From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast

There are few things more glamorous than having a house Champagne, and wine writer Julia Coney’s is a Lallier brut rosé. “I drink about a bottle of that a week,” she tells me, and in doing so, provides a point of inspiration. Her work itself, too, is inspiring. She’s written for publications such as Wine Enthusiast, Vinepair, Food + Wine, and more, does popular weekly “wine chats” on Instagram to introduce her followers to new bottles and regions, and has recently formed the platform Black Wine Professionals.We talked about how she got into wine, not being able to travel this year, and how she’s managing this new platform. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hey, Julia. Thanks so much for coming on. Julia: Oh, thank you for having me.

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

Julia: So I grew up in Houston, Texas, and pretty much every weekend went to my mother's side of the family in Leesville, Louisiana, which is why I always say I grew up between Houston and Louisiana—they are both a part of me. But I grew up eating a lot of Gulf Coast seafood, which I absolutely love. I grew up eating crawfish. I grew up eating, you know, fresh vegetables and fresh meats because my grandmother kept, like, rabbits and hens and all that kind of stuff. So basically, just like to me a normal family meal was like, it was always greens on the table. It was always some type of seafood or protein, you know, meat protein, and it was just a lot of fun. My dad was the cook. My mother couldn't cook, so my father cooked.

Alicia: That's so you know, rare?

Julia: Yes, yes, but in the south a lot of men cook. I think a lot of men cook really well, actually, too.

Alicia: And you're based in DC now?

Julia: I'm based in D.C. and between D.C. and Houston a lot. So because of COVID I am here, otherwise I will usually go to Houston. This is the longest I haven't been to Houston since I moved to D.C. 15 years ago. I usually go to Houston probably every six, eight weeks, sometimes maybe a little longer, like every three months, but very often.

Alicia: And you were just telling me before we started recording that you're super busy right now, what are you working on?

Julia: Well, I am between writing assignments, helping people with panels—I'm moderating a panel next week; I’m on different panels. As you know, that happens, that people are doing those. I slowly am weaning myself, trying to take August off from not having any personal wine chats. I usually do a different wine chat most Mondays. And so I had one two days ago and I have one tomorrow, but it's not a wine chat. It's just talking with an author I really, really like. And I'm going to not actually do my own chats; I'm just going to be a participant in other people’s chats for August.

Alicia: Amazing. And how did you decide to enter the wine world, and specifically, how did you get so interested in French wines?

Julia: So, I will say this, I studied abroad in France. That was not the way I got into French wines. I got into French wine because an attorney—I used to be a legal assistant, and an attorney I worked with, he drank a lot of California Napa Cabs, but he also drink a lot of Bordeaux. And so he introduced me, actually, to food and wine pairings. He was a person that paired, like, Texas barbecue with all these amazing high-end wines, as we would call them. And he just really made me taste a lot of food and I'm a, you know, adventurous eater, but I just—I don't know, my family doesn't drink. So I didn't come from where wine was on the table. And he could really see I was really getting into it, and he would always encourage me every week, buy a different bottle of wine, have something different with it, just try to figure out what you like, try to work on it, and make it fun. And it wasn't too pretentious. And I wasn't working in wine; I was a legal assistant. So it just became really, really enjoyable. So for me, in my late 20s, I discovered wine. And that's when I really started traveling back to Europe to drink wine, as part of my vacations.

Alicia: How did you professionally get into wine? How did you make it your life?

Julia: Well, from the legal field, I moved to D.C. I was still a legal assistant, and in 2006, I started a beauty blog. I don't think people really know that. 

I did a beauty blog for ten years. And I could see I really enjoyed doing it. I really, really enjoyed writing. I mean, I actually have a degree in English. One of the things I kept going, Wow, I could eventually make this a job,like my job. And in 2010, I quit my legal job to write full-time. But I was writing about beauty. And so at the end of 2015, I had been having these things going back and forth that I didn't want to write about beauty anymore. I actually wanted to move into food and wine, because I was finding more enjoyment with that. I still like beauty; I think it’s great, but something was calling me about food and wine, but food wasn't calling me to be a food writer. I could say I wanted to be travel writer more, but the wine was calling me, because also I was when I started realizing and googling, I didn't find many Black wine writers. I knew about Dorothy Gaitor from the Wall Street Journal. I knew about Melody Fuller. I knew about a handful of people, but I just—I knew a couple of bloggers that I met because I googled them. But I didn't see anybody who was making a career out of it. So I just took the leap of faith in 2016 to write full time about wine.

Alicia: People, you know, might be hopeful writers or people interested in how people's careers start. How did you make that happen? Like, how did you get your first assignment in wine?

Julia: Well, you know, like it says everything: you pitch until you get a rejection, right? And I also kept my own blog. I am a person that believes, I think people should own something of their own, so they can also write about whatever they decide without that. 

And I was still, as having a career in legal, I was still doing freelance stuff,; I was picking up other jobs; you have to do that to really where even it keeps going. But even now, I work at a wine store part-time. It helps with being able to taste a lot of wines. That's the way I was able to really taste a lot of wines is because working at a store, you know, before COVID, people brought so many wines to the store for you to taste to see if you want to put them on the shelf and we taste as a team. We didn't, you know, it wasn't like there's a buyer and they taste–no, we all taste, everybody tastes, because the story is very small. And they allow me to have this crazy travel schedule. So it started because I was just pitching and just knowing the publications like, okay, what's the front of that magazine, and learning those terms, because if you don't work in magazines, you have to figure out how they are laid out. But I read a lot of magazines, and I still read a lot of magazines, so I knew what part that I can get an entry to, and also, just keeping the blog helped me keep my creativity going, because I was always writing content.

Alicia: And so you recently formed the platform Black Wine Professionals. What inspired you to do that and what are your hopes for it?

Julia: Well, after I will did this Instagram Live talking about the racism in the wine industry, which a lot of people don't realize, I have been talking about this nonstop for two years, literally two and a half years, have just been really, really talking about this and writing about and speaking about it. 

I remember being on a media trip and one of the PR ladies, she said, “Well, Julia, I'm being honest, I just don't know how to find many Black wine professionals because I just don't know them.” And I remember that just kind of sparked my mind. I was like, Okay, I get what you're saying is she was like, I don't know a lot of media, especially Black wine people in media, like we're talking bloggers and podcasters that kind of thing. 

And so that had been in my head, but it took that Live and people going, Wow, we didn't know so many Black people in wine. You know, I made this little quick little Canva like photo of like, hey, please don't tell me you don't know anybody Black in wine, because here are some Black wine professionals. After that, I just couldn't sleep. So I just started to say, if I create a list and this database, and I personally visit every single person on that list, not an influencer—because I always tell people, I am making a very big distinction between an influencer and a professional, some people were a little upset about that. But I have to make that distinction, because these are the people who are honing this as a craft; these are these people's livelihoods. But then how do I get people to recognize them for projects, for wine classes to lead, and actually get paid to do that? That's why I created it. So if someone needs a somm, if they need a wine educator, if they want to talk to a wine buyer, if they want to talk to a salesperson, if they need other voices in media, here's a list of people that we have in it to say, hey, and we're going to slowly keep adding people, but we have a process. If you haven't had the experience, you have to have a certain level of certification, because that also means you have skin in the game. It's not for people who are entering the industry, and I'm working on something for people who are trying to get into the industry, but this platform isn't that.

Alicia: And how did you differentiate between influencers and professionals, because I think this is a big conversation in food, travel, beverage media?

Julia: Well, I look at if you make a certain income of your living as a wine professional, but also I went through—and it took a long time. I mean, I took a lot of hours. I went to a lot of people’s social media, not just the pictures. I went through their videos; I listened to their language. Wine is very factual. There's an emotional part of it, but the wine is factual. And if I listened to someone who couldn't explain tannin, what they're trying to—they're calling themselves an educator, and they couldn't explain it. They're not on the list. Because you're not a wine professional. That is a simple factual thing. There's a reason there's a tannin. It's one of those things you cannot see. And if there's—if you don't have that basic wine knowledge, then how can you teach someone else? And so I know there are people who are on social and they're win professionals and they have influence, but to me, I think an influencer is someone separate.

Alicia: It was interesting. I watched that Instagram Live of yours and it brought to mind so many media events that were just, you know, just I mean, yeah, you know—you know from me just saying that. I mean, I remember going to a dinner for Uncle Nearest Whiskey, and I don't know if you've heard of that brand, but—

Julia: Oh, yeah, we sell it at our store.

Alicia: Yeah, right. But you know, everyone there was white and I went home and I was like, what what was that and I you know, I emailed my friends and was like, Hey, did you get invited to this? No, okay. So how are these—the decision-making among the publicists who are organizing things is just, it's really beyond my comprehension because people who do this work are not hiding, you know? Like, by the nature of this work, everyone is out there. And so that, you know, you've had to take this time to form this platform, which is going to be great and is going to hopefully be, you know, game-changing for the wine industry and for wine media, you know, that's, you know, you shouldn't have had to take on that labor. I don't know how you feel about that. 

Julia: Here's the thing. I shouldn't have. I mean, right. But I'm glad I did, though, right? At this point, I'm just glad I did. Because now I could actually, you know, talk to publicists and go, Hey, who do you need that actually fits, right? And we can work together that way. They're not googling someone who you know, they may want somebody who, you know, could actually talk about the wine for some, you know, a class or an event, a live whatever. Now, we could actually work together. And that's why I created it and that's why I'm glad I had the time, because I will say this and I hate it. I always hate to say this, is it took COVID and a person getting murdered in the streets for actually me to have time to sit down and create this, because otherwise I would be on the road. 

Alicia: Absolutely. And that's one of my questions for you actually, is are you finding that inability to travel right now challenging, you know, how has it changed your work in your life?

Julia: So, I'm—honestly, the first month was rough, right, when I realized, I'm not going to Champagne. And I just did one of these really big cries. I grieved that, that is not happening, probably won't happen this year for me. And when I let that go, I was okay. I was like, Okay, I'm creating community with these wine chats. I'm bringing these great people who some people have never heard of, they've never known about this wine. We're just coming on and having a great chat. So I'm bringing a new set of eyeballs to these wines, into this region. And I just embrace the new way of traveling, which is in a wine glass. That's just the way it is.

Alicia: And have you been trying anything new and interesting? What have you been drinking lately? And how are you deciding what to focus on in your chats?

Julia: Well, a lot of people know me because I love bubbles. I love sparkling wine. So I love sparkling wine and I'm one of those people—I like all wines, and a lot of people think I only drink, when I say sparkling, Champagne. I, you know, am working on a Champagne certification because Champagne is usually the way a lot of people set the way they make sparkling wine. But I am able to find wines because I have, you know, work in a store, people email me, or I'm just reading other publications. Also, I find out about a lot of different wines from the UK wine newsletters; I subscribe to those. I'm just a naturally curious person, so I'm always trying to figure that part out.

So right now I am drinking—is that what you’re asking me? What am I drinking? Alicia: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Julia: I'm drinking a lot of Chenin Blanc and Sauvignon Blanc from California, which is surprisingly one of the just—I just like drinking it. I really enjoy it. I'm also definitely drinking some pet-nats, sparkling, to just see how people are making them. I don't want to say that they are natural pet-nats; I don't use the term natural. I just know they're very well-made, from a very good soil, from a very good family. And also, I do drink, one of my favorite Champagnes is called—quote unquote my house Champagne—is Lallier Brut Rosé. I drink usually about a bottle a week.

Alicia: And you mentioned the natural thing. I mean, that's a huge topic in the wine world right now and it's being covered usually quite terribly, it seems, in the mainstream media. It's always just like, what is natural wine? So yeah, how did you come to not use the term natural wine? And how do you make these kinds of differentiations between things that might be, you know, low-intervention versus higher-intervention wines?

Julia: Okay, so you know how like in the food world we always say everything now is about the soil, or the soil and where it comes from and where it's grown, right? I drink wines based on that. That's how that winemaking family, company, makes wine. They don't put a label on it. They just make wines with minimal intervention, but they don't even call it natural. They just make wine that actually appreciates the land and they don't want to ruin the land. And that's what I drink; I don't think it needs to have the natural label or organic label. You have a lot of people—they don't want to pay for that organic term, and that's okay if they don't want to. They don't have to. But I think it's my job as a wine professional to say there are people who make natural wines that don't use that word. There's a lot of people in Italy, in France, and Europe in general who have been making a lot of natural wines. They just never say it. If you drink Georgian wines from Georgia, the country, they have been making natural wines for 8,000 years. They just don't have to say it. 

Alicia: And so why do you think that's become kind of a buzzword?

Julia: I think it started with a lot of somms. I think it's somms getting geeky and then you had a lot of people talking about it’s healthier for you. It's the same thing as this whole “clean wine” concept. That kind of like—that's just the way the world works, and I understand that. And I think it just took off with, like, social media. “No, it’s natural,” and you know, I've gone to natural wine festivals and some of that stuff is horrible. Some of it is not good. And people were using it like “Oh, is it like—” No, this is not good. This is not done. This is gross. And they're using the term “natural” and I’m like “hmmm.” If I wanted kombucha, I’d just drink kombucha for $3. I'm just going to drink kombucha.

Alicia: Because I know exactly what you mean by wines that taste like kombucha. For, you know, for people who might not understand these distinctions on a visceral level of like, you know, the not-doneness of a wine, can you describe what you taste in a wine that is done versus a wine that is not done?

Julia: Well, one, you know, sometimes there's a bubbling on the tongue, almost like if you put baking soda or peroxide on your tongue. That's not what I want in a wine. I want, when I taste the wine, I want to be able to experience all these great flavors, right? If it's going to be lemon, if it's going to be, you know, honeysuckle, or pineapple, I want to experience that. I don't want to drink a wine, to me, and then the whole thing is just like this very tart—and I really say kombucha-esque, because, you know, the whole thing with like, a lot of natural wines, it's like we don't filter wines and everything and natural sediment and that's perfectly fine, you know, if that's your thing, but at the end of day, whether or not they filter that, I just need to know that the fermentation that actually should have probably been longer, should have had more time in the bottle, and actually just is a well-made wine, that everything is in balance, that the acid, the alcohol, and the flavors, and some of these ones that they're missing the flavor, but the alcohol and the acid might be there. So for me, I don't mind, you know, if it's supposed to be a carbonic maceration with a little bubble, your frizzante like in a pet-nat, that's perfectly fine. But if it's supposed to be a still wine and I'm still getting that, that is to me something that's not done. Abd that’s the beauty of wine, right?

Alicia: I worked at a wine bar and we would refer to that as kind of effervescence, that would be the euphemistic way of describing that. Julia: Okay.Alicia: But I you know, that and it depends on whether you like that or not, but no, at the same time, it is super interesting  how people are describing all these wines and how people are creating distinctions when they're really, you know, as you say, you know, wine is wine and whether it's good or not, and whether you like it or not, or those are the those are the judgment points. You've written a lot about the $1.2 trillion buying power of Black Americans and how the wine world has ignored that—have you noticed any changes in that or are you hopeful that there are changes in that in terms of how the wine world is marketing to and and being welcoming to Black Americans?

Julia: Well, I first want to say Nneka Okono wrote that story initially about the trillion dollars. I did want to clarify that, and so I was quoted in that and I speak on that a lot because I feel like the wine industry, the color they're missing is green. And I say this all the time: The color is green, and in their marketing, the way everyone markets now. We're in a social media marketing culture. It is not going anywhere, as much as sometimes the wine world is behind the spirits world in that. And they're missing the money on who they think is a wine drinker. It is the same reason why you shouldn't market a wine to, Oh, this is for women because it's soft and pretty. It can be pretty but are you—why are you marking it to just women? Because men like rosé. That's the perfect example. Rosé. Usually the marketing for rosé is always women; it's never mean. Why is that? And so with that, with race it’s almost when I see your social media, you have all these beautiful vineyard photos and vineyard shots. Why are there no people of color? Why are no Black and brown people in the marketing? We all know that Black and brown labor—primarily brown labor is the reason we have wine. That's why it seems like people are voting with their dollars. And people are listening to a lot of these brands who are taking initiatives and I've talked with them, and I also tell them, as I tell myself, I have to allow everyone to have grace that this change takes time. This is not an overnight change, some things can be fast. We still live in COVID. So you can't shoot new photos for your vineyard, right? That's, you know, we have to look at that. You can’t hire all these people to be so close to each other to take a photo shoot. So understanding also, that's going to take time. But if you decide to use stock photo images on your social, you can go look for Black people drinking wine; those stock photos exist. It's not that hard.

So yes, that’s in a nutshell. I have patience. I am waiting on people. I think, in the grand scheme of things, you're going to always have people who want to be on the right side of history and you're always going to have people who don't care, and that's going to be it. I'm just going to concern myself with the people who are going to be on the right side of history.

Alicia: For you, is cooking—or, perhaps more appropriately, drinking wine—a political act?

Julia: Well, here's the funny thing: I drink wine and cook, and I cook and drink wine. And that's one of the—here's my thing, though, too, that the food world and wine world are very separate, and I don't really know people who don't drink wine with food—they've seemed very separate. But, to me, I do think, as you know, I know you had on your newsletter, the comment, “has the term ‘food is political’ been overused?” “Has ‘wine is political’ been overused?” We can say that, right. But I do think they're political, in a way, right? I can drink a wine and think, Who made it? How are they treating their workers? How, you know, do the staff that actually work for this winery feel? I can be okay with that and say it’s kind of political and do that part, but that’s me.

I think for me food and wine are political, so yes wine is political. It’s political in a way. Recently there has been who or who gave donations to the Dunk campaign—because I don't like to say his name—but I also have friends who work there who are very nice people who don't believe in that either and so it's very multi-layered and it's hard. So yeah, wine is political. It really is. It is voting with my dollar. It’s political. It’s political.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much, Julia, for coming on and chatting.

Julia: Oh, no, thank you for having me. Thank you. So feel free to reach out anytime and oh, man, your work and your newsletter is my cup of coffee on Mondays. Is it coming in? It’s in my inbox. Looking forward, it just makes me happy because you make me think about things I wouldn't think about.

Alicia: Ah, I'm so happy to hear that. And same for your work. Your work is so indispensable. 

Julia: And I'm really, really, I'm like, how do you do it? How do you do a newsletter every week? I'm just I don't know how you do it. I'm grateful to be a subscriber. Every week, goodness gracious, and all the writing you do like, which is amazing, and the cooking and I'm like, How is she? Okay.

Alicia: I'm always worried I'm not gonna have anything to say. But somehow I always end up with something. All right, great. Well, thank you so much again.

Julia: Thank you.

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I could have talked to Devita Davison, executive director of FoodLab Detroit, all day. Technological difficulties, though, thwarted that plan, and we talked for just under an hour. I think we still had a good discussion, though, on everything from her upbringing as a first-generation Detroiter with roots in Alabama, experience in magazine publishing in New York City, starting her first business, the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, and, most of all, about the uniqueness of the city of Detroit. Whether you listen to this chat or watch her short but information-packed TED Talk on urban agriculture in the city, you hear the love and passion in her voice for her hometown. She told me about how its history of labor and racial justice activism, focus on art and architecture, and more have all come together to make it fertile ground for food justice; she told me about how false narratives form to capitalize on the work of Black people. But it’s better to hear her tell it. Listen above, or read below.

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

Devita: Hey, Alicia, thanks so much for inviting me. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while. So this is the highlight probably of my month—maybe of the whole damn pandemic.

Alicia: No, no, I'm super excited to have you on because I've been following your work but I've only been following it online. So I can only have, you know, one level of understanding, I think, of what it is you do. And I know that it goes much deeper than what one can see from Twitter, from videos, and from, you know, articles and that sort of thing. So yeah, let's get to it.

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

Devita: Sure. So, that is a layered question. And the reason why I say that is because I identify as a first-generation Detroiter. So it's very simple in terms of where I was born. I was born in the city of Detroit, and I identify as a first-generation Detroiter, but it gets complicated after that. Not really complicated—just because it layers and the reason why it is layered is because I'm a first-generation Detroiter, and what that means is is that I am the first person in my family that was born in the city of Detroit.

Both my mother and father are southerners. They are from the rural south. They are from Alabama. So were my grandparents, my great-grandparents and their parents. So not only am I a first-generation Detroiter, but I'm also a descendant of the enslaved, and I also identify as a daughter of the Great Migration. My mother and father migrated, fleeing the Jim Crow South and racial terror in Alabama in 1963. They fled Alabama and they moved to Detroit, Michigan, looking, of course, for a better way of life, opportunities, much like 7 million other African-Americans who made the migration from the south to the north. Opportunities for their unborn children. I was the firstborn, I also have a younger brother as well. And so it was really important for me to kind of lay down that context; it is so important because it influences your next question, which is what did I grow up eating. And so, even though my parents left Alabama, the place, and made good lives in Detroit, Abbott, the segregation and redlining and violence they received when they came to the north, they did make a way for themselves to provide opportunities that were better for themselves and better for their children.

So even though they did leave Alabama the place, they never left Alabama, the idea, that altogether. And what I mean by that is that, you know, I didn't spend my summers at camps. I spent my summers as a girl growing up at my grandparents’ house going back down to Alabama. As a matter of fact, when my father used to drive myself and my brother every year when school would let out around Memorial Day, the end of May, early June, and then him and my mother would come and pick my brother and I back up in September, my mother and father would always say, “it's time to go home,” right, every summer. And so we knew when going home meant going home, it was time to go to our grandparents’ house in Alabama every summer. And so that kind of reconnecting with culture really influenced what I ate. So growing up as a child in the summer I can distinctly remember trips that my mother and father took driving me and my brother to Alabama and what we ate. We ate shoebox lunches, right, and in those shoebox lunches were things like fried chicken, potato salad, and coleslaw. And of course something that was a southern dessert that my mother would make—it would vary: coconut cake, sweet-potato pie, pecan pie. I remember those lunches over those ten-top rest stops as a child growing up in the city of Detroit when my father and mother migrated. They also brought the agricultural skills and love of being able to cultivate the land, so my mother always had a small garden in our backyard, and what that meant is fresh greens, you name it, collards, turnips, mustards, mixed greens, black-eyed peas—mommy grew. Corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, homemade ice cream, watermelon and honeydew.

We didn't call it farm-to-table when I was growing up as a child, Alicia, we called it eating, and that just has has always been with me and has influenced the way that I still eat today.

Alicia: How did you become involved in the food world in a in a professional way?

Devita: So I became involved in the food world in a professional way through my work with Hearst magazines. I worked in a department that was called branding and licensing. And Hearst is a magazine publisher with titles like House Beautiful, Veranda, Seventeen, Cosmo, Country Living, Oprah, Esquire, etc. And you think to yourself, like, how in the world are you going to make the connections? What is the connective tissue between a magazine and the food world? Well, and I'm dating myself, so I'm 51 years old, and if folks can imagine this, like back in the day when I worked in publishing and when I worked from Hearst, there was no kind of social media presence. Magazines weren't online like they are now. We were still buying and subscribing to magazines and the earned revenue strategy for Hearst was the earned revenue strategy of many publications or publishers of magazines, right, it was either through a subscription base or through advertising in the magazine. Hearst had added an additional revenue stream, and that additional revenue stream is where I come in. They started a department that was called branding and licensing, and that is they would take their hundred or so magazine titles, and they would attach the name of their magazine or the title of their magazine onto a consumer product of good. I had what was called the shelter category. To give you an example of some kind of consumer products that I created with large manufacturers would be something like Country Living pie in a jar, Good Housekeeping salad dressing, Esquire barbecue sauce. I can't even believe I'm telling you this, because—but you know, I gotta tell you so yes. And my job was to create licensing deals, and using and leveraging Hearst magazine titles and working with the editors and the writers; they would write what was called advertorials, right, using the products that we created with these large manufacturers. And it was a model until it wasn't, and when I say until it wasn't, there was a time in which, you know, again, the internet and digital became very prolific, where magazines started to move all their content online and to think about what digital strategies will look like. Advertising on the internet became big, and so Hearst made a decision that after about five or six years of working in branding and licensing, they shut the department down and decided to start moving all their content online. And I took a buyout. When Hearst decided to do that and shut down our entire department, with the money that I got from the buyout, I opened up a small store in Brooklyn. And the reason why I opened up this small store in Brooklyn not only was an homage to my family—it was called The Southern Pantry—but it was also because there were so many of my friends, Alicia, who lived in Brooklyn. I lived in Queens at the time, but there were so many of my friends who lived in Brooklyn, who, to be honest, were laid off from either like Wall Street or finance or they either worked in theater—they were super-creative people, and one of the things that they started to do was they actually started to make like these “Made in Brooklyn,” locally sourced products, right? And so it was like, I mean, it was so ridiculous. Like I'm talking late 1990s, early 2000—folks were like raising chickens on top of frickin’ rooftops, chickens were laying eggs and they were making limited-edition, handmade, crafted artisanal mayonnaise. I'm talking like, you know, growing Meyer lemons—it was like this whole made in Brooklyn phenomenon that was taking place. And so I wasn't making anything, but I opened up a store, that small hyperlocal kind of store. It actually sold the products that my friends created. So that's how it all started.

Alicia: And then when did you go back to Detroit?

Devita: I lived in New York for almost 20 years. I worked for only two companies while I lived in New York. I worked for Ralph Lauren for about nine years, worked for Hearst for about five, six years, and had my own business for about three or four years. And so I lived all over New York City. I stayed in Manhattan, stayed in Brooklyn, and stayed in Queens. But then I got married and I bought a home in Long Island, small little cute maritime community in Nassau County that was called Freeport—South Freeport, because it was south of the Sunrise Highway, and then a superstorm came. And that storm was Hurricane Sandy. And it took me out, and what I mean by that is the storm hit my community really, really hard. It destroyed my home, nine feet of water came to that house and destroyed it. As a result, not only was I rendered homeless, because I had no house anymore, and not my store that was located in Brooklyn, but the warehouse that I stored all of my product in was in Red Hook, Brooklyn. And that warehouse was destroyed as well, along with all the products inside of it, right. So it wasn't like I could call a mainline distributor and be like, “Oh, I need more ketchup. I need more eggs. I need more…” like, everything's gone. And so, yeah, I went back to Detroit. And as a result of that hurricane, I permanently moved back to Detroit in 2013. And I have been here now for about seven years.

Alicia: Wow. I had no idea you lived on Long Island. Devita: You're you're a long Islander. Alicia: Yeah, I'm from out in Suffolk County. I was born in Huntington and grew up in Patchogue.

Devita: So you so you can understand my short answer, like, yeah, I lived in Long Island.

Alicia: But Hurricane Sandy, I don't think we we hear often enough about how powerful and life-changing that storm was for so many people. I think because it didn't hit, you know—Manhattan was largely spared. And so at that time, I was working at New York Magazine, and I remember the way people were regarding it coming in, and the way people regarded it after it happened was so nonchalant. And it really brought a lot of class differences to the fore for me, in terms of how—in terms of how the media was perceiving people who lived in communities that were so hard hit, but it seemed like oh, because Manhattan was fine, it's not it's not actually a big deal. It was a very—it was just very strange. I remember not having power for you know—I got through it, but not having power for four days and waiting on long gas lines. Like that was it for me, because I was living on the north shore at the time, which wasn't as hard hit, but it was catastrophic. Devita: Absolutely. Yeah, it definitely was. So yeah, but you know, I've gotta tell you, my life in the way that it is now never would have happened, Alicia, if I'm quite honest, if I had not moved back to Detroit as a result of Hurricane Sandy. You know, listen, I am again, born and raised in the city of Detroit and Detroit was going through what many people classify as a renaissance, right. There was a lot of investment that was happening in the city. Things were happening in downtown or the 7.2 square miles, the greater downtown area, and so many people—my mother and father included—said Devita, “There are so many great things happening in Detroit. All eyes are on the city of Detroit right now. When are you going to come back home and contribute and be a part of this, this kind of like new Renaissance or dare I use the word revitalization that's happening in the city of Detroit?” And Alicia, if I'm super honest with you, like I never thought about when I was coming back home to the city of Detroit, maybe like, yeah, sure—like, I don't know, like, I never really thought about it.

But when folks would ask me that, my question was not an answer to when I was coming back to Detroit. My question was always, “Why would I ever leave New York City?” Like why? It’s the place that I've always wanted to live my entire life. And, you know, I lived there for almost 20 years. Me my husband there got married there, got divorced there. I mean, good times and bad times. But you know, it’s New York City. I mean, and, you know, say what you want to say, Well, I guess if I could take a line from, you know, Carrie Bradshaw from Sex in the City, nobody talks s**t about my boyfriend, right? And it was just kind of like, yeah, you know, it was good days and some bad days. But at the end of it all, it's the place where I always wanted to live. And to be super honest, I have a little niece, um, her name is Aaliyah, she's four years old, and yeah, I want her to live in New York, too. It's just I don't know.

Alicia: And it's fascinating that you went back to Detroit during this time, even a bit reluctantly, perhaps. But when I interviewed chef Omar Tate, I asked him if he had seen places that were reckoning with the inequities built into the restaurant system and he said, you know, a million places in Detroit and he named FoodLab, you know, as chief among them. But it made so much sense to me when he said that He's like, you know, Detroit, of course. And so why do you think Detroit has been such a fertile ground for food justice?

Devita: Yeah, that was nice to him to say. Oh, gosh, you know, that. You know when I think about the word, food justice, one of the things that the elders in Detroit tell those of us who are kind of like in this movement: There can't be food justice, without social justice, and how important we have to think about our work, kind of intersectionally. And so you know, why Detroit, right? Why is Detroit such fertile ground? To be honest, Alicia, I think because, yes, it is because Detroit is a place that when 6 million African-Americans migrated from the south to the north, Detroit was the place that many Black folks along with Chicago, or along with Indiana, or Cleveland or other places in the north, or Black folks landed, you know, Harlem, Philly, you know, you name it. Right. And Omar is is is from Philly. So I can't just say it is because Detroit had a large population of Black folks from the rural south, right? I mean, that's “yes, and” right. I think that there are other things that make Detroit super unique where the food justice movement was able to leverage and build upon, and I think one of the things that for me I always harken back to in Detroit's history is how there is this history in Detroit that is really rooted in labor activism. And the reason why I say that is because Detroit is literally the city that put the world on wheels. We are known as the Motor City. And so it was labor activism and our long history of organizing around labor. I think that when you look at Victor and Roy and Walter, these are the three brothers. They are the three Reuther brothers, Walter Reuther, Roy Reuther, Victor Reuther, right. These are the men and the organizers of the UAW. And they organized around harsh working conditions in the auto industry, in this the roosters, who champion kind of like this industrial democracy, and they created the UAW right back in 1935. And then, through that organizing work, like people began to see Detroit as a fertile ground for activism. And what happened? Union leaders end up joining Martin Luther King Jr, who brought the fight for civil rights for African-Americans—he brought it to the city of Detroit. Before Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous speech, that I Have a Dream speech in Washington, he tried it out first in the city of Detroit, right. And so there's this long history, the first strike against a fast food restaurant, Burger King, happened at a Greyhound bus station, Burger King was located in the city of Detroit. And so Detroit has this long history of organizing. And it is that same kind of principle around activism that I think influences movement building and organizing in the city of Detroit. But that's not even enough, Alicia; I think there's layers on that too, right. I think also what’s so important about the city of Detroit that people may not really know when they think about the city of Detroit. So when you think about Detroit, again, I mentioned that you think of cars, some people even think of like Motown, right? But it’s rare to think about art. And the truth of the matter is, is the city’s grit, has long been fertile ground for artists. And so you know, I can remember harking back to a gentleman by the name of Dudley Randall, right, the founder of Broadside Press, right. He was a poet, but he was also a pioneer of being a publisher for Black artists, so it was Dudley Randall and his publishing company Broadside Press that brought the world the leading voices in the Black Arts Movement, folks like Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde, Etheridge Knight, Nikki Giovanni, like so Detroit has its like—it gives me goosebumps when I think about the history of my city, and how we leverage our work. And the reason why I bring up labor, the reason why I bring up art, is that that all has influenced, Alicia, how we think about food, right? And how we think about food justice for movement building in the city of Detroit—all of that is influenced by Detroit's history around labor, and art, and music and activism.

Alicia: I love that. I love that because I think what I've been hoping to do with this newsletter is show how much all these things are connected—labor, race, you know, farming, art, literature—all these things aren't as disparate as we've been trained to think of them as, and I love that Detroit really brings it all together.

Devita: Listen, you know, and I'm sure we were going to get into this but you know, one of the things that is so important, and why for me, it so important right for us to know and understand our history, is so that we can push back against false narratives and why that's so important, right? And so, you know, when I hear people say, call Detroit, oh my God, like, a food desert? Of course we immediately correct them and say no, Detroit is not a food desert, you know, the citizens of Detroit are living under food apartheid. A food desert—no, you know, that is a negative framework. And more importantly, we have over 1,600 farms and gardens in Detroit, so we know how to grow s**t in the city of Detroit. So let's be clear: We're not a desert.

But another thing about the city of Detroit, even when you talk about the citizens living under a food apartheid, it's just kind of like the things that were done to Detroit. Like, let's be very clear, was like super intentional. Like, these are neighborhoods that were intentionally created in the city of Detroit and the reason why I mentioned that is because when I talk about the history of the city of Detroit and why art, why design is so influential is that Detroit had a neighborhood that was called the Black Bottom neighborhood. And that's where a lot of African-Americans were kind of marginalized when folks made that migration from the south to north. And it wasn't only in Detroit, but Black folks were regulated to certain communities or certain neighborhoods, because God forbid, you know, white folks have us living next to them. And so we were relegated to certain communities or neighborhoods, and in Detroit, where a large majority of Black folks live was called Black Bottom. But do you understand in the 1950s, as a result of a federal policy that was called urban renewal, they destroyed that community to create a freeway, and when they destroyed that community to accommodate a freeway, they also built a residential development, and you know who it was designed by? An artist and architect called Mies van der Rohe. So Detroit has this beautiful community now of all these beautiful nice homes, and they were erected after Black communities were destroyed and after hundreds of African-Americans were displaced, right? So this erasure of our history to make space and to make room, right, for artists that were not reflective of our community is very prevalent in the city of Detroit.

Alicia: And when you mentioned false narratives, it reminds me in your answer to the first question of how you didn't call it farm to table, you call it an eating, and how these things, these concepts have been, you know, taken from the root and sold back to people who may not have the same connection to the land that your family has, but what do you think about that phrase, farm to table?

Devita: Yeah, again, I think it is a narrative that was created in a way to add this marketable, this palatable, sense of kind of value—to upcharge, to charge more to the consumer, very easy, easy way in terms of how folks used it to describe their restaurants. Basically through that description and through that kind of added value kind of narrative, they were able to charge more for a plate, right. You know, and it's really interesting. I mean, I feel the same way about from the table as I do nose to tail—it's marketing jargon, that's exactly what it is, right. And in so many cases, you know, we see that now. We see that and when I say “we see that” is that even now in this moment, like mass protests that are happening all over the world and you know, the value of Black lives and racial inequality—you're talking about that now and in a mainstream way, like in the public square, like there is this national or global conversation, like you even see the coopting the coopting of our language, Alicia, that came from like movement building, we see this right. You see the coopting of survival skills, my God, Audre Lorde, a Black queer woman that gave us the language of self care. Now what they have done is they've commodified self-care and now it's about what? Going to get your nails done and like facial mask or whatever, and like, you know, cleaning, skincare—like, are you serious? So they take our language, right? I mean, that's nothing new, like even youth culture. I mean, it was a Black girl who created like, on fleek, and they took that. Next thing you know, you’re seeing it in commercials? Like, what? Excuse me?

It is taking language, and it was a language we did not have, but it's not something that we that we called it, but it's this marketing of our lifestyle that they have been able to coopt. Alicia: It's a very interesting phenomenon that keeps repeating itself in terms of the coopting and the shifting of narratives to serve, you know, specifically, you know, these capitalist purposes.

And so I wanted to ask, though, in your TED talk on urban agriculture, you talk about people knowing where their food comes from—community kitchens, cooperative models. Why do you think agriculture has such power to change how communities interact? And do you see the potential for these models to have as strong an impact in other cities, not just Detroit?

Devita: That's interesting. I've been thinking about the power of agriculture and the power of food. And I think that, you know, Alicia, it has always been a powerful kind of movement-building tool in our toolbox as African-Americans. And so it just, it makes sense, and what I mean by that is that, you know, ever since Detroit filed for the largest municipal bankruptcy in the United States of America, we've seen tons of articles about what went wrong with the city. Now, a lot of it was political finger pointing. But the common narrative is that Detroit was in decline. And it all began in the 1960s when Black folks started to run their cities, when we elected our first Black mayor, right. But what annoys me about this language, not only is it false, but it also does not, again, go deep enough and explain that the creation of communities in the city of Detroit were intentional, and I think what is the power of a food and what is the power of agriculture is that it had the power to like transform these communities. It had the power to kind of like reshape neighborhoods, and it is important to understand how when southerners from the south moved to the north, how they were met with northern anti-Blackness that really did shape their neighborhoods using systemic violence, using segregation laws, using discriminatory practices. And when white folks started to flee Detroit—we call that phenomenon white flight—so did resources, so did investment begin to leave the city of Detroit. It was by the imagination of those farmers, it was through the imagination of folks who knew how to grow food. It was through their imagination that they didn't succumb to the fact that there were vacant buildings or blighted property. Like I just think about the fact of what kind of imagination they must have to imagine that they can actually use this vacancy to actually grow food. So I remember one of our elders, her name is Grace Lee Boggs. And she died at 100 years old, but one of our elders and an activist in the city of Detroit. And she talked about, you know, a revolution that is based on the people exercising their creativity in the midst of devastation is the great historical contribution of mankind. And I think about those farmers, I think about those elders, I think about the people who actually put their hands in the dirt, and where other people saw despair, they saw opportunity, and so agriculture does that. And it did that for the city of Detroit. That's why I think is so powerful. That's why I think it's so strong.

And what I love even more, right, is that, again, the reason why I lifted up Detroit's history around art and design is because the farmers and the people who are part of this urban agriculture movement in the city of Detroit, they had that artist, they had that designer mentality around imagination, right. And the reason why I say that is that Detroit is a city where we practice imagination-collaboration. And that means inviting someone to be a part of an idea, or to create an idea with you. So the urban agriculture movement wasn't created in a vacuum. And the reason why I love that is that, you know, I'm the kind of person who thinks really big picture, right? I'm like, oh, like, I got a vision; let’s do this. And that's the work that I do at the nonprofit that I work for, FoodLab, we’re thinking how can we transform the food system, right? I'm thinking really big picture. But in order to be a farmer, your imagination has to be systemic and structural; it has to be a process. You have to understand the soil. You have to understand what the plant [needs]. You have to understand the weather. And so I love working with farmers because they bring a different imagination skill set that I don't have. And so when I think about imagination-collaboration, I also think about what the farmers and folks involved in agricultural movement were doing, right?There is a book by Dr. Monica White that's called Freedom Farmers—my God. And so when you think about snatching back the narrative, particularly in a place like Detroit, where you have so many people that left the south and moved to the north, snatching back this narrative around farming as freedom. So you began to change the narrative and instead of thinking of Black farmers as the enslaved people who are working the land or picking cotton, instead of thinking of Black farmers as sharecroppers, right, instead of thinking about tenant farmers—like now, in the city of Detroit, when you see Black farmers, we think about power, we think about sovereignty, we think about dignity, we think about harm reduction, right?

That's the power of urban agriculture. So you say to yourself, when we're planning, and when people are thinking about turning side lots or people are thinking about turning their backyards, people are thinking about turning their school gardens into, like, these agricultural places, not only to grow fruits and vegetables, but for conviviality, bringing people together. Questions are asked, Alicia, like: how do we make sure that the people who are most impacted by what's ever happening in this community in this neighborhood, get to co-imagine this particular part of land with us? How do we prevent those people from being excluded from the conversation because of someone else’s power dynamic of an imagining? So here in Detroit, like we've gone through massive gentrification in certain communities, but it is in those places, it is in those gardens it is in those fields, when we start to think about, you know, who is not at this quote, unquote, imaginary table, like who should be a part of the conversation. And so you know, you and I talked a little bit earlier about like this divergent of movement, and how it was important to like, think about the work that we do, or the work that I do from an intersectional lens, and a big part of the work and the language. And the practice that I borrow from has to be the Disability Justice Movement, because they are very clear that if you don't have people who use wheelchairs, if you don't have people who are blind, if you don't have people who are deaf, at that imaginary table, when you're creating or building? I don't care what it is. You'll find out later, that whatever you made is not actually accessible to those people, because they weren’t at the table, right? So this is collaboration that happens in Detroit around urban agriculture that makes it so powerful.

And then you ask like you know, can what is happening, what has happened in the city of Detroit, what will happen what we're continuing to build in the city of Detroit—can it happen in other places?

You know, Alicia, that's so touchy for me. Because to be honest, when I think about, you know, it happening in other places, I really think of the word scale. And I hate using the word scale, because I'm so place-based. It is so important that we do place-based work. I don't know. You know, I definitely think that, you know, people have got to find a place, people have got to find a space within food justice movement, where they're creating spaces where love gets fermented. I mean, that's—and I don't know how that looks, I don't know how that shows up in your community. Right. I don't know if that shows up in a big shared-use kitchen space. I don't know if that shows up in a farm. I don't know if that shows up in a cooperatively owned restaurant. I don't know where that happens, but wherever there's food happening, wherever there's growing happening, produce happening, it needs to be fermented in love. Because I think we should be working to love each other and create spaces where people feel loved and sustained. And guess what? Unfortunately, food movement work is often driven by fear and scarcity, not love. People are coming together in food movement because they're terrified something. Oh, my goodness, we're terrified of security, right? We're terrified of the fact that we won't have enough money to actually be able to go to the grocery store to put food on our table. We're terrified that all the grocery stores are going to leave our neighborhoods and we won't have someplace to go to buy food— like we're terrified of something that's coming.

As a result of that, there's this deep, urgent scarcity but I know that when you operate like that, that can burn you out. And so I know in movement-building work, when we talk about, you know, scale, when we talk about expanding what is happening in Detroit to other places, right, we always talk about scale happens, movement building happens at the speed of trust. I like to think that movement happens at the speed of love, right?

So I don’t know if it can happen in other places. But I do know that people come from all over the world, to come to the city of Detroit, and to look and to learn, but you know what they always say when they sit down at the table with me or my comrades or colleagues or people when we take them to DBC FSN D-Town Farms or Oakland Avenue Farms or Keep Growing Detroit's farm. They're like, I feel so much love in this space. That's where the transformation happens: Through the stomach, but it also happens through the heart.

And that's what we want. Yeah, we want you to see everything that's grown here. Sure. Of course, we want you to feel it, we want you to see it. Right? Absolutely. Our mission is food sovereignty. We want to make sure every produce, fruit and vegetable, that's grown in Detroit stays in Detroit. Absolutely. But you can't do that without love. So we want them to feel it as well as see it. So that was a long way of answering your question.

Alicia: No, but I think that's so important. And I think it's missing a lot of the time when we talk about food systems and we talk it that word scale does come up so much and growth etc., etc. And like, we have to make sure everyone has food but we're not talking about what that food is and you know, how it connects to them culturally locally, etc., etc. You know, it's that bigGreen Revolution thing of, you know, getting everyone enough rice but—

Devita: Like for me, can’t you tell the difference between if you're eating string beans that were actually grown by someone and someone's hands physically snapped those beans for you versus some s**t that you get out of a jar? Like it tastes like pain. I'm sorry, I don't want to sound elitist or anything like that, but like, canned vegetables taste like trauma.

Alicia: [Laughing.No, it's real.

Devita: You can take those string beans out of the can and y'all can make your casserole and put all that—I don't even know what you put on it, but it's crazy. The casserole with the—I don't even know what the crunchy stuff on top is. It's crazy to me, but yeah, no: I'm not eating it. I’m just not.

Alicia: The green bean casserole comes completely from a can, every ingredient.

No, and it is—it's really interesting and it's so important that everyone remind themselves that things need to be so place-based and so much would be lost if it wasn't it—these movements and these ideas that people are forming.

But for you—and I think you answered this question with the can comment—but for you, is cooking a political act?

Devita: Oh, gosh, yeah. I mean, absolutely. I mean, it courses through my veins. I mean, I couldn't even think about it in any other way, about how revolutionary and how political food is, especially when you come from a southern family like mines, who was obsessively preoccupied with food, even based upon the fact that they had very little, right? Here I’m gonna tie it back in terms of that imagination, that artistry mindset, like they have very little but the creativity that they exhibited when they created every meal—that was a revolutionary act, right? I think it's political for me is that, you know, when you have dishes that are crafted using fresh produce from the garden the meat that came from—ooh, and I know you I know you are a practicing vegetarian, Alicia, but you know, the meat that we raised that came from the slaughterhouse, fresh eggs from the hen house. I mean, it came from revolutionaries who grew their own food; they grew their own fruits and vegetables and ate whole foods and, emphasized—you know, again, we didn't have the language, but they emphasized what we now call food sovereignty. And I think through that, and growing up with that, two things happened. Number one, it's in the gardens and in the kitchens and in the markets where my ancestors have revisited me, right? They have revisited me. And when I say that is I feel them in my stomach. I feel them whispering to me knowledge about food systems. This knowledge is in my hairs and my blood, is in my hands. It reminds me that there's so much left for us to do, right. It reminds me of their resistance. It reminds me how they used food as liberation. But you know what else it reminds me of? Is that, you know, when I think about my ancestors, and I think about my grandmother, Thank God my mother is still living who reminds me of her grandmother, which is my great-grandmother, reminds me of every day when I'm sitting around the table with family, enjoying a meal? That I know that somebody in my family or somebody that I knew grew it.

You know, it also reminds me of joy. God, and that right there is revolutionary. And the reason why it is revolutionary and it feels like is important, and I think is politically important for me as an African-American woman is because I think it's politically important to be a Black woman having a good time and being free and letting people see this. And I tell people all the time, I'm like, they tried to kill us. They tried to steal our joy. But they didn't succeed. And look at me, right? Look how happy I am. Look at me on the farm, changing that narrative? Look at me on a farm with other Black folks, other folks? They try to define our work. Isn't it a fact they don't even want to give us credit for being the backbone of the agricultural systems that we now have in the United States. We created this—Black and brown people.

But I don't want them to always speak our story in tenant farming or in slavery; I want them to see me in the field happy. Here’s the thing: I'm happy, but I'm still connected to great suffering at the same time. But despite everything, despite the work, despite all the s**t that's going on, despite all of the history getting wrapped up in the land around Black people, I still find joy, and I think that that is important, because I want Black women specifically, to tell them every day it is okay to experience some joy each and every day. And I believe it’s a measure of freedom to be able to experience the joy that's available to me and available to others at this moment.

So absolutely it’s a political act and you know, I can get into history and explain what I see that you know, food, of course is political. I can talk to you about the southern tenant farmers union, right, as a part of a rich tradition, again, of labor organizing. And again, that happened from farmers in the south, at the height of the 1930s, of course, political. So I can tell you about CTFU and the rallies and the meetings that were heavily influenced by the Baptist Church. Why? Because my father is a preacher, my grandfather was a preacher, my great-grandfather was a preacher, so I know the role of farming and the Black tradition of spirituality, and how that is all wrapped up into political movement building. I can talk to you about the Black Panthers and their understanding that hunger deserves immediate attention. And they also understood that radical transformation happens through—if you can't lead your people, if you can't feed your people, you can't lead your people and they knew a new political education was vital to understanding the reasons behind hunger and envision a world where all children are fed, the Black Panther breakfast program, long before the United States of America, long before the government had the free breakfast program at schools—it was the Black Panther Party did it first. They talked about food at the intersection of health care, intersection of education, intersection of housing, at the intersection of land, in the intersection of the right and the privilege for water. And so all of that, but that history around movement building, food movement building, food activism, I guess, is a part of my DNA. Absolutely. I cannot sit up here and deny any of that. So for me food has always been political, because it's a part of my history. It's a part of who I am.

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

Devita: Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Alicia. It was great talking with you.

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There are people who view astrology as frivolous, but I am not one of them, and one of the astrologers who makes that feel very easy and defensible is Claire Comstock-Gay, perhaps better known as Madame Clairevoyant, who writes weekly horoscopes for The Cut that toe the line between incantation and prose poem. Her book, Madame Clairevoyant’s Guide to the Stars, has deepened my understanding of myself as a Scorpio with a whole lot of air in her chart, and the cast of characters she invokes—think David Wojnarowicz, but also Kim Kardashian—speak to a rare breadth of cultural understanding.

But Comstock-Gay is not just an astrologer, but a brilliant thinker generally, and she’s been recently lending her kitchen skills to a mutual aid effort in Minneapolis. We discussed the stars, Silvia Federici’s Marxist-feminist recognition of magic, and the beauty of a kitchen without bosses or customers. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Claire, thank you so much for taking the time out to come on.

Claire: Thank you for inviting me. I'm really excited to talk with you.

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

Claire: Yeah, so I grew up a couple places. When I was a little kid, I lived in Towson, Maryland, which is just outside of Baltimore. And then when I was in fifth grade, my family moved to Concord, New Hampshire. And so what I ate, I feel like my early childhood food memories are really like stereotypical kind of white American mainstream food. Like the strongest

early kid food memory was my mom making bags of frozen mixed vegetables, and I hated the peas in it so much and I would, likem swallow them whole because I didn't want to taste the peas. Chicken breasts and mac and cheese and mixed veggies.

I think kind of that as I grew up, my family's food tastes and the foods that we would eat in the house really changed kind of, along with what mainstream America was eating. So like,

by the time I was in middle school, maybe we would have avocados in the house, or like in high school, we would have sriracha sauce in the house, and so these things that became popular that kind of hit the mainstream, hit my house and my own palate at the same time, I think.

Alicia: Yeah, there's a great book about that called Eight Flavors. I can't remember the subtitle but it's about how things like sriracha, specifically, enter the American consciousness, which is a very fascinating topic. But how did you get into astrology?

Claire: I think I'm a little bit different from what I can tell than a lot of other astrology people that I know. I think for a lot of people, they encountered it when they were young or teenagers and something really great clicked right away. For me, I hated it when I was young; I felt kind of belittled and insulted by all this stuff that I would read about my sign. Like the Sagittarius stuff was kind of like, you're this cheerful jock, which was so sick to me. I was moody and really wanted to be, like, smart and intellectual and it just hurt my feelings a little bit. And it also just seemed silly, the newspaper horoscopes you would read, like, I don't know, like, “talk to your boss for that raise today.” Nothing to me, this is fake. So then it was only like later on, I was in my early 20s living in New York, and I met all these kind of cool feminist punks who were into astrology and were conversant in it in really different ways than I had known were possible. And so that was kind of when I started to take it seriously even as a thing that I might want to know anything about.

Alicia: Why were you in New York, first of all? What made you move there? 

Claire: Nothing, right? Like, I didn't want to live in New Hampshire anymore. Um, New York seemed cool.

Alicia: Well, what were the ways that they were into astrology that made it compelling to you?

Claire: I think part of it was just being from, like a social universe that felt legible to me. Like all the horoscopes that you read in glossy magazines are imagining you, the reader, as this glossy magazine type of person, or all the newspaper horoscopes are imagining you as this like, professional-class man, basically. And so to see these astrological ideas kind of reflected in a way that I could see myself—that changed things A lot. And also a lot of it was just mainstream astrology, and this is changing some now. But it has traditionally been just extremely heteronormative. All about like, men in the sign are this way and women are that way. And in relationships, it's this way. And if you're a woman, here's what you want when you're getting married, right? Like all these things that just were so icky and gross, and so to see it outside of any of those constructs really helped me.

Alicia: No, I totally understand because like, as a Scorpio—I think probably every Scorpio is really excited that they're a Scorpio. Like, for their entire lives are like, “Absolutely, I am intellectual and mysterious and you know, dark and brooding.” Yeah, like absolutely correct, but then like to get my whole chart and then understand, you know, I contain many different things and have to reckon with that. That was like, that's a good intellectual exercise—to not think of yourself in such a, like, singular way. But yeah, it makes so much sense that it is a really interesting way—like it's embodied differently in feminist and queer spaces, because it is a way of understanding yourself as a plurality, you know. The first page of your book notes that one of the possible uses of astrology, which are vast and varied, is kind of predicting political unrest, and so was our current moment predictable in the stars or no?

Claire: Honestly, it was. It was really funny. I don't know if you saw this. A few weeks ago, there was a piece in The New York Times that was like, will astrology be canceled since it failed to predicts the pandemic? And astrologers got so angry because for like, literally years, everyone's been saying 2020 is the year of upheavals, change, transformation, and it's funny, right? So like, the simple answer is, yes, 100%. 

That's not really what I do, right? Like, I'm less interested in kind of the societal applications of astrology. Personally—I think this might get astrologers mad at me, I don't know—I think a really good historian is going to be able to predict things, honestly, as well as a good astrologer. It's just different ways of looking at patterns to get to the same thing. Alicia: And you do have a very unique voice among astrologers, and I might be getting this wrong. Did you start writing your horoscopes for The Rumpus, or—

Claire: I did. Yeah.

Alicia: Yeah. And so it has it always been more of kind of a literary form for you or—

Claire: It has, honestly. And when I started writing horoscopes, it's funny, I really kind of learned about astrology as I was writing; I knew not very much at all, and it was more of kind of the literary exercise of it. And over time, right, I've kind of grown more and more deeply interested in astrology itself. But it is a lot about the mood and the voice and the feeling versus right, like, “it's a good day to talk to your boss.”

Alicia: And you're based in Minneapolis. Now, how did you end up living there?

Claire: I am, technically right across the river in St. Paul. Very important to people who live here and are from here, and to me feels not different at all.

But mostly I just really wanted to live somewhere other than New York. This is a very Sagittarius thing about me is that I love change, and I love moving. And so I’d left New York before; I moved to New Orleans, and then moved back to New York, and then wanted to go somewhere else again. And I moved here specifically because my boyfriend was able to get his job transferred out here, so it was kind of an easy move to make. That was a few years ago, I really didn't like it very much at all at first and like it a lot more now. And weirdly or not that weirdly, I don't know, all of the uprising has made me like it so much more here. Alicia: I mean, who would have thought that Minneapolis would be the site, the starting point of such an incredible, you know, worldwide protests. I mean, I sure didn't, but that might be my New Yorker thing. How has it been to be there during that time. I've seen on Twitter that you've been cooking at a mutual aid kitchen, and I know from doing some other interviews with folks based in Minneapolis—which again, I had no idea I'd end up talking to so many people in recent weeks— but it seems very, very, you know, community-oriented and driven, the work that's happening now, and not just through mutual aid, but like, in all ways, and yet how has that emerged, and how have you become part of that?

Claire: Yeah, so I've been involved through—it was a group that was organized through a part of the DSA here, and this was work that they had started doing previously just to address kind of people's food needs because of the pandemic, and then really rapidly shifted to meet this kind of sudden emergency need that came up. And so, what happened was I got involved kind of right at the start, you know, protests have been going on for maybe one day, maybe two days. So we were like scrounging around trying to find kitchen space in the cities, and so cooking in all these kind of bizarre, random churches using their wacky serrated knives only and glass cutting boards. Just horrible equipment to try to cook these giant meals.

That was to feed people on the front lines and also to feed people in the neighborhoods in South Minneapolis right by the precinct, where the stores were either damaged or just closed down because, you know, they didn't want to get their windows broken or whatever, I don't know. But in that neighborhood, for a few days, people really couldn't access groceries. And so we were making meals for them.

I feel like overall, it's funny—I've been out to protest only a little bit. And my experience of the uprising has really been about this community work, and the mutual aid stuff, and it's so—it's so joyful; there's so much possibility. And I think it's really, it's really euphoric, and really wistful at the same time because, right, we all know, or if you've done anything like this ever before, you know how hard it is to keep the energy going. There's this wonderful moment where everything breaks through and everything is possible, like okay, but once the normal life pressures start to come back, how do we keep it going?

And I think in the kitchen itself—so, after the church spaces, eventually we found a professional catering kitchen that was closed because of the pandemic. And so they let us use their space and that was really, really great, to be cooking in this professional space without any of the bad things about professional cooking. There's no bosses; there's no customers on the other side. There's people eating the food, obviously, but there's nobody holding it over you that there is a paying person that needs to be treated a certain way. And so that was really this magical kind of euphoria, like why is it not like this all the time? Why is cooking food not always like this? Because it could be.

Alicia: Was this your first experience in a professional kitchen or no?

Claire: No, it wasn't—first for a long time. But in my early 20s, I worked for a prepared foods kitchen for a fancy grocery store in Brooklyn. And so that was really funny in a lot of ways. It was kind of, all right, like, not totally restaurant style, but it was a weird kitchen to work in. But it was really fun to be doing a lot of the same things, right, like the same type of embodied labor, but only because everyone wanted to be there. There's no no bosses and so—I keep coming back to this.

Alicia: Well, what influences your politics in this way, you know, the doing mutual aid, you know, hating bosses? How did you come to your kind of political perspective?

Claire: It's such a good question. It's such a hard one to answer at a certain point, right?

It's like, I don't know, this is the world; this is my life. I don't know if I have a good answer for you. 

Alicia: Well, is there any reading that especially was influential for you? Maybe?

Claire: Um, let me think. I'm so embarrassed. Let me look at my books.

Alicia: No, these are hard questions. And I know it's putting it puts you on the spot for this, but I'm always so curious about you know, what, are the moments and the things that are really, you know—to use a very old second-wave term—consciousness-raising for different people. I always go back to my American feminist poetry class in college where, you know, we read this big anthology called No More Masks and we read Anzaldúa and we read Adrienne Rich and we read all these, you know, feminist poets and I was like, holy s**t. But, you know, we all have our different moments.

Claire: No, I think that's, that's right. I do think for me— similar, I think, to a lot of white women—got into it through feminism first. And then hopefully, you broaden and deepen that.[In unison]: So many people don't.

Claire: A recent one that I was reading that was not so much foundational but has kind of clicked things into place right around a lot of this work. I was reading Silvia Federici, this book about the commons. What is it called? Reinventing the World. I really like Silvia Federici kind of on the astrology side because unlike a lot of Marxists, she believes in magic a little bit. She's not dismissive of these kind of non-material things that are still a part of our material lives. In this one specifically, it was all about this worldwide erosion of the commons, and then all these different little spaces where people are trying to rebuild them, and so this is a really nice example what's been going on here in the kitchen, with so many of the projects happening, I know in Minneapolis and other cities too, as these ways that we're trying to rebuild commons for each other, whether that's about food or housing. The hotel that was here. They took over this former Sheraton Hotel to house unhoused people who had been displaced by the police because of the riots. And that's, I think such a beautiful example too. Like, there's this huge hotel here. Let's use it for each other.

Alicia: No, that's so important. And when that happened, it made me think of how many hotels here in Puerto Rico were probably vacant during the pandemic, yet the unhoused population was still unhoused. And during this very dangerous time, because we've had a curfew ever since March 15, you know, being policed as well, in that time, and it's like, well, why wouldn't you create an initiative to put people in the hotels and it's like, we know why but—At the same time, it's just, why isn't this very obvious good pursued. I don't know—it’s very crazy. And then there was another time during the earthquakes here at the end of last year when so many people were sleeping in tents in their yards, and again, it's like—there's hotels here. There's plenty of hotels and you know, just never making—

That's why I think that was such an important moment of this time, was the Sheraton kind of—I don't want to say takeover but you know, right, you know, use proper use of that space, because feeding people, we have that language for it because we have soup kitchens, I think, you know. So with mutual aid kitchens and community fridges and that sort of thing, it's like, okay, like, we understand this, like, we already do this in a charitable way that is translatable into the capitalist world. So it's not as you know, difficult on people's minds, but I do think maybe the Sheraton thing didn't get covered that extensively outside of Minneapolis probably because it is so challenging to ideas that we never really conceive of.

Claire: I think think you're so right about that. Like for some, for whatever reason, kind of because of that charitable model, right, people are really comfortable around food as the site of charity in the way that they're not comfortable with other things. 

I think a lot about around here, kind of in the immediate days after the precinct burned and all of that. There were so many distribution sites set up to get food and stuff to people, which is great. And the need was there, right, unlike in a lot of disasters, I think: There's stuff and it’s not what people need. But it was the stuff that people needed. But it was—I don't know, something about the people who are willing to do that work versus like, okay, but let's get these people housed. 

Alicia: There's a strange unwillingness to house people who need help. It's just, why isn't this need seen as the same as the need to eat food? I don't understand.To get back to your your book a little bit, I was of course happy—you know, I've already gone over that I'm a Scorpio and all Scorpios are very pleased with themselves—but you cast the Scorpio as the punk and you use Kathleen Hanna as kind of the icon there. And you do include a lot of counterculture figures in the book as well as major pop culture figures. How did you decide on the references? Was it kind of a conscious effort to balance the popularity of the iconic figures or you know, what was the kind of framework you had in mind for how you used people as characters to describe the signs?

Claire: Well, first of all, thank you. I feel like not a lot of people—people talk about

the book as a pop culture book, which it is, but it's not only a book about like, celebrity-celebrities. 

Alicia: Well, it's cultural. It’s just cultural figures.

Claire: This was something that I struggled with a lot as I was kind of putting together the proposal and the structure of the book, because astrology only works in this sense, right? If you have characters to talk about, right? It only works when it's connected to real people. It gets really boring to me, at least when it's just these like lists of qualities, right? It's like, oh, Scorpio, like, dark, like, Okay, what does that mean? I don't know.

And so we’re in real life.  I can point to my mom as a character, right? Like, oh, you know, my mom. She's such a Pisces. It doesn't work when you're writing this book for a general audience. And so the question becomes how to use kind of common touchstones and these common people in a way that's interesting enough to me to write about it. Because a lot of these big celebrities, that's not interesting to me personally. And I also think that at a certain level of wealth, right, you're all a little bit more like each other then anybody else.

I think if anything, it was kind of the reverse, where I had to work to get enough like, actual celebrities in the book to balance it so it wasn't just my own personal canon.

Alicia: That's funny. And so for you, is cooking a political act?

Claire: Yes, I love this question, because it's like so simple and complicated, right? I feel like there's things I have to define and explain to get to an answer. 

I think, you know, in the most basic level, yes, of course it is. It's political kind of in the same way that literally anything any one of us ever does is political and obviously cooking as part of a mutual aid effort, that's political in a different way. As far as my personal home cooking goes or cooking for other people, right, I think it's political, but it's not revolutionary—and I think those are things you've talked about before—but those are things that we like to conflate a little bit more than is totally helpful, especially kind of broadly on the left. We want everything we do to be radical. And there are things that are not radical that are still valuable and worth doing, and that's kind of where cooking falls for me.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much, Claire.

Claire: Yeah, thank you. This was great.

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Nik Sharma, author of Season and the forthcoming The Flavor Equation, always comes to my mind first as a scientist, but most know him for his blog A Brown Table, his column at the San Francisco Chronicle, and his new gig at Serious Eats. That association was probably at the forefront of my mind because I’d just gotten done going through a galley of that forthcoming cookbook (preorder it here) and was absolutely blown away by the depths of the science presented in such an accessible manner. There are charts and illustrations of a chili heat scale, a flavor wheel of amino acids, smoke points of various cooking fats and oils, and so much more, all alongside recipes for things like pizza toast, gunpowder fries with goat cheese sauce, and new potatoes with mustard oil herb salsa—all gorgeously shot by the multi-talented Sharma, whose photography style is immediately recognizable for its distinctive use of dark backgrounds and movement, a massive departure from the overblown whiteness that’s been so in fashion.We discussed why he hates overripe bananas, the stigma that continues to exist around food blogging, the potential of cookbooks, and more. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Nik. Thanks so much for coming on and chatting with me.

Nik: Hi, Alicia. Thanks for having me.

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

Nik: I was born and brought up in Bombay, India, which is now called Mumbai. For the most part, what did I eat? Let’s see. I ate a lot of things. It's always easy for me to remember what I don't like to eat, so that always jumps into my mind immediately. But as far as what I grew up eating, I grew up eating a lot of seafood because Bombay is on the west coast of India. My mom also comes from a community that eats a lot of seafood, so seafood and then coconut was a huge part of our diet. Let's see—a lot of fruit. I actually do like eating a lot of fruit and a lot of yogurt. Those are a couple of things that have moved on with me into adulthood.

Alicia: Well, what didn't you like, since those memories are more vivid?

Nik: That’s the interesting thing that conjures images in my head. So I don't like to eat bitter melon. I do not like to eat turnips. Let's see, and overripe bananas. That's something that's actually happened in adulthood. I think it's because I recently—uh, let's see—about a year, two years ago, I made an upside-down banana cake from my blog and I had to recipe-test that several times to get the texture right. And because of that, I went through several rounds of overripe bananas, extremely overripe, and now, the smell and the texture—it really makes me queasy, so no more of that.

Alicia: Well, that's so funny. You're known as a food scientist, I think first and foremost, and also a photographer and also a writer. How did you end up wearing so many hats and how do you balance all of those skills? When you're when you're figuring out how to spend your days, like, how do you—how do you balance all that? 

Nik: I think I’m definitely known more as a food blogger, for the most part, and then photographer. The food science thing is something that I've been pushing for so long to write more about, because that's what my background is in. I studied molecular biology and biochemistry before I moved into food. I think it was part of the fact that I started with a food blog, and because of the nature of a food blog, people usually don’t—they may not cook your food, but they definitely visually react to what's available online. And so photography was a skill that I had to learn to convey the food across. And so photography is—that’s how my relationship with photography began, in terms of forging a career, and then in terms of writing about food science, that’s something that I've always always been interested in; it's also what drew me into food, to see the similarities between how people cook food, test recipes. It's very similar to what's happening in a lab. And I think the similarities—with its differences, of course, kind of blended in and so it made sense to me that this is really what I want to talk about.

Alicia: Your photography style is so singular, though, how did you come into that style?

Nik: One of the things that I wanted to do with food photography was to talk about the process visually, because that's what I find really exciting. Besides the hero shot and the beautiful shot at the end, one of the things that really draws me to cooking is, you know, the little, little steps. They might seem unimportant at the time or something so simple that's being done every day, but I find those kinds of things to be very beautiful. So I look to kind of exploring that visually and see how I can do something—say whisking something, or just adding flour, folding it in into a batter. How do where, what is the beauty in that? I think what is amazing a bout photography, it's a moment in time; you're taking a snapshot. So something might be moving, say the flour’s moving through a batter and it might look really pretty in texture on one side of the bowl versus the other, and that might change over time. So for me, those kind of macroscopic things that are taking place are really attractive.

Alicia: You reminded me of the idea that food blogging is thought of as different from food writing. And, and it seems like as a blogger, like—same as someone who's publishing something themselves—you have to have, like, a host of different skills in order to even put anything out. You know, you have to like, be a photographer and a recipe developer and you have to have this very approachable kind of voice in your writing, and you have to be able to like know how to create a website even. Do you think there is a divide between food bloggers and food writers? Like, is there a stigma around blogging still?

Nik: I think there’s definitely still a stigma around blogging. I definitely think there is that.

I mean, it was a struggle for me. I mean, I'm really fortunate to be given opportunities by different editors at, you know, different publications to get a chance to write for them. Because I know it's not easy. It's not easy to make that transition. I've been really fortunate to kind of navigate that journey, but it also took a lot of work. You know, it didn't happen overnight, that’s for sure. I mean, I took my time blogging, so I blogged for perhaps, I think four or five years before I actually started writing for the Chronicle, which was my biggest—for the San Francisco Chronicle, which was, at the time, you know, the biggest moment in my career and it still is. So, it definitely took a lot of getting to learn how to know my voice. 

Also, I didn't go into it wanting to write for the Chronicle. It just happened. It was a coincidence. I was looking for food photography freelance jobs at the time, and that's when the editor at the Chronicle asked me if I would be interested in writing a recipe column. So it wasn't an intended path. And at least for me in a lot of cases, a lot of instances, these things were never—I didn't have a plan or a focus. So I feel weird sometimes when people ask for career guidance, because I think when that happens, people want me to kind give them a set of steps or a series of goals. I just didn't have any. And I am not trying to like minimize or, you know, make this sound superficial in any way. But I was focused more on being a photographer more than anything and also with my job in science, I did not expect to get into food writing because I don't see myself as a strong food writer by any means.

Alicia: Has that changed now that you've done two books?

Nik: No. I still panic when I write. Writing for me is a struggle, because it's really easy for me to develop a recipe and you know, work on that. It's also really easy for me to photograph—not easy, but in relative comparison, writing is always the thing that I worked my hardest at.

Alicia: And in Season, your first cookbook, which was very well received, and it was, you know, pretty straight-forward as a cookbook, but it was very distinctly you, with recipes that are clearly influenced by the various places you've lived and notes on the science behind the cooking, but your forthcoming book, The Flavor Equation, goes like way, way deeper into the science. There are charts on emulsions and you document, like, chemical structures of aromas and the effects of pH on the color and texture of onions. Like it's, I mean, it's stunning to look at and it's all, you know, a great amount of information, which is I'm sure going to be endlessly useful as a reference. But what made you want to go in that direction? And how was it to, you know, develop a book like this, that’s so, so science-driven but for the kind of mainstream consumer and kind of such a departure from the first book in tone?

Nik: Yeah, so with the first book, I wasn't sure at the time if I would get to write a second book, so when developing the idea for the first book, Season, I really wanted to just come out and say, Hey, folks, this is who I am. This is what influences my recipe development and my style of cooking. I wanted it to be a bit more personal, because what if I never got the chance again, to write a second book? I didn't want to be one of those people that kind of like came out late in my career publicly. I mean, though, I'm already out. I just wanted to deal with my background initially, you know, in the first book, and then move on from it. It's not something that I really want to spend my time focusing on. But I just wanted to say, Hey, this is who I am. This is how life has shaped my thinking. These were and are my personal struggles, and this is the food that's been influenced by my life experiences. But in the second book I really wanted to get, when I got the chance to write the second book, which I wasn't sure I would, I've always wanted to write a book about the science of cooking at home, but explore it more from a taste and flavor perspective, because even in Season, I'm more focused on flavor than anything. And then in the second book, I really wanted to talk about the science because now I could talk to people about Hey, this is actually what's going on in my head, what's influenced my style of cooking, but at a more in-depth level. And I also wanted this book to be about science, but one of the balances—this is something that I personally have to kind of navigate, and thanks to my editors on the book—one of the things with writing a science book is that I can get lost very easily writing about science because to me, it's familiar. It's something that, you know. That’s what I actually have studied all my life, and so I can go down this rabbit hole of, you know, a lot of things that probably a lot of people don't care about. So one of the things that I really wanted to do was write a science-based cookbook that felt practical to people at home where they could see the science that I'm talking about, but with real-life examples and kind of correlate those things. Now in this book, I'm really focused more than anything on flavor, less about textures—even though texture is a component of the book as a separate chapter, I wanted to do that. And then the other thing with this book was I really wanted to talk about emotion. Because one of the things that I did when I was living in D.C. was I went back to school at Georgetown and studied public policy and health, and one of the key components during the course was human behavior. And I had never put two and two together to see how people respond in behavior to policy changes. So like sugar taxes, and all those kinds of things. So I found that really fascinating where you play with, you know, like the labeling on the box, or, you know, to affect policy change, for consumption of ingredients, to improve health outcomes. So I found that really fascinating. And that's what led me to explore human behavior in this book, although very gently. I don't really go into that much depth, but just about what I think will be applicable for a home cook, So I wanted to talk about those things, but how emotions affect our cooking and perception of taste, but also how this can affect the perception of taste also affects our emotions. And I wanted to do that in a cookbook, you know, kind of build a whole picture, because I don’t—I've never seen flavor as something that's just taste or aroma. I see it as a multidimensional component. So one of the other things that I did with this book was I also talked to folks that had lost their sense of smell, or their sense of vision, to get a better understanding of how they then relied upon their other senses to cook at home, and a lot of that informed on the topics that I wrote in this book.

Alicia: And how did you go about using emotion—were you focused on kind of how the visual influences, you know, how much someone eats, in terms of when you’re talking about labeling and that sort of thing like, yeah, how does emotion kind of affect our perception and our experience of recipes?

Nik: So one of the things is, one of the things that I read a couple of studies on being done on this is, for example, if you're in a bad mood, or you've had something that's happened in a negative way to you, you perceive food, the taste of certain foods as sour, bitter—it’s a turn-off. And an example that I use in the book, which is based on a study that was done, was about people who've lost a game. And when they lose the game, their perception of food becomes negative, because they're sad. So it changes and you're not, they're not really interested in eating and if you think about it, that's something quite common. Like when we're sad, we lose our sense of appetite. Nothing really tastes good. And this is something that happened to me. My dog passed away last year, so when he passed away, I really wasn't interested in cooking. I really wasn't interested in eating out and it was a struggle. I remember my husband taking me out to kind of get to help me move on, but also get a little distracted from what we were going through. I just wasn't interested. And so I started putting two and two together when I was writing this book, and I said, Okay, you know what, I'm actually going through these things that people are researching on a personal level. And I want to kind of bring that into this book. And then there are things that excite us so when we are happy, you know, like, if you think about it, sweeter drinks are often used at celebrations. You've got desserts, like cakes that are used as a symbol of, again, celebrations, birthdays, weddings, etc. Desserts at the end of a gathering. So, you know, the taste of food is—it’s really interesting how people look at things.

Alicia: And this is totally unrelated, but we talked a bit once about food media's obsession with identity for a piece I wrote at The New Republic—that representation in the media doesn't often translate into material changes for the people who are represented. In recent weeks, we've seen, you know, two top men at at magazines and newspapers in the food world, either resign or lose their jobs. Or I know you're you're a bit distanced from this kind of food media as someone who's focused on recipes, but do you do think that there will be a real shift in how stories are told and who's telling the stories and what do you think, you know, food media could look like in the future if there's different people in power?

Nik: I’m a bit pessimistic about what will happen, to be honest. I don't want it to be a one time thing in response to fear, you know, in response to fear of accountability. I want to see something that's long-term, you know, I don't want it to be seen in 2020, and then come back to 2021. And then it's all kind of pushed back. And then maybe like five years from now, again, you know, the same thing is repeated. This shouldn't be in ups and downs. That's not what I want to see. What I really want to see is that people who are talented, given a platform, you know. One of the things for me this year, that was really exciting was the James Beard Awards, because for the first in a very long time—and you can correct me if I'm wrong, and I'm sure people will—but The Ethiopia Cookbook won the international category. That's what it should be. Right? It should be a person who’s—and I don't want to also limit people from writing about other cultures. That’s not what it is. And you don't have to do this for everything. Like for example, cumin came from Iran. I’m not going to mention that all the time, you know, in a recipe because it's something now that's a part of Indian culture. I do understand that assimilation of ingredients will occur over time. Nothing is static; everything is dynamic, so we have to accept that. But at the same time, kind of acknowledging or giving recognition to the culture or the place where things come from, to me that's important. Also, it makes you look really well read, so I don't know why people don't do this enough. That's when you start respecting someone. The people that I respect as food writers are the ones that from whom I've learned things, from the people that say, Oh, you know, this is actually something that originated in say Italy, or in a say in Turkey. You know, those are the things that make me understand better. 

And also, as someone who's really interested in like the science behind food, it also then helps me understand why people were using a certain ingredient somewhere. For example, why date syrup is used as a sweetener in the Middle Eastern countries. To me, that makes sense then, because that's a plant that grows really well there, so I can connect those dots and see the influence. So for me, it's a learning experience. I really want that more of that. And I think people who are really talented are getting a platform to speak and share their food. That’s something that I’ve really enjoyed reading about, and also to see different voices come in. But it should be focused on talent. That is something that's really important to me. Because you could have a lot of the same old, same old, which happens in cookbooks. You know, I'm probably guilty of this too. I probably repeat ideas all the time, but it's the diversity of ideas that makes not only food writers better, but also the cook at home, because in a way, a cookbook can be so much more. It could be a gentler way to teach someone history; it could be a gentler way to teach them all about food science; it could be a gentler way to explore culture. And I'm not the person also that says "food brings everyone to the table,” because I think there are definitely things that food actually throws everyone against the wall and they’re not willing to talk about. So I don't want to, like, sell that notion. I'm quite aware that people get angry about food, too, all the time. But I think there should be opportunity to explore and write about things because, I mean—like I said earlier, if a person knows about what they're talking and they write about that in a head note, it means so much to me, because I view them with a lot of respect. Because I'm learning from them.

Alicia: I’ve thought about this lately, how important citation is and how important. I think because during the pandemic, I've had time to read again in a way that I didn't before, and now I'm like, Oh, if we all just had time to read and think more, we would not stop being so reactionary and superficial, in kind of the way we present ideas, especially around food. And I think it's also important that people haven't been able to go to restaurants so much, because I think it's just people have had to think about things that they haven't thought about before, because they just haven't had time or it's been too easy to just go out and prioritize like the chef-y type energy. Nik: And I think one of the things that I'm hoping comes away from this—nothing against chefs, but I feel it will be nice, and I see a lot of chefs are doing it right now—where I found a lot of chef cookbooks for the longest time, well, a bit unapproachable. Even for me, like I look at it and say, Okay, this is a nice idea, but I need to reinterpret so it works for me at home. And I can do that. A lot of home cooks will probably not. And sometimes I'm not always successful with these interpretations, but I think there seems to be a focus now more on the home cooks, but a lot of chefs have been forced to pivot in that direction. And I think that's good. That's one good thing that's coming out of this. There are a lot of bad things that are coming out of this. But I think that's one of the good things, where they're building a better connection with home cooks.

Alicia: I've talked about this, how it's been nice to see chefs have to take on sort of a new role, where it's less about their ego and more about your knowledge.

And so for you, is cooking a political act?

Nik: Well, this is the—I looked at this in your questions, and this was the hardest one for me. Because I never know. I've been asked if my cooking is queer or is it political, and I know food is political. But at the same time, I don't know if what I'm doing is with an intent to deliver either of these messages, if that makes sense. And so I would probably say that there are two statements that I'm probably trying to make with my food intentionally. One is that I should be allowed to cook whatever I want to cook. I don't want to be boxed into just because he's Indian, he has to cook Indian food, which I'm always trying to navigate very carefully because it is a terrifying thing for me. I want to be able to write about the food that I want to cook. And that's what I tried to do with Season—even though it's Indian influenced, it's also just influenced by what's around me. And then at the same time, I also want to be able to have the freedom to reinterpret things the way I want to. I don't want to be boxed, is what I'm trying to say. And that is my goal throughout—is that if I want to reinterpret something Indian, I shouldn't have to answer questions about why did you not do it this way, you know, and sometimes I do get that from a lot of people who are more familiar with the cuisine, or grew up eating it. And this happens to me with—I'll probably get attacked for saying this—but for me, I really want Indian people as a community, for us to be proud of the food we cook, and that doesn't mean we have to be boxed. One of the things I did with this new book also was—I do have Indian food in the new cookbook, but not enough to make it an Indian cookbook, by definition—but at the same time, I did want to express some of the science in Indian cooking because for me, it is really fascinating from a historical perspective, to see that our ancestors were doing things in the scientific way, even though at the time there were no definitions for those things. And for the longest time, if you look at science cookbooks and books on science, they primarily focus on the science of Western cooking. The principles are the same, you know, like, fat-soluble ingredients will dissolve in fats. And that's what I've been trying to do with Serious Eats. I’m not going to write about Indian food all the time at Serious Eats—definitely not. But at the same time, when it's relevant, and I feel I have something to say about the methods being used in Indian cooking or other techniques that I'm familiar with, from Asia, the Middle East, then I will bring up the science, because I feel all of us need to be proud of not only the history of our food and culture, but also about the science that our ancestors used, developed by trial and error. And those are celebrated techniques that have been used time and again, and I think we really should acknowledge not only history and culture, but also the history, the science that's behind these things.

Alicia: Absolutely. Thank you so much for coming on. 

Nik: Of course. Thanks for having me.

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When I opened Zoe Adjonyoh’s bright orange cookbook Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen, I was immediately thrilled with all the possibilities for the many plantains and various root vegetables—viandas—that enter my San Juan kitchen. “Yam 5 Ways,” “Plantain 5 Ways” kick off this book, which is subtitled Traditional Ghanaian Recipes Remixed for the Modern Kitchen.

But Zoe isn’t just her recipes: She’s also part of founding Black Book, “a global representation platform for black & non-white people working within hospitality and food media,” and has spent much of the pandemic feeding her community. We discussed all of this and more. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Thank you for taking the time and putting up with my technical difficulties today. Zoe: They’re my issues, not yours.Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Zoe: Yeah, well, I mean, I grew up in more than one place, really. Because you know, I'm from southeast London, but I'm a third culture kid. So my mum's Irish and my dad's Ghanaian. And so I'm brought up English in southeast London, but I spent a couple of years as a baby into my toddler times in Ghana, so I would’ve been eating fufu and like Ghanian baby food, basically lots of mpotompoto, pounded yam, porridge, things like that.

But I also spent a huge part of my childhood growing up in Ireland. So yeah, like, every available summer—all the school breaks, half terms, Easter, summer holidays - up until I was probably… I think I started losing interest when I was about 14, I think I carried on doing the family holidays until I was about 15. And when I say family, I mean, that was just me, my mom, my sisters—very small nuclear family. And yeah, I was in Ghana, without my parents, actually living with my grandmother, and there was some woman looking after me. But the majority of my childhood, I guess, was growing up in southeast London.

Alicia: And then how did you end up working in food?

Zoe: Yeah, really good question. There's not an easy answer to that either, I’m afraid. But, you know, I like to think of it as kind of, in one sense, it's like this happy serendipitous accident, but actually, increasingly, I've come to believe that the universe funneled me down a certain path because it really never felt like any of it was, you know—I didn't think I was destined to be a cook of any description; it was really not on my radar. But it's certainly the space in where, like, I found my power and my voice and stepped into my purpose. But, how did that start? Well, I guess I have to go back quite a few paces to childhood and the fact that I am from two different ethnic parents and the fact that I had this close relationship with Ireland and my Irishness growing up. And I didn't have that same relationship with my Ghanain-ness, and so food, from quite a young age, became my access point to Ghana and that sort of inquiry into my heritage and trying to understand what that part of my culture was about. I started working with food, in a way, from a very young age. I used to cook my friends particular dishes that I love, like peanut butter stew, which has gone on to become my signature dish. And then how my business started was in 2010, I basically got back from the States. I spent three months traveling around the States on Amtrak and, you know, any means possible really to see as much of the continent as I could and had an amazing time and I came back broke. I've always lived in Hackney Wick when I've been back in London—well, not always, technically, that's another story—but anyway, I came back to Hackney Wick, and I don't know what you know about Hackney Wick then or now, but I guess it was like Brooklyn 20 years ago, where it was kind of very affordable living, cheap warehouse, big spaces. So the dominant kind of tenant then, we were artists, creatives, writers, photographers, right? Huge studios, white spaces. But there was nothing else here. There's no bars, no restaurants, no cafés or anything like that—good times, before it was gentrified. So Hackney Wick then used to have a festival, an arts festival called Hackney Wicked. And so all of those studios would get opened over the course of that weekend. And so during this weekend, I was looking at this bleak industrial landscape of Hackney Wick suddenly fill up with like all these people from all over London. And I thought, well, there's an opportunity to make some pocket money here because they’re gonna be hungry, they're like roaming around. So basically, I decided to make a makeshift kind of food store outside my front door because my actual home, like the warehouse we live in, was being used as a video gallery, so I couldn't be in it. And I didn't have anything to do, so I thought, well, let me cook some food and see if I can sell it. And my friend made a big sign saying Zoe's Famous Peanut Butter Stew. Obviously only famous for me and to them, but as a marketing ploy, it kind of worked. And the smell, you know, it's a big smell. It's like a bold, full flavor piquant, spicy, sweet, delicious smell so it drew people and to outside my front door, you know. I kept selling out of this stuff, basically, and it started some interesting conversations around why people had never heard of Ghanian food, why people have never heard—a lot of people didn't even know where Ghana was, you know, on the map. So I think that's the moment where something subconsciously ticked in my brain, I thought, there's a problem to solve here, but I'm not going to be the problem-solver, do you know what I mean? It was still wasn't on my radar. And people wanted me to do it again and I was like, “Ah, probably not.” Anyway, fast-forward a year and I started my MA at Goldsmiths and that same weekend—I was just about to start my MA at Goldsmiths, sorry. So that same weekend, we turned the flat into a restaurant, so instead of an open studio, we made it into a restaurant because we had so much fun the year before, right? And I called it Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen—actually, I called it Ghana Kitchen; it didn't have my name on it yet. So we made loads of tables and chairs—I still live in this space now, actually, I’m sitting in it—and we made lots of tables and chairs. I would basically ransack loads of charity shops, got all second-hand cutlery and plates and went through Ridley Road Market, got this African fabric; I created a Spotify playlist. And for all intents and purposes, it looked like a restaurant. So people thought they were in a restaurant and people were trying to—and it was Ram Ram, Ram. Thank you, ma’am. It was so busy, like so I cannot tell you how extraordinarily busy it was over the course of four days and people were trying to book you know, for next week and the week after, and so on. And I had to be like, I'm really sorry, this is actually my living room, you're actually standing in my office. This isn't how this normally looks. It's like a fun thing. But I'll take your email address, and if I do it again, I'll let you know. And that's basically how that started. And because I enjoyed it so much, I kind of started doing it every few months, and then it became monthly. But it's still a hobby, right? It wasn't a business. And then when I started the MA, I thought, Oh cool, I can do this and not have to work for anybody else. And, you know, I can just write and read and have all the fun and cook when I feel like it and have these amazing parties. Because that's what they were, really, is like these huge dinner parties of like 60 people twice a night. And we used to do 60 covers twice a night. It was just so much fun. 

And I was still kind of hesitant, to be honest, because I really was focused on writing and wanting to be a writer. And I tried to move to Berlin—and I did move to Berlin, because I found my bohemian paradise there. And, you know, I was going to be this cigarette-smoking, whiskey-drinking, late-night, you know, bohemian person breathing in Berlin culture and society and then putting my spin on it. But I also took a kitchen residency while I was there to earn some money, and then at the same time—and in doing that in Berlin, right, the first event I did in Berlin went into their version of Time Out straightaway. And after that I had like my inbox full of people in Berlin trying to book for the next one. So that gave me a reason to keep going back to Berlin before I moved, then I eventually moved there. But you know, there was this Zeitgeist moment, I think, where cooking shows were taking off. Jamie Oliver's Naked Chef had done some interesting perspective-changing around what TV cooking looked like, you know; foodie became like the new language for people that love food. And there was this big gap, right, around what African cuisine was. And nobody was really stepping into that gap. And not to say that there weren’t African restaurants all over London, because there certainly were, but they certainly weren't doing what I was doing, which was having a modern perspective and modern take on it and also making an environment for people from all parts of society to feel comfortable in having that experience. The reason I came back from Berlin was because, you know, I just kept getting so many catering jobs in London, I ended up coming back to London once every two weeks I thought, Well, this is silly. So I decided to move back to London. And when I realized, you know, so it started taking off in blogs and the press. I was in German press; I was in British press; I got asked to go to do some amazing projects in Moscow, like this long table dining in a public park and it was f*****g cool as f**k. And so I was like, Okay, there's something here. What is it? Like, why do people enjoy this so much? What is the problem that I'm solving? kind of thing. And I decided that the reason—well, there's lots of reasons, but I just decided that, okay, so what you need to do is educate people about what this food is. And then that became the mission statement for Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen, to bring African food to the masses and start an African food revolution. And that's pretty much why we spent the last 10 years doing.

Alicia: And it's so interesting because I do feel like the universe, you know, you can have all these intentions and put all the work toward doing one thing that you think you want to do, that you think you're supposed to do, and then the world will be like, absolutely not. No, you're doing this other thing. Zoe: But yeah, and ironically, I mean, interestingly, I don't even think that, you know, everything that's happened so far in the last ten years still isn't even—I think I'm only just now actually getting to the point of what the purpose was of all of that experience. And that's exciting.

Alicia: And in the introduction to your book, Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen, you write “African cuisine has been surprisingly marginalized.” And that reminded me of, I'm sure you know her work, Dr. Jessica B. Harris. She wrote in High on the Hog, which is about African cuisine in the States, the same thing, basically. And you know—why do you think that's the case? And have you seen that change at all since your book came out? I mean, in the States, for whatever reason, right now Nigerian food is having kind of a moment—at least in the media because, you know, nothing can have a moment in real life right now. But yeah, so do you feel that that's changed at all? Or if it has, you know, maybe morphed slightly?

Zoe: Yes, I mean, I wish when I wrote that that I hadn't written “surprisingly,” because it's not surprisingly at all. I was a bit more polite in 2015 when I was writing that book than I am now, for sure. 

But it's not surprising, actually, for lots of reasons. And the big reason is because we understand that the food world has a white gaze all over every single aspect of it, right. So... but let's take some responsibility where we need to actually, and we do, and I think that part of the reasons that we can raise our hands up on that front is the fact that you know, within our communities—and even as I say this, there is still the lens of white supremacy behind what I'm about to say—but you know, 99.9%, if not 100% of African mothers and fathers want you to do a hard academic or hard science degree, right? Because their belief is, the world is going to be hard enough for you anyway, you need to have the best qualifications behind you so that people can't say no to you. So we don't think of, in those cultures, we don’t think of hospitality and catering as desirable careers, historically, for good reasons. 

Also, from a historical gastronomic perspective, those cultures in West Africa haven't had that leisurely headspace that the French and the Italians have had for hundreds of years to develop their cuisine, because we've actually been oppressed for hundreds of years and been trying to get our land back or our freedom back. Food was very much sustenance, and a means to an end. We know that, culturally speaking, food is very important in terms of celebration and in family get-togethers and things like that, but outside the context of nostalgia, sustenance, familiarity, and togetherness, and connection, there isn't a career associated with any of that, at least historically. 

So they're just not careers that we’d have thought to go into. Add on top of that, the huge lack of representation of Black faces in food media, full stop. I’m going to speak to the UK perspective. Growing up, the Black faces and food I saw on TV—and I mean, no disrespect to these people—were… it was just Ainsley Harriott. He's a guy of Caribbean influence, but he wasn't cooking Caribbean food. He was hosting this fun, throwaway, almost... it was called Ready Steady Cook or something like that. In its first iteration, it's like “Oh, I've got a pepper and onion. What can I make?”

And he was a fun, nice, charming character. Easy on the eye for the white gaze, for sure. And then you had Rustie Lee, who similarly, I think, was from a Caribbean background, but cooking in in stereotype of, yeah, ha ha ha, I'm a big, gay, boisterous, fun, unintimidating Black woman. Let me guide you through this thing that's got nothing to do with my heritage or culture. That was kind of the landscape apart from, maybe you saw Amanda Jeffrey occasionally or something like that. And certainly anybody from the continent of Africa was just absolutely absent in terms of representation. 

You can't be what you can't see, right? If you don't have any role models in that space to make you think, Oh, that person's doing it, I can do it, and you put all of those things together, and you've got roadblocks in the way. But then there's the inherent problem of having an all-white media and whether or not they're interested, and this is why I'm always going on about how important it is to own story and narrative and be in charge of it. Because if I wasn't the person I was, with the experience I have, and my intersectionality and all the tools that I equipped myself with, because I came into food in my 30s. I wasn't some spring chicken.

I had my armor for the world already, and I had my intention. So, you know, for a lot of young people, I think that it could have gone really wrong, really quickly. It's because I've got a strong voice and a strong intention. I have this armor that I built up through various other things over the years, I was able to be really quite forceful about how I wanted my cuisines to be represented. And even with that strength of mind and voice, I still get mis-introduced on panels. My cuisine, my style of cooking, all the food I cook still gets mis-called or mis-named on labels. There's constantly this desire to put me in an authentic bracket or traditional bracket, which is absolute b******t. I just spent an hour on the phone in another interview talking about that. 

There's like layers and layers and layers of reasons why, but has that changed? Absolutely, yes, of course it has. Dramatically. When my book came out, Hibiscus, it came out the same time. How that book came out, and the way they went about publishing that, I'm not 100% behind, because basically what they decided was, Oh, Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen is doing really well. There must be some kind of market for African food. Like, let’s do a competition to find a Black cook, because we like to—we're just too lazy to actually do a real investigation who's actually cooking this stuff. So it’s this kind of like this tokenistic adding into the equation another cookbook. And I don't say that to take anything away from Lopè Ariyo, because we’re friends; I like her a lot, and she was a great food blogger before that book came out, and the book’s a lovely book. But I don't think that she had the armor she needed to make that book the success it needs to be and to have a strong enough voice over how the marketing and publicity of that book happen.

And incidentally, another racist thing that happened was they put those books out intentionally at the same time. So they delayed my release by a year so that it would come out at the same time as her release, which meant that they then split our audience. And, you know, the reason I say that that's part of systemic racism is because they're not giving appropriate value to the work, and to the fact that we're already competing in a space that is hugely competitive with niche cuisines. And trying to give it a voice, a place, and a platform. And if you split our market, you split our voice and you split our earning potentials and blah, blah, blah, and so on. 

I thought that was an extremely cynical and untrustworthy move by the media. And of course, we had The Groundnut Cookbook just before those two books came out, actually. So there was that moment around West African cooking, but they would like to keep that as a moment, so they're not going to encourage us to keep producing books, and I even had a meeting in which my publisher said to me, probably not even a year after it was released, they were like, sales haven't been what we wanted and we’re not going to do a reprint. And I said, will you do a paperback or something? And she was like, no. And then I said, okay, well, I'm interested in doing like an afro-vegan something or other, and she said, I think you missed that boat. Missed that boat? In 2018? What the actual f**k are you talking about?

So I've been trying to get my rights back to my book, which they haven't been willing to give me. Well, let's say there's been a lot of excuses like this person's on maternity, this person's on maternity, this person's not in the office. And then the whole BLM movement blows up. And then suddenly I've got my extra 3,000 followers overnight, and everyone's like buying Black. And then suddenly the publisher wants to reprint my book, and it's like, oh, you son of a b***h.

But anyway, in the meantime. We have lots of new African food businesses. Some of which have been kind enough to reference me as an inspiration for what they've done. So you've got you we have Jollof Box, we have Nim’s Din with her Cham Cham from Sierra Leone. We have Little Baobab, who's got a cookbook coming out soon. Chuku’s, which is in London, has just opened a restaurant in North London and Tottenham. They do Nigerian tapas. We have Akoko, which is fine dining opening October which has been delayed from April this year. We have Stork in Mayfair. And obviously we have Ikoyi, but they want to distance themselves for whatever reasons they have from West African, being labeled West African food, but inherently it is and, and hundreds, hundreds of street food vendors, supper clubs, private dining, and food writers, food bloggers. 

We have seen a huge change in how at least the cuisine is represented in terms of the number of people representing it. We still have a long way to go in terms of how it’s represented in the media visually, whether it's online or on TV, but also in print. And we still have the problem where there's only space for one Black face at a time, and there's only room for one conversation around African food at a time, even though it's a continent that has 54 countries. 

There's still lots to do. But we have made huge progress. And I have seen that progress translate to the States. I think there's a whole other conversation there around the relationship with slave history, and slave culture and the food. That is the origin story of so much of the food of the South. And I think that's a complicated thing to unpack, but I think that there's definitely been, in the last 10 years, a movement of voices, whether they're chefs or writers in food, who are making the connection between the African American food experience and the origin point of all of that and that is leading to great new concepts. 

There’s cooks, people like Kurt Cooks; Yewande [Komolafe] is doing great things; she's a great friend of mine as well. And I mean, I could list lots of chefs, Kwame [Onwuachi]. There's lots more chefs who have gained traction and profile around their cuisine, and they are majority Nigerian. And I don't know if that speaks to the fact that, especially the East Coast has a larger population of Nigerians than does Ghanians.

Maybe that is why it's gaining some traction, because there must be a lot of immigrants from those communities there to have the relationship with it in the first place, I suppose. Whereas we have a huge community of Nigeria and Ghanian people in Britain, probably in equal measure, whereas perhaps maybe on the East Coast, there's more Nigerians. 

Eric Adjepong from Ghana, he's not based in New York, I think, but he's certainly been a huge profile builder for Ghana in the States. I'm hoping he does all the work that I've done over here so that like when I get there I don’t have to explain to anybody where Ghana is.

Alicia: It's fascinating for me because I'm in Puerto Rico right now. And for me, in the cuisine here the African influence is so obvious, you know, and not in a way that it's been sort of translated through the food of the American South, like because the climate is the same, the food, the ingredients are so much the same. And that influence is so, so strong and it's obviously it's combined with Spanish influence from that colonization. But it's interesting because I feel so distant from whatever is happening in the United States around food right now, because I'm not there. And so I'm watching this and I'm like, Oh, wow. How is this happening? I mean, as you noted, it's like there's this push right now where people are like, Oh, follow all these Black people in food, buy their books. And it’s a bit… I've talked a bit about this with another friend whose magazine has seen this kind of bump from this moment, and it's a complicated thing to deal with. It's absolutely and so how I feel like... did you launch Black Book, the kind of conversation series you're doing on Instagram, as kind of a way of discussing how this moment is very complicated?

Zoe: Well, the answer to that is also a little bit … not complicated, but it's actually a bit longer than that. The Black Book has been on my mind as an important thing that needs to happen for a couple of years. And I'll tell you, when I've worked in New York...  my wife's from New York, so I spend quite a lot of time in New York, and I've been lucky enough to work there. I've been lucky enough to meet some amazing inspirational voices in food. And when I became part of or saw what Black Food Folks was, honestly, my jaw dropped. I was like, What the f**k is this? Everybody in this room works in F&B, and they're Black. And there's no hierarchy in this room, right? We're just all there because we are all Black, and we are all working in this industry. And it's really easy to have a conversation with anybody in this room. And I was blown away by that, because nothing like that exists in the UK. And ever since that, I've been like, how do I make that happen? Like, how do I make that happen here? But I was still trying to run my other businesses in this chaotic, horrible, messy way. So this wasn't a priority there. But when I just got back from New York, recently, in February… I was having this big... as a result of COVID, as a result of lots of personal development and growth I've been doing in actually shifting my perspective on vision and purpose and stuff. 

And so really the Black Book is born out of that experience of being in America and seeing the power of connectedness between a community. So back in February, March, I emailed two friends of mine—I've been having these conversations for years. This is the other thing that's very frustrating, is I've literally been one of the few voices criticizing publicly or having these conversations with people about inherent systemic racism and how and why our voices are controlled and limited and how we're not paid properly. 

So at the start of COVID, I reached out to these people and said look, I want to start Black Book, here's the vision. This is what I want it to be. And we’d been working towards that. And then the BLM thing happened. And then in the UK, the wave of the movement. And then suddenly all these people were wanting me to speak on panels. And I was like, wait, wait, wait, no, you've got this all wrong, you don't get to host this conversation. You don't get to tell me what's important to me, or what needs changing because you've got no f*****g idea, you know? 

So I just contacted as many people... I just said, we need to talk about this meaningfully, and it actually, it needs to be a global conversation. And it needs to have the voices in it who've been having this conversation for years, because we need to get past this question of whether or not there's a problem because of course, there's a f*****g problem. The next part of the question is, How deep is it? And how do we unpack it? And do we bother unpacking it or do we just let them carry on with it and we start our own versions? 

The food industry is so big—it's bigger than hospitality. There's so much to discuss. And there's so much to unpack, it's like, you can't do it in one panel. So that's why the Black Book series was born, decolonizing the food industry, is because I wanted us to take control of the conversation, and also not wait for them to have the right conversations, and not wait for them to come up with the solutions that would only just suit them. So that's the point of the Black Book series of talks. It's eight weeks at the moment, but I can see it probably extending, because there is so much to talk about on so many different topics. I've been lucky to get some amazing, amazing voices on the panels, and the first one last Sunday was great, very energetic, and ultimately very positive, because what we also want to do is give people hope that there is space for Blackness in F&B and hospitality. Whether it's in the existing institutions or not is another question. But everybody should be hopeful in this moment, because there is so much for us to look forward to if we've got the right glasses on, you know what I mean? 

Alicia: Absolutely. And what made you what the specific topics that you guys are talking about over these eight weeks? How did you decide on what they would be?

Zoe: The honest answer to that is in about 30 seconds, I just went—off the top of my head, what are the eight most important things? I said, guys, can you work up these headline topics a little bit, like give me a paragraph as to what this conversation looks like? And that was it. That's how it started.

Alicia: Amazing. Yeah. I always say this, that the best things start from nothing, you know, the best things start from just dumping your brain.

Zoe: I think it's true, because I've been saying this a lot recently, because the vision for Black Book is so big—and I don't think I've explained it adequately. So let me just do that for a minute.

So Black Book, the vision for Black Book is to be a global representation platform for Black and anybody who doesn't identify as white, right? So some people, I don’t know why they get hurt by this phrase non-white. If you’re not white, then you’re not white, and that's the end of it. I feel okay about non-white, but have it your way. Ultimately, it's about creating, inspiring, and empowering people, and giving them the tools to represent themselves in a way that gives them the tools to fulfill their dreams the way that they want those dreams to unfold, rather than going down the wrong rabbit hole and seeking the wrong kind of attention in the wrong kind of press because the way the system is currently works… it has its own kind of modality and its own rhythm. 

Publishers are like, okay, we've got a cookbook, it has to go into the Times and The Telegraph and so on. And it’s like, is my book suitable, actually? Is that the right space for this book? No, it really f*****g isn’t. I know that, but trying to tell the man at the top is another story. What we need to do is understand where we want to be, be connected to the right people to help us get there, but the extra piece of it in its essence isn't agency, but it wants to be a little bit more than that, because it wants to plug in the need for self-care, self-empowerment. I wanted to give people tools to navigate a white space and industry. 

It wants to give people the connections they need for the things that they want to get done. Mentorship, training, funding in some respects, and to do it or to do it in a more holistic kind of way rather than just being like, okay, I've signed you up, you go for the next five years, build your career, and when you start earning money, I'll take 20 percent of what comes into your inbox, you know what I mean? Which is majority of the time my experience of how an agent treats you and your talent. They just wait for you to do the work, and they try and cling onto it.

It's an antidote to all of that. And it wants to give people across the world a platform or voice for whoever wants to build their businesses how they want to do it, or their brands, if they’re writers or whatever they are. It wants to create equity in the food and beverage industry and also wealth creation. This makes sure people are earning the appropriate amount of money for the amount of work they're doing, because for so many years, I have literally almost killed myself working for other people's interests for nothing. Not getting anything out of it, apart from what they would like to call exposure in entirely the wrong media, in entirely the wrong space. That's what the big vision is for Black Book, a global representation platform for anybody working in F&B.

Alicia: That's great. And not to kind of pivot back to your book, and to food, more literally. But in the notes section of your book, you mention sourcing ingredient ingredients responsibly. And that's not a thing that anyone says in a book that comes out in the United States. In a cookbook from the United States, no one talks about where the food comes from. That's not a thing that anyone talks about in the States. There was kind of a moment maybe in the maybe 10 years ago when that could have been a thing, but it's very alienating to a U.S. audience to ask them to care where their food comes from. But I've noticed it's more of a thing in the UK, like, from the cookbooks I've read, which I have…. I have like a million British cookbooks on my desk right now. I don't know why—I don't know how it happened. But why was it important for you to make that statement? And how does it affect your food choices in your day-to-day life, and in your work as a cook?

Z: Inherently, I am a human who values the planet, right? So if we consider ourselves humans that value the planet, then we have to be thinking sustainably around most things we do every day. What I am aware of is that definitely something I don't want to do is be preaching at people, you have to buy organic, you have to do this, and you're not a good human if you're not spending 20 pounds on your eggs. This actually really winds me up, because people are priced out of sustainability and they're priced out of healthy choices because of  idiotic marketing around it. And, you know, I love that you've got a new book coming out, haven't you?

Alicia: I do. Yes.

Zoe: I love the topic, and I love the title because you’re right. Anyway, let's go back. I try to practice sustainability as best I can every day. And sometimes it’s macro choices, sometimes it's micro choices. When it comes to my everyday cooking, like Sarah and I—she's keto. So her protein usually comes from a meat source or a fish source. But we only eat meat or fish maybe two or three times a week, and that's because we want to be buying the right sustainably-sourced meat or fish proteins. And that's a responsibility to the environment that we think is important. We don't eat loads of meat and fish.  

If I put loads of meat or fish on my menu when I'm cooking, it means that the price will reflect the fact that it is sustainably sourced and organic, and that is problematic for a lot of people, because they're people think they want to be woke, and into sustainability and the environment, but then they don't necessarily want to pay the price of what that actually costs when it comes to a supper club or a restaurant. So it's challenging. I have something to say as well about how we can work harder to bring the cost down of organic and free range and stuff like that. Because there's lots governments could do in terms of subsidies and legislation against existing farming practices, and just make everybody f*****g do the same thing the same right way and subsidize it and then we're all good. 

I'm certainly not there to preach at people about their spending choices around food. I grew up eating out of tin cans. I'm not saying I was poor on the street, I'm just saying, tinned food wasn't uncommon in my house growing up, frozen meals and ready meals. I'm not a snob around any of that stuff. But I certainly see the value in amazing fresh ingredients. And I see the value in the better flavor that you get from good sustainably sourced ingredients, full stop, whether it's vegetables, proteins, legumes, lentils, grains—whatever the ingredient is, it's always going to taste a little bit better if it's sustainably sourced, sustainably farmed. All sustainably means, really, is with love, right? Instead of for money. Instead of capitalism being the sole driving force behind the production of food.  

That’s in there because I care about it. But also I don't want to labor the point too much. Also, a lot of these ingredients are coming from the continent of Africa, and there is an environmental impact there. I choose to make these other choices around not using single-use impact plastics or using cleaning things that are better for the environment than what I used to use. Nobody's perfect, so you have to make compromises. 

It’s—okay, if I want to eat really good quality meat, then I'm only gonna eat it once a week. If I want to be importing ingredients from Ghana, well, then I should be a bit more mindful about how many times I put the kettle on, how many times I flush the toilet in a day. Whether I'm using eco- or some other environmentally friendly products. If I'm using cling film or not, which we don't anymore. I try to make the choices that I'm comfortable with, because I know that me and my business are essentially adding carbon. Even things like using the browser I use, Ecosia every time I do a search on Ecosia, they plant a tree. My conscience is balanced in those ways. I think it's up to everybody to find their own conscious balance in a way that's affordable for them. 

But I am really, really annoyed and frustrated by the marketing around healthy food and veganism, actually, and just the barriers to entry that are put over people who don't have high disposable income. They're kind of marketed out of and priced out of healthy choices around food, which is probably a campaign I might take up at some point later. Maybe not this year, but maybe next year. 

Alicia: Yeah, no, that's why I'm... my book will be about these things, sort of about how all these choices that get pushed on us as individual are actually structural, and the price of things that you know, meat isn't cheaper then vegetables, inherently, it's because of the subsidies. My book is about veganism, but it's more about how to diversify the way you eat in a way that recognizes all these forces that are crushing your ability to make good choices, to make better choices for the world. And to show that yeah, it's not a rich person's thing. Eating well and eating sustainably is not just for rich people.

Zoe: Exactly. I don’t know if I’ve already spoken on this or not, but Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen as a business is pivoting now… I hate the word pivoting, because we were doing it anyway, but I wanted to change the brand a little bit to make it more focused around accessibility. For one, there are a lot of people who don't want to do the work of just googling where to find an ingredient. But then there's the problem of okay, I'm interested in that ingredient. I didn't want to pay 25 pounds for a kilo of it from that posh health food store, because what if I don't like it? 

Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen now is basically transforming into an e-shop, basically, for interesting, healthy, African, not just West African ingredients, whether it's your maringas and your baobabs or grains of paradise. And the beautiful thing about this food is every single thing has an amazing health property behind it, and not just one, probably like four or five, six or seven, right? What I get to do now is bring African food to the masses, but do it through an e-shop that's also going to give people access to healthy ingredients in small quantities and affordable quantities with guidance on how to use them or apply them. That's where we're going. Basically, your health is your wealth, and you can achieve this. You don't have to only shop at Holland and Barrett, you don't have to go to Whole Foods. Here's some nice choices you can make that happen to be exciting flavors in your kitchen, but also have these amazing properties behind them as well. That's where the business is going long term, and more away from catering. Definitely away from street food. I'm done with that.

Alicia: Is there Whole Foods in the UK? 

Zoe: Yeah, yeah. 

Alicia: I didn't know that they made.., I don't know where Whole Foods is and that anymore. I thought it was just a U.S. thing.

Zoe: Here’s the thing. You can tell, the people who shopped at Whole Foods… it's like there's some cachet around it, you know? There shouldn't be cachet around buying healthy food, it should just be, everybody has access to this food. Like the whole caged hen thing. Why are we still doing caged hens? Like, why? Why, why, why? I want to ask the people in agriculture at the ministerial level, why haven't you not just banned caged hens? We know it makes bad products, we know it's bad for the hens. And it's probably not that great for the environment somewhere along the line. So why are we doing it? Just give everybody nice, good quality, organic, free-range eggs. That's a big bugbear of mine, how health is marketed mainly to white people, mainly to middle-class white people. And it assumes that nobody else is interested. And it prices out anybody else who might be. I'm over that as well.

Alicia: Absolutely. No, I love talking to Bryant Terry, because he is so vocal about being like, people think veganism is a white thing. But he grew up in Tennessee, where also people think veganism doesn't exist. And it was Black folks who were the people who taught him about plant-based eating and that lineage is so important. And it gets erased because it serves a purpose, of course. 

Zoe: There's so many reasons why I wanted to start. When I figured out the reasons why Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen existed, there were so many reasons why it needed to exist. And part of it was this…. I grew up in the ’80s, watching this narrative come out of Africa—that there was poverty, it was famine, it was destroying itself, imploding, dictators. That was the media description of what was going on in Africa for me. And you know, compare and contrast with my delicious kenkey, and my tilapia, and my shito, and I'm like, what is going on? There must be some other stuff happening here. And so, you know, it's all about the gaze, and how they want to position it, and how they want to keep the power. 

The other part is people thinking that African food is bush meat, and it's all like, fatty, greasy. People were looking down their nose at that cuisine. My menu, before veganism became fashionable, before plant based became fashionable—that's what my menu was. I didn't even realize. It was gluten free. It was dairy free. I had probably 80 percent of the menu was vegan and plant-based. And you would have a meat dish, you would have a fish dish and maybe you'd have one more. I had my fried chicken, you always got to keep fried chicken on the menu. But the majority of it was plant-based and like, I've kind of missed a trick by not capitalizing on that sooner. I certainly would have made some bang for my buck then. But it wasn't in my marketing concerns because it just inherently this was it, you know? Fixing those stereotypes, or addressing them anyway, is super important and yeah, we live off of plant-based diets, because me actually is a luxury in some part of the world. 

Alicia: People don't understand that. And so during the pandemic, not to use the word pivoted again, but you were providing—are you still doing this? You're providing meals to NHS workers from Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen? 

Zoe: Well, I set up a community kitchen via public donations from crowd-funder, and that was to specifically help vulnerable people in the community around me in East London. So I’ve been working with like Hackney Migrants’ Center, Across The UK, which is a West African at-risk migrants center—lots of little organizations, basically, whether they were elderly people or people in sheltered accommodation, or homeless, or had health underlying health conditions. I work with all these little small groups to get food to those people. And then on top of that, we were also providing meals for NHS key workers and staff, and also care homes. So yeah, we were doing about 500 meals a week in the end, which is kind of incredible because I only set it up to do 150 meals a week. 

But we're not doing NHS meals anymore, as of this week. And the crowd-funder, to be honest, has kind of lost its momentum and stuff like that. But I've also decided I can live my purpose by running a community kitchen, or I can live my purpose by doing the bigger work. So I decided not to extend it very much. So what I am going to do is I'm going to continue to provide meals for the at-risk migrants, because they are my community. And the numbers are small enough for me to be able to pay out of my own pocket. So we're going to carry that on. But like the big 500 meals a week stuff—this is the first week where I'm not doing that, actually. And it's really nice, in a way. I hate to say it. 

But it's been a very rewarding thing to do. I've grown tremendously from it. I stepped into my myself a lot more during the process of doing that scene, I had to make myself super vulnerable by asking people for help, and that really isn't me. That's not what I've done historically, I'm a strong Black woman. I learned so much, and I met some amazing people along the way and obviously, we've done good work, feeding people. It's been hugely rewarding. That's scaling right back now so that I can focus on Black Book, focus on writing, focus on the spice business. There's so much more going to happen.

Alicia: So for you is cooking a political act?

Zoe: Yeah. Yes, it always has been for me, and you can define your politics another way. I mean, it's cooking at home political for me? Hmm… also, probably, because of the choices I make when I make my purchases around food, right? They're politically informed. They're made with a consciousness around food politics, around sustainability. But I don't always want to talk about politics when I’m eating. 

So politics is informing my choices around food, but me cooking, me representing Ghanian flavors, or West Africa, or Africa in any context when it comes to food—and whether that's me on a panel, whether that's me giving a demo, whether that's me hosting a soccer club or a residency, whatever the space is—that is political, because I'm challenging people to interact with a culture that's perhaps, for some people, unfamiliar to them. Or I'm challenging people to interact with a culture in a new way that's familiar to them. And that's going to challenge all their concepts of what is traditional, who’s allowed to cook what, cultural appropriation, and so on. 

If you're from a place that's considered other, and if you yourself are a representation or have been made to be a representation of other, then everything you do is political in the end, because you're a living, breathing, walking… I nearly went so dramatic and said bill of rights, but that’s too much. But you're basically like a manifesto in flow, right? So every exchange you have around food, every meal you cook, you're prepared for the conversation that's either an interrogation of the thing, or an introduction to the thing or an education of the thing. There's always some political moment around the food, even when it's a positive, bringing people together over food, there's politics in that as well. Why do we need the food to bring those people together? Because there was some political thing keeping them apart. So I think inherently when you are what other people call other, politics is that part of my fabric.

Alicia: Thank you so much for taking the time.

Zoe: Oh, absolute pleasure. You know I love to talk, babe. If there was a job where I could just be on back-to-back podcasts… 

Alicia: I mean, there are so many podcasts. I feel like I now—I have to say no to people lately. I'm like, I can't... I can't, because for me, I'm like, I don't actually enjoy talking that much. Like, I like writing. So I'm like, doing this is just like… stressful. 

Zoe: We do need… I mean, I know there's a lot out there but we need to have a lot out there so that people can hear. So thank you. 

Alicia: Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Korsha: Yes, that makes it worth it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Korsha: I mean, I feel differently for sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Korsha: They think you work for them.

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

But for you, is cooking a political act?

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

Alicia: Thank you so much for coming on today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victoria: Of course, Alicia, thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alicia: That's okay. A little bit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victoria: Thank you Alicia. Thanks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alicia: For you, is cooking a political act?

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

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

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

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