really academic, really cerebral. I was in my head a lot, and became disillusioned with my studies just at the point where I was finishing a degree. And one day stumbled into a friend of a friend, who told me that she was leaving her job as a cook, and did I want to apply?

So as I was finishing my graduate degree and writing my master's thesis, I also took this job in a sweet little café in Austin, Texas. And that was my first taste of what it was like to get my hands dirty and make something. And it was the process of making something, I think, which was so compelling to me. 

Alicia: You stayed in the kitchen instead of, I guess, pursuing what you were studying in graduate school. Why? Why was that your direction, your path?

Ronna: Everything was tangible in the kitchen. I loved the reward of cooking, of taking raw ingredients and turning them into something that then somebody else ate: of going into the kitchen in the morning, turning on the lights, filling the pots with water, filling the dish sink, getting the cash register ready, cooking all day, working really hard. And then taking the kitchen down at night so that you closed it and put it to bed. And then the next day, you got to repeat the whole thing over again. 

There was a satisfaction in that [that] I had been missing for me in graduate school. And there was an immediacy and a gratification to it, to getting my hands dirty, to the physical work, to producing something in real time and witnessing others make use and love it. And that itself became something I felt I needed to have.

Alicia: And you note in your bio that cooking professionally wasn't a help when you began your family and started up children and needed to cook at home. What were the differences there for you and how did you learn to overcome them?

Ronna: Cooking professionally teaches you tremendous skill. It teaches you how to move fast. It teaches you how to create good systems of prep and production. But at the same time, you have a lot of support that you don't have at home. We don't have dishwashing crews at home. We don't have people bringing us ingredients. 

And the real, for me, the fundamental difference is that when you are working in a restaurant, even one where a menu might change pretty frequently, you're always working with a menu or a set of dishes that then you set out to prepare. So, you come into the kitchen in the beginning of the day and you slice the onions so that you can put it on your station for this one particular dish. And you get everything ready so that when orders come in, you can make these various dishes with the highest quality, really efficiently and seamlessly. 

The difference with home is that an infant becomes sick, or your fridge stops working, or you drop the chicken on the floor. And so this nice tight system of planning and prepping and executing falls apart with the mishaps of life. So I quickly realized that it wasn't skill or experience that was going to serve me well as a new parent, but it was the ability to adapt, the ability to be nimble. So to start from where I was, which was a tired new person, I'm sorry, tired new parent, and then to be able to craft systems that enabled me to feed myself and my family in spite of my new circumstances became really important to me. 

And that's how I made the shift from cooking professionally to then beginning to teach.

Alicia: For Purple Kale Kitchenworks, how did you kind of blend these two approaches to cooking, the professional and the home, into something that was accessible to new cooks?

Ronna: Well, accessibility was really key. And, for me, I felt that the home cook needed, benefited from a change in perspective, one where you focused on ingredients rather than recipes, on what you have rather than an idea of what to make. And while that initially feels pretty intimidating for cooks, it actually is the simplest and most accessible place to start. 

So for me, I try to teach people to look at the ingredients they have in front of them and ways to prepare those individual ingredients, and then ways to take those individually prepared ingredients and build dishes with them. So it's sort of an elemental, fundamental approach that starts not with an idea of what you're going to eat but ends up with something delicious by just using what's in front of you. 

Alicia: And then in your cookbook, The Nimble Cook, which came out at a time when it seemed that cookbooks were starting to kind of refocus on teaching techniques and methods rather than recipes to be followed to the letter, yours focused a lot on reusing waste. What was your vision for that book, and how did you adapt teaching in person to teaching in writing?

Ronna: The food waste part became, was kind of a bonus, I think. 

While I had done a lot of writing and incorporated the idea of minimizing food waste into my classes, it was never the point. Nobody likes to waste food, and I didn't need to tell anybody that. But I did need to provide people with some ideas about using food, whether it's parts of ingredients that they might otherwise throw away or leftovers from a dish they made the night before, about using these ingredients so that they could follow them to where they might lead. 

So for example, if you have a head of cauliflower that comes with all of its greens intact—and it's a fresh head of cauliflower, not one that's been sitting on the shelf for a while—then you begin to nibble around at the leaves and realize that they taste very much like a cabbage and can be used on their own. And what you've done is you've seized an opportunity to make use of something in front of you rather than throwing that opportunity away. 

A lot of what was in my book was just a direct result of materials that I used in class in combination with so many conversations that I had in people's homes and in the classroom itself. The workbook that I used in my class became fatter and fatter as time went on and my classes became harder to fit into even five hours, that it became clear I had more material than just for the classroom. And I set out to try to take the things that people most wanted to know, and distill them down into a system where I could teach people through the book.

Alicia: And how did you kind of figure out the recipes in the book that would be the most kind of accessible? For Edible Brooklyn, I wrote about the garlic-scrap vinegar that you make. And that's something that sounds very kind of heady and very nerdy and maybe not something that the average home cook would like to attempt, but at the same time you make it very approachable. How did you create that voice in the book?

Ronna: Well, I had to really balance the emphasis on strong, simple, good technique paired with really good ingredients with this option to explore ideas, and explore dishes and combinations of flavors that were—these ingredients could take you.

In the case of garlic, if you looked at a head of garlic on its own, then it leads you to mince it or to slice it or to do what you would normally do. But if you had a bunch of garlic, then all of a sudden in preparing that garlic, you have a whole bunch of peels that—and when, in moving them to the trash, becomes sort of more to reckon with as an aggregate as a pile of peels than they would have if you had peeled one clove at a time. 

And it's in seeing possibilities in things like that, that then help you build new ways to use them. So the garlic-peel vinegar came about, because I had a whole bunch of garlic that I had long neglected and was not able to use up just by mincing and chopping. And so one day, put them in a pot of water and said, 'What the hell?' I turn the stove on and cook them away. What I got in the end was delicious, soft poached garlic that I had no plan for, but was—I could immediately put to use, because of how good it was. 

But then I also had this kind of broth in the pot as a result of cooking so much garlic in this amount of water, and I saved that broth. And then I had the peels themselves, which were all of a sudden soft, but when they came off of the garlic cloves were tacky with some of the garlic itself. And so, it's just a simple act of putting those peels into a bowl instead of straight into the trash can, which clued me in to the fact that maybe I could do something with them. 

So in the same amount of time that would have taken me to dump them in the trash can, I instead got a bottle of just cheap red wine vinegar and glugged it on top. Came back to it the next day and was fully prepared to still throw it away, but instead realized that I had a delicious garlic-infused mellow vinegar at my disposal. 

I think the trick with the cookbook is to remind people that the point is never the garlic vinegar. The point is just to see an ingredient through to the extent that you want and it's possible for you, and understanding that even though the garlic vinegar does not give you dinner, it remains part of your kitchen toolkit and your arsenal. So that maybe in a couple months’ time, if tomatoes come your way, you slice some, remember that you have this garlic-infused vinegar that you can drizzle on top. 

And what you've done is create a little plate of food with the ease of opening a package of cereal, but one that is as presumably elegant and thought out as if you were sort of brainstorming new options for a new tomato menu. 

The thing about food waste for me is that whatever you can save has value if not immediately, then certainly later on.

Alicia: And yeah, as food waste has been kind of the most, I think, popular aspect of sustainability conversations in food. And I do think that people find sustainability in their—when they think about it in terms of food and in terms of cooking, they find it very overwhelming. How do you broach the subject of this in your classes?

Ronna: Well, I think that people come at it in their own way. And I personally believe in smaller local food economies and certain kinds of growing practices. 

But it's not up to me to tell others what to believe. So I think the most powerful thing I can do is show them that by choosing the very best ingredients they have access to, that will make them better cooks. 

Again, back to the head of cauliflower. If you have a head of cauliflower where its florets taste almost sweet because it's so fresh, then you need to do little to it to make it into something you can enjoy, certainly less to it than you would if you had a head that was wrapped in cellophane and maybe tasted more of plastic or supermarket shelf then of itself. Then it needs more work, then it needs to be corrected. 

So to let people know that great ingredients actually make it easier to cook well, I think is more compelling than to tell them they should spend their money at the farmers' market than at the large chain grocery store.

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

Ronna: I think that to the extent that it is an act itself, to the extent that I make things, maybe. For me, it's about bonds between people. The idea of nourishing somebody else is really powerful. It's also really elemental. It feeds me at the same time that I'm feeding others. 

When this whole pandemic struck, and we all were at home, as much as I cooked before the pandemic, I found that I cooked nonstop all of a sudden at home; I cooked everything and all the time, and it was just for my family. My classes were canceled. My studio was shut. But it was the fact that there was something I could do, something that I could make and something that I could contribute that made me feel a little less helpless in the face of all the things going on. 

I don't know that that's a political act. But it is one that I approached with intention and trying to support and nourish others. So, I suppose it could be extended into one. 

The other thing I think that I want to try to do with cooking but also with teaching is—and this comes back to the question of sustainability—I'm really interested in helping people cook the way they want to over the long term for the long haul. For me, true sustainability is making it work day in, day out, not only when you have time to make a menu plan or only when you have time to go to the grocery store. 

I want you to be able to walk into your kitchen and to find a source of confidence, a source of  empowerment in it to be able to say, 'Ok, what have we got? Let's figure this out together.' That, to me, is how cooking becomes part of your life, how it becomes less of a task and a chore, and more of just a practice and a habit. 

The only way that we can truly sustain feeding ourselves and feeding our community is if it's something that makes us feel gratified rather than tired most of the time.

Alicia: And I think most people are feeling quite tired, right now? [Laughs.] Yeah. 

Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

Ronna: Thank you so much, Alicia.

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My fiancé is making me a martini as I put together this interview with Jackie Summers, and I think he’d appreciate that. What we have in common is that we are writers and boozehounds. But Jackie is much more than that: He was the first Black distiller to be licensed in the United States since Prohibition, to make his delicious Sorel liqueur, and is a fabulous public speaker on matters of equity in hospitality. I first came across him when I was assigned to write about Sorel, and I’m thrilled that we’ve been in touch ever since. But I’m more thrilled that we got to have this conversation about his work. Listen above, or read below.

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

Jackie: Absolutely. It's a pleasure to talk to you. 

How have you been? 

Alicia: Oof. 

Fine, good. A lot of work lately, which is a double-edged sword, as we all know. [Laughs.] Thankfully, people are getting vaccinated, so hopefully things will be different soon, but just kind of missing inspiration a lot. 

How have you been doing?

Jackie: Like you, I have been busy doing the pandemic. As you said, it's a mixed blessing in that the way in which you're busy is not always the way in which you anticipated.

Alicia: Right. Yes. 

Well, how did you anticipate being busy, and how are you actually busy?

Jackie: I had all of these plans for 2020, which did not happen. And things went entirely different directions, which I'm sure we'll get into in this conversation.

Alicia: Yes.

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

Jackie: So I was born in Queens, even though my company is called JackFromBrooklyn. The interesting part about the story is my father was Muslim, and my dad—my father was Muslim and my mom is Christian. So right off the bat, there was no pork in the house whatsoever. My mom and dad had a conversation early in their marriage that they were just going to worship their gods and not ever discuss it. But there was just no pork in the house. 

And I remember having this revelation. We were on a road trip; I was five or six years old. And the family stopped at a Bob's Big Boy diner for breakfast. And I smell bacon for the first time. And I said, ‘Mom, what is that?’ And my mom said, ‘Well, that's bacon, son.’ And I said, ‘Mom, can I have some bacon?’ And she kinda looked at my dad, and I could tell that the look—the look, in retrospect, said, ‘We're not at home. Technically, yes.’ And my mom let me have bacon for the first time. You remember that scene in Close Encounters, where he just makes a mountain of mashed potatoes? Six years old with a mountain of bacon. [Laughter.] Was looking at my dad thinking to myself, ‘Why did you keep this from me?’

But really, I'm Caribbean on both sides. On my mother's side, from Barbados. On my father's side, from Saint Kitts [and] Nevis. Well, I didn't know there was a word for this when I was a child. We were largely pescatarian. We ate a lot of seafood, fish, vegetables, fresh fruit, fresh greens, baked goods. My mom was a home mom, so there was always something fresh baked in the house. But the general rule was, you could pick it out of the—off of a tree, pluck it off—out of the ground, or cook from the ocean, because those were the options that my ancestors had.

Alicia: How did you end up getting into food? I know you've written a bit about becoming the cook in your family. How did that happen?

Jackie: So, I mentioned that my mom was a home mom. My relationship with her developed by hanging on her apron strings, literally. So, she would cook. She would bake. She would fix all this food for us. And my job was, I was the family taster. She would pick something and then give me a taste and go, ‘Tell me what this needs.’ And I was like, ‘Mom, I'm a kid. I don't know what things need.’ She’d walk me through spices and herbs and go, ‘Well, this is basil. Here's how it tastes. This is oregano. This is how it tastes. These are the different things that are our tools to cook with. And here's how you use them.’

But what I figured out in retrospect as an adult, was all of the recipes had stories with them. So learning how to bake, there were stories about my mom baking as a kid. Learning how to make hot sauce hearing stories about my grandmother's hot sauce. So what I realized was, as the person who inherited mom's recipes, the responsibility for cooking, I also became the steward of the family stories because all of our stories were tied to food. 

Alicia: And I know that you had a different career before you got into working in beverage, writing about food. Can you tell me about that career? [Laughter.]

Jackie: I had a few different careers, actually. I spent 5 years on Wall Street. I spent 10 years in advertising marketing. I spent 10 years as a publishing executive. Somewhere mixed in that I was an underwear model, and somewhere in that—true story—mixed in that, I was a music producer. So I did a bunch of different things before I found myself in the spirits industry, specifically, in hospitality, in general.

Alicia: And so, how did you end up in food? I know you wrote for Esquire about starting Sorel, your liquor brand. And your main motivation you said was in wanting to day drink and enjoy life. And for me, too, I think, choosing to go the independent route means a lot of work and a lot of stress and a lot of insecurity and uncertainty. But at the same time, it also means actually getting to enjoy every day of your life, if you're able. And so, how has that dream that you had when you launched Sorel come true?

Jackie: Well, it's funny. I was a director of production in digital for a fashion magazine a decade ago, and I had a cancer scare. And they told me pretty much I had a 95% chance of death. And the thing that made most sense to me to do right before my surgery was go on vacation. So I consented to this surgery that I didn't expect to survive, and then nine friends went and rented a beach house in Cancun. And just the best vacation in my whole life, and just great food and great conversation and good booze. 

And when I woke up from the surgery that I didn't expect to survive, I thought to myself like, ‘I can't go back to my old life now.’ I have this very specific memory of my first week back at my day job, getting into a four-hour argument with the director of photography because she felt the pinks on the cover of the magazine we just printed were too pink and the grass wasn't green enough. And I thought to myself, ‘This is my life? I can't do this anymore.’ And again, having just come off that vacation, what I really want to do is I wanted to be on vacation again. 

So yes, in a sense, the idea of being around cool people all day long and talking about things that mattered over good food and good drinks is born of this moment in time where I'm surrounded by just great friends and having the best time of my life. The reality is, there's responsibility tied to this. There is business that needs to be conducted every single day, which affects people's lives that allow me to do this thing. There are difficult conversations around racism and sexism and ableism and homophobia, and all of these issues of our day that I'm engaged in daily. 

The idea of eating and drinking for a living sounds great. And I'm not going to say it's not great. It is. I love what we do. I've seen the world. I've traveled. I've had just fantastic meals. I've met amazing people, but it is not frivolous. There is a seriousness tinged to everything that we do.

Alicia: Did you want to address that seriousness? Was that a part of what you wanted by entering this world, or was that just kind of a necessity?

Jackie: A little column A, little column B.

Alicia: Yeah.

Jackie: I don't think it was what I initially intended, but the year that I launched my business was the year Trayvon Martin was killed. And I couldn't not speak up. And I noticed that talking about this in a public way was considered divisive. It still is considered divisive in many circles, but I had to reconcile the idea that a lot of the people that I was doing business with were, if not outright, downlow racist. You have this choice you have to make. ‘I'm a new business person. What do I really want to do? Do I want to keep my mouth shut and just try to make as much money as I can? Do I need to speak up?’ And I had to speak up. I had to address these things. 

I didn't mention this. But when I got my liquor license in 2012, I was the only Black person in America at the time with a license to make liquor. So being that guy, and having those conversations, in 2012 was difficult. It was difficult. 

But the interesting thing about having that conversation is it leads you down the path of the entire spectrum of privilege and oppression. I am a cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied male. I've got so much privilege, despite the fact that I live in a country that has been racist from its inception. Do I have oppression? Absolutely. Is there anyway that I can address my own oppression and not intrinsically fight for everyone else who's oppressed? No. Addressing racism, by definition, means I've got to speak on sexism. And I've got to speak on ableism. And I've got to speak on homophobia. I've got to speak on all of those things. They all matter. It all connects. It all intersects. You cannot fight for your own rights at the expense of anybody else's.

Alicia: Why do you think that the food and beverage industry has put these conversations off? And do you think that the conversation has gotten better and louder in the last few years since you began your business and started doing public speaking and writing on these issues?

Jackie: I think that food and beverage, like all other industries that are mired in white supremacy, didn't have to have these conversations. Nobody was making them talk about this. And because no one was making them talk about this, folks were willing to just continue business as usual, with the idea that if you talked about these things, you are going to be shunned and wouldn't be able to conduct business. 

And I always feel like that's—you have to be able to pick and choose the fights that are worth fighting for. And that moment in time, when Trayvon Martin was killed, I think we will mark in 50 years as the beginning of the new Civil Rights movement. I do not see how that doesn't become the—from the death of Trayvon Martin to the death of George Floyd, that period, this decade that we just lived through, starts off this whole—we're going to have this conversation, and you don't have to like it, but you're going to—Can I curse? 

Alicia: Of course.

Jackie: You are going to f*****g deal with this. You're going to f*****g deal with this. There was a time in this country when you could kill enough of us to keep us quiet, and that time has passed. You cannot kill enough of us to shut all of us up anymore. We are done. We're done. 

So the conversations in food and beverage, I don't think, are in and of themselves essentially different from the conversations of any other industry that is mired in white supremacy. But I do think we are uniquely positioned to have these discussions, because so much of what we do is born from people of color. We can't talk about rum without having a conversation about colonization. You can't talk about whiskey now without addressing the fact that Jack Daniels was taught how to make whiskey by a slave. Thank you, Fawn Weaver with Uncle Nearest, for making everyone know the story. We can't talk about dive bars or cocktail bars without David Wondrich doing the history and acknowledging that Black people started all of that in this country. All of it. 

And for the detriment to all of us, most of that history was erased. And we're fighting. We're fighting, not only to make sure that all these stories get told, but that they're being—that the history that's happening right now is told as well. All of this matters. And this is something that I've become very passionate about. You have to really make it a—you have to consciously elevate these stories. The people who write history decide. And what you don't elevate, you’ve consigned to the midst of history. 

Alicia: And I mean, that's why it's so important that you write I think. Because in that Esquire piece that I mentioned earlier, you wrote, ‘And in this country, where a lot of drink culture is owed to Blackness, very little of it is owned by Blackness.’ And I know that you went through a situation recently—it might be ongoing, I don't know, if they issued a correction—the New York Times named a different distillery the first Black-owned distillery in the country, though you have proof that it is you. 

And I think about that, and the significance of narrative and the significance of who tells these stories and what gets erased and what does not. So as a writer, you own your own narrative, but at the same time, you're still always having to work against the miswritings of this history. 

So, how is being a writer significant to this, in your experience of being a distiller?

Jackie: So this was fun, and it is ongoing. 

New York Times did put out a story recently, where they named somebody who was not me, the first Black distiller post-Prohibition. And I wrote them a letter that said, ‘Oh, love the article. By the way, you made a mistake. I actually had my license a year before that guy.’ And the first response I got was, ‘Yeah, we're not going to bother with that. It's just not important.’ 

So I did the thing that I do, ’cause I have a platform. And I took it to social media. Always on social media, then they called me. And they said, ‘Oh, well, we discussed it with our experts. And our experts said, ‘You don't have a distillery.’ And I said, ‘Your experts are wrong.’ And I kind of feel like it's necessary at certain points in history, to say to whoever people think the experts are, ‘You're wrong.’ At a certain point, the Supreme Court said, ‘Women can’t vote,’ and someone had to say, ‘You're wrong.’ At a certain point in history, someone said, ‘Marriage is man and a woman,’ and someone had to say, ‘You're wrong.’

I got into this argument with the New York Times and sent them a copy of my liquor license, which has the words distiller and distillery on it, with a date. And they didn't print the correction. What they said was, ‘It is now unknowable, what the first distillery is post-Prohibition.’ And I said, ‘That's not true. You made the statement before. And you had no problem making it before. I don't know what your research was before. I don't know who fact-checked it before now. But now you're saying, you're unwilling to do the research.’

And this is the funny thing about erasure is, it can be intentional or it can be just laziness. There’s that which is unknown, and there’s that which is unknowable. The size of the universe is unknowable. Finding out who had the—who was the first licensed distiller post-Prohibition, that—There are records for this stuff! You could know this if you wanted to. So to choose not to do the research is willful erasure. And erasure is violence. Erasure is violence. 

So, I happen to be someone who got—who has feet in both worlds, as you mentioned. I am a distiller and I'm a writer, which means I have a platform to speak my own voice. And I'm at the moment of pitching a story, which hopefully will be published in a publication that has as much gravitas as the New York Times, about the nature of erasure. Who gets to tell history?

We only have Black History Month, because so much effort went into erasing Black people from history for centuries. We only have Women's History Month, for the same reason. Women were systematically erased from history. Women are women all year long. I'm Black all year long. Your history isn't limited to one month, and neither is mine. But until we get to the point where we get to tell our own stories in our own voices, and they're elevated to the same height as the people who have, up until this point, controlled the narrative, we have to fight for this. 

So, having my own platform is one thing. But I still need access to the people who control the narrative to go, ‘Here's the real story.’

Alicia: Why do you think that they did not offer a correction? Do you think it really was just laziness? I think the New York Times got rid of all their copy editors and fact-checkers, which would explain a lot. But yeah, why do you think that they have no interest in changing what they publish?

Jackie: I don't believe it was laziness. I believe this was intent. Again, the opportunity, having made a definitive statement, the opportunity to make a secondary definitive statement was presented to them, and they declined. There's a lot of what I'd like to call performative wokeness that happens at the Times because their newsrooms, like most media newsrooms are predominantly white. And so, they literally get to decide whose story gets told them and who doesn't.

And the interesting part to me was in the middle of this fight with the New York Times about erasure, their editors put out this page-long article about how they know, how they're aware that they have racial problems in their newsroom. 

So, if you're going to ask me why? Polite white supremacy. Just to be clear on what I mean when I say that, there are lots of people who think that storming the Capitol with Confederate flags is white supremacy. And they’re right. White supremacy is also going, ‘Yes, I'm aware that you have the license that says you're the first Black person to ever have a distillery after Prohibition. But no, I'm not gonna bother to make it a point to say that. Thanks anyway, though.’ Both are violence. Just because one is polite, doesn't make it any less violent than the other.

Alicia: And to kind of go backwards, can you tell us about Sorel and what it is, how you make it? Obviously, no proprietary secrets. And the kind of process that you figured out to create the shelf-stable liqueur.

Jackie: So, you've got to go back 600 years for this story. This is tied, like most things to do with colonial capitalism, to the slave trade.

They begin to import hibiscus flowers from West Africa around the same time they start to import human beings. And they make a tea out of the flowers, ’cause it’s got all of these great medicinal values. It's an antioxidant, and it's an antimicrobial. It has more vitamin C than most citrus fruits. It's a natural aphrodisiac. Hibiscus is great for you. 

British naval officers all had a stipend of rum as part of their pay. So, they would put rum in the tea as a preservative. And so this beverage, which came to be known as sorel, S-O-R-E-L, gets distributed throughout the Caribbean. 

And depending on where you fell in the slave route, in the spice trade, it would have different other spices mixed in. For example, if you were in Jamaica, you would get hibiscus with rum, with almond and allspice. If you were deep in the spice round like Trinidad and Tobago, you would get Indonesian spices like cinnamon and nutmeg. 

This goes on, again, for centuries. My grandparents emigrated to this country exactly 100 years ago. And so I got this culture from my parents, who got it from my grandparents. So this is a beverage I was raised with. I've always known it. I've been making a version in my kitchen for 20 years, more than 20 years. God, I’m old. And like all Caribbean families, I believed my version was the best version. 

But when I decided to launch a liquor brand, I thought to myself, ‘Of course, I'm going to try to bring my heritage to the world.’ At which point you ask yourself, ‘Why has nobody done this before?’ And the joke I tell at this point is if you think you have an idea so good, and no one's ever thought of it before, it's probably a terrible idea. [Laughter.] There’s probably a reason why no one has done this before. 

And to be clear, Alicia, I had, I have zero background as a food chemist. None. I am not a food scientist. I had no background in liquor. I knew no one in hospitality. But I am stubborn. The first 600 attempts were discouraging. [Laughter.] On attempt 623, I came up with a version that can't be broken. You can open it, close it, come back in six months, boil it, nuke it, freeze it, leave it sitting out in the sun, leave it in the back of the car. Both through stubbornness and research and luck, I developed the version of the spirit with which you can't break. 

And the thought behind my general company is, if sorrel sat in the Caribbean for hundreds of years, waiting for somebody to discover how to make it stable, how many other beverages like this exist with centuries of culture, with distinctiveness that only the culture that consumed it really knows about, that are waiting for somebody to bring it to light? 

So, I really believe that my mission somehow has become twofold. The first is to find these things, these hidden gems that have been laying up there for centuries, figure out how to make them not just shelf-stable and commercially saleable, but legitimately authentic. If a Caribbean person tastes sorrel, they know. If it was in any way not true to itself, you would never hear the end of it from Caribbean people. These things have got to be authentic. 

At the same time, we have to have the conversations about the cultures that make these things and why, again, they've been erased for centuries. Because what we don't elevate, we erase.

Alicia: And how was it getting it to market?

Jackie: It was interesting in that no one had ever seen a Black liquor brand owner before. So most of what I got when I walked around New York City was, ‘Oh, deliveries are in the back.’ No one believed I owned the brand or created the brand from scratch. 

But it was so critically received that people tended to get over that. It performed incredibly well in bars. It performed incredibly well in stores. And I'm looking forward to having to get back on shelves by summertime.

Alicia: And can you tell us about how that's going to happen, because this is exciting news?

Jackie: Not really. But stay tuned.

Alicia: Ok. [Laughs.]

Yeah, no, I'm very excited that it's going to be back. I think people are going to be more ready for it, maybe. Do you think so?

Jackie: I think the world changed in necessary ways. And it had to. It had to. I cannot take credit for the fact that the world changed. 

But I can say, I've been running my mouth about these things for a f*****g decade now. And now, you can’t enter spaces in hospitality and not have conversations about how we can keep women safe, and how we can kill sexism, and the fact that we should have equal pay, and the fact that we need to normalize Black bartenders. Now, these things are part of our everyday discussion, as they should be. 

And again, I don't take credit for this. I am glad to be part of a movement where a lot of people have decided to get on board, not just the people who are part of oppressed groups but people who have seen a need to use their privilege to make things more equitable for everybody. I am glad and proud to be part of this conversation, but the world changed because we're changing it.

Alicia: Absolutely. 

And as hospitality comes back to life after the pandemic, what are you hopeful for?

Jackie: So, one of the things that everyone said, as soon as all of the restaurants shut down was, ‘How are we going to get back to normal?’ And my intrinsic response to that was, ‘Why would I help you get back to a normal where I was never welcome?’ So my feeling is, there has never been a better time than right now for people who have been marginalized, whatever that marginalization is, to figure out how to build your own table. 

I spent years teaching this seminar course across the hospitality circuit, ‘Build a longer table.’ It's a great slogan, build a longer table. I mean, it sounds good, right? It was, ‘Be inclusive, and I have some, and I'm going to extend to other people who don't.’ Alicia, no one did a damn thing. Sound and fury and anecdotes and statistics signifying nothing. I stopped teaching that altogether. 

I'm hoping that in a post-pandemic world, whenever that happens, people will be more motivated to figure out how to do their own thing, and establish structures from the ground up that aren't based in white supremacy. And for the structures that continue to exist, post-pandemic that were there before, it is a worthy question to ask any individual or organization, ‘What are you doing to undo your complicity with white supremacy?’ It is one thing to say that the problems are systemic, but systems are maintained by people. And people can change things if they are so inclined.

Alicia: And how do you feel your personal writing fits into your larger work as a distiller as a speaker on these issues?

Jackie: I feel like there is a depth of understanding which I need to reassess on a daily basis. The things I perceived yesterday, or a week ago, or a decade ago, those things have changed today and they'll be different tomorrow. And I feel the need to continually ask myself whether or not I am full of s**t. 

There's a James Baldwin quote that stays stuck in my heart like a knife. ‘Your slogan hides your truth.’ You have to have the courage to despise your slogan. It's easy to string pretty words together, and be pithy and quotable. But am I hiding behind something that sounded good as a quote, instead of actually digging deeper and going, ‘Well, here's the truth behind that statement. And it's painful to admit this, but here's what really needs to be said. And it might not be as pithy but it's honest.’

So, I feel like with my writing, I'm trying to be more honest about my understanding of the world and my understanding of my role in it. 

Alicia: Are you planning to write a book?

Jackie: I've got a publisher of works, just shopping—I've got my agent, who I love. I'm signed to Pande Literary. It’s fantastic. And they're shopping a book of mine right now, but it's not what you’d think. An illustrated fairy tale for adults about how to deal with social justice fatigue.

Alicia: Wow, that sounds great.

Jackie: And it is called The Garden of Infinite F***s.

licia: I think that'll be really success—People will love that name. I think that'll go well.

Jackie: The idea is, everyone makes a joke about how they're all out of f***s. And they have been out of f***s. You have run out of f***s. F***s mean you care. So if you find that you are out of f***s, you're not allocating correctly. That's a distribution issue. 

And so hopefully, the book, when it gets published, will show in a fun way how people can effectively manage the firehose, systemic abuse that we're dealing with today. It’s always something. But if you let yourself get upset about all of it, nothing gets done. So hopefully, this book gets out. And it will give people a fun manageable guide to how to not run out—how to have infinite f***s, and how to not burn yourself out.

Alicia: Right, which is so important. That's all we talk about now, is burnout. [Laughs.]

And for you, is cooking a political act?

Jackie: So I think not only is cooking a political act, I think grocery shopping is a political act. I mean, you can't really do your own cooking unless you're doing your own grocery shopping. It is important to know the food supply chain, and I think that’s gotten extremely brought to fore during the pandemic. 

Where is your food coming from? Who's pulling your roots out of the ground? Who's slaughtering your animals, if you’re eating animals? How is this getting to your door?I have been on a long path for the last few years away from eating meat for highly personal reasons. To be clear, I'm one of these people—I think meat is delicious, person. But I have privilege. And privilege means I've got responsibility, and responsibility means, ‘Am I acknowledging my role in the fact that meat production in this country is a horrific thing that's destroying us?’ I can't change the industry, but I can change my own behavior. 

And this is one of the things that I learned from your writing. You're one of my favorite writers. This is true, I’m psyched about this. One of the things I learned from you was that veganism, it's not a pure course towards clean hands of the food processing industry. There is industrialism with processed foods. Someone's picking your food out of the ground. How is that person being compensated? We live in a country that happens to be incredibly focused against immigrants right now, but at the same time, unwilling to pick or grow their own food. How the f**k does that work? 

So I feel like not just cooking, but grocery shopping is an incredibly political thing that one has—you have to be aware of these days. ‘Where's my food coming from? And to the extent that I can make the difference in my life, what's my footprint like?’ 

One of the biggest differences that I made over the pandemic is, there's a guy who ran—there’s a guy in Astoria, Queens, who was running his parents’ Chinese restaurant. And they hit hard times when the pandemic started, and he decided to convert his restaurant into groceries and get the groceries into delivery. 

And whereas I was initially getting my grocery delivery from Whole Foods, now I get all of my groceries delivered from asian-veggies.com. I know who's doing it. I know where it's being sourced. It's a local business. It's all good food. And I don't have this weight of, ‘I'm supporting this organization that may or may not be caring for workers in a particular way’ weighing on my shoulders.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much again for taking the time out today. This was great.

Jackie: It is always a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much for your time today.

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When the opportunity to interview Dr. Badia Ahad-Legardy upon the release of her book Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture (next Tuesday) landed in my inbox, I couldn’t say no. To discuss food with a literary scholar? Of course.

There is an entire chapter on food in the book, relating current expressions of Black identity in cookbooks and restaurants to past Black power movements. It is illuminating, especially in its discussion of Bryant Terry’s Afro-Vegan, for making connections that would usually go unstated, because—simply put—we so rarely see literary scholars or critics talking about food. It is vital and necessary.

We discussed the under-sung deliciousness of carob, the “complicated space of food studies,” food and the Black Lives Matter movement, and the cultural role of the restaurant. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Badia. Thank you so much for taking the time out today.

Badia: Thank you for having me. I'm excited.

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

Badia: Sure. 

So, I grew up in Chicago in the Hyde Park community. So, I think it was made perhaps most famous by Barack Obama. That's where he lived in Chicago. But we were there long before Barack Obama got there. [Laughter.] My grandparents actually migrated to Hyde Park in the 1940s, so it's where I grew up and where my mom grew up and so forth. So yeah, that's where I grew up. 

It's really interesting, because I have actually very few recollections of what I ate between the ages of, I guess, between when I was born and nine years old. And I was thinking about that, like, ‘What did I eat in those years?’ And it's so interesting, because my parents got divorced when I was nine. And I literally cannot remember the foods I ate prior to that. I don't have a recollection of what my mother cooked during that time. But after that, we moved in with my grandmother once they divorced, and I remember so many of those meals. 

And it's, I guess, a cliché, but my grandmother was an amazing cook. And my favorite food was okra. [Laughter.] One of the few people who's really attracted to, I guess, the slimy texture. I really loved okra. She would make these wonderful Parker House rolls that I used to schmear with a ton of butter and grape jelly. And desserts, of course. So I think five-flavored pound cake was my favorite. 

And interestingly, my aunt, who was also living with my grandmother at that time, she was and is a naturopath. And so she would take me to the health food store and buy me all kinds of treats. And my favorite ones were the carob covered raisins and the root beer sodas that were clear because they weren't—they didn't have the artificial coloring, so they tasted just like root beer. So, those were my favorite things to eat growing up. 

Alicia: Wow, I love whenever carob comes up in a conversation. [Laughter.]

Badia: Yeah, I was really—I shouldn't say I, but my aunt was really an early adopter of carob.

Alicia: Yeah, it's always just very, very specific. And it's just a very specific time. And I love that. And yeah, I'm always saying, ‘We should bring carob back.’ I don't think it was as bad as people remember at all. [Laughs.]

Badia: Well, the interesting thing is I actually don't like chocolate. Yeah, I'm not really a chocolate eater. Never have been. But carob was my jam as a kid. So, I don't know.

Alicia: [Laughs.] Amazing.

Well, why was it important for you to include a chapter on food in your new book, Afro—Nostalgia?

Badia: Sure.

I didn't really think that I could write a book about nostalgia and Blackness and get away with not writing a chapter about fo—about food or some reference to food. I think food and music are such key touchdowns of nostalgic memory. So, you hear something and you get transported back to a moment in time, or you eat something and it has the capacity to take you back to a particular kind of memory or a set of memories. So that's a really personal, I think, relationship between food and memory. And nostalgia plays such an important role in that. 

So in the book, I wanted to go a little bit beyond just kind of the personal nostalgic relationship that we have with food and really think about how it plays out in the Black culinary space. So, showing how chefs can play really important roles in evoking memories of this imagined historical past, and how those are really kind of tied to a certain kind of politics but also a sense of the future of Black food. 

Alicia: Right.

And you note in this chapter the “complicated space of food studies.” And I wanted to see if you could elaborate on what you mean—define as food studies and why you see it as a complicated space.

Badia: Sure.

Food studies is very broad, which is one of the reasons I think it's really complicated. And as I understand it at least, it's really about exploring the relationship between food and identity. And you can approach that from so many different angles. So you have public health, or environmental sustainability, or literature and folklore, sociology. I mean, all of those areas can really speak to the relationship or a certain kind of relationship between food and identity. And I think just because it's so vast, and it's so nebulous—and it's also a really, a fairly new field. That's one of the reasons why I think it's really complicated. 

It's funny. I was listening to Eve Ewing, and I'm not sure if you're familiar with her, but she's—yeah, amazing sociologist, writer, speaker, poet. I mean, just a brilliant individual. And she did a little Instagram Live mini-talk. And it was so fascinating, because she talked about the notion of pre-existing health conditions and how that's being played out right now in the trial of Derek Chauvin, and—being used as an attempt to prove that George Floyd's body was already broken, that there were kind of pre-existing health conditions at play. And we've also heard a lot of that around Covid, especially when it comes to communities of color. 

But when we think about something like pre-existing health conditions, so much of that is tied to issues like poverty and food access and food deserts and food justice. And these aren't natural conditions, but they're the product of a myriad of social injustices. And I think food plays a really important role in that. So there are many reasons why I think it's a conversation—complicated space. There's so many conversations happening about food and food waste. There's so much to say. 

And I think for me, at least when I was writing the book and just doing some reading around this, it was really hard to try to find a way in, actually, as someone who's coming to this work from a very different vantage point. And that's probably why this chapter on food was the most personal for me, because I actually used my own food memories as a way to participate in what I saw was a really kind of expansive conversation.

Alicia: Right. 

I mean, it's funny, because I started reading a book this morning, published in 2003. And the writer, who I think is a philosophy professor named Lisa Heldke, she was saying, ‘It's in the last ten years that food studies has emerged a little bit.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, boy.’ And it is still such a fractured area of study. 

And I think part of it is that nostalgia connection that it is—you have to come into it from a personal perspective. And you're talking about you using your memories. She begins this book as well with her own memories. And I'm like, ‘I don't think you can get into food without connecting it to nostalgia, connecting it back to your own identity, which is such a fascinating—’ Yeah, that's why it's so wonderful when other people write about food. I'm a food writer, so I only write about food, really. [Laughter.] That’s why I love reading other people write about it.

Badia: My background, obviously, is as a literary scholar, right? And I write about a lot of things, but I usually write about books. [Laughs.] But I do eat a lot. And I read about eating, and I read a lot about food. Again, I could not really figure out how to situate myself in this conversation without delving into the personal. But I think that's one of the reasons why that chapter for me, at least, was one of the most rewarding to write as well.

Alicia: Of course.

And the lack of pork in your home growing up is part of that, as well as the focus on Dick Gregory and Bryant Terry, who are big parts of this chapter. So, I wanted to ask ’cause I—I always ask people about this—but what is your relationship to meat as an omnivore? And I know you don't eat fast food. That seems like an interesting kind of relationship to food, as a conscious omnivore. [Laughter.]

Badia: Well, again, I guess going back to thinking about how your memories or food or your relationship to food is really formed, I think, at such a young age—or at least for me, it's formed at such a young age. And until you posed that question, I have to say, I had actually never really thought about my relationship to meat. Do me and meat really have a relationship? But I guess we do, because I do consume it. What's really interesting is that in high school, my mom and my stepdad stopped eating red meat. But I didn't. I still eat red meat. [Laughter.] My husband does not eat red meat at all. But I do and our kids do. 

So if I'm honest, I'd have to say that I think my relationship to meat really is the result of having had such a restrictive diet as a child. So growing up in the Nation of Islam, and then also on top of that, I had a lot of food allergies, which I have now outgrown thankfully. So if I'm honest, maybe my unwillingness to not eat meat is pushing back on what I perceive to be a really confining way to live for a good part of my kind of growing up. 

And honestly, you know, I don't know if I reject ‘fast food.’ I definitely preach the gospel of moderation. And I think if you want a fast food meal every now and then, get after it. 

But I'll share with you a really striking memory. When I took my kids to this art fair in Chicago, and—they were about ages around 8 and 11 at the time. And I got them popsicles. And the popsicles were made from fresh fruit, but they weren't unsweetened or anything and there was still obviously sugar present. And both of them said that their popsicles didn't taste right. And I was like, ‘What’s going on with these popsicles?’ 

I tasted the popsicles. And they tasted like the fruit that they were labeled as. So, the strawberry popsicle tasted like strawberries. The mango popsicle tasted like mango. But they were so used to that kind of artificial strawberry flavor, and an artificial citrus flavor, that the recognition, or the kind of expectation of having a popsicle that was the flavor of the actual fruit was something so foreign to them. And that was, quite frankly, heartbreaking for me, right? And I was like, ‘Ok, yeah, we're gonna do some things differently here.’

So, I think when I'm thinking about the kind of choices that we make as a family, I don't want them to feel as though or understand that natural foods in their natural form are something that's foreign. I want them to at least be able to recognize the foreign thing is the actual foreign, artificial thing that you're eating. I think that's why, at least for us, fast food isn’t a—we don't do that on a regular basis, I'll say.

Alicia: Right.

Yeah, no. And it's always interesting to talk to parents about this, because you have to negotiate food in a whole new way and figure out how to pass on your relationship to it without making that the whole thing and that sort of thing. I asked because you mentioned your kids asking for fast food in that chapter, and I was—it's always interesting to understand how people, yeah, make and negotiate those aspects of life because—yeah. [Laughs.] 

Badia: And I think that what I've tried to do also is not make them feel guilty about having it because then that is a whole other thing. And I talk a little bit about this in the book, but I had a lot of shame around food growing up. And that's never a healthy relationship to anything. So, I don't want them to feel if they're out with their friends, and the choice is to—they're both teenagers now, so—and the choice is to go to McDonald's or whatever, that they have to feel bad about doing it, or they lie and tell me that they went somewhere else or something like that. But I do want them to be able to strike a balance. 

Alicia: Of course.

Yeah, in the chapter you also write that Bryant Terry's Afro-Vegan is about making tangible and accessible the relationship between food and emancipatory politics. In what kind of ways and venues do you see this relationship being made nowadays in culture broadly, if you do? I mean, I think that's such an important intersection, of food and emancipatory politics. And I've talked to Bryant Terry about this before. As you are a literary scholar, how do you see that manifesting? Because I also want to understand how food for non-food-focused people, where you see it and where you see it as important?

Badia: Yeah. 

Well, interestingly, I just think that, right now, we see it kind of everywhere, right? So in the aftermath of the summer of 2020, where we saw national racial unrest and second wave of Black Lives Matter, the notion of Black radicalism and imagining Black freedom, I don't know if it's been more visible to me. [Laughs.] So, it certainly is more visible now then even when I was writing the book. 

So if I'm thinking about even renewed attention to Black cultural creators, and I—I'd be remiss not to mention folks like Thérèse Nelson and her Black Culinary History project. Also, the work of Cynthia Greenlee at The Counter, anti-racist projects happening everywhere, even popular culture. 

Oddly enough, I just saw the first episode of the new season of Top Chef last week. [Laughs.] And something that I was immediately struck by was, I don’t know if I want to call it an eagerness, but it kind of felt like an eagerness to really put West African cuisine on display. And that was something that was really fascinating to me. And I think it would be easy to kind of critique that as like, ‘Oh, this is empty symbolism,’ and ‘What does this really mean?’ But I also think the restaurant industry, like so many different industries, faced a racial reckoning in that moment. And it's clear that a lot of folks, at least to my mind, are—seem to be trying to do things a little differently. 

So I see this relationship between food and kind of a politics of liberation honestly operating in so many different spaces. Musically, in terms of literature, in terms of obviously food. But certainly, I think in a kind of popular cultural sphere we're seeing a little bit more of that conversation come to the fore. And I think it's a direct result of, again, the events of summer 2020. 

And I think it can be really easy to see these endeavors as merely historical. But in the book, I talk a lot about this notion of nostalgic reclamation, or nostalgia as an act of reclamation. So, what are you reclaiming? What are you trying to kind of get back to? And I think it's really a way to imagine the past. It’s a particular kind of memory. But it also does a lot of work for us in the present and provides a good deal of inspiration for the future, which I think is really at the heart of nostalgic projects. 

So, I see that—see it all over the place. It’s interesting. I was talking about Hyde Park earlier where I grew up, and there's a new-ish restaurant there, Virtue. And the chef is Erick Williams. And even if you go on the site, he has these kind of archival images of the American Black South on the website, and really kind of pointing to that space and that time as a mode of inspiration for what he's doing in the restaurant now. But I would say that it's not just kind of trying to recapture that very moment or the cuisine from that very moment in that space, but it's about kind of using that as a starting point to create something anew but also, really not forgetting the foundation of where all this came from.

Alicia: And in the chapter as well, I mean, to talk about restaurants, you discuss Marcus Samuelsson’s Red Rooster and specifically Sam Sifton’s review of it. And you bring up the difficult role that a restaurant has in changing its neighborhood, especially—this is a Black restaurant in a historically Black neighborhood in Harlem. 

Do you see the restaurant as having a duty to occupy a role that is not simply about gastronomy, a role that actually kind of is in service to the neighborhood and in kind of anti-service to gentrification? [Laughter.] We've been talking a lot about what is the role of the restaurant, especially because in the pandemic they've been laying people off. It's been a site of transmission. Line cooks have been deeply impacted by the pandemic. So we're talking about, ‘What is the restaurant?’ And so do you think the restaurant has a cultural function beyond being kind of just a business, that's a showcase for a chef, especially kind of in that context of Red Rooster?

Badia: That's a great question. 

I mean, I have to say, normally I get really nervous when I hear words like ‘duty’ and ‘responsibility,’ especially attached to roles that Black people are supposed to play. [Laughs.] And I am definitely, just by the way, anti-gentrification, just to let everyone know. 

I would say that honestly when a restaurant or any business for that matter occupies a space within a neighborhood, especially neighborhoods that have been neglected, that have been forgotten, marginalized, there really has to be—to my mind, at least—some sense of responsibility for how your presence in that community is going to affect the lives of the people who existed there long before you. So, I do feel like there is some responsibility there. 

And the reason why I even talk about Red Rooster in the book is because it's—it really does exemplify how complicated nostalgic projects are, right? So, on the one hand, nostalgia is a feel-good emotion, which is really what the book is about, right? So it has the capacity to be energizing. It can be life-giving; it could be comforting. And even in the name, Red Rooster, is obviously an homage to the Red Rooster of the Harlem Renaissance era. So you kind of think about that moment, and the kind of images that it evokes of this vibrant Black Harlem. But nostalgia also has a really dark underbelly. And it's one that is often informed by historical erasure and violence. 

So with Red Rooster, we see a little bit of both sides of nostalgia at play. And I see it as a space that's really grappling with that. So, that's one of the reasons why I really wanted to kind of focus on it, because it obviously—even in its name, invokes this kind of historical relationship. But we have to think about the work that it's actually doing in that, their community right now. 

In terms of whether restaurants have a cultural function? I would obviously say yes. I'm not sure if restaurants, though, always know that they have that function and they're aware of what that function is and what role that they play in it. So when I think about a restaurant, I think about things—again, not as a person entrenched in the food space, but location, menu items, price points, waitstaff, seating arrangements, decor, music. I mean, I think about all the things that go into the making of a restaurant. And it is such an overtly political space.

I was thinking about a time when a few friends and I went to brunch in this neighborhood, Wicker Park, which is a bit of a tony, predominantly white neighborhood in Chicago. And my friends and I were the only Black patrons in the restaurant. And if anyone knows Chicago, we are a deeply segregated city, right? So you go to the North side, it's mostly white. Southside, mostly black. 

So, we're in Wicker Park. We're having brunch at this restaurant, only Black people there. And this Biggie song comes on the loudspeaker. And it's a restaurant, so it's still somewhat muted. But you know Biggie, you hear the song, that must be the explicit version. And the N-word is all over the place in the song, right? So, here we are in this space. The patrons are mostly white, the waitstaff is mostly white, the cooks look to be mostly Black and Latinx. And I was thinking in that moment about how our experience of the space in that moment was very, very different. 

So, restaurants are not neutral spaces. I think that some of them seem to intend to operate from a place of neutrality without recognizing that for many people, whiteness functions as a neutral. So I think that restaurants would do well to think more deeply about the cultural functions that they serve, and the roles that they play in the communities in which they exist, right? 

Alicia: Yeah, no, I think I asked that question, of course, out of interest. But also I'm writing a list of restaurants in San Juan for a food website, the essential restaurants of San Juan. And thinking about that, these questions of these areas that have been so deeply gentrified. And here in San Juan, gentrification is tied to Airbnbs. It's not necessarily tied to actual residents, because the economy is so based on tourism. And so thinking about, ‘Who is this restaurant for? Who is this serving? And how is it changing the neighborhood?’ is just such an important consideration. 

And yeah, that idea of like, ‘Who is comfortable in these spaces?’ is such a big one when it comes to food that I don't think people think about enough. From farmers’ markets to restaurants, who is comfortable and who is being served?

Badia: Yeah, exactly. 

And also, you kind of think about—I'm not a restaurant owner, I don't aspire to be one. But I imagine though that you do have a vision of the space. And I honestly don't think that, especially in many of the spaces that I've been to, there is a good deal of consideration for the kind of diversity of people who potentially could occupy that space. And I think when you're coming into, especially, again, particular kinds of neighborhoods, you really have to be mindful of the power that you wield within those spaces, and also how your mere presence, again, can really alter not just the lived experiences of the people who are there, but really the future of those communities in irreparable ways.

Alicia: Right.

And for you, is cooking a political act?

Badia: Ok, so I'm going to be the consummate academic here. [Laughter.] Nothing that we do or say escapes the realm of the political, so I would have to obviously put cooking in there. 

And can I just tell you how much I love this question? Because I thought about this, and I'm like, ‘It's cooking. It's not just food. It's not just eating. It’s the act of cooking.’ And so yes, I would say that food is—I mean, that cooking is definitely a political act, and—as much as our politics are reflected in the choices that we make on a day to day basis. So, ‘Am I going to get takeout, or am I going to cook in my kitchen? Am I going to fry, or am I going to bake? Am I doing the cooking, or is my husband doing the cooking?’ And how these decisions get made, I think, are inherently political. So, I would have to say that cooking is very much a political act.

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

Badia: Thank you for having me.

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I met Emily Stephenson one day years ago at a café right by our then-apartments in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. She had emailed me because I was an editor at Edible Brooklyn at the time and wanted to discuss my work. I was jealous of her work, though, because she developed recipes for cookbooks. Eventually, we collaborated on the Food Writers’ Workshop, along with Layla Schlack, attempting to demystify food media for a bigger group of writers through a ticket price of $13.50.

Emily has since written two brilliant cookbooks with her own name on them: Pantry to Plate and The Friendsgiving Handbook. We talked at the end of last year, when Pantry to Plate was coming out, and I wanted to hear about her decision to leave social media that has become such a big part of being a writer and cookbook author. (This was the second to last of my interviews done with poor internet, so please excuse any audio glitches.) Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Emily. Thanks so much for coming on to chat. 

Emily: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. 

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

Emily: Sure, I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago.

We grew up eating—we had a lot of takeout and fast food, for sure. We also—I've been thinking a lot about this, like, service that no one I've talked to has ever used, but kind of like saved my family since both my parents worked full time. It was called Market Day, but basically, kind of like a Costco, Sam's Club thing where you order in bulk, but then pick it up and buy it at the school. And so like, once a month, we would go and just pick up a bunch of boxes of frozen entrees and stuff that then would help with quick meals during the week.

Neither of my parents are super into cooking. And were just, you know, stressed with having two kids and time jobs.

But my mom is also super into gardening. And so like in the summer, you know, she would grow green beans and tomatoes and stuff. So we would have that for a couple months a year. There was a really great farmers’ market in the town where I grew up, but because it's the Midwest and the climate doesn't really allow for like an abundant farmers’ market, you know, for more than maybe like three or four months a year, that was kind of like just limited to the summer.

Alicia: Right, right. And so how did you get into food? Because I know you went to culinary school, you worked in restaurants—what was your path—

Emily: No, I didn’t go to culinary school

Alicia: You didn’t go to culinary school!

Emily: It started as just like an interest. I think from just watching a lot of Food Network in like junior high school I got, like, into cooking as a hobby.

But, you know, I don't know, just like, as a high school kid didn't occur to me that I could be like cooking our dinners every night and also was, you know, like, busy with schoolwork and extracurriculars. And then when I went away to college, the way that it worked at the school, I was you lived in a dorm for the first year, and then most people moved to apartments.

And so I just kind of was forced to learn how to cook when I was 19. There weren't any good restaurants in town. And you know, I was on a budget anyway. So that's when I got really into it and more into cookbooks and just doing a lot of research. 

The first year I was cooking, I wasn't a vegetarian, but I kind of didn't do a great job staying healthy as I learned to cook and felt kind of terrible after that first year, so decided to become a vegetarian. And so that also required a lot of education and research and just trying to stay inspired and like what to eat, that would be exciting and kind of healthy.

And I kind of had journalism dreams. They were very vague and not formed when I graduated, but was hoping to get a magazine or newspaper job or something and kind of keep food more as just like a hobby.

But I graduated in 2008. And, you know, it was just not a good time to pursue that work. I remember having like this, like, you know, a few steps removed connection. He was like an editor for a news wire or something. I talked to him a few months after I graduated. And I was like, yeah, I'm like, I would love to work for like a newspaper or magazine. You know, like, do you have any advice and he was like, just find another industry. Do not attempt to get a job doing this. And I, I don't know, I think I was just a little bit overwhelmed and really took that to heart and so kind of went another direction. 

I had gotten an internship at Slow Food USA. It combined my interest in food and politics. I was working on, they were sort of taking a turn towards more actual advocacy. And so I was working on a campaign about the Farm Bill and the school lunch portion of that. And so I worked in food nonprofits for a few years and it just wasn't quite satisfying. It still didn't have the writing component that I wanted, and had always just continued to just be interested in, reading about and learning about food and buying cookbooks and cooking for people all the time. I ran a supper club for a couple of years and just cooked for big groups in my apartment.

And I this moment after my second job where I just I realized that development in programs and nonprofits just was not what I wanted to do. And my current job was comfortable enough where I had the space to sort of figure out what it is I did want. 

I went on a vacation and I bought a book while I was there. It was one of the few souvenirs and it was Claudia Roden's The Book of Jewish Food. And I was flipping through it on the plane on the way back and I was like, I want to do this somehow. Claudia Roden has turned it into a job. And I just imagine she's sitting in her beautiful  London home and she's just writing cookbook after cookbook.

I was like, I want to figure out a way to do this. Like, I want to write. I love cookbooks. I love cooking. I think that maybe I could do this.

Which was very ambitious for someone who had made very safe career choices until then. But I

had talked to a few people who are kind of in the food media world. Everyone had told me that like culinary school was a waste of money. And if you just got restaurant experience, that would be enough. 

So I had made a plan to work in restaurants for a couple of years. And then after that would try to figure out how I could get into media and publishing. And just by coincidence, or chance, I saw that Food52 was looking for an intern to work on their first cookbook. They had signed a multi-book deal with Ten Speed. And I don't know, I just think because it was exactly what I wanted to do, my cover letter just stood out.

I got the internship, which was great. So I think I was like, 27 at the time, it was like a little bit of a career change. Thankfully, it was weekends only. And so you know, since it was an unpaid gig, I was able to work. And also get that really great experience.

That was Genius Recipes, Kristen Miglore. And it was mostly just doing recipe testing, research, kind of some like admin and project management stuff as the book went on. And it was great. I loved it. I was like, Oh my god, this is like exactly what I want to be doing. And when that ended, I went to work in restaurants for a little while, just ’cause I didn't have anything lined up. So I worked as a line cook. Sorry, this is like very detailed. 

Alicia: Oh, it's great. It's great. To be detailed. 

Emily: Um, it was like kind of a windy path. But once I got started, I felt like things kind of fell into place. So I was in restaurants for a little over a year. And thenI guess at some point, yeah, maybe like a year and a half later, one of Mark Bittman's longtime employees was going to grad school and so he was looking for someone to come join his team. And he got my name from Food52. And I remember being—I was working at the restaurant, and I checked my phone after service one night and I had this email that was just like, from Mark Bittman. Subject, Hello.

I thought It was a weird promotional email from the New York Times or something.

But yeah, he said he'd gotten my name. He was looking for stuff, was I interested. And so yeah, I applied for that. I did an edit test. I wrote, I think, like an outline for a cookbook chapter, went through a few rounds of that, and got hired. And so that was not too many steps away from deciding that I wanted to write cookbooks, to getting a job that was pretty much full time and writing, you know, working on his books, and I knew, kind of from the outset, I think, because I had started researching and also just loved cookbooks and was really familiar with them that I had started to see a lot of names pop up, in multiple books, and especially working on Genius Recipes, since that is a collection of like other people's recipes. Like you look through a lot of books and you look at the credits. And, you know, I would start to see Melissa Clark's name appearing in places that I had never seen or, even, you know, like Peter Meehan co-authored a few books, and I was like, oh, like, this is a job like I could find a way to like, pay my bills, writing other people's books.

And that was really appealing to me at the time because also it's like, you know, you get to work with someone who's really knowledgeable. Get to do the thing that you love, and then I get to learn and make a great product. So that was always kind of the goal.

And I've been trying to get into restaurant co-authoring for quite a while. I have yet to make that work, but in the meantime, I was able to also write to have my own small cookbook, and that kind of came about because I had been working kind of in publishing with Food52, with Mark Bittman, and was just like really hustling and emailing any editor, agent, whoever who would respond to me, meet with me, let them know what I was looking for and if they needed someone kind of behind the scenes, whether it was like ghostwriting, co-authoring, recipe editing

At that point, I knew because I didn't have like a following of my own, that was probably more the work that was going to come my way than writing my own big cookbooks.

I think you know within the last however many years it's become fairly clear that you need to have quite a following of your own to for a publishing company to take a risk on you 

Alicia: I mean, do you want to have a following of your own? I mean, I think you don't, right?

Emily: Something that i've just come to accept is like Ii have such a fraught relationship with that part of me who would love to be a public figure, and Ithink fame is always—famous is perhaps a strong word, but at least being well known in a smaller professional community, but there's also something really unappealing about it to me and I just—I  don't have the desire to do what it takes to build that and I feel like if it's kind of, for a while everyone was like, ‘Oh, you should have a blog. That's the secret to success now,’ and I was like, ‘I know, but it's a lot of work. It's just not quite what I want to be doing and if I am doing it just because I have to and i resent it, what's the point? It's not going to be engaging. It's not going to be original.’

I don't know, and I am at this kind of crossroads now where it's like i don't want the Instagram following and so like do I need to rethink what I want to do because it has become again in the last like however many years a big part of being a writer and being in publishing? I don't know. I think there's maybe like a ceiling for people who don't have that kind of following and maybe I’ve reached it.

I also just like have such a fraught relationship with social media. Ii've been taking a break from Instagram and Twitter for like the last maybe two months or something and it's been pretty great. I don't want to go back.

Alicia: I can understand this completely because even though I like enjoy social media and always have and, you know, since I was a preteen, have been on LiveJournal and just on the internet and have you been like—I love, I love, I love posting.

I think because for me, I have a lot of social anxiety about actual human interaction, so for me it's always been very nice to have the medium of the internet, and that's always been that way. I’ve been able to express myself kind of more honestly as a person, but now that like my newsletter has been quote unquote successful and I have more followers on Instagram and Twitter, it's so annoying and so toxic for my mental health and I've had to, because, you know—

Before I was pretty much in control of stuff. I didn't have tons of random people in my DMs or tweeting at me and so I just didn't have a fraught relationship with it, but now I’ve had to really control who can respond to me and that sort of thing because it's just so taxing.

Having to try to have boundaries and like, for me, I feel like i don't know is it rude if someone DMs me asking—like, someone I've never talked to before and I post like an Instagram story of a necklace that I'm wearing and they're like where did you get that—I just get a request for like did you get that and like I’m then I'm like is it rude if I just delete this because I don't want to interact with this person and I don't know this person, like the knowledge of where my necklace is from. 

I know so many people in our world, in the food world, who have assistants who deal with that stuff now because it becomes too overwhelming and that sort of thing and I'm like—I don't think i'll ever get to that level to actually pay someone to do that, but at the same time,now I completely understand like why someone has an assistant who filters through their email, because yes, people are really overwhelming.

Emily: Iit's like this tool that started out as something personal and then became professional and none of us really had a say or a choice in that. Maybe I'm sabotaging my whole career by feeling this way, but it's not like outlook or like Slack, even, a work tool that I can turn off at the end of the day. Especially the thing about the algorithm, you know, that it's designed toget you kind of like riled up. I feel like the algorithm, especially on Twitter recently, has really perfected itself that it just like—it was just taking over my life and I just don't want to feel like I have to do it, and that feels important to me enough that I might need to reconsider some some career choices based on that.

But I don't know, it just feels like a necessary boundary at this point.

Alicia: It's totally necessary and it's interesting to watch people who've tried to kind of like balance that. Like I know Korsha Wilson doesn't really go on in on social media unless she has something to say. I respect that so much and I wish I had that boundary for myself and I probably should try to cultivate it.

But it is really interesting to think about how these these platforms can affect one's career when one works in media and what a real effect it has, more than one's talent, frankly, on on what they're able to do.

It’s bad, but your latest cookbook, Pantry to Plate—it which ended up being way more timely than i'm sure you expected. How did that come about? Was that your idea, was that the publisher’s idea? What was the market—what were the forces that made this book come to fruition?

Emily: So both of my books, both published by Chronicle, were kind of a continuation of sort of what I talked about earlier where I, again, because I am not a public figure, kind of coming to writing a little bit more of a different way, and so because I had experience with Mark Bittman and some other projects I had worked on kind of being like a jack-of-all-trades, it was like you know, ‘here's the idea, go with it. Make something good.’ 

So that was sort of my skill and so Chronicle, for some of these smaller books, I think it's more identifying a need in the market, something that is timely and will sell well, and a lot of the ideas come from like editorial meetings and then it's a matter of finding a writer. The first one worked out perfectly because I had been hosting Friendsgiving since I went away to college at 18, so I had a lot to say on that one. This one, kind of similar—they were like we want to write a pantry book and the idea, the thing that will make this one stand out from all of the many, many other pantry books is that the ingredient list is going to be really small and tight and so it'll really be a book that stands alone. Then after some back and forth about what my ideas were and how I would make that work, then we can go to writing. So they came to me with the idea both of them but it was always just the prompt. First one was Friendsgiving; this was pantry book only 50 ingredients, go.

I liked that it was that collaboration, and I do feel like I've been really. I was able to have the connections and they thought of me for these books and also, I don't know, sometimes the market’s really saturated. There's a lot of books sometimes, it's hard to identify what is different and what will sell. I think it's like, publishing companies—it's their job to identify those things, so it was nice they were like, ‘all right, pantry book, we know we're gonna sign it, we know it will sell well, take the idea and run with it.’

Alicia: How did you kind of approach doing this? Is it a reflection of how you cook or was it kind of a more foreign sort of approach?

Emily: I think it was a little bit of a combination. I started because I knew it was a limited number of recipes and only 50 ingredients, so I made this giant spreadsheet of both the pantry ingredients that I like to use and also, because everyone's pantry looks different, but doing some research for a lot of the general servicey kind of stuff out there—all the pantry ingredients you need, you know, stuff that that gets mentioned over and over. It's definitely a very, you know, entry level cookbook, and so I wanted it to be ingredients that hopefully a wide swath of people will like to use and cook with. So anyway, making a spreadsheet with that and trying to figure out which ingredients will go the furthest and in that process, having to cut some stuff that I use all the time and depend very heavily on but wouldn't be able to use in as wide an amount of recipes. For instance, I love vinegar. I cook with vinegar all the time, but trying to get a variety of flavor profiles and dishes and ways of cooking, it seemed like citrus was going to be more versatile, so the acid in the book is citrus not vinegar. That kind of thing.

Once i landed on the list, I only made a few tweaks in the writing process, but once I got to that part, I think it is how I cook once I was able to start working mostly full-time writing cookbooks. I found that I had stopped using recipes when I was looking at them all day. It was kind of the last thing I wanted to do and so pretty much where I've at now and how i'm still cooking is just like, looking at what I've got and figuring out something from that

It was a great way to write because I would just reference this list of 50 ingredients and I was like, okay, I want to make a chickpea soup or something. Here's what I'm working with, what sounds interesting? So that was actually kind of a fun process, and again mostly how I cook in my day to day life.

Alicia: So what do you think makes a cookbook stand out in a very, very crowded market? And also I wanted to ask you like what, for you, what have been the formative cookbooks? Because you've talked about this but I don't think you've named yet what was super important to you.

Emily: Definitely How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman. That one. I think I had been a vegetarian and cooking for maybe like three or four years at that point, but it's so helpful and it's so flexible, and I think it really does a good job of teaching you how to be nimble in the kitchen while also just having so many ideas. It’s a really great book to go to and you're like, alright like, you know, I bought this green at the store and I don't know what to do with it—what are some ideas? I have these greens from the farmers’ market that are about to go bad, what can I do with them? And so that's probably like the book that i've used the most

It’s funny. I've always loved cookbooks as items to collect and I think that maybe recently it's become more about the collecting than the using, especially as I am looking at cookbooks and recipes all day. I cook less with them and I'm trying to think if there's any in the last couple years that I really enjoyed or read, and I was just like reading them cover to cover. I think the storytelling and the philosophy and just the way that a person packages their cooking life is very fascinating to me. 

There's a lot of ngreat restaurant cookbooks that I've loved to read but have never cooked from. I remember getting I think it was the Night and Market Cookbook—I just really loved reading that; I felt like I learned a lot. It was a great book to spend time with. My Name Is Ice Cream by Dana Cree— I just loved that book. She made ice cream seem so technical but also appealing, but then I worked on an ice cream book for a little while and I never wanted to make ice cream again, so again, it just sits there as a book that I enjoy and love to reference sometimes.

You're also asking me at a funny time because all of my cookbooks are in boxes right now. So it's not like I can look at them and be like, Oh, yeah, that one. I'm kind of theorizing, like who do I

I know. Unfortunately, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian really stands out as the one formative one that really changed how I cook.

I know I've picked up so much from books. I'm sorry. I'm blanking on any other ones. I'm sure there's more.

Alicia: We worked together with Layla Schlack to try to create an equitable food conference with the Food Writers’ Workshop, which I think was mostly your idea. But right now, it's like, kind of I know, you're sort of like, working tangentially to food media now. But, you know, do you think there's hope for food media to become more equitable, more kind of open? I mean, we talked about how social media platforms and audiences are probably far too important in terms of one success in this industry. So like, do you have hope for food media? Like, what do you want to see change?

Emily: I don't know. I mean, I feel like you're catching me at kind of a, like, pessimistic time. But I mean, I guess like the flip side, right, to social media is that people who are good at it, and who are willing to put in the time and effort, it's a way to create a career outside of the traditional pathways. For me, it's like, I was able to get to where I am. I mean, maybe I could have taken a different route. But all because, you know, I was able to do an unpaid internship at a New York media company. And, you know, I do want to be open to the fact that that is a path for some people. It's not one that I think will work for me, but, I don't know, it's, I feel—it's like how much change can really happen if it's like these giant companies that hold so much power, you know, it's like Conde Nast, and perhaps the New York Times, or maybe like listening to some of the feedback they've been getting, but it just feels like we put so much emphasis on these big institutions and give them so much power. 

And like, I guess one hopeful point is maybe crowdfunding, and I think that there have been like, specifically with my interests, and I like cookbooks, you know, people who have tried to shop around a cookbook. Editors don't bite for whatever reason. And so they just decided to crowdfund it. And I think, you know, the problem with that is that it is just a lot more like time and effort on the writer’s part, but I think, you know, if someone believes that they have a good idea, and you know, and hundreds of other people do, too, that maybe some more kind of interesting, and different books can be put out, kind of like what we were talking about before, even with my book, there are a million pantry books and big companies kind of just often keep doing what works, but I think they do pay attention to crowdfunding as well. I feel I can think of one book off the top of my head, there's probably been more, the Eat Offbeat Cookbook. They're like a catering company in New York that employed refugees. It was like a work program through the

—I can't remember the organization—anyway, they had a super successful crowdfunding campaign. So much so that it got the attention of publishers, and they were able to finish the book.

I guess maybe it's a mind-set shift to  not needing the stamp of approval of a publishing company, either. You know, it's like you'd write, you write your book. And hopefully, if you can get the funding to support your time to get it out, and people will find it. And it's perhaps not the most satisfying answer, but I feel like it's like one bright spot in an industry. I'm otherwise feeling like, I don't know, I'm kind of like holding my breath and waiting to see what happens. 

Alicia: Yeah, no, it's true. And I do think that it's funny because when you ask people what are they optimistic about in food media, the answer usually is something like self-publishing. And that is a big shift, I think.

And I think it's a very interesting shift. And, I mean, it's also kind of a problematic shift. I mean, as a person who has a newsletter that I self-published, like people, there are people and there's been this backlash—I think it's over now—to the idea of newsletters and not having an editor, etc., etc. And it's like, well, this is what I do for a living and have done for a living, but I stopped being able to make a sufficient living at it, doing it in the, you know, traditional manner. And so what am I supposed to just like—what was I supposed to do? Especially independent, right? Especially if your backup plan is usually to just work in food, and cook people food, and then you're in a pandemic. This isn't the time to do that, you know, then it's like—this is kind of a way of getting through that. But yeah, I hope that the respect continues for self publishing. But I also think it's very, yeah, state of corporate food media that people have been like, we have to take this into our own hands, because there's no one who's doing this properly. 

Emily: As someone who has kind of invested in traditional publishing, and I don't know, though, it's—it's a tough time. I think, let's check  in like, a year and see if any of the stages of stocks that have been happening, I feel like that's kind of where I'm at at the moment. 

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

Emily: I think I, you know, I, I feel like this is an answer that quite a lot of other people have given, but when I really do think about it, I feel perhaps not me at home cooking. I don't think of it as a political act. But I do think like, getting ingredients is and my only personal philosophy has been kind of all over the place on this. I feel like I started off, you know, working at Slow Food and a little bit, as they were trying to shift their mindset to is to how political exactly is cooking and eating, and then, you know, periods where, as a, you know, freelance writer, it's like, my budget was so low, I just felt like I didn't really have the ability to really think through where my ingredients are from, but—and I think it's one thing that I really appreciate that you speak so much about—but I do think that we have to put a lot of thought into where our food comes from, and how we get it, and to the best of all of our abilities in our situation, try to make choices that feel good.

It feels really overwhelming. I feel like there's so many different things to take into account. And it can be hard. But I think when you get on autopilot, and I don't know, just mindlessly buy things from the grocery store, I feel like the chain of effects is so much longer than any of us ever really think about. That is something that I definitely—I am trying, you know, to be much more mindful of. 

Alicia: I think that's so—that's interesting. And I'm excited to see how that manifests for you now that you're in L.A., as opposed to living in New York.

Emily: Everyone’slike, the farmers’ markets are so great. I'm excited to get back into that,that lifestyle. So yeah. 

Alicia: Well, thank you. 

Emily: And obviously there's more to it than that.

Alicia: Awesome.

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When I talked to Mark Byrne for my piece “On Booze,” I was so excited by the free-flowing conversation that I knew I had to do a proper interview. He’s a journalist turned distiller who has co-founded Good Vodka, made from coffee waste. While it hasn’t turned me into a vodka martini person (nothing could rip me away from gin), it is a gorgeously vanilla vodka with a rich mouthfeel that has changed my mind about the spirit. Someone once told me vodka is simply a “feat of engineering.” Good Vodka proves that’s not necessarily true.

We discussed how he made the decision to leave magazines (an easy one, it seems), how corporate booze green- and virtue-washes their real planetary impacts, and how alcohol can become sustainable again. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Mark. Thank you so much for coming on.

Mark: Thank you for having me.

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

Mark: Yes.

So, I kind of bounced around a little growing up. I was born in Southern California, and then moved to Kenya when I was very young and lived there for several years. And then we moved to Appleton, Wisconsin, which is a paper mill town in northern Wisconsin, in the early ‘90s. And then in the late ‘90s, moved back to Africa, this time to Zimbabwe for a year. And then back to Appleton. And then Appleton is where I graduated from high school, and then I never went back.

Alicia: Oh, ok. [Laughs.]

And what kind of food was present during those times bouncing around? Did you get a good sense of the kinds of differences and cuisines from those different places?

Mark: Yeah, definitely.

I mean, in Kenya, obviously the food was very regionally specific there. For I think about a year, we lived in a little village called Igunga, which is in the western part of the country, near Lake Victoria. And that was a very rural, very, very rural village. And so, that was kind of traditional Luhya food. I don't know. I just struggle to describe it in any way other than kind of maize-based staple dishes. And so, that was what we had over there. 

When I moved to Appleton, obviously, that was a very different type of cuisine. [Laughs.] Culture shocky. So, Appleton—there's a lot of malls and fast food and stuff like that. But my dad had actually been a chef when he was younger. He'd been the head chef of a restaurant in St. Louis, and he was a very confident, competent cook. I've never seen him open a recipe book in his life. He was the main cook in our household. I would say it was pretty traditional fare. I mean, he liked French food a lot. He was a Francophile. And, so I'd say on good nights we'd have a filet mignon with a couple of side dishes. And he was really into trimming the meat himself. 

And then around, when I was 12 or 13, my dad started working out of town. So, he'd fly out every Monday and fly back on Fridays. And my mother did not cook at all. In fact, I've never even seen her in the kitchen. So at that point, it became my mom would leave money on the counter and we'd order pizza. 

And then when I was 15, I got a job in a restaurant, kind of like a high-end, white tablecloth place. And I pretty much just every night, I just had a family meal there. And that's where I got most of my sustenance through the end of high school.

Alicia: Did you like cooking? Do you still cook?

Mark: I love cooking. Yeah, I'm the primary cook in my household now. Yeah, I love cooking. Absolutely.

Alicia: [Laughs.] Awesome. 

And you started your career in magazines. Why did you want to work in magazines, to begin with?

Mark: Uh. God, I don't know. I mean, that's such a complicated question. 

I'm gonna answer this in a way that I feel like is really cliched and apologize in advance for that. I've always been good at it. All my teachers had always been like, ‘You’re really good at writing.’ And I was kind of a really bad student in every other aspect. And so, that was kind of the thing that I latched on to and was like, ‘There's a pathway here,’ that seemed like one that I could excel at. And what I really liked about it was it was a portfolio-based pathway, where if I could present, if I could do a good job on a writing assignment, if I could publish something, then it kind of made up for lacking the other credentials around academics. 

And so, I kind of just took that path. I thought, ‘Ok, I'm gonna publish a lot. I'm going to be a real self-starter and pitch a ton in college and have a real clip book by the time I’ve graduated. And then, that will kind of make up for the fact that I'm just an astoundingly subpar student.’

Alicia: [Laughs.]

And did that work out? Is that how you got into your first jobs? 

Mark: Yeah, it did.

I got my first internship in Chicago, at Chicago Magazine. That was a fact-checking internship. And at that point, I had been working on the school newspaper, I was at Columbia College in Chicago. It's an art school. And I got an internship at Chicago Magazine that I wrote while I was there. I pitched a bunch of different sections and wrote for it. 

And after college, I applied to New York Magazine, having never been to New York. I'd been to New York at that point for like a week. But I definitely did not know New York from Chicago, from Appleton. None of it made any sense to me. But I used my cousin's address on my résumé to imply that I already lived there, which I did not. And I had a pretty good clip book at that point. I've been writing for a lot of small publications around Chicago, and probably five or six different magazines and zines. And coupled with the, what I would say, the minor lie that I already lived in New York, I got an internship at New York Magazine, which at that point was a full-time, minimum wage position, but full-time. 

I had to figure out how to move to New York. I moved to New York in like four days. I found an apartment on Craigslist, went back to St. Louis, where my family was at that point, and then drove back and basically moved into the first apartment I saw, which was this terrible loft in South Williamsburg. 

And then I started in New York, and I wrote for every section while I was there. I made myself kind of indispensable in that internship, and they kept me on afterwards. I'm good at being annoying until I get something published. 

Alicia: And then, yeah, what were you writing? What kind of stuff were you focused on writing?

Mark: I was kind of just doing everything. 

I mean, at that point in my career, I was like, 22, 23. I worked a lot with the books editor, Boris. And so, I was doing a lot of book, kind of collating reviews and figuring out what we would pass along to Sam Anderson, who was the critic at the time and kind of made myself in charge of the book galley room. I ended up editing this little section called Agenda, which was at that time-I think it's changed a lot since then-but at the time, it was five or six things that you could do in the upcoming week.

I did a thing called the Recession Index, which was a cool little-so, this was obviously 2008, and the economy had just tanked. And so, we started putting together a little-an index of, a documented data sets from the recession. So how many Lehman Brothers bankers had been fired that week, or things like that. They were kind of quirky. I'm struggling to think of a good example. How much Brooks Brothers stock was down. That kind of stuff. 

So I was doing that, and I was doing the book stuff and I was doing Agenda. And I was writing little culturally, things. I don't know. I mean, I was 22. So, I was writing basically anything that I could.

Crucially, I was also doing a lot of Party Lines reporting for Jada [Yuan], who was that time, at that point, kind of the queen of Party Lines. And that was great, because that meant I would get sent to some ridiculous celeb party, where I wouldn't have to buy myself dinner because it'd be passed hors d'oeuvres. So, that was a real like, act of kindness. And then, all I had to do was kind of find a couple celebrities and ask them questions. Unfortunately, that's the thing of my job that I was the worst at.

Alicia: Really? 

Mark: Oh, yeah. I'm incredibly shy about—I don't like to approach people at parties. It's not what I do. So, I ended up doing-kind of side kicking it with other reporters. But for the most part, I was just there for the hors d'oeuvres, to be honest.

Alicia: Right.

How long were you there? ’Cause I started there at the end of 2009.

Mark: I left in the beginning of 2009. So the middle of 2008 to around, I guess, mid-2009.

Alicia: Well, how was it that you decided to leave the magazine industry? And are you completely out of it now, or is it— [Laughs.]

Mark: I would say, I'm pretty pretty much out of it. 

So from New York Mag, I went to—I ended up going to grad school at NYU. In retrospect, I have no idea why I did this. It seemed like an opportunity to write a thesis and do another thing that I could then pitch into a portfolio. So, I was writing a thesis about the independent publishing industry, which I was really interested in at that point. And that was kind of I thought of it as an opportunity to just kind of write a book proposal, basically. I was really interested in how indie publishers were innovating against the big houses, which is still kind of a fascination of mine, just like in alcohol. 

And I was there for three semesters. And then, I was also working at Esquire. I'd gotten a job as a fact-checker at Esquire. So, I was doing that on a regular basis, too. And then I'd also was—had started working at this distillery, Kings County Distillery, which was where David Haskell, who's now the editor-in-chief of New York Magazine, had started this distillery and asked me to be their first employee. Which is another kind of great kindness of his, just teach me how to make whiskey. 

So, I was doing a lot. And this was 2010. And then, at the end of 2010, my dad died suddenly and I didn't finish grad school. I was one credit shy of it. I had to stop going to classes, ’cause I was kind of grief-struck. Like two weeks later, I got a job offer from GQ. And that was just kind of just very, very shocking to me, but also amazing. I quit grad school; I quit Esquire. And then I sort of wound down my time at Kings County Distillery and started doing—started working at GQ, and I kind of dove into that headfirst and was there for five years. 

And the reason I would say I left magazines is, I started to see a pathway around alcohol was opening up for me. It seemed like something that was worth pursuing. And at the same time, I started to kind of look down the line a little bit at what my magazine career might look like. It was looking to me there were maybe a handful of jobs that would be available in magazines in 10, 15 years. Perhaps this was imposter syndrome, or a lack of confidence or whatever. But I didn't see myself as one of the people that would have those jobs. I saw a couple of people I was working with, I was like, ‘These people will be the three remaining editors-in-chief in this industry.’ And I was like, ‘I'm gonna be fighting for senior editor scraps into my 40s and 50s, and still not going to have a retirement.’

At the same time, I'd started to do this consulting work around liquor. I've been writing about liquor for a long time. I knew how to distill, and the consulting work was a lot more interesting to me. So, I basically started thinking of it as basically writing display copy, coming up with a name for liquor brand, or, excuse me, writing a label copy for it. Coming up with brand voice stuff is really just writing a really good caption or a really good headline or a really good deck. And that's stuff that I've always been really good at. I'm really good at writing in brief. 

And so I started doing that for liquor brands. I realized it was an entire kind of niche industry there. And so I did that for about a year or so, to just kind of give myself the confidence that it was something I could actually do. And then I left GQ. At the same time, I knew in the back of my head, I was working on this vodka project—which I think we'll talk about—I was aware that I needed to focus more energy on that, more energy than I would be able to had I continued to have that full-time 10 to 7 job.

Alicia: Right, right. 

And working at Kings County Distillery, was that your real entry point into the spirits world or did you have any interest in it before that?

Mark: Yeah, that was my entry point. 

I mean, I had an interest in it, so far I'd like to drink and talk about drinking. At that point, I guess I had a liberal arts student interest in craft beer. [Laughs.] I was like, ‘Oh, cool, this IPA, whatever.’ 

But yeah, at that point, again, I was like 23 when I started at Kings County Distillery. And I very quickly was like, ‘This is fascinating.’ And that distillery was interesting, in particular, because it was the first licensed distillery in New York City since Prohibition. And David and Colin, who started it, were pretty much self-taught distillers. And so that meant, we had a little library there on one of the shelves in the distillery. And basically everything that we knew about making alcohol came from that library. It didn't come from apprenticeships or preconceived notions about how you should make liquor. It was us reading books on the chemistry of distillation, and trial and erroring our way around recipes. 

So, that was a really deep end kind of—jumping into the deep end way of learning about alcohol. There's nothing surface level about it. So by the time I ended that, I felt like I had a really clear understanding of not just how our bourbon was made, but how alcohol in general was made. And I took that with me to GQ and started writing about alcohol. And I’d say that experience really informed how I wrote about alcohol, because at that point I was really interested then in where grain was sourced and how it was sourced and how craft brands were innovating in ways that the big brands weren't. And that that obsession kind of led to just kind of how I wrote about it.

Alicia: How did your understanding of the big brands versus the smaller brands, how did you get there, too? Was there a moment where you were—you realized that there was a huge difference in these ways of doing things, and that maybe one way was a little bit more destructive rather than constructive? How did you bring that to writing about it, and how did you bring that to working in the industry?

Mark: Yeah, that's a good question. 

I guess the first thing that kind of tipped me off was the way that people would ask about liquor on tours. We would do these little tours over at our distillery. And it became really clear to me that there were all these preconceived ideas about what bourbon was and what it had to be and what it had to taste like that were not—that didn't occur naturally. They happened as a result of decades-long misinformation campaigns, where a lot of the big distilleries in Kentucky wanted you to believe that bourbon could not be made outside of Kentucky, even though that had never been true. 

And that kind of stuff, every tour, there was somebody that would ask about that, ‘How can this be bourbon if it's not made in Kentucky?’ And then there was also—they would taste it and they'd be like, ‘This doesn't taste like bourbon.’ And I'd be like, ‘Well, I mean, what do you—if you think that bourbon tastes like Maker's Mark, that's not true, right? There's something messed up there about how we're putting flavor profiles into the world.’

And a lot of it is because a lot of these distilleries basically share resources to the extent that a lot of their product is made in the same distilleries from the same grain and very, very, very similar mash bills. So, people would kind of come in there with this idea that if it didn't taste like Maker's Mark and Knob Creek, which are functionally identical, then it wasn't—then they were like, ‘Well, why does it taste wrong?’

And that was something that I just kind of mentally went to war with that. What is this idea that we have that something has to taste this way? Bourbon is just something that is made in America made from 51 percent corn and put in a barrel for at least a day. That's all that it is. And it can taste like so many different things. I really wanted to dive into where those misconceptions come from and how we can challenge them. So it was less about at that point the-specifically about the sourcing, and more for me about like, ‘What can we do to challenge the notions of what bourbon is and what alcohol is in general?’

Alicia: And I think that this is such an interesting thing, because then—we've talked about this before when I wrote “On Booze”. But the idea that brands really own the flavor, and they own the categories. And so many times people don't ask for a spirit, they ask for a brand. And I think that this happens across the spectrum in food, especially in the United States, where people really connect food products to brand products and that they won't think of maybe mayonnaise as something you could make with eggs and olive oil, but as Hellman's in a jar. Or chocolate isn't a pod of cacao, it's a Hershey bar.

But I think that it's less questioned, of course in alcohol. And I guess it was Prohibition, maybe you can talk more about that. But how this kind of understanding of where alcohol comes from was totally cut off. I mean, yeah, what do you think is the cause of this that—I mean, obviously, it's money, that the brands have money. There's this real disconnect between the origins and everything. And that's why there's brands, like Tito's Vodka can say that they're handcrafted, or they're—People make a big deal about a spirit being gluten free, and it's like, ‘Well, of course, there's no gluten in it.’

How is this misinformation so powerful in alcohol?

Mark: I think conglomerization is a big part of it. It's that conglomerization demands things to be kind of, processes to be combined. The entire reason that companies like Diageo and Beam Suntory and Brown–Forman, the entire reason they're so profitable is because they share so many resources across brands, and to some extent, it doesn't even make sense to talk about those brands as distinct things other than labels. It's that they're creating all this stuff in the same places, and then it goes to a bottling line and at the bottling line they kind of decide, ‘Which of these spirits is it going to be?’ 

That's kind of what happens in product generation, too, new products development is they have—the liquid is the last thing that they think about. What they first think about is, ‘What's the name going to be? And what's the path gonna look like, and how is that going to appeal to the demographic that we want?’ Because the liquid inside is the easiest part. It's already done. They're not interested in changing that, because it would be so disruptive to their efficiency to do that. 

These are companies that have these gigantic industrialized supply chains, one big farm feeding one big wholesaler feeding one big distillery, which is basically like a big ethanol plant. And then that's churning out neutral grain spirits, like 95 percent alcohol, basically pure, into a series of little, but also still big distilleries that are then putting it into barrels. It would be so disruptive to their bottom line to have to break out the different pieces of that into interesting parts. 

To say, ‘Okay, we're going to source at this one little farm that's making a really amazing batch of something this year,’ just getting like the logistics involved in that. The trucks to move that stuff from the farm to their processing facility is way more expensive than they would ever—then they would ever agree to. It's really they've built up these efficiencies. These efficiencies compound on one another, until you basically have something that if you want to start a new spirit at a big house, the question is not, ‘Where will the spirit come from?’ The question is, ‘Which of our pre-existing spirits are you going to put into a new bottle?’

Alicia: Right.

And how has the craft movement in spirits pushed back against this, and how are—do you think it's being successful in this, or is it being successful maybe only in tiny pockets where people really have access to these things?

Mark: Honestly, the latter. The latter, that’s the approach.

Yeah, yes, absolutely. That is a part of it. Has it been successful? I think it is in the process of being successful. And I think that you're seeing the big houses kind of realigning against these new expectations for the kind of numbers that craft brands could, can do. And to them, that means—and then, forgive my cynicism as I recount this, but to them it means purchasing a craft brand and incorporating it into their pre-existing supply chain. 

So if they see a small bourbon brand doing something interesting, they’re not interested in the liquid inside of it. They're interested in the label and people's relationship to that label. The way that it's changing the industry—and again, I understand that this is kind of a cynical way to view this—is that they're seeing that they have to talk about their spirits differently, because they're seeing that those craft labels are having an impact. They're not looking at that, though, and saying, ‘We need to make our spirits differently,’ because that is off the table. That's not a thing that they're going to do. 

So, I think that a lot of them see these craft brands that come up and say, ‘We use estate-grown corn.’ Or talking a little bit more about their mash bills, and what they'll say is, ‘Oh, that's interesting. That's ok. We can do that too. We can have some buzzwords about our harvest or whatever on the label.’ 

And if you pay attention to the way that some of these bigger brands—I'm not going to say which ones, but if you pay attention to the way their labels have changed in the last five years, you will see this influx of dialogue around sourcing. And it's almost always just vague to the point of nonsense. ‘The best rye fields in Poland,’ or whatever. They—

Alicia: Oh, I know what brand it is. [Laughs.]

Mark: Yeah. That was not as coy as I thought it would be. I would say that they're changing the industry in that way, although it is a label-deep change for the most part.

Alicia: No, and it's so obnoxious because it's such an obfuscation of the issues. 

There's so much virtue-washing, I think, in alcohol as opposed to other food aspects. When we're talking about food, it could be really difficult to feed someone like Oscar Meyer hot dogs or something and tell them it's like, ‘We're doing something good.’ But Bacardi—I mean, whatever. I'll say what brand because I don't work in the industry. But they'll pay someone money to support a festival or something that's about diversity in the industry, or education around the history of Black work in the industry or brown work in the industry. And then, where does their molasses come from? It's on another level in the alcohol industry with all this money. And it's just really upsetting constantly to see, because people don't really listen and people don't really have a consciousness about it. And also, that access point is really difficult. 

So with Good Vodka, which you've launched last year, how are you thinking about how to bring your product to more people, to not just have it at Duke's Liquor Box in Greenpoint? [Laughter.]

Mark: We are in more liquor stores than that now. We have expanded a bit, and I do want to expand a bit.

I see Good Vodka as a platform. I don't see it as a brand. I see it as an opportunity to rethink the way that not just how coffee fruit is processed and discarded, but also how alcohol can be made. And it's important to me that the vodka’s the proof-case in this. The vodka is how I say, ‘Here's what we can do with this.’ I'm not ashamed to say my sights are set on anything that has a neutral spirit base. I want to prove that we can make a number of different products from coffee fruit. That's what's interesting to me about it, not just—we're not just one product. That's something I'm working on. 

The reason this is so complicated is because it involves the supply chain that is—it’s new. It's novel. It's never been done before. There was no movement of the coffee fruit wastewater from point A to point B before we started doing it, and there would—it actually had never been imported to the United States before. So cascara is having a little bit of a moment, and there is now some importing of dried cascara. But what we use is a fresh, ripe fruit concentrate because that's where the sugars live. That's where there's the most sugar. And that's just every step that we grow is a new—it involves more logistical work just to get it from, again, from point A to point B. 

So that said, I've got a scalable model in place with the Colombian Coffee Federation. I'm seeing how the vodka does. I'm seeing how people respond to it. And then hopefully, later this year, we're going to launch our second product and—

Alicia: Ooh.

Mark: Yeah.

And that will be very exciting as well.

Alicia: Nice. 

Well, to step back, how did Good Vodka come to be?

Mark: I was doing some consulting work around liquor, as I mentioned. And I had become kind of disillusioned by some of the projects that I was working on, continued to work on for several years after that. [Laughter.] It was this time where the—like I said, the big clients, the big brands, were changing their label copy or coming up with new products that, again, they wanted to present as millennial-appealing. The way that they wanted to do that was by talking more about their sourcing and using this craft language, and in some cases also talking about sustainability.

But it was really frustrating to me because again, I would ask, ‘What is interesting about the liquid? What are the ‘product truths’ that we can put in a label copy?’ And the answer to that would be, ‘TK’ [magazine speak for, “to come”], right? They don't have them yet, because the product truths are the least important part. To them, again, it's ‘We're gonna take this label, we're gonna put it in front of some focus groups. And then if it does well, we're going to launch it into the market at a price point that we feel like there's an opportunity to carve market share out of.’ And that process precludes interesting spirits. It doesn't give an opportunity to really innovate there. 

And so, I was doing these projects where all I wanted was one to be like, ‘Here is an interesting liquid. We started at square one, accomplished some interesting s**t here, and we just need you to describe it.’ What I realized was that was actually—they would never give me that assignment, because that would be so easy. It's incredibly easy to sell a product that has an interesting liquid inside of it, but that's not what exists on the market. What you're selling is a vibe or a mentality or an emotion or a time to celebrate, or something. You're selling a captain character with his leg on the barrel, or like a sea creature. That's why they have these fanciful names and made-up backstories. Think about all these bourbons that have someone's name on the front. That name is not associated with the product. You can't trace back a history of Captain Morgan to how rum is made. 

So, I was doing that. And I was starting to feel someone needs to make a spirit from square one, where what's interesting about it is built into how we make it, not just—not the other way around, not, ‘We have this liquid and now we need five ways to describe it that are good.’ But what if the way we sourced it was already good?

And at the same time, my business partner, Tristan, was starting to play around with coffee fruit. He had gone to visit a coffee farm in Guatemala. He had seen this pile of fruit in the corner and become kind of fascinated—Tristan had worked at Kings County Distillery with me—he'd become kind of fascinated with the opportunity to distill it and play around with that. At that point, he was at Booker and Dax bar at that point, a very experimental cocktail bar in the Momofuku empire. And he kind of for a couple of years after that kind of kept this fruit in mind and thought about the opportunities there.

Then, we linked up. And I thought, ‘Okay, this is the opportunity to do the thing that I want with the thing that he wants,’ and kind of combine these ambitions and use the coffee fruit to build a spirit from the ground up that can speak to these things that people actually want in the spirit, which is transparency, traceability, eco-consciousness, and, at the end of the day, deliciousness.

Alicia: And how did you bring that to market? What would have been the challenges and the—-just the necessities of making a spirit like this and bringing it to market? 

Mark: Yeah, I mean, it took six years, so there were a lot of them.

First of all, we had to figure out what we were—where we were gonna process the fruit and how we were going to process the fruit. And then once we got down there, we also had to think about what piece of the fruit we we're going to process. So if you think about the piece of coffee fruit, there's the cascara, which is the shell, the husk around the fruit. And then there's a layer of pulp, which is kind of a mushy, sticky, pulpy stuff. And then there's the parchment, which is a kind of a paper around the bean. And then there's the bean. 

And like I said, around that time—so this is like 2015, early 2015—there's a little bit more of an economy growing around cascara as a tea, which is something that was actually—something that was occurring in East Africa for a while, traditionally, but hadn't really taken place much in Latin America at all and certainly not in America. 

And so we started looking at that cascara tea, this dried tea substance, but we realized that—two things. First of all, that we weren't getting as much sugar out of it because it had been dried and just wasn't retaining the sugar in a way that was efficient to distill. 

And two, that there were new economies kind of being built up around this that were subverting its byproduct nature, were becoming profitable to grow a coffee fruit specifically for the purpose of drying and selling the cascara. And I was looking at that, and—especially as Starbucks and Blue Bottle were kind of looking at that too. And to me, that was not a byproduct. That was a product-product. If you're gonna install tens of thousands of dollars of equipment on a coffee co-op to dry cascara and you're going to pick it for its ripeness, specifically for a kind of cascara flavor profile, to me that seemed a little bit like not what I was interested in. 

But at the same time, we started looking at the coffee wastewater. And the wastewater was really fascinating, because it was basically in certain types of coffee processing, semi-wet processing, they were washing the beans, washing the pulp off of the beans and ending up with this liquid that had a lot of suspended pulp in it. And in that pulp, sugar. And we realized that if we could take that wastewater and concentrate it, we could make a syrup. Kind of like an eco-conscious molasses. And that's where we started focusing then. 

So everything that I've described to you in the last two minutes was six years of work, but it was like—but each of those steps along the way took a year. And then eventually we got to this wastewater. We did a lot of tests on it. We shipped a hobby still down to an AirBnB in Colombia in Santa Marta and spent a month down there just distilling coffee fruit. 

And eventually we had a product that tasted kind of interesting, too. It was a brandy at that point, so it was one step before a vodka. And we tasted it. We thought, ‘This is delicious. It can only get more delicious. If we distill it one more time, it’s just going to be just incredibly pure but still have some interesting notes to it.’ And at that point then, we started working with the Colombian Coffee Federation to build out a logistics network with us to work with their pre-existing network of co-ops and farmers to source the wastewater. 

And the other thing I'll add to that is that this wastewater stuff can't be used as fertilizer. That was important to us, too. It's too wet, and it just ends up creating methane emissions. So, when we were looking at the cascara, one of the farmers down in Colombia said to us, ‘You can take this stuff, but basically, then an organic farmer is gonna have to go out and buy a new fertilizer source.’ And it became equally important to us to not disrupt that already good reuse chain. So, the wastewater was really interesting for that reason.

Farmers in Colombia also get fined if they don't dispose of it properly, but it's expensive to dispose of it properly. So, a lot of them were just eating that fine. So for all of these reasons, we started working on this wastewater material. And the Coffee Federation helped facilitate that.

Alicia: Awesome. Yeah. 

And how has the response been from consumers? I know you launched at an odd time when it's not like it's gonna be in cocktails and that sort of thing. But how has that been?

Mark: Yeah.

So, I kind of imagined it as being a well spirit. I wanted it to be in cocktail bars. I wanted it to go in cocktails. That's where our network was strongest. But for obvious reasons, a lot of cocktail bars aren't really operating full capacity right now, and many of them are closed down in general. So, we put it in a few bars just to kind of seed it out there and see how it got used and see how people liked it. I thought we'd sell a case a month for the first year. 

But what actually ended up happening was a lot of liquor stores reached out to us and asked if they could bring it in. And that's been really fascinating to watch. I did not imagine the spirit would have a life in liquor stores that it does. I struggled to imagine people trying a new vodka when they go to the wine shop. 

But I think it does a good job of kind of selling itself on the bottle. And I think that the same reason that we imagined bartenders would like it, liquor stores like it too. Because it's something interesting to recommend. There's an interesting story to it. There's an interesting thing about it, for the same reason that it was easy to write the copy on the front of it because it's not hard to tell that story. I think shop owners like to be like, ‘Here's a bunch of things about it,’ that aren't just ‘It's gluten free’ or ‘It's handmade in Texas.’

Alicia: And like you said before, that you want Good Vodka to be a platform. Does that mean you want it to be something that kind of teaches people where alcohol comes from and that it could be made from waste?

Mark: Yeah.

Well, when I said platform, I mean I want a lot of different alcohols to be made—I would love to sell neutral alcohol made of coffee fruit to somebody that was thinking about buying corn ethanol from a gigantic industrial ethanol plant. I would love over the next few years, as people imagine what their new, ready to drink spirits could be, if they went a step beyond thinking that it has to begin with neutral grain spirits from Kentucky or Indiana. 

I, at the same time, to your point, I believe that simply telling people more about their liquid challenges the bigger brands to do that as well. And so, as I've watched that happen, as I’ve watched the language change a little bit in the way the big alcohol companies conceive of their labels, what I see is them kind of getting challenged by the little brands to disclose a little bit more. 

And I think that they're doing it kind of weakly, but at the same time I think that that challenge we made. I think that we can say, ‘Here's the harvest season. Here is the specific region. Why don't you put a harvest season on a bottle?’ It's mystifying to me why more brands don’t do that. It's the thing you said, the coffee always comes from somewhere. The grain always comes from somewhere and it always came from some time, too. I've never wanted to overlook that about alcohol.

Alicia: Right. 

And yeah, it's interesting because I was talking to Helena from Haus. Did you guys collaborate on the ‘Know Your Alcohol’ website? 

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Alicia: Yeah. 

And we were talking about how she was able to kind of sell directly to consumer with the-their apéritifs and that sort of thing. And her whole thing is about accessibility in that way. But with ‘Know Your Alcohol,’ how did you decide on the most important things to say to the consumer? I mean, you said your thing was brevity in writing as well. How did you kind of figure out how to communicate with people?

Mark: I thought a lot about those tours that I used to give at Kings County Distillery, and what were the things that people asked that I wanted them to know going in. What were the things that sort of stopped the tour and had to be explained?

The fact that people don't know that—I hate to keep ragging on these two, but they are such a good example. The fact that people don't know that Maker's Mark and Knob Creek come from the same manufacturer. That's such a crucial point of how you look at the liquor store shelf, that you have to understand that 99 percent of these spirits are made by ten distillers. And that those distillers make them for pennies on the dollar. 

And not to get too specific about this, but most vodka brands, those big market vodka brands cost their producers about 75 cents to make, including everything, including the grain, including the distillation, including the bottle. And then, that's their entire cost of goods. So these are incredibly profitable. Their profit margins are something like 75 percent. They've been really, really successful for these companies. And it's really, really hard to compete with that as a craft brand. You can't get your cost of goods to 75 cents, unless you're buying 10 million bottles at a time. So, that makes them more expensive. That means that if you're going to have sort of a craft brand and you want to break even, you have to sell it for a little more, then that puts you out of this kind of this purchasable tier for a lot of people. 

I think that kind of thing is really important to me that people know why some of those brands are able to be so cheap, and why other brands need to be a little bit more expensive. At the same time, we sell Good Vodka pretty cheaply considering how it's made, and I'd say pretty much break even because I didn't want it to be a luxury spirit. I don't see any interest in making another Tesla when there's no Prius on the market. It's not interesting to me to have something that people have to conspicuously spend in order to do the right thing. I wanted it to be the exact same ‘consumer decision’ to buy the eco-conscious brand as it is to buy the regular brand.

Alicia: Right.

And I mean, you’d mentioned that you're living in New Paltz and you're the primary cook in your house. How do these ideas manifest in your everyday living? I feel like that's always the question people have for me. Especially living in New Paltz, I'm assuming you have some really good produce.

Mark: There's a really good co-op up here. One of the reasons we moved up here, my wife and I, was because it was a really amazing co-op in New Paltz.

I really like being near farms. I love being able to know where things come from. When I do eat meat, I prefer it to be traceable. I'm not gonna say that I'm any sort of vegetarian. I’m not, and I would like to be more of one. I do try to be intentional about how I choose meat products in particular. And it's important to me to kind of know where they came from and know that it's not a gigantic factory farm. 

And how does it manifest in my life? Oh, God, I don't know. Probably not in as many ways as it should. I don't know. I guess I don't want to make it seem I moved up here as a live off the grid kind of thing. I realize that when I talk about spirits I make myself out to sound like I'm waging war against the consumerists and all of that, but, and in a lot of ways, I fail those tests, too. 

I like having a little bit of space between me and my neighbors. I like New York, but I never really felt like that was a hometown. I don't actually feel I have any hometown. I never felt that way about Appleton. I didn't feel that way about Kenya or Zimbabwe. I didn't feel that way about L.A. I kind of feel comfortable anywhere, to be perfectly honest. I like traveling. And I like kind of parachuting in somewhere and making a home there.

Alicia: Right. 

And for you, is drinking a political act?

Mark: Making alcohol certainly is a political act. Drinking, insofar as I try to be intentional about the choices that I make, and in that intentionality I think there is a kind of rebellion, then yeah, a little bit.

But to me, it's making alcohol, I think, because it is so much the—not the path of least resistance, because we've chosen to do it the hard way, is absolutely political to make those choices. It is hard every day to not just buy neutral grain spirit from the same place that all the distillers, that all the big distilleries do. It's challenging, and it's challenging to tell that story.

But at the same time, yeah, I think this is something that I think is important. And to take this full circle a little bit, I feel part of what growing up a little bit, just spending time in Africa as a kid did to me was it kind of made it so that I didn't see the self-pathology of America that I think is hammered into a lot of kids. And I have a great deal of skepticism about how—about America in general, and about how our, the things that we consume, are made and sourced. And a lot of that comes from having kind of moved to Appleton as an outsider with having come from a very rural village in Kenya. 

I don't know. I don't take for granted that we should be able to buy cheap alcohol from gigantic conglomerates. To put it how you do, it always comes from somewhere, right? That's kind of my mentality as well.

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

Mark: Thank you. Thank you as well. 

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 met Jenn de la Vega at The Brooklyn Kitchen in 2017, when it was still in Williamsburg but wasn’t operating as its old self. She came on to do prep for a fundraiser there after Hurricane Maria, for a burgeoning nonprofit meant to keep the hospitality industry on the archipelago afloat. She was working, and still works, as an editor for the seminal food zine Put a Egg On It. Her attitude was so chill that she adapted easily to the work and the vibe—no questions asked, no ego fluffed. As I discovered in our interview, that’s how she does everything: with a plan, with chill, with good yet assertive vibes.

Jenn has catered extravagant weddings, developed recipes for cookbooks (namely with the brilliant Nicole Taylor), and made a big pivot from working in tech to do it all. Listen above, or read below.

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

Jenn: Hi, Alicia. Glad to be here.

Alicia: How are you? How are things? Where are you right now?

Jenn: I'm in Brooklyn, New York. I would say sleep is not easy to come by these days. But I'm happy to report that I got my first vaccination last week.

Alicia: Nice! As a food service worker?

Jenn: As many things, yeah. [Laughter.] I'm glad that New York is moving along. 

Alicia: Yes, they are moving things along and that's very nice to see. 

Jenn: It is awkward. I'm sorry that I said anything because I do see people online being like, ‘I got vaccinated!’ and then people are like, ‘How? How did you do it?’ Also, persistence. It’s been refreshing.

Alicia: No.

I mean, for me, it's ‘everybody needs to get vaccinated.’ Who really cares how they go about it? We just need to freaking do it. 

But I'm happy to hear that you're on the road to immunity. [Laughter.] It's going a lot slower here, but I'm happy New York is on the mend. 

Jenn: Yeah. 

Alicia: Yeah.

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

Jenn: Sure. 

I grew up in Hercules, California. It's a small Bay Area town on the coast of San Pablo Bay. I read some history recently, because I'm starting to write a little bit about this little town. And it used to be a dynamite factory in the 1800s, so it had a key part in a lot of gold rushing, I think.

Alicia: That's wild.

Jenn: I know. 

It was a lovely little town. And my grandparents, aunts and uncles all lived within 20 miles in El Sobrante, California, and what I ate as a child is very different from what was available and around. 

My folks loved food. My grandma had a bustling garden full of fruits and vegetables. I liked carrots because they were good for your eyes and my eyes were going at a very young age. I'm not sure how much credence to give to that, but carrots all the time. Fruit snacks and McDonald's. [Laughs.]

Alicia: Wow. [Laughs.]

Jenn: I know. I had every birthday up until I was eight years old at a McDonald's. They had the best playground. They even had like a program for birthdays, a whole activity day. I wish I had a photo of it because there's this purple character, Grimace. You remember Grimace? 

Alicia: You remember Grimace, yeah.

Jenn: But in the playground, there was a jiggly sort of thing that you stepped into. It had prison bars as a tummy. And if I only knew then fast food is a prison. It’s smiling and holding the bars, that's kind of my childhood. [Laughter.]

So I was picky, and really into the things that I saw on television, I was commonly sitting at the dinner table with my arms crossed, pouting, getting yelled at about never finishing my plate. So, here's a word for this in Tagalog. So I'm Filipino American and there's a word, takaw-mata, which means, ‘My eyes are too big for my stomach.’ [Laughs.] Or I am some kind of ungrateful American. [Laughs.]

So, mealtimes were not something that I looked forward to. I drank a lot of soda. I was severely underweight through most of my life. But I have this experience that I'm noticing among first-generation Asian Americans is that we're sort of stumbling through our own personal histories and trying to connect back to it. I call it my great cultural backpedaling. I sort of revel these days in inauthenticity. 

And I'm not really one person to define the food of the Philippines, just because my family is from there. I'm also from California and have lived in New York for 15 years. So I would say that the palate has widened since childhood, but it continues to be a journey now.

Alicia: Right, right. And how does being part of that diaspora reflect in how you cook, if it does it? 

Jenn: It’s sort of sprinkled in these days. I had an opposite reaction to all of the fast food and convenience food of my childhood. I thought that French cuisine and technique was the way to go, and then I dropped out of culinary school because it wasn't the way for me. I fell in love with Spanish tapas just because I had a small appetite. But digging into the history of that, it's dangerous and sad and really intertwined with Philippine culture. 

And so, that's sort of been the crux of my — the beginnings of my writing portfolio has been the history of the Philippines mixed with new techniques and things that we thought were the way to go are not really the way to go. [Laughs.]

Alicia: Right, right. [Laughs.]

And how did you even come to focus on food? I know you used to work in tech.

Jenn: Oh, yes. Ugh. [Laughter.]

I got into cooking for others in college, through dinner parties. I wasn't much into cooking for myself. In fact, I actually mess up a lot of cooking for myself today. Before technology, I was working in the music industry, and it was going through a paradigm shift as far as promotion goes. I was one of those people that sent CDs to radio stations and magazines. When it was shifting from CDs to digital, people were requesting mp3s over CDs, we were saving on postage. People were starting to lose their jobs. I was burning out. And to cope with that, I started serving grilled cheese out of my house on Sundays. And it was sort of a good time to quit one industry and jump into another headfirst. 

But as I said before, I did not love culinary school. [Laughs.] And working in restaurants, you don't automatically get health insurance. [Laughter.] And that made me accept a job in technology. 

I was between kitchen jobs, and a friend from music called out of the blue because I'm a very avid tweeter. It wasn't a job that had been defined yet. A community manager, a social media manager, was very new a decade and a half ago. And my only question for that person was, ‘Do I get health insurance?’ I didn't really care what the job was. I was like, ‘Do I get health insurance?’ And I did. So I worked at a startup under a big film company, technicolor. This is all in TechCrunch. If anybody's curious about it, you can go check it out. 

But I was using all this newfound money to build out my kitchen, because food is something I still cared about. I loved having dinner parties. And so I was starting to buy all those fancy ingredients I could never afford. I got a food processor, making my own hummus all the time. So it really leveled me up in my spare time. But I had zero, zero concept of saving money. [Laughs.] I had always come from this position of scarcity. It was a very hard lesson after I had left. 

But my job sat in the middle of social media and curation. The big selling point was a big human team working with algorithms, because algorithms cannot tech — tell you context or narrative, no matter how smart artificial intelligence is. It can read vocabulary. It can tell us search volume and sentiment, but not a complete story. And I thought that was incredibly fascinating and helped me a lot in the way that I talk about my work and other people's work online. 

But just the shorter story of it is, it went through some kind of acquisition. I tried to explore this career seriously, but I had no desire to move to upper management. My momentum as a chef on the weekends started to pick up. I was pulling doubles. You can't spin that many plates that long. And I made this really long, six month plan to leave to start my own catering company. And that's kind of where we were as of 2019, until everything changed,

Alicia: How have you changed your business model in the pandemic?

Jenn: Oh, my goodness. 

So I was slated, or was in the middle of negotiating eight weddings as of January last year. And thankfully, I had already started to freelance a couple years before that. And so thanks to a residency at TASTE Cooking, I was able to start my first public pieces about food. And I had always dreamed of it. I've always wanted to be a writer, I was a LiveJournaler. [Laughter.] A lot of my writing has been in my social media posts. It was a matter of stringing it together and really holding on to a thread of an idea. 

But I took a strange path into this. [Laughter.] So while I was working at that tech company, I was trying to insert more food content into the workflow and responsibilities. Because I was reading so much news, my job was to surface news. And so if I could surface more food news or be in charge of that specific vertical, it would make me a little bit happier and to round out the knowledge that I was after all the time. If there is a chef or a food editor to be interviewed, I jumped at the chance, 100%. And if there was a conference my company took me to, I'd be lined for any food people, or even just hovered around the catering people just to watch. [Laughter.] That obsessed. 

But I learned about digitally native copywriting and optimization. And I learned how to talk about myself online. I don't like to. I don't like writing my bio or puffing my chest up, ‘I'm a food writer now!’ and pushing my glasses up over my nose. But I know that a lot of writers are timid about promoting their work. The big lesson for me, it was not about going viral in one moment but creating a consistent hum and an actual body of work that we can always be referencing whenever there is some kind of opportune moment or moment of learning or teaching. 

But as far as craft and practice, go, or — I was reading cookbooks before bed, getting my food handler's permit. Every event that I catered on the weekend — so, I'm still working 100% this whole time. So I'm doing things on the weekend, burning the candle at both ends. But every event that I did, added new equipment to my inventory. I added new people to my staff. I was in a time of my life that I lived for that crunch, the productivity crunch. And you'll hear that term in tech and the games industry. Lots of folks are speaking out now about labor practices and preventing crunch. But it was pretty normal for me to work 70, 80 hours a week and still stay up an extra hour to just kind of pursue the culinary knowledge and the craft and writing. 

And as I said before, no one can last that long. And this is an interesting turn, and I don't think people know that this is an option for them. But I asked to go part time at my job for a summer to join an innovation lab. 

So NYU had a program called the Innovation Lab, which was under the interactive telecommunications program. And I'm gonna keep pushing up my nerd glasses, like, ‘What does that have to do with anything?’ And that's kind of it and why I was drawn to it. It did come out of nowhere. And I craved some other creative outlet that wasn't food. It was somewhere I could solve problems with my unique point of view. 

And it was cool. Museums came in with a design problem, and we'd split up into teams to solve it. So, for example, the Met museum has a large collection. And people check it off their bucket list, but they never intend to return. And I mean, I know because now they can't really return. But theoretically, how do we get people to return physically and digitally? And I loved thinking about this problem. And I landed on, ‘What if we made a Chrome extension?’ because people hoard their tabs. How many tabs you have open right now? I have like five.

Alicia: Always at least five, yeah. [Laughter.]

Jenn: Yeah.

And so for every tab that you open if you have this extension, it shows you a cat from the Met museum's collection. So you're exploring art, but also this passive thing that you do all the time. 

But those are the kinds of problems that I like to think through. And art installation and digital UX were now a new lens for me to apply to both a day job and in event catering. And that's kind of how my catering perspective sort of opened up. It sort of blossomed into something new. Because I thought catering was just, ‘I'm going to provide this platter for you.’ But it became more of a production thing for me, of the little minutiae of the colors and the flow of the event and just experience, people experience. And so, that was incredibly amazing and valuable for me. And so, I loved the idea of artists residences. And that's how I joined TASTE, and was speaking to Anna and Matt about it. 

And then after I quit my job, my first step out the door was another residency at Kickstarter, which is a place where I've funded a few of my stranger ideas. I have hosted parties where the goal was to collectively create pornographic food videos, one. Not incredibly explicit, but more like popping 100 egg yolks in one day was a goal, or creating as many kinds of nachos that we can create and then sort of looping all that footage together into something that we've made as a community. And I love challenging what a party should be. And just cooking for people is exciting for me. 

So I took this creator's residency very seriously, but also spent that time figuring out what is freelance, what is an invoice, what is a budget, who was a mentor. I still don't know. But important lessons from that have been enforcing rest, creating boundaries. Especially when you head into a creative field, you have to have lots of boundaries. And taking the time to figure that out was life changing. But that's now why I sit squarely 100% in the food world.

Alicia: Nice. Yeah. [Laughter.]

Jenn: Lot of work.

Alicia: Yeah, of course. 

I mean, you manage a lot of projects right now. I know you're working on a few cookbooks all at the same time. You're writing for outlets. How have you kind of moved into that recipe zone with cookbooks?

Jenn: That was part of the pivot. 

It started a long time ago. It was through cooking competitions, actually, where I've met a lot of the collaborators that you might recognize today like Emily Hanhan, Cathy Erway, and Nicole Taylor, who — they've all joined these cooking competitions in Brooklyn and stood next to me trying to — not sell, but these were ticketed events where people in Brooklyn would bring a pot of chili. And you could serve them to hundreds of people, and people would vote. And there was a winner. And at first, there was no prize or money involved. But it started to have a money prize. This series was called The Takedowns. Matt Timms organized all of it. And he started to introduce other kinds of food. 

I got an email from a roommate saying, ‘Oh, you love cooking? Why don't you try this?’ And so I did. And I got addicted to it. I love competition. But most of all, I love the community of it ‘cause there's so many quirky people that enter competition. [Laughs.] As reality television can show us, there are a lot of personalities out there and a lot of really great ideas. 

But I met Nicole Taylor through that. And after she got her first book deal, we — she asked me to just test one recipe on her first cookbook, which was the Up South Cookbook. And I was getting into, getting comfortable with food writing and writing my own recipes through the residency. And I just sort of put it out into the universe. I wrote up sort of my goals for this. It was at the same time as the artist residencies and figuring out my life. 

But I did the thing. I did the Internet manifesting thing and told people on LinkedIn — I hate LinkedIn — but I did it on LinkedIn, on Facebook. Everywhere that I am present on the internet, ‘cause as somebody who grew up on the internet, why would I not use it to tell people what I need and want in life? And I was just putting it out there. If people don't know that I want to do these things, then no one's ever going to know. And thankfully, Nicole was paying attention around that time when she was working on The Last O.G. Cookbook. And so, that's how I joined that project. 

And I really enjoy the production process. It’s very similar to making an album, except we have a longer table of contents and more editing passes and things like that. But it really spoke to the iteration part of my brain from technology. As you refine a product, you look at features that work and don't work and rely on community feedback and tasting to refine it. And I really enjoyed that process. 

And so it wasn't necessarily a pivot-pivot when the pandemic started, but more of a weight shift. I'm shifting my weight to another foot. And hopefully I can come back to catering, but very, very lucky to know Nicole and to work with her and flesh out these ideas. But yeah, it is more weighted in the direction of freelance and writing these days then events. But I'm glad I got my shot and hopefully gonna get there, get the second one in it.

Alicia: Right.

Well, you do in your catering such wildly unique events, like the weddings that you do. And I know you've talked about — you just said that it comes from that same sort of problem solving. But what is your process when you are doing an event like that? Where do you come from and what questions do you ask to determine how to kind of create such a unique approach? [Laughs.]

Jenn: Yeah, I joke that I'm the opposite of Franck from Father of the Bride. [Laughter.] He has this big ass binder with all the prices listed out and just these ’90s printouts. I look at that YouTube clip a lot whenever I'm feeling down about catering. [Laughs.] I look at that, because my method is way more flexible and unsustainable. 

I love that it's unsustainable. I can't create inventory or consistent recipes if every menu is different. And I find that really exciting. That's where my online handle comes from, Randwiches, random sandwiches. Personally, I don't like eating or making the same thing twice. But I know that's necessary for creating and finalizing something, as I've learned through the years. But I used to have a random sandwich delivery service in New York and that's how I built my internet following. I love that project. But it is unsustainable. It is just me delivering sandwiches on foot all over New York City, and it gets tiring. And that's sort of inspired me to look into actual catering. 

So, when it came to weddings, it started with friends that I knew that I couldn't really mess up with them. Anything I did, I was an angel. [Laughs.] But before the pandemic, I'd ask to meet up with a couple at a bar or restaurant, and I'd go through a journalistic battery of the venue, the vibe and their story. 

And I'd ask them questions like, ‘What foods did you have on your first date? Do you remember that? What do you cook together now on a normal day, or on a special day? Is there something you make when you feel bad? Are there any family favorite dishes? Are there any favorite restaurants?’ The big question of dietary restrictions, allergies, and picky family members, because sometimes that can create a little bit of stress. And pie in the sky ideas. I love entertaining the pie in the sky ideas, because I treat it like a design brief mixed with a band's backstage rider list. 

We start throwing out the big ideas that we can anchor a menu on and then bring it down to earth as we reconcile the cost and the venue. [Laughs.] And we visit that venue and ask all the questions and make sure that we can do it. 

I have a bleeding heart for smaller budgets and a little bit more of a DIY hybrid. If you're looking for a package you just point at, I'm not the person you should be working with. I'm way more collaborative. I'm not going to turn away Mom's dilly beans that she pickled for you over the course of the whole summer. I'm going to encourage Grandpa to go catch all the salmon for the reception. And those are the real things that have happened because I'm open to it as a chef. I have no ego about like, ‘This is my menu and you should choose it.’ It's more about the story you are trying to tell, and I find that so, so exciting because I want to be able to help you tell it.

Alicia: Right.

And it's interesting, because so much of cooking and being a chef is understood as a very ego-driven thing. And how do you kind of see your role then, as a cook, if it's not about your ego?

Jenn: Oh my goodness.

I'm a conduit, absolutely a conduit. I'm shepherding in some way the feelings that you're having that day, and it should come out as joy in the food. And I want to celebrate that as much as possible. 

Obviously, I love a good party. [Laughter.] I mean, my entrance into cooking for others has been dinner parties through and through this whole time. Weddings are even offices or whatever it is that you're celebrating — celebration has always been the center of everything that I do, mostly ‘cause it comes from my family. I have a huge ass family, and any excuse to gather is something that I didn't realize that I valued at up until this moment. [Laughter.] I’m currently processing as we speak. 

But I have a lot of cousins. Every graduation, every tooth, every step, every everything has always been a reason to cook something. And my family has always been a part of that. And I live across the country from them. So now it's changed into all of their cooking endeavors, they'll tag me ‘cause they know that I'm a chef now. They want to show it off. And I love that.

And it's sort of bled into another thing that I've done. Another new thing that I've done during the pandemic has been live streaming on Twitch, which is typically a video game streaming platform. But there was a whole division of people who now cook or talk about food. And I started a little talk show called Attack the Pantry, and it is geared toward the 101 community of cooks who are a little scared of it. And I love deep diving into ingredients and talking about their potential.

And we sort of ripped off the idea of Chopped, where we asked the audience to give us some ingredients and then we pretend that's our basket and sort of mentally prepare ourselves for, ‘What can we do with that?’ And I enjoy it very much. It's the favorite segment of the show.

Alicia: And your own cookbook. You've only done one of your own cookbooks, right?

Jenn: Mm-hmm.

Alicia: Yeah, Showdown. It's about cooking contests, which you mentioned earlier. But what was it about the cooking contest that you liked and what made you want to create a book out of the experience?

Jenn: Oh, man.

I was addicted to the thrill of competition, that the — some of the prizes were hilarious. [Laughter.] A year's supply of bacon is very vague. But I'm here to pop the bubbles that it's not as you expect, a pallet of bacon arriving at your front door. It is coupons, people. It's coupons. [Laughter.] But it was exciting to thirst for those things. 

And I became friends with a lot of the competitors like I mentioned earlier, and I treated it like it was my culinary school. Because I didn't like culinary school. I did not like the brigade to graduating to a line cook in some restaurant where it's not my food. I didn't want to be an executive chef somewhere. I wanted to create, create, create. 

And iterating through competition was something that helped me learn about recipe development, because if I never wrote it down I couldn't do it again or fix it. So I started to take notes and create all of these huge tomes of ‘Ok, that didn't work.’ And I would go through a testing regimen for each recipe. 

And I remember there's this photo I took a long time ago of eight meatball sauces that we were trying out like, ‘Oh, is ginger work here? Is parmesan rind work here? How much spice do we need?’ 

And I don't really talk about it, but I was — I started as a biology major. And I had this sort of mental breakdown in the laboratory where we were learning about titration. You have two long pipettes that drop single drops into a beaker, and it was driving me insane. You drop one drop and then write it down. 100 drops later, I'm staring at it like, ‘Why haven't you changed? [Laughs.] I want to just pour the whole thing in. And with cooking, I still get my little obsessive research mode, but also I can pour whole things in there and be like, ‘What happened?’ [Laughter.]

But yes, after a long time of competing and writing the recipes down I thought about like, ‘Oh, I've always wanted to write a book.’ I had this checklist when I was little, ‘Write a book. Go to the Olympics. Make a film.’ I wanted to do every single large thing there was, like, ‘Write an album.’ And I can safely say that yes, I have written an album. And yes, I have now written a book. And now I'm going after other things, but still sitting in the food world. 

But yeah, so all this competition helped me hone the skills. It took me about eight years to actually win anything. I kept at it. And along the way, I kept winning wonderful kitchen prizes. This is why I have expensive Le Creuset. I could never afford $300 Dutch ovens. No way. I mooned about it, I dreamed about it, but I never imagined that I would buy them. 

So through competition is how I outfitted the rest of my kitchen, which I don't think is possible so much anymore in Brooklyn, ‘cause it's not an active series anymore. But Instagram definitely still has contests that I've won a few items through photo styling contests. And that's sort of also where I developed that skill. 

And when you work on a cookbook, you under — you realize that all of these jobs are specialized and they're different people. But because my cookbook was a little more bootstrapped — I hate using that word, that's such a whack word. But because I had a smaller budget, I sort of was a lot of those things. I styled my own book, I developed my own book, and I'm starting to understand the value of that. And now, I can offer that to other other authors and work with them on it. So, that's really exciting. 

I just wanted to document that period of time. And I'm really glad I did, because it's not happening anymore or won't come back for a while, I don't think. But if I may brag, I have a seven foot trophy in my house from a barbecue competition. And that was a different series that was really eye opening for me. I didn't know anything about barbecue or the history of it. And my very presence there was powerful, I think, looking back on it. I'm a short Asian American woman standing in front of a fire burning herself like, ‘Ow!’ 

But making my place there was interesting. I have a small title, a small bestowed title of grillmaster. And when you Google grillmaster, it's a lot of larger men in the South, scattered among the South. I'm a Northern-ite. [Laughs.] And not a lot of them are women or tiny, tiny Asian women at that. And so I love that I am contributing to the fabric of it and trying to break down what it is to be a person at a grill. I like that that book has sort of cemented it, or at least held my place in that atmosphere.

Alicia: Right. 

And for you, is cooking a political act?

Jenn: Absolutely. Yes.

I may not be outward about it on social, but I think seizing creative control and shaping a career that doesn't follow that typical path is a statement. And I think the wedding and event industry can be very mechanical and focused on a capitalistic bottom line. And while I'm engaged in capitalism on many different levels — I'm sure you have that sickly exhale every now and then.

But what's important to me or what's become important to me is creating safe work environments and events and leadership. My leadership is not top down. It's very sideways. I learned this from both technology and a family member who has a restaurant. I prefer to go sideways than up and down. I'm very open to collaboration and to ideas for improvement and efficiency, and above all, just learning. I'm constantly learning. That is the perspective that I always will have and hold on to. 

And the people that I work with will always have something to teach me. That's so exciting. And so, this aunt or great aunt who lives in Bacolod, which is a tiny town, tiny island in the Philippines. She runs a restaurant called Mely's Garden. And I asked her, ‘What happens when someone is sick?’ She says that everyone knows every station and recipe so anyone can step in. And none of the recipes are gate-kept in someone's brain. It's not in some secret room, made a ways, whatever. When you're sick, you stay home. And that kind of care regarding labor and wellbeing really stuck with me. And so, I sort of build that into the relationships and events that I do. 

And like I said earlier, injecting my stories into barbecue and into the fabric of barbecue is political and powerful. I want to change the face of what American barbecue can be and what a grillmaster looks like. That's very thrilling. [Laughter.] And so yeah, my politics are tiny but I feel I make progress in a very empathetic way. Very community-oriented way. And it makes me so happy to be able to relate to people on that level and to give them that kind of safeguard that they want. I am not some kind of predator that's going to leave you destitute, because that's what happened to me and I would hate for that to happen to anybody I worked with.

Alicia: Right. Well, thank you so much.

Jenn: You are so welcome.

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

Listen now | The chef and community organizer talks occupation and moving to a worker-owned model.

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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

To speak to Reem Assil of Reem’s California in the Bay Area was a privilege. As a Palestinian-Syrian chef, former labor and community organizer, and restaurant owner moving toward a worker-owned model, she is particularly knowledgeable and thoughtful on every segment of the food system and industry that I care most deeply about. From colonization and occupation, to what role the restaurant plays in our society, to how to create equitable systems while living under capitalism—she is versed in it all. And so, through some technical difficulties, we talked about everything. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Reem Thank you so much for taking out the time to talk today.

Reem: Thanks for having me.

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

Reem: So I grew up in a very small suburb, right outside of Boston in New England. My first food memories are actually — the stories of the food that I grew up versus the memories of food, there's a complete dissonance between the two, I remember sort of growing up and eating macaroni and cheese from the box and ramen, instant ramen. We were latchkey kids, so that was our comfort food. 

But we also had sort of an eclectic mix of Arab food. My mom always tried to find ways to take sort of American classics and Arabify them, as we would say. Our spaghetti and meatballs were more kofta and meatballs, with the red sauce that was spiked with our seven spice mix. So yeah, just a hodgepodge of sort of traditional Arab foods, but with a lot of sort of Americana cuisine trickled in between.

Alicia: How did you make your way into cooking, into professionally cooking?

Reem: Sort of a roundabout way, I would say. I never imagined that I was going to be a professional cook, per se. Sort of prior to my culinary career, I was — I spent a lot of time in the nonprofit sector. I was doing work around the issues that really matter to me here in the Bay Area, which I've been lucky to call home for the last 18 years, issues like affordable housing and living wages for workers and community benefits for residents. 

And that work was really amazing. I was part of campaigns that won some real tangible things for the communities that I was working with. But I think that my work as a professional community and labor organizer wasn't sort of getting the transformative piece of organizing that I was really yearning for, that sort of taking time and transformation of people in their leadership. It's too unstable. The nonprofit sector just basically was reliant on the funding we would get, and one month I'd be working in one community and sort of building up towards a campaign and the next minute the priorities of our funders would change and we’d have to move.

And I was like, ‘I don't want to do this anymore. I really want to build deep with the communities I was working with.’ And I also noticed that like the communities I was working with, and the things that we were fighting for, it was just like, ‘We're losing our ability to imagine what actually is the world that we want to live in.’ And that made me really sad. 

I was burnt out at a certain point, and went on a trip to kind of just deal with the burnout. So, it was really a selfish thing in the beginning. And when I was burnt out, I was really turning towards baking. Baking was sort of my place. And I had sort of been an amateur baker throughout the years. California is really where I learned how to work with ingredients, how to learn all these things. And it was really sort of a healing place for me, but it was personal, right? It wasn't like, ‘Oh, I'm gonna pursue a career in baking.’ 

But then when I took a trip in 2010 sort of out of Burnell back to the homeland, it was there where I kind of — everything sort of came together. For me, it was seeing these spaces. And these are the kind of spaces I was yearning for, this deep connection to my culture that I didn't have. I had been to Syria, Lebanon, Palestine over the course of my childhood, but I was a kid from America and I didn't have the memories in that homeland that my parents did. 

And so it was always sort of a strange feeling going back home. But it was this last trip, and it has actually been the last trip that I've taken there since. The food spaces is where I really felt connected, and I, really — the sort of gift of Arab hospitality and Arab breadmaking, and a way to think about the lifeline of Arab history and all that we bring. And I was like, ‘The U.S. needs to know about this.’

So, it became sort of just a mission. And I came back, and I was — I quit my job. And I enrolled myself into a culinary program at my local community college. They had a baking and pastry two-year program. And I scared the crap out of my parents. And there it is.

I was like, ‘I'm gonna be a baker, because I want to create this.’ So I always sort of had a mission, that sort of pursuing a culinary career was a means to this end, which was much bigger than just like, ‘I want to learn how to bake.’ But I knew that if I was gonna create this bakery; it had to be the best bakery. And I needed to show the truest reflection of what I saw when I went to Syria and when I went to Lebanon. 

And so I spent really 10 years doing that, or 7 years doing that before I opened my bakery. And I feel super fortunate to have done it in a shorter amount of time, ’cause the food world is not kind. [Laughs.] Working in kitchens is not great. And I got to learn what is it that I want to do, and what is it that I don't want to do. So yeah, my entry into the food world was really sort of a roundabout way. It wasn't my love for food, but my love for community that sort of brought me in.

Alicia: And how did your work as a labor and community organizer influence the way that you run your restaurants? 

Reem: Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, as somebody who is a self-proclaimed anti-capitalist, to suddenly open my own bakery and become the ‘boss,’ that was a huge contradiction. And I grappled with it for a long time. I mean, I spent, prior to that, spent my time in underground campaigns to help workers sort of deliver their letter to the boss. And so I was like, ‘Ok, I'm going to be different.’

And in many ways, I think my labor organizing, seeing my workers as sort of leaders, and how do I build a team that builds the leadership of these workers to be more than just workers, right? I don't see my team as just cooks or front of house, or any of these things. And so I think, sort of having that experience of building leadership and workers as sort of nuts and bolts organizing skills really did help me and my leadership style. 

Right out of culinary school, I was really lucky enough to get a job at a pretty renowned bakery and pizzeria cooperative called Arizmendi. And so I learned what sort of participatory management and leadership looks like, in a way that I think I wouldn't have if I just reading about co-ops. 

And so I think all of those things really helped me build empathy. I mean, it's not easy to be a small business owner and I was constantly at odds with sort of the constraints of running a food business with sort of my recognition that from a workers’ rights standpoint, it's that these things have to be in place. And so it didn't make me necessarily the most profitable business in the beginning, but it was a long-term investment that I knew that I was going to build my model around sort of having a high labor line and in really investing in my workers.

Not just in wages and benefits, but also in time. We would have staff meetings, and we would pay people for their time to sort of go above and beyond. And that turned out to be really good for us. You know, we have a pretty good retention rate at Reem’s. 

And I want to say the biggest moment — and I talked about this in the piece with Tunde that you mentioned — that my workers delivered a letter to me in the midst of the pandemic. And of course, as the ‘boss,’ I could have been really scared and threatened and take it personally like, ‘Don't they know what I'm going through?’ [Laughs.] 

And instead, I was really proud. Yeah, I was like, ‘Ok, go, this is you stepping into your power and asking for transparency.’ This is a chance for me to kind of really check my own contradictions in sort of the role of power that I play. 

So, yeah, it's a lot of contradictions and a lot of things that I grappled with. But I think, above all, my world and community and labor organizing really helped me be a better leader. And that's kind of how I think of myself at Reem’s. And I'm still learning, but it definitely informed the way that I structured my business to really sort of center my employees first.

Alicia: And when you opened Reem’s, you told the press that you had envisioned it as a community hub. And has your understanding of the role of the restaurant in politics and community changed since that time, and especially in the pandemic?

Reem: Yes and no.

I don't think it's changed, per se. I think it's gotten more and more clear. When we opened Reem’s, or when I sort of envisioned Reem’s even 10 years ago, we weren't imagining just a restaurant, like the sort of traditional form of a restaurant. And the more and more I got — the deeper I got into the food industry, I realized that it's very short-sighted.

Alicia: I wanted to ask you about how you express political ideas and political realities through food and through the space that you have created. And how have you been successful and what do you think helps in trying to discuss issues of maybe colonization, apartheid, all these things? How do you express them through food and through a food space?

Reem: So, I think that sort of how my food sort of intersects with these larger concepts of colonialism and apartheid, I think that that is a multi-layered question. I think that just inherently my food is political, just by nature of being a generation of oppressed people who are fighting to, just for their mere existence. And so food becomes sort of a marker of our existence, our identity, in the midst of a myth that we never existed as a people. 

So the work that I do around my food is really as someone who is an exile. I'm in diaspora, as a Palestinian and Syrian, and my role is to continue sort of the generations of storytelling. Many communities that come from struggle sort of use food and other sort of cultural traditions to be able to carry that story, so that we don't forget.

But I think, in particular, being in diaspora in the U.S., which is the belly of the beast, as I would call it. The U.S. has been single handedly responsible, if not aiding and abetting, other forces of colonial rule and extraction of resources from other communities. And so if we can change the worldview of people, it's a sort of organic consciousness raising. 

Food becomes this sort of very visceral experience. If you create these conditions through food, you can break down at least some barriers to be able to have the hard conversations. And then hopefully the people who engage with my food, particularly as an Arab in this country, they could start to question, what is the role and what power do they have to hold their government responsible? I don't think that I'm going to end apartheid in Palestine through my food or anything like that. But I think that that sort of deeper level of consciousness raising is important. 

I think the second part of my work, which is a little bit more indirect, is sort of the issue of food sovereignty. Reem’s, we sit in different neighborhoods in Oakland, mostly Latinx communities, Black and brown communities. It is important to intersect the struggle that people are dealing with the forces of gentrification and being sort of cut off from their food systems, and what has helped them be resilient. We think about sort of the connections between our disconnection from our food with the disconnection of other Black and brown communities. 

And so the intersection of struggle is really important for us, and why we sort of engage in questions of food sovereignty, and how do we build resilience in communities, and fight sort of the forces of disaster capitalism.

Alicia: Yeah, no, it's interesting because I was reading about the sort of controversy that emerged over the mural you have of — and I'm not sure I'm going to say her name correctly, but Rasmea Odeh. 

And so it's interesting to me, because here in Puerto Rico, people don't know about — well, Americans, white Americans generally, or most people from America don't understand the situation with the United States. They come here because they don't need a passport, and because the money doesn't change. And they don't come here with any real understanding of the impact that the U.S. occupation and colonization of the island has had on how things are. They'll make commentary about things kind of not working properly, or not being available, or maybe the government is corrupt. 

And it's like, ‘Well, do you understand how that circumstance came to be? And do you understand why local food is far, far more expensive than imported food, and also far less abundant?’ And all these things.

And I was thinking about how there's a bar down the street from me called The Mezzanine, which is almost themed, but — as Pedro Albizu Campos, who was a very big force in, for Puerto Rican independence. And there's bullet holes there from the FBI shooting up the bar, but I don't think that anyone makes any connections about — they go there and they have a drink. Maybe they look at a newspaper article. There's no real attempt to make this real conversation happen. 

It was so interesting to read about what happened in your restaurant, because it just seemed like a different sort of acceptance that happens here and — about things, or erasure that happens here, versus that conversation kind of really coming alive and happening, which is something I would like to see, I guess. It was interesting to see that. And there's so many — there's not so many — but there are parallels between the struggles.

Reem: My experience with the sort of political backlash of — I had two ways I could have gone with that. 

One, I could have just shied away and been like, ‘my food is for everybody,’ and kind of taken that line. ‘This is just a community elder.’ But that would have been a little disingenuous. I mean, those things are true, right? My food is an inclusive space. But I think that I really pushed, by doubling down and saying, ‘I refuse to sort of hide parts of my identity,’ made my food even better and my spaces even better, because I think people are—

We're in a moment of history, because this is not the first time this has happened. And I think about resistance fighters like Nelson Mandela, and now he has the Nobel Peace Prize. Who was the first person to put him up on a wall? And same thing, I'm sure in Puerto Rico, there are moments in history where you can kind of shift people's thinking. 

But I think here in the U.S., there is definitely — I call it like Progressive Except for Palestine, the PEPs, and it's like nobody's willing to touch that. Like, ‘Yes, ok, we’ll help combat anti-Arab racism. The Muslim ban is bad.’ But when it came to Palestine, people don't want to touch it. And so I do think that I kind of play a role in that, for better or for worse, of not shying away from these things.

But it is true, Puerto Rico — I’m just so fascinated by the history there, but I think about — I often think about it as a parallel with the situation with the occupation of Palestinians, because we're — it's like 70 years now. So it's new, right? And the occupation of Puerto Rico, it's over 100 years.

Alicia: Right, by the U.S. And then before that Spain, yeah.

Reem: And the normalization of occupation is a scary thing. That's the hardest to fight. And the State of Israel, the government, they put thousands, I mean, millions of dollars into marketing campaigns. And even gastrodiplomacy is kind of their big ‘thing.’ And wow, they're putting all this money in their — they understand food is a way to pacify people and normalize it. Like, ‘Look, we're all this nice — this is like a beautiful place to visit.’ And like, ‘Don't mind what we're doing.’

They do these farm-to-table programs, and right next door they're razing farms and kicking people off land that have been connected to that land for hundreds of years. And so, the true contradictions, they're putting millions of dollars to try to normalize. And so, I'm in the business of fighting that normalization. And just talking to activists on the ground in Puerto Rico, I think that that is a part of the work, is denormalizing. 

The other thing that I always see the parallel between is the NGO-ization.

Alicia: Oh, gosh, yes. [Laughs.]

Reem: [Laughs.] Yeah, like squashed people's movements, nonprofits. And that is very apparent in the West Bank and Gaza. 

But I am really inspired by people on the ground who are building their own cooperative movements and figuring out ways to work outside of the NGOs to do that work of denormalization.This is not normal.

Alicia: It's so important to say that. But as you say that, it reminds me of this kind of, also fetishization of Palestinian ingredients in the West that has happened where it's like, ‘Oh, this is za’atar from a co-op in Palestine.’ I have za’atar from a co-op in Palestine in my pantry. I love it. But at the same time, it's like, ‘Well, what does that mean, really? And what difference does that really make?’

And someone was saying to me, ‘This olive oil is from a co-op.’ These are really fetishized ingredients and food without real conversations there. How do you feel about that, or how do you—

Reem: Glad you’re going there, I love it. [Laughter.]

I always joke, I'm like, ‘A win is a win, right? If Whole Foods is selling—’ But obviously, the pessimist in me is like, ‘Oh, they're just doing this to avoid our conversation about deshelving from Israeli products.’ Like, ‘Here’s a co-op. [Laughs.] There. Don't bother us,’ kind of thing. So, that's the pessimist side of me. 

But yeah, I grapple with that. I grapple with that even in my own identity in this age of the celebrity chef of like, ‘Oh, she's Palestinian.’ And it feels a little tokenizing. It's like, ‘Ok, but what are you gonna do about that? Are you gonna challenge the next time you see in the news about something?’

Yeah, I mean, I think it's not to take away from the fact that these things are becoming more and more sort of — I wouldn't say mainstream, but at least sort of knowledge. That's different than it was 10 years ago when I was organizing. But yeah, it's a weird place to be. I'm just so used to being on the fringes that when you — what happens when it becomes sort of the hot thing?

That really bothers me in the food world. I feel like the food media — this is something that you talk about a lot, is like, ‘What does the food media have to do with this?’ And I think absolutely in the way they shape and frame the stories that people just gravitate and repeat those frames in their heads. So yeah, we have a lot of work to do. [Laughs.]

Alicia: I mean, I think about it, as kind of say — in the same way as the media has said, ‘We are representative now and we have diversity now,’ because you put people in positions, you know? But then you do nothing politically to — or even in writing, you don't really take a political stand to say anything else. And so, yeah, it's very complicated. 

And food has such a big role to play in keeping people, as you said, from believing that occupation and colonization is normal. And I don't think that the food media necessarily is kind of holding up any sort of end of that bargain. It likes to cover chefs like you, but I don't think it likes to take it any farther than that. 

Reem: Some sort of social justice. I'm like, ‘I just need to start my own sort of ‘State of the Dough’ or something.’ Because if somebody asks me again, ‘How are we going to solve the issue of the restaurant industry?,’ I'm just gonna just go crazy, you know? 

I think not dealing with the root causes is just like, ‘You're just part of the problem. You're asking the wrong questions around what is to be done.’ And yeah, it's quite frustrating, because we don't have to tell you the answers. The answers are there. And they're just not willing to touch it, I think is the big thing. 

I don't know how controversial I was, but I was a good figure to cover for a few years. But then when we actually go down and do the work, that part is not covered. It's just the sound bites, and I'm just tired of the sound bites, you know? So I don't know if media, food media can change and will change. Hopefully, there's more folks like you who are covering the real root cause. 

But until that changes, I think that we — there has to be other ways that we — there has to be other gatekeepers. [Laughs.] Maybe we're our own gatekeepers, and we continue to do the work. Yeah, just talking about the ideas as this — almost tokenizing, it takes away agency and power from the real work that we're doing. And that is very frustrating.

I don't feel like I really accomplished my goals. Yes, I got a national platform to talk about these issues. And that is important to some extent. But it also distracted me from the real work that I was doing on the ground. So, for me, this pandemic has been a blessing in that way of like, ‘Ok, great. Za’atar is popular. Ok, what are we gonna do about it? How do I subversively use this za’atar to take it a step further?’

And the thing that I'm most proud of is when we got someone like Gabrielle Hamilton to not take an Israeli-sponsored trip. I mean, those are the wins. It's gonna take a while, and it's gonna take real organic conversations, but those are the things that are most rewarding for me is to connect with people on the real.

I did these pop-ups in New York three, four years ago. I made so many comrades in the food worlds from those pop-ups that are doing work around food sovereignty both here in the U.S. and in Puerto Rico. And Indigenous folks, that's a whole struggle that I'm only just surface level learning about and seeing the parallels. That work is — it's gonna take us. It's gonna take the people who are most impacted.

And that's kind of why we shifted gears at Reem’s. Obviously, I was on this path to this meteoric rise, as the media would say. I halted all of that. And I was like, ‘We’re gonna switch to a worker-owned cooperative.’ That's easier said than done. But we're doing the work to get there.

Alicia: Well, in ‘Let It Die,’ a short film by Tunde Wey, which kind of touches on all of these things that we're talking about, he talks to you about the differences between incremental change and revolution. And you end it by saying, ‘We need to start from zero and that some people will have to give up their privilege in the restaurant industry,’ which seems connected to you saying you're going to go to that worker co-operative model. 

So a lot of the conversation has been happening during the pandemic about maybe not focusing on the chef, maybe talking to people who work in the restaurant itself. What does that shift of power and privilege look like to you when it comes to the restaurant industry?

Reem: Yeah, I think you said it so eloquently. 

I mean, I think I included myself in that. I had to lose some power, and what — how are we going to use that power and share that power and give up some of that power in order so that we can all sort of step into our power? I used power like six times there in that sentence. 

So we were doing an apprenticeship program for our workers. And we were doing the pyramid of power yesterday. I was demonstrating it to them. And I was like, ‘What would happen if we just said, ‘While we're pressuring you to give up your power’ — ’cause we know that people in power don't give up their power freely, so there is organizing that needs to happen — ‘but while we're doing that, what if we build our own systems so we don't rely on you? We're not gonna rely on your banking institution. We're gonna build our own health care systems. We're gonna grow our own food.’ 

And I saw this spark in my team. There was an a-ha moment of, ‘We don't have to. We have power on the bottom of this pyramid, ’cause we are the foundation of it. So let's crumble this thing. Let's turn it up on its head a little bit, and cut off some of the lifelines a little bit.’ 

And so, that work has to be done on the ground level. But those of us who are sort of in the middle of that pyramid, we have a role to play to step aside to allow that work to happen. And so for me, I'm really hoping that the — we're documenting everything that we're going through at Reem’s to go through this transition, so that people can imagine. 

I think a lot of people in the food world, especially my own sort of colleagues in the industry, might be curious about this model. Might want out. It's so burdensome. The sort of pressures of capitalism are not healthy for anyone. But they might not know how to wrap their brains around how to do it. And so, we're doing a lot of work to sort of document that process. It's a process. 

And what I told my workers yesterday is just because we're pressuring those in power to give up their power doesn't mean that we're not going to replicate the same things we see. And so, there's a lot of unlearning we have to do in this next year. If we're going to turn into a cooperative, we need to learn how to be with one another and recognize even our own power and privilege within that space. 

Yeah, so a lot of work has to be done sort of on the ground level to unlearn the generations of internalized racism and all the things, all the oppressions that people, especially in the food world. I mean, the food system in general, it's majority BIPOC folks. We have internalized all these things. And so we have to unpack that a little bit and explore it and figure out what is the new model? That's just gonna take time.

And I thank Tunde every day. I never believed an incremental change, so he put some words in my mouth, just for the movement. [Laughs.] He compared me to Obama. I'm like, ‘I don't think that I was Obama.’ I understood the contradictions of being a business owner; I'm trying to just feed my family; I'm the primary breadwinner in my family. So, I understood that was a means. I didn't think that the revolutionary work that I was doing, sort of within the scope of my business — was within the scope of my business. It was more the byproducts of my business that I do, not work. Just for the record, Tunde.

But I think that I did sort of play into the — I could do side by side. And I was like, ‘Actually, no, we could be more revolutionary with our models and the economic system that we play in. And I have a role. I have knowledge. I have experience, I've seen models. I have all these tools in my toolkit, and I have all these relationships with different communities. Why don't I fast track this?’ We always wanted to be worker-owned at some point. So, all I did was fast track a vision that I already had. 

But that said, I am a little bit less wavering. And if it doesn't work, I don't want to participate in the things that were detrimental to my community. And if the contradictions become too much, I will exit. And so that's something I'm grappling with personally. But I feel really inspired by my team. They're primed for worker ownership. So that’s good. Some places aren't, because of the structures they’ve built. So everything that I built thus far sort of made it a little bit more fertile for this kind of transition, but transition is hard and it's a process. So I'm just trying to be humble, and decenter myself in it all as much as I can.

Alicia: Well, my normal final question is redundant here. I want to ask you about the phrase, ‘There's no ethical consumption under capitalism.’ I wrote a piece about ‘ethical chocolate,’ very beginner's guide, just kind of reminding people that there are still so many labor issues happening in chocolate, and that we could lose chocolate at any moment if a disease decides to attack the one species that we consume. 

So they were like, ‘But there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.’ Regarding chocolate, chocolate made from cacao, that children picked versus chocolate made from cacao that children did not pick, that the maker paid a fair price to directly to a farmer. These are actual differences, but also it is — we're still stuck in a very bad structure. And so, I wanted to ask what you thought of this phrase, generally.

Reem: Yeah, the frustrating — especially if that person hasn't worked in the industry. It’s like, ‘Ok, what kind of privilege do you have to say that?’ Yeah, I was reading your peanut butter. incident. It reminds me of that.

Yeah, I mean, we’re trying to get by. We're trying to create our systems outside the system. And there's always something. Reem’s, even in the, when it turns into a cooperative, is all, is gonna be — it's not immune from the forces of capitalism. We still got to make a profit. 

People are not going to be making a true — the only way that that will happen is if we overthrow capitalism, which is a goal. [Laughs.] In a dream world, we'd have reparations and we could build our new model from scratch. 

But until we get those reparations and have an equal playing field, we got to figure out what's the path away from capitalism. How do we build resilience? Some of that means trying to engage in more ethical ways of currency and building livelihoods for our people. 

So, yeah, I mean, that was the thing that I was struggling with in the conversation with Tunde. It feels very similar. It's like, ‘Ok, well, then what do you suppose I do?’ [Laughs.] I'm sure you deal with that as a writer. I know that capitalism is not good for my health, and I'm trying as much to kind of build that sphere of resilience for myself and my team at Reem’s. It is a process. 

But yeah, I think what we're vouching for is a complete overthrow of the system that at least we had in our little corner of the world. And hopefully, other people will catch on to that. And we see more worker ownership. We see food media actually talking to workers. We see them at the table dictating what are — they know the solutions. They're the ones who have the lived experience, right? 

But it's crazy, Alicia. Every time I get asked about these things, I even put people in touch with my employees and very rarely do they get a call. So, we have a long way to go. 

Alicia: Yeah. [Laughs.] Well, thank you so much for taking the time today.

Reem: Thank you for—

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