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https://www.whetstonemagazine.com/podcast-blog/episode-25

Everything that Stephen Satterfield at Point of Origin / Whetstone Magazine produces is excellent, but this episode in particular hit home how economic and governmental structures contribute to oppression in schools. Highly recommend!

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"This is about money. This isn't about trying to promote health because we have so many medical and scientific papers and research that demonstrate that drinking milk is harmful to health."

Professor Andrea Freeman

On episode 25 of Point of Origin, we discuss how milk is the perfect microcosm for the many maladies plaguing our corporate food system. Currently, in the US an estimated 2.7 million - 3.7 million gallons of US milk is dumped every day as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. We investigate why. Join us as we uncover the politics rife in the US food systems, the everlasting systemic problem of money shaping policy, and how the joint actions of industry and government led to the creation and perpetuation of health disparities. Helping us navigate this landscape is Andrea Freeman, author of The Unbearable Whiteness of Milk: Food Oppression and the USDA.

Highlights

( 00:00 ) Introduction

( 02:50 ) Racism in the Milk Industry

( 07:45 ) Money in the Milk Industry

( 10:55 ) Milk Dumping during COVID-19

( 13:40 ) USDA's Negative Affects on Students

( 19:55 ) The Marketing of Milk

( 24:32 ) Baby Formula in America

( 29:15 ) The Future of the Dairy Industry

( 32:20 ) Closing Remarks from Stephen

Nutritional Racism and

Lactose Intolerance

"We actually look at it as a negative, and call it 'lactose intolerance', which is what most people have because it's actually unusual to be able to digest milk past breast feeding age. But as with many things, white people are the ones who do it the most, so that becomes the normal, baseline, and anything that diverges from that, even though it's the common thing, is seen as some kind of anomaly, and given this negative name of lactose intolerance."
Characterizing lactose intolerance as abnormal appears to reflect the belief that the experiences of whites define the baseline of normal, and any departure signifies an unusual and undesirable condition.

The group study charts of which people in the world can digest milk, and see this as a symbol of their greater health, greater strength, and that idea was first promoted in the 1920's by the National Dairy council, by the Agricultural Association of New York, in pamphlets that explicitly associate Arians and white people that drink milk with the strongest, the most intelligence, the greatest culture

Quote from Pamphlet:

"the people who have used liberal amounts of milk and its products [meaning white people], are progressive in science in every activity of the human intellect."

The Dumping of milk During a Pandemic

"The dairy farms did not have a way to repackage their milk into smaller containers to send to a food bank or a grocery store, so this is what led to the dumping of the milk because there was just no way to get it to consumers or individuals. That's a pivot that would take a lot of infrastructural change, that wasn't possible on such short notice."
Currently, farmers have had to resort to milk dumping because of a precipitous drop in demand from schools, restaurants and other food service providers, which have been mandated to close their doors to stop the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. The sudden shift in demand means that dairy farms across the country have an excess of milk. Between 2.7 million and 3.7 million gallons of US milk could be dumped per day as a result of the crisis, the Dairy Farmers of America, a major dairy co-operative, estimated. Because farmers are not able to stop milking their cows, dumping becomes inevitable.

Dairy groups are scrambling to figure out ways to prevent more milk from going to waste without further harming the industry.

The National Milk Producers Federation and the International Dairy Foods Association have estimated that supply exceeds demand by at least 10% and have asked the USDA to provide financial incentives to dairy farmers to reduce their supply by that much for about six months. They've also asked the USDA to compensate dairy farmers for the discarded milk for about three months.

The groups are asking the government to purchase dairy products and donate them to food banks, a way to both feed people in need and prevent demand from plummeting further.

"Most people know from our personal, physical experiences,that milk is not a great product for us, but then a lot of research has come out showing that not only is it not nutritious, but it's harmful, and it has no health benefits."

Andrea Freeman

The Alternative Milk Market

The showdown between dairy and nondairy milks has been a long time coming. Consumption of conventional milk has been cratering since the 1950s, a product of both modern concerns about fat and the explosion of consumer beverage options after World War II. In more recent years, sales of, first, soy milk and later almond, cashew, rice, coconut and quinoa milks, have steadily eaten into dairy milk's already shrinking market share. According to Nielsen, almond-milk sales grew 250 percent between 2011 and 2016, a period when the milk market shrank by $1 billion.

Even with a set price, Americans still aren't buying milk in the volume farmers say they need to turn a profit. Since 1975, milk consumption per capita has dipped roughly 40 percent, according to data from Nielsen, and between 2010 and 2018, sales of milk dropped by 13 percent. The already-low price of milk, which is set by the federal government, is projected to drop even further this year.

Despite this surge, almond milk only accounts for 5 percent of the total milk market, but the dairy milk industry is taking notice and aim, even creating ads in an effort to portray almond milk as "less than".

Andrea Freeman's Book

Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race and Injustice

Born into a tenant farming family in North Carolina in 1946, Mary Louise, Mary Ann, Mary Alice, and Mary Catherine were medical miracles. Annie Mae Fultz, a Black-Cherokee woman who lost her ability to hear and speak in childhood, became the mother of America's first surviving set of identical quadruplets. They were instant celebrities. Their White doctor named them after his own family members. He sold the rights to use the sisters for marketing purposes to the highest-bidding formula company. The girls lived in poverty, while Pet Milk's profits from a previously untapped market of Black families skyrocketed.

Over half a century later, baby formula is a seventy-billion-dollar industry and Black mothers have the lowest breastfeeding rates in the country. Since slavery, legal, political, and societal factors have routinely denied Black women the ability to choose how to feed their babies. In Skimmed, Andrea Freeman tells the riveting story of the Fultz quadruplets while uncovering how feeding America's youngest citizens is awash in social, legal, and cultural inequalities. This book highlights the making of a modern public health crisis, the four extraordinary girls whose stories encapsulate a nationwide injustice, and how we can fight for a healthier future.

Professor Freeman writes and researches at the intersection of critical race theory and food policy, health, and consumer credit. Much of her work explores her pioneering theory of food oppression, which examines how facially neutral food-related law and policy, influenced by corporate interests, disproportionately harm marginalized communities. She is the author of Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice and the recipient of the 2020-21 Fulbright King's College London US Scholar Award.

"This is about money. This isn't about trying to promote health because we have so many medical and scientific papers and research that demonstrate that drinking milk is harmful to health."

Professor Andrea Freeman

On episode 25 of Point of Origin, we discuss how milk is the perfect microcosm for the many maladies plaguing our corporate food system. Currently, in the US an estimated 2.7 million - 3.7 million gallons of US milk is dumped every day as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. We investigate why. Join us as we uncover the politics rife in the US food systems, the everlasting systemic problem of money shaping policy, and how the joint actions of industry and government led to the creation and perpetuation of health disparities. Helping us navigate this landscape is Andrea Freeman, author of The Unbearable Whiteness of Milk: Food Oppression and the USDA.

Highlights

( 00:00 ) Introduction

( 02:50 ) Racism in the Milk Industry

( 07:45 ) Money in the Milk Industry

( 10:55 ) Milk Dumping during COVID-19

( 13:40 ) USDA's Negative Affects on Students

( 19:55 ) The Marketing of Milk

( 24:32 ) Baby Formula in America

( 29:15 ) The Future of the Dairy Industry

( 32:20 ) Closing Remarks from Stephen

Nutritional Racism and

Lactose Intolerance

"We actually look at it as a negative, and call it 'lactose intolerance', which is what most people have because it's actually unusual to be able to digest milk past breast feeding age. But as with many things, white people are the ones who do it the most, so that becomes the normal, baseline, and anything that diverges from that, even though it's the common thing, is seen as some kind of anomaly, and given this negative name of lactose intolerance."
Characterizing lactose intolerance as abnormal appears to reflect the belief that the experiences of whites define the baseline of normal, and any departure signifies an unusual and undesirable condition.

The group study charts of which people in the world can digest milk, and see this as a symbol of their greater health, greater strength, and that idea was first promoted in the 1920's by the National Dairy council, by the Agricultural Association of New York, in pamphlets that explicitly associate Arians and white people that drink milk with the strongest, the most intelligence, the greatest culture

Quote from Pamphlet:

"the people who have used liberal amounts of milk and its products [meaning white people], are progressive in science in every activity of the human intellect."

The Dumping of milk During a Pandemic

"The dairy farms did not have a way to repackage their milk into smaller containers to send to a food bank or a grocery store, so this is what led to the dumping of the milk because there was just no way to get it to consumers or individuals. That's a pivot that would take a lot of infrastructural change, that wasn't possible on such short notice."
Currently, farmers have had to resort to milk dumping because of a precipitous drop in demand from schools, restaurants and other food service providers, which have been mandated to close their doors to stop the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. The sudden shift in demand means that dairy farms across the country have an excess of milk. Between 2.7 million and 3.7 million gallons of US milk could be dumped per day as a result of the crisis, the Dairy Farmers of America, a major dairy co-operative, estimated. Because farmers are not able to stop milking their cows, dumping becomes inevitable.

Dairy groups are scrambling to figure out ways to prevent more milk from going to waste without further harming the industry.

The National Milk Producers Federation and the International Dairy Foods Association have estimated that supply exceeds demand by at least 10% and have asked the USDA to provide financial incentives to dairy farmers to reduce their supply by that much for about six months. They've also asked the USDA to compensate dairy farmers for the discarded milk for about three months.

The groups are asking the government to purchase dairy products and donate them to food banks, a way to both feed people in need and prevent demand from plummeting further.

"Most people know from our personal, physical experiences,that milk is not a great product for us, but then a lot of research has come out showing that not only is it not nutritious, but it's harmful, and it has no health benefits."

Andrea Freeman

The Alternative Milk Market

The showdown between dairy and nondairy milks has been a long time coming. Consumption of conventional milk has been cratering since the 1950s, a product of both modern concerns about fat and the explosion of consumer beverage options after World War II. In more recent years, sales of, first, soy milk and later almond, cashew, rice, coconut and quinoa milks, have steadily eaten into dairy milk's already shrinking market share. According to Nielsen, almond-milk sales grew 250 percent between 2011 and 2016, a period when the milk market shrank by $1 billion.

Even with a set price, Americans still aren't buying milk in the volume farmers say they need to turn a profit. Since 1975, milk consumption per capita has dipped roughly 40 percent, according to data from Nielsen, and between 2010 and 2018, sales of milk dropped by 13 percent. The already-low price of milk, which is set by the federal government, is projected to drop even further this year.

Despite this surge, almond milk only accounts for 5 percent of the total milk market, but the dairy milk industry is taking notice and aim, even creating ads in an effort to portray almond milk as "less than".

Andrea Freeman's Book

Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race and Injustice

Born into a tenant farming family in North Carolina in 1946, Mary Louise, Mary Ann, Mary Alice, and Mary Catherine were medical miracles. Annie Mae Fultz, a Black-Cherokee woman who lost her ability to hear and speak in childhood, became the mother of America's first surviving set of identical quadruplets. They were instant celebrities. Their White doctor named them after his own family members. He sold the rights to use the sisters for marketing purposes to the highest-bidding formula company. The girls lived in poverty, while Pet Milk's profits from a previously untapped market of Black families skyrocketed.

Over half a century later, baby formula is a seventy-billion-dollar industry and Black mothers have the lowest breastfeeding rates in the country. Since slavery, legal, political, and societal factors have routinely denied Black women the ability to choose how to feed their babies. In Skimmed, Andrea Freeman tells the riveting story of the Fultz quadruplets while uncovering how feeding America's youngest citizens is awash in social, legal, and cultural inequalities. This book highlights the making of a modern public health crisis, the four extraordinary girls whose stories encapsulate a nationwide injustice, and how we can fight for a healthier future.

Professor Freeman writes and researches at the intersection of critical race theory and food policy, health, and consumer credit. Much of her work explores her pioneering theory of food oppression, which examines how facially neutral food-related law and policy, influenced by corporate interests, disproportionately harm marginalized communities. She is the author of Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice and the recipient of the 2020-21 Fulbright King's College London US Scholar Award.

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Point of Origin Episode 25 - Whetstone Magazine

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On episode 25 of Point of Origin, we discuss how milk is the perfect microcosm for the many maladies plaguing our corporate food system. Currently, in the US an estimated 2.7 million - 3.7 million gallons of US milk is dumped every day as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.

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This podcast debunks diet/wellness trends. The episode on the BMI is BANANAS!!

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Sohla El-Waylly: I was just filled with so much rage and frustration with the job. My whole life I'd felt like I was getting these jobs or this salary because I didn't deserve more, you know? That I wasn't good enough, like maybe I do need to work for 20 years to get to a job that takes a white person two years to get to.

Dan Pashman: This is The Sporkful , it's not for foodies it's for eaters, I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show we obsess about food to learn more about people. We're covering some breaking news for you this week, which is why this episode is up early. The protests happening across the country, and the conversations about race and racism so many of us are having, are happening in newsrooms and media outlets too. Longstanding anger over representation, diversity in hiring, double standards in coverage, it's all coming out. In food media, this attention has focused so far on Bon Appetit . Bon Appetit the legendary magazine, and the home of the BA Test Kitchen , where some of the most popular food videos on all of YouTube are shot. The channel has billions of views, and fans online gush about hosts like Claire Saffitz and Brad Leone like they're best friends.

Dan Pashman: So let's talk about what's been happening at Bon Appetit . Two weeks ago, Bon Appetit 's editor in chief, Adam Rapoport, posted a statement on the website, titled "Food Has Always Been Political" . It basically said Black Lives Matter and directed people to some of their articles about black chefs. It was similar to a lot of corporate statements that have come out, and it came under fire because food writers and chefs of color have long felt largely shut out of . In response to that statement, food writer Illyanna Maisonet tweeted about her previous interactions with Bon Appetit . She had pitched them a story about Afro-Puerto Ricans, who make regional rice fritters, but was told the story wasn't new and trendy enough. When she tweeted about Rapoport's statement, she added the hashtag #solidaritymyass. Then a couple days later, just this past Monday, another food writer named Tammie Teclemariam out a photo of Adam Rapoport in brownface. It was taken from a 2013 Instagram post on his wife's page.

Rachel Premack: And he was in a costume that was clearly intended to be a stereotypical representation of Puerto Rican people.

Dan Pashman: And then there was a mocking tone to it.

Rachel Premack: Exactly.

Dan Pashman: This is Rachel Premack, a reporter for Business Insider , who's broken a lot of the news about Bon Appetit in the past week. The Rapoport photo was posted to Instagram in 2013, but it was a throwback from Halloween 2004. One friend had commented on it, "I was so scared of you guys that night." The post includes the hashtag "boricua," an informal term that Puerto Rican people often use for themselves. Tammie Teclamariam posted all this to Twitter with the comment, "I don't know why Adam Rapoport doesn't write about Puerto Rican food for Bon Appetit himself!"

Rachel Premack: And I have to say one thing about the photo. No one digs through your wife's Instagram from 2013, if they don't think they will find something. So this is not something that food writers of color are doing for fun or in their free time for no reason. Based off of Adam's previous actions, it was pretty clear to them that something offensive and racist would be on his page.

Sohla El-Waylly: I forgot about that, so much has happened that I just remembered again.

Dan Pashman: In case it's not clear, he meant he wants his coffee to match Rihanna's skin color.

Rachel Premack: Additionally, she had asked multiple times for a raise. So she makes-her base salary of $35,800 to live in New York. And she's also eligible for overtime. She needs to put in hours and hours and hours of overtime just to pay her rent. And since the beginning of the coronavirus, her overtime has actually been cut. And for that reason, she hasn't even been able to pay her rent. And Ryan asked, "Adam, please, I need a raise."

Dan Pashman: And Ryan, who makes $35,000 a year and hasn't made pay rent for three months, goes to Adam to once again ask for a raise.

Dan Pashman: And what does Adam say?

Rachel Premack: Adam says, "Have you considered that you're just not well suited for this job?"

Dan Pashman: It wasn't just Ryan who experienced this kind of treatment. Rachel also talked with Nikita Richardson , who started at before Ryan. She's now a writer at The Strategist , which is part of New York Magazine . For most of the time Nikita was at , she was the only black person on staff. She was there for about a year, from 2016 to 2017, which was before the YouTube channel exploded in popularity.

Nikita Richardson: What if you broke up with someone and then they became extremely famous right after you broke up? So that no matter where you went, you heard about them, you saw them and your friends all were in love with that person. And you're like, but it wasn't a great relationship. So it's one of those situations or it's like I-it was hard to move on knowing what my experience, not only my experience but the experience of other minorities had been there. We have talked about this for years. You know, what we went through. And it's like you can't heal from something if you can't unburden yourself of it.

Dan Pashman: She wrote: "Hi. I hate to write this email and really don't want to single anyone out, but unfortunately I feel obligated to communicate this info. Several people came to me yesterday and today to voice concerns about socializing during work hours in the test kitchen in studio. And your name came up, specifically. I know that the kitchen is awesome and that it's hard to not want to hang out there. But I'm asking that you please think of it as a workspace first. The food team, the video team, and our stylists have a lot to do and distractions, extra people and lots of talking can be very tiring. "

Nikita Richardson: Well, I think I cried. When something seems pretty innocent on its face, it can be hard to read between the lines.

Dan Pashman: Nikita had only been at for a few months. It was the second major publication she'd ever worked at. Talking about this email on Twitter this week, she wrote, "When you feel like an imposter every day, even the smallest slight can break you." Nikita says the same email was sent to Alyse Whitney, who's a woman of color, and Alex Delany, who's a white man. But Alyse told that white staffers never stopped going to the Test Kitchen . Carla Lalli Music denies that assertion. She also told us that there were multiple back and forth emails clarifying the issue, and that the single email doesn't tell the whole story.

Nikita Richardson: When I found out that Ryan, who had been hired, was black and she found out that there was a black person on staff. We were like, "Oh, my God, another black person." And then two months later, I was let go. I text Ryan. I'm like, "Ryan, they laid me off.", and she was devastated.

Dan Pashman: Nikita was let go in November 2017, part of a big round of layoffs across Condé Nast . At the time, she was in the middle of writing two stories for . One of them she finished as a freelancer, after she was laid off. The other was a story about a black line cook at Le Coucou, a fancy New York restaurant. Nikita had already done the interviews and all the leg work. Someone at reached out to her to ask for the cook's contact info, which Nikita provided. She figured the magazine just wanted to dot i's, cross t's. A few months later the piece came out written by a white writer, Amanda Shapiro , who's now the interim editor in chief of Nikita was not credited.

Nikita Richardson: I was surprised to learn the story had run. And I-you know, the person who asked me to call for the contact information, I reached back out to them. I said, "Oh, I see this story ran." And then 24 hours later, I get a response, "Oh, we owe you."
+++ BREAK +++
CLIP (ANDY SHALLAL): White people will go and discover the coolest place in the back of a trailer park. They're comfortable anywhere. It cold be very uncomfortable for a black person to walk into an all white place. It could even be dangerous. In order for a black person to walk into a space there has to be signals that says, "You're welcome."

Dan Pashman: So what happens when the signals of signals of restaurants sends bring certain people in and keep others out? In this episode we visit three restaurants in D.C. that are coded in very different ways to ask, can a restaurant be for everyone? Then there's our episode "When White People Say Plantation". We just re-released an episode from last fall because it won a Webby Award. It's an exploration of why the word plantation keeps popping up in restaurants, cook books, food blogs, and what white people are trying to communicate when they use it. Both those episodes are up now wherever you got this one. Finally, while you're looking for those, please subscribe to our show in Apple podcasts . Or if you listen in , favorite us. You can do it right now while you're listening. Thanks.

Dan Pashman: Okay, let's get back to Bon Appetit , and a quick warning that there's some explicit language in this segment. Nikita Richardson left Bon Appetit in 2017. Last year, 2019, Sohla El-Waylly, who's Bengali-American, applied for a job at the company. Her various interviews there spanned six weeks. When they finally offered her the job, she found out the pay was $50,000, which is New York City's median individual income. But Sohla had 15 years of experience. She thought it was less than she deserved. But it was Bon Appetit , so she took the job. She had heard that there were race issues there. But as she told me:

Sohla El-Waylly: Honestly, the thing that made me think maybe it wasn't true was the Youtube videos. The big thing for me was Gaby.

Dan Pashman: Sohla is referring to Gaby Melian , a longtime staffer, who's from Argentina. Gaby's now the Test Kitchen Manager, and she frequently appears in Test Kitchen videos.

Sohla El-Waylly: I thought it was really awesome that Gaby was getting highlighted in videos and that she started as a dishwasher and that she moved up and they gave her these opportunities. So, I mean, that made me really think maybe they're getting better with their race stuff but it all turned out to be bullshit.

CLIP (CLAIRE SAFFITZ): Sohla?

CLIP (SOHLA EL-WAYLLY): Uh-huh

CLIP (CLAIRE SAFFITZ): Do you have a minute? I came over to ask if you had time to temper chocolate at some point.

CLIP (CHRIS MOROCCO): Hey Sohla?

CLIP (SOHLA EL-WAYLLY): Uh-huh?

CLIP (CHRIS MOROCCO): Can I ask you a question about technique, real quick?

CLIP (BRAD LEONE): Dosa? What's dosa, Sohla?

CLIP (BRAD LEONE): What kind of-what temperature are we looking at Sohla?

CLIP (SOHLA EL-WAYLLY): How's it going?

CLIP (ANDY BARAGHANI): We've never been on camera together.

CLIP (SOHLA EL-WAYLLY): We have! Thanksgiving, right when I started.

CLIP (ANDY BARAGHANI): I'm very forgetful.

CLIP (MOLLY BAZ): So I feel like the tortilla needs to be like about like this.

CLIP (SOHLA EL-WAYLLY): Okay.

CLIP (MOLLY BAZ): Do have time for this today?

CLIP (SOHLA EL-WAYLLY): I'm gonna make time.

Sohla El-Waylly: I'm not frustrated with, like, helping Claire and people on camera. That's not it. I just, um, what frustrates me is that we have this image of being this really diverse team and this really inclusive club or whatever. But there's not real equity there. There are some people who get paid huge, huge amounts for their appearances on camera. And then the people of color, we were either paid nothing, such as Gaby, myself and Christina. We've never been paid for video or very nominal amounts like $200.

Sohla El-Waylly: They kind of treat us like side characters to pull in, in the name of diversity. Like they have Christina come in when Morocco is making Korean short ribs.

Dan Pashman: Christina is Christina Chaey , she's Korean-American, one of the other Test Kitchen chefs who says she was never paid for her on camera appearances. Morocco is Chris Morocco , one of the white stars of the YouTube channel. Priya Krishna , who you've heard on this show, has also spoken out about similar treatment, brought in as a guest when one of the white hosts is cooking Indian food.

Sohla El-Waylly: They have this like circular logic that the people they choose to put in a show and give a lucrative contract to are the people who have a lot of followers. But the people who ended up with a lot of followers are the people who got the show. You know what I mean? Like, they never gave us a chance.

Dan Pashman: That's one of the explanations that we hear is sort of like, what? Well, it's not about race. We're just following clicks. We have to get clicks. We have to get views and the videos. And so we have to put up food that is "accessible", that that appeals to a "mass audience", which is all really just code for a white audience.

Sohla El-Waylly: Yes, exactly.

Dan Pashman: And it's even unfair to some portion of the white audience.

Sohla El-Waylly: Yes, it is.

Dan Pashman: Who might actually be interested in things beyond grilled cheese

Sohla El-Waylly: I completely agree. Yeah. Well, that is something that a lot of us have -I think everyone has a problem with the content, the type of recipes we're putting up. There are never things that we would ever put in the magazine. I try and have a meeting with the producers once a month to push and be like, "Hey, let's do something like the chicken biryani recipe I did last year. Like, we proved it was like one of the top performing recipes on the site. I think it will do well as a video." You know, we've tried to push diverse things but they all they just want to make fucking smash burgers and mac and cheese and it's just like we can do better. And I think that it's really underestimating the audience as well.

Dan Pashman: Multiple staffers say one of the biggest obstacles to getting more people of color in prominent roles in video, and getting more diversity in the foods featured, was Condé Nast's head of video, Matt Duckor. Those staffers told us that Duckor earned a bonus based on the performance of these videos. The more clicks, the more he stood to gain.

Sohla El-Waylly: He was the problem, to be honest. I think he was a much bigger problem than Adam. He was the one that, like, only wanted Priya to make Indian food. And since we've been working from home. I've been shooting more videos than ever. And since we're like doing it on our own, where the sound guy or the video guy or the food stylist or the dishwasher-So it's like significant amount of work and every week I keep telling them, "When are you going to pay me? Like when are you going to pay me?", and I have a talk with Duckor, like once a week. He looks me through the Zoom eyes and he tells me, "It's coming tomorrow. I swear. It's tied up in legal. It's coming tomorrow. Just finish this shoot." And he did that to me for months.

Rachel Premack: They would have the meetings, they would listen to people. They would say, "Oh, yes, we hear your concerns." They would initiate these sort of like guidelines of like, "Oh, we're going to do this. We're going to do this. We're going to do this," but in practice that did not actually come out. So actually, one interesting thing which also didn't make into my piece is that they said six months ago that they were going to hire a full time black person to be on their videos and they haven't. It does not take six months to find a talented black cook with on camera experience.

Dan Pashman: In the midst of all that, Adam writes a piece that sort of says all the things he's supposed to say. We need to all come together. We need to fight racism, racism bad.

Sohla El-Waylly: Racism bad. All caps.

Sohla El-Waylly: We were all livid, like internally. The editors we were all so angry with his wishy washy statement. And it felt like he was almost like patting himself on the back about the couple of articles we did have that featured black chefs. And it's like you need to relax. There's only two black people who work in this entire company, so we have nothing to be proud of.

Dan Pashman: It's interesting to me that, you know, the brownface photo was kind of the first thing that hit.

Sohla El-Waylly: [laughing] I'm sorry, I laughed. It's just I forgot about that. So much has happened this week that I just remembered again.

Dan Pashman: Now we get to the brownface photo. After it drops, Adam calls an all-staff Zoom meeting to discuss it.

Sohla El-Waylly: He just kind of said, "Sorry. I'm sorry. This was dumb, a dumb costume. I didn't realize how this might affect people." And it was like a couple sentences. And then he wanted-and then there was like a pause and no one spoke. And he was like, "Okay, so let's wrap this meeting up." And then I was like, "Absolutely not. You should resign. Like I think it's crazy that you think that you can do anything now but resign." And then that got the conversation started.

Dan Pashman: [laughing] As it will. I'm sorry to laugh, that just like that is like the most awesomely bad ass thing I can ever imagine happening. But go on. What did, what did he say to that?

Dan Pashman: Were any of the people who chimed in white?

Sohla El-Waylly: Well, what happened was most of the people, it was like 40 people on the Zoom meeting. Half of them were not showing their face. And then it was me and like a couple other people of color and one white girl, who were speaking. And then I just kind of snapped and yelled at everybody. And I'm like, "This is why this shit happens! Like everyone's hiding. Like half of you are hiding. Most of you aren't saying anything. And like, you post all this stuff on Instagram about pretending to care. But now is the time where we can actually make a difference." And no one was speaking up and then the white people started talking. They just needed to be yelled at. It's just-it shouldn't happen that way. It really shouldn't.

Dan Pashman: It's amazing to me that he would have had the thought that maybe he should be the one to stay on and fix it.

Sohla El-Waylly: I know, yeah. That's what really upset me.

Sohla El-Waylly: My whole life I felt like I was getting these jobs or the salary because I didn't deserve more. You know? That I wasn't good enough. Like, maybe I do need to work for 20 years to get to a job that takes a white person two years to get to. But then I was like really thinking about it. And like, I don't know. I'm sure that a lot of people have been just like reading more about racism in the last few weeks and thinking more about it and thinking about how these things are so deep within all of us. And it just made me realize, I don't want people to make me feel like this anymore. I should I should feel like like I'm equal.

Dan Pashman: Now, the people of color in the Test Kitchen are negotiating new deals. The mostly white stars of the videos have said they won't shoot new videos until the pay disparity is rectified. Which means that contract that Sohla got on Monday, the one she'd been pushing for? She hasn't signed it.

Sohla El-Waylly: None of us are going back to work until everybody gets paid. This is not just about me. Like everyone who does videos for the Test Kitchen should get compensated because it's the most lucrative thing that Condé Nast has.

Dan Pashman: Have you raised with them the issue of getting retroactively paid back for the work that you've done or for any of your colleagues?

Sohla El-Waylly: Well, the contract that magically appeared in my inbox included back pay but we want it for everybody.

Sohla El-Waylly: Mmm, I don't know. They've all been different. It's different for different people, I think. Surprisingly, Molly sent me a really like heartfelt email, acknowledging a lot of stuff and her complacency with it, that allowed things to happen. But then there's people like Brad, who I genuinely think just found out racism is real. So it's going to take different people, different amounts of time to understand what's happening.

Dan Pashman: So there was a statement that got put out a couple days ago.

Dan Pashman: What are some of the things that you're asking for that would seem radical?

Sohla El-Waylly: We want to increase the pay for the people of color on staff. So we just want to make sure that there is no one on the team that doesn't make a livable wage, which I don't think is wild. You just want everyone to...

Dan Pashman: When do we get to the radical part?

Sohla El-Waylly: Yeah. We want everyone to make a living wage. Yay!

Dan Pashman: So Sohla has a seat at the table now, and she's using it.

Sohla El-Waylly: I've experienced some of the highest highs of my life this week. When Adam resigned, when Duckor resigned, and when that came out, I finally felt like I wasn't just screaming in the wind anymore. So I feel like now finally things might change. I don't know. I always grew up believing that I would always experience casual racism, and that's just a fact of life. And that there's no way around it. But I finally think that maybe we don't have to anymore.

Nikita Richardson: It's actually it's so sad because I have been doing so little work the last two weeks because of this and because of Black Lives Matter. But I did do a story about like how to start fermenting at home that I was really excited about. I just want to do my work so badly. And, but I also want to address this head on. I've been trying to heal from it, too, and kind of rebuild my own confidence in myself and my ability to do the work. Because people can tell you up and down like, "Oh, you're good. You're good," but it's hard to believe it, if this is an environment you've come from.

Dan Pashman: If someone came to you, Sohla, and said, "We want you to do a special YouTube video about how to cook a dish." It can be any dish you want.

Dan Pashman: What are you gonna cook?

Sohla El-Waylly: Instead of a dish? Could it be-I feel like I need to do a full proper chocolate tempering video.

Sohla El-Waylly: We need that. It needs to be out in the world.

Dan Pashman: Sign me up. Count me in as your first click.

Dan Pashman: A few things to add. Adam Rapoport and Matt Duckor declined to be interviewed for this piece. We sent representatives at Condé Nast a list of questions, but they did not respond as of this publication. We taped the interviews in this episode two days ago. Since then, several of the white hosts from the BA Test Kitchen have put out statements on Instagram addressing what's happened, and their own roles in it. Also, there are a lot of stories people of color have been sharing about their experience at Bon Appetit that we did not include in this episode. So, we'll share links to all of those stories and statements at Sporkful.com .

Dan Pashman: On final thing, the attention right now is focused on Bon Appetit , but as Soleil Ho, food critic for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote this week :

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

Dan Pashman: We'll link to that piece at Sporkful.com as well. If you'd like to hear more of our coverage of race in the food world check out our recent episodes, "Can A Restaurant Be For Everyone?" and "When White People Say Plantation" . Both those episodes are up now where you got this one. And please subscribe to our show in Apple podcasts or if you listen in , favorite us. Thanks.

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Sohla El-Waylly: I was just filled with so much rage and frustration with the job. My whole life I'd felt like I was getting these jobs or this salary because I didn't deserve more, you know?

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I am a teacher, an Embodiment Coach, a writer, and an experienced group and conflict facilitator, who holds the importance of intimate, body centered transformation as key to healing and key to justice.

Prentis Hemphill (They/Them) is unearthing the connections between healing, community accountability and our most inspired visions for social transformation. Prentis is a therapist, somatics teacher and facilitator, political organizer, writer and the founder of The Embodiment Institute. For over 10 years, Prentis has been working with individuals and organizations during their most challenging moments of change; navigating leadership transitions, conflict, and realigning practice with values. All of this Prentis does through an embodied approach, ensuring that our intentions and ideas can be lived out and practiced in our lives and through our bodies.

Before founding The Embodiment Institute, Prentis was the Healing Justice Director at Black Lives Matter Global Network and a lead somatics teacher with generativesomatics, an organization committed to bringing politicized somatics to movement building, and Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD), a group dedicated to rebuilding Black movement infrastructure, for the past seven years. Prentis holds a M.A. in Clinical Psychology and has worked in low cost mental health clinics offering therapeutic services to marginalized people. In 2016, Prentis was awarded the Buddhist Peace Fellowship Soma Award for community work inspired by Buddhist thought.

Prentis' work has been featured in the New York Times, Huffington Post, and Shondaland. Prentis is a contributor to The Politics of Trauma by Staci K. Haines as well as the upcoming You are Your Best Thing edited by Brene Brown and Tarana Burke and Holding Change by adrienne maree brown. Prentis is the host and creator of the popular podcast, Finding Our Way entering its second season in Jan. 2021. Finding Our Way entered the iTunes Top 100 podcasts chart in its first week.

Fundamentally their work is to disrupt the complacency and comfort of mainstream healing and therapeutic models and infuse what we know of justice, repair and accountability into our deepest work of transformation. Their belief is that the reclamation of feeling and relationship makes room for justice in our lives and in our world.

Prentis currently lives on a small farm in Durham, NC with their partner, Kasha and their three dogs, on land first loved and stewarded by the Saponi people and near where Prentis' ancestors first arrived to Turtle Island.

"The kind of change we are after is cellular as well as institutional, is personal and intimate, is collective as well as cultural. We are making love synonymous with justice."

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Prentis Hemphill (They/Them) is unearthing the connections between healing, community accountability and our most inspired visions for social transformation. Prentis is a therapist, somatics teacher and facilitator, political organizer, writer and the founder of The Embodiment Institute.

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https://www.eater.com/2020/5/20/21262304/global-pantry-alison-roman-bon-appetit

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Alison Roman is the " prom queen of the pandemic." Or, at least, she was. The cookbook author and YouTube star, who rose to fame on the strength of her heady-yet-approachable recipes, low-key glamour, and self-effacing charm, recently experienced what she referred to as " baby's first internet backlash." It stemmed from a recent interview that Roman gave in which she criticized both minimalism icon Marie Kondo and cookbook author Chrissy Teigen for peddling branded merchandise, implying that they were sellouts - while discussing her own "capsule collection" of cooking tools, no less. A low hum of outrage greeted Roman's choice to rebuke two women of color, then positively exploded after Teigen created a long thread on Twitter to talk about how hurt she was, as someone who "genuinely loved everything about Alison."

The backlash to Roman's comments, like most backlashes, was a combination of legitimate grievance and the way that Twitter refracts and concentrates reaction. All the same, there was a whiff of inevitability to the suddenness and vociferousness of the anger directed at Roman, who had become ubiquitous thanks in part to her knack for proselytizing ostensibly "ethnic" ingredients like tahini, turmeric, and yuzu kosho to a broader American audience. Roman's critics charged that she was not only a hypocrite but a racist, one who had moreover very successfully capitalized on the ingredients of other cultures. If it felt as though people had been sitting around waiting for her to mess up, it was probably because many of them had.

Roman, after all, is arguably the most fashionable avatar of a broader shift. We are living in the age of the global pantry, when a succession of food media-approved, often white figures have made an array of international ingredients approachable and even desirable to the North American mainstream - the same mainstream that, a decade ago, would have labeled these foods as obscure at best and off-putting at worst. This phenomenon is why you now see dukkah on avocado toast, kimchi in grain bowls, and sambal served with fried Brussels sprouts. It's a kind of polyglot internationalism presented under the New American umbrella, with the techniques and raw materials of non-Western cuisines used to wake up the staid, predictable flavors of familiar Americana.

Not long ago, you could see this playing out on the menus of hip restaurants across the country. At AL's Place in San Francisco, squash tahini was served with burrata, sumac-galangal dressing, pickles, and dukkah; in LA, there was preserved Meyer lemon and lacto-fermented hot sauce in Sqirl's sorrel pesto rice bowl, and a "Turkish-ish" breakfast of vegetables, a sumac- and Aleppo pepper-dusted egg, and three-day-fermented labneh at Kismet. Over in Nashville, Cafe Roze put a turmeric egg in its hard-boiled BLT and miso ranch in its barley salad. Up in New York, Dimes served a veggie burger with harissa tofu and a dish called huevos Kathmandu that paired green chutney and spiced chickpeas with fried eggs.

Only whiteness can deracinate and subsume the world of culinary influences into itself and yet remain unnamed

But now, as the COVID-19 pandemic has forced most of us to stay home and make the most of our kitchen skills, the global pantry is most visible on the pages and websites of establishment food media. It's Bon Appétit's gluten-free coconut-turmeric pie and kimchi-cream cheese toast; Food & Wine's tofu masala and rosy harissa chicken; the New York Times's brothy chicken soup with hominy and poblano; and Every Day With Rachael Ray's minty matcha smoothie and Korean barbecue burgers. You can see it all over social media and particularly Instagram, where its most viral example is #thestew, Roman's 2018 recipe for a chickpea-coconut milk stew whose broth is made golden with turmeric. And you can see it on Bon Appétit's extremely popular YouTube channel, where its test kitchen stars make everything from saffron brittle to " dahi toast" to slow-roast gochujang chicken to spicy chicken katsu sandwiches (though it bears noting that the first two of those recipes were created by people of color).

As the culinary has become a marker of contemporary culture, occupying much of the space once monopolized by music or fashion, food media and social media have fused to create a supercharged form of aspirational desire. Within this mode of desire, however, the idea of using new, hitherto "exotic" ingredients only seems to become aspirational when those ingredients appear on the pages of prominent tastemaking magazines (or, perhaps more relevantly, on Instagram) - or are espoused by white tastemakers. Remember that time in 2018 when the author Stephanie Danler told T Magazine about her " kitchari cleanse," explaining how the Indian dish of lentils and rice (actually called khichrhi) allowed her to "reset [her] system"? Or the time that haldi doodh took over coffee shop menus, the food media, and Instagram after being rebranded as the turmeric latte?

The question that such representations present for the food world is a difficult one: Who gets to use the global pantry or introduce "new" international ingredients to a Western audience? And behind that is an even more uncomfortable query: Can the aspiration that has become central to the culinary arts ever not be white?

Because the aesthetics of food media are indeed white. That white aesthetic is not, strictly speaking, the abundant natural light, ceramic plates, strategically scattered handfuls of fresh herbs, pastel dining rooms, artisan knives, or even the butcher diagram tattoos that the food media so loves to fetishize. It is more accurate to say that the way we define what is contemporary and fashionable in food is tied to whiteness as a cultural norm - and to its ability to incorporate other cultures without actually becoming them.

Only whiteness can deracinate and subsume the world of culinary influences into itself and yet remain unnamed. It's a complicated little dance of power and desire: The mainstream is white, so what is presented in the mainstream becomes defined as white, and - ta-da - what you see in viral YouTube videos somehow ends up reinforcing a white norm, even though the historical roots of a dish or an ingredient might be the Levant or East Asia. You might say whiteness works by positing itself as a default.You might also say that this sucks.

You cannot have influence without authority. It's why well-known (usually white) chefs and cookbook authors have historically been so effective in popularizing global ingredients among the North American mainstream. Think, for example, of Rick Bayless, the Chicago chef whose Mexican restaurants introduced many Midwesterners to contemporary regional Mexican cuisine, or Andy Ricker, the Portland, Oregon, chef whose Pok Pok restaurants spread the gospel of Northern Thai cooking through the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Then there's Yotam Ottolenghi, the Israeli chef and cookbook author whose London-based restaurants and cookbooks were so effective in communicating the joys of Middle Eastern ingredients like Aleppo pepper and tahini that his influence earned its own moniker, the Ottolenghi Effect.

Each of these chefs became successful at a time before social media and the notion of viral stardom had become as all-encompassing as they are today. And, aside from some extremely boneheaded comments Bayless made regarding race and appropriation, their notoriety hinged far less on their personalities than the seductive properties of their food - and how readily their work was gobbled up by the establishment and, by extension, the white mainstream.

In today's food media landscape, there are few more powerful authorities in the Anglo-North American food world than Bon Appétit. BA's YouTube channel has become so viral that it has spawned memes, to say nothing of a fan account just for star Claire Saffitz's hair (and, hey: understandable). It has almost 6 million subscribers, and its videos have collectively surpassed a billion views.

Bon Appétit's on-camera staff is predominantly white, and the aesthetic and culinary mode of the channel feels similar to a lot of contemporary food media: attractive, mostly millennial people wearing bespoke aprons make vibrant, casually elegant, well-lit food that balances approachability with technique and/or fancy ingredients.

It was an aesthetic developed on the glossy pages of the Condé Nast magazine. When editor Adam Rapoport came over to BA from GQ in 2010, he was tasked with reinventing the publication one year after Gourmet folded. It was neatly symbolic: As one bastion of high-end food disappeared, another announced itself as the wave of the future. Rapoport imported a particular style to BA from his previous gig: cool but unfussy, effortless but only superficially so. It's a mix that has occasionally gotten the magazine into trouble - see, for example, its website's (since deleted) 2016 " Pho Is the New Ramen" video, in which a white chef told viewers exactly how they should eat the Vietnamese dish. Today, it allows BA to teach its readers how to reverse-sear steak or carve $1,500 legs of ham, but also make mac and cheese or the perfect vodka soda. The foods it chooses to cast in the spotlight illustrate the way in which authority grants legitimacy. If BA is using sumac on eggs, or dashi powder in porridge, it means it's time for you to use those things as well.

But if desire, expertise, and charm work magic in food media, then perhaps it's no coincidence that the globalization of the pantry has found its viral apotheosis in Alison Roman. An erstwhile pastry chef who worked in the Bon Appétit test kitchen before going on to become a New York Times columnist and the author of two best-selling cookbooks, Roman's story is one of years of hard work, viral-recipe creation, and social media savvy - at least until her recent self-own.

It remains to be seen if Roman's comments about Kondo and Teigen coalesce into a broader or more permanent rejection (yesterday, the New York Times confirmed to the Daily Beastthat her column is on temporary leave, though it declined to provide a reason why). Regardless, the lessons of Roman's success are lasting. For one, it is impossible to talk about Roman's influence without talking about social media, and her masterful use of it.

The fame of #thestew, the now-viral recipe for chickpeas in coconut milk and turmeric, felt a bit weird: I know these ingredients; what are white people so excited about?

With 566,000 Instagram followers and legions of fans who make and then photograph her approachable, well-tested recipes - which she then reposts in her own Instagram stories - Roman is successful in part because of her understanding that social media has transformed cooking into a social experience, one that particularly resonates with millennials. It points to how aspirational desire - and the brands that tap into it, whether personal or corporate - can popularize things within that space. Oh, this is one of Alison's recipes? I want to make it too.

Like the staff of BA, Roman's appeal doesn't lie just in what she does, but who she is and what she represents to her audience. She is self-deprecatingly funny, unapologetically opinionated, and, with her signature orangey-red nail polish and bold lipstick, she projects effortless cool. As Michele Moses put it in the New Yorker, "Roman, with her crackling chicken skin and red lips and nails, is libidinous and a little bit mean." Even Roman's kitchen, which features prominently enough in her videos to warrant its own treatment, is undeniably appealing, and its organized clutter of Le Creuset pots and hanging plants may as well have its own Pinterest page.

Roman's loosely white style is mainstream, contemporary food culture right now: Looking through Roman's cookbooks, Dining In and Nothing Fancy, I noticed how every second page of beautifully shot recipes seemed to feature some "mainstream" American ingredient made new with yuzu kosho or turmeric or chile oil.But even as I found myself poring over the recipes, something felt off. It was the same thing that made the fame of #thestew, Roman's now-viral recipe for chickpeas in coconut milk and turmeric, feel a bit weird, but also vaguely familiar to me: I know these ingredients; what are white people so excited about?

Is #thestew really just a curry? (Roman has insisted it's not, but others beg to differ.) And are all curries just stews? It's precisely the ambiguity of what separates one from the other that makes neat assertions of cultural appropriation unhelpful, but also lets the issue linger. Less important than ascribing a strict lineage, or, worse, the retrogressive idea of cultural ownership, is the question of whether, say, a person of color could have also made a stew featuring chickpeas and turmeric go viral. Aren't both the perceived novelty and the recipe's virality tied to the whiteness of its creator?

For her part, Roman feels the success of that recipe was less about her than what preceded it. Talking over the phone while on the road for her book tour several months ago, she suggested her viral success wasn't unique. "I think if it were Padma Lakshmi or Nigella Lawson or any other person who already has a platform, it could absolutely go viral," Roman told me. "I think the only reason the stew went viral is because the cookies did."

Perhaps that's true, but it does seem worth asking: If a South Asian or Middle Eastern person put forth that mix of ingredients, could it have merely been #thestew, with no other descriptors attached, or would whiteness have forced it to have a name? While it wasn't Roman who gave #thestew its label, having a thing that draws on a variety of influences, but takes on such a generic, rootless - and yet definitive - name is precisely how whiteness works: positing itself as the norm from which all other things are deviations.

"The sad thing about my cultural background is that I don't really have one," Roman told me with a chuckle. It's a line she had used before, one that evokes the same self-deprecation she employs in her videos.Peering in from the outside, one of the things that seems, well, sort of fun about being white is that way in which things can just be: "Ethnic" fashion is quirky or inventive, spirituality can be a generic mix, and cuisine can simply be food. There's a sense, too, that the collective output of Bon Appétit takes a similarly obfuscated view: It's just food, man. I mean, imagine the freedom.

When we spoke, Roman seemed aware of this reality, if only partly. "I absolutely feel whiteness is a factor [in my success] because white privilege is everywhere. That's not lost on me," she said. "But I don't think that has to exist separately from the hard work I've put in to create a career for myself and a palate and flavor profile."

It's a comment that reads differently now, and the lengthy apology Roman issued for her comments about Teigen and Kondo suggests that she is more aware of the complex relationship between her privilege and her prominence. Still, I don't think there is much to the idea that Roman's success is somehow unearned, or even that we aren't better off for it. Nor do I think that Bon Appétit comes close to the more egregious examples of appropriation and erasure; to the contrary, it increasingly seems to be doing more to educate its audience. Bon Appétit is also hardly the only powerful food media authority to grapple (or not) with whom it chooses to cast as its ambassadors of the global pantry: Scrolling through the New York Times's cooking section's 15 of Our Best Vietnamese Recipes and its Mexican at Home recipes, for example, it is impossible not to notice that every single byline is that of an (ostensibly) white writer. And just last week, Momofuku Milk Bar owner Christina Tosi posted a recipe on Instagram for " flaky bread " that, as some commenters quickly pointed out, looked an awful lot like paratha, an Indian flatbread.

But to recognize white privilege is one thing; to actively combat it or resist taking advantage of it is something else altogether. That balance between competing and contradictory ideas is a useful way to think about food media in 2020.It doesn't help to say that certain people own ingredients, or have dominion over certain types or presentations or techniques. But the way that excitement over particular trends and recipes circulates publicly, whether on Instagram or in Bon Appétit, can reinforce whiteness as a norm, just as divorcing history from food erases the contributions and lives of people of color from Western narratives. When whiteness is allowed to function as if it weren't that, it hurts us all.

During our interview, Roman pointed out that many home kitchens, particularly in places like the U.S., the U.K., and Australia, now feature such previously so-called exotic ingredients as anchovies, soy sauce, and Aleppo pepper. "The modern way we cook now integrates so many different ingredients that come from so many different places, and I think that's fucking awesome," she said.

That seems quite correct, and the last thing anyone should argue is that people shouldn't use an ingredient in their own home for some abstract fear of "theft." Instead, the question here is much less about what we do in private than what public representation does and means: if or why it matters when a white person popularizes ghee, or Nashville hot chicken becomes a big thing but the work of African-American cooks and chefs is still ignored. In the circuits of culture, there are routes to legitimacy and fame, and the problem we have in the food world is that the most reliable path seems to center whiteness again and again.

That's not to say things aren't changing. It felt symbolic that last year's BA Thanksgiving extravaganza featured Rick Martinez's self-described "Mexican-ish" take on stuffing. Fan favorite Andy Baraghani now draws on his Iranian heritage in some dishes, particularly after coming to terms with how he suppressed both his ethnic identity and sexuality. And BA's more recent hiresinclude Sohla El-Waylly and Priya Krishna, the latter of whom used her profile at BA to augment the launch of her book Indian-ish, a collection of, um, Indian-ish recipes that to my mind is pleasingly inauthentic. In fighting to get their recipes featured, all of these cooks from nonwhite backgrounds are doing the hard work of representation.

Yet Krishna herself believes there is still a long way to go. "I have been told so many times that my Indian food isn't click-y, that it won't get page views," she says in an email, "and then I see white cooks and chefs making dishes that are rooted in Indian techniques and flavors, calling it something different, and getting a lot of attention."

Her experience speaks to the assumption that food media's readership is always white, as if the audience is unfamiliar with or intimidated by what, to many of them - to us - are in fact quite ordinary things. "I love that people's pantries are getting more global," says Krishna, "but I do hope that when people cook with them, they take the time to educate themselves about the origin of these ingredients, rather than treating them as ingredients in a vacuum, divorced of their context."

The idea that we need to pay attention to where things come from is certainly true, but it's a mantra that can take you only so far: If cultural forces like BA or Roman are necessary to popularize new-to-white-people ingredients, then only part of that dynamic changes. In the attention economy, those who garner attention will always have more sway, and even in 2020, the collective unconscious wants what it wants.

What is it that actually captures attention, then? At least one thing is the subconscious desire to emulate BA 's authority or Roman's cool. In aspiration, desire matters. But that leaves me with another question, one that stalks my thoughts a lot of the time: What might nonwhite aspiration look like?

Real change only happens when the thing that white supremacists fear becomes true: that the mainstream increasingly becomes rather than simply appropriates the "ethnic."

Thankfully, we already have one answer: Samin Nosrat. Her warmth and seemingly limitless charm, coupled with her encyclopedic knowledge of food, has endeared her to many, and her book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is a No. 1 New York Times best-seller that became a Netflix series. Nosrat jumps between cultural influences frequently, particularly her own Persian heritage, and her generous, open approach to both food and people has done much to expand the conversation. As Jenny G. Zhang noted on Eater, the image of Nosrat eating with gusto throughout the Netflix series changed the rules for who gets to eat on TV.

Yet Nosrat's success isn't only about who she is inherently, but her ability to bridge worlds, to speak about and make comprehensible to the mainstream the assumed difference of minorities and the places and cultures they come from. To paraphrase postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak, it's indicative of the way in which minorities must contort themselves to ever have any power: They have to manifest it in ways recognizable to those who hold it.

The only way that changes is representation. "As long as staffs of food websites and publications are mostly white, and as long as the leadership of food websites and publications is mostly white," Krishna says, "everything other than white food will always be seen as the other, as a museum artifact versus someone's lived experience."

Even then, representation has its limits. It's easy for those in the mainstream to cherry-pick the aspects of whatever culture they happen to like that week. Actual change, then, comes up against a difficult paradox: We need to pay attention to where things come from, to focus on their difference, but in order to overcome both fetishization and exploitation, the foreign needs to become domestic.

Rather than simply having people who look like us on our screens or pages, our definition of what is shared needs to change. The polyglot culinary vocabulary that Roman and Krishna evoke must represent a genuine expansion of how we understand food and flavor and, sometimes, culture, too. More simply, real change only happens when the thing that white supremacists fear becomes true: that the mainstream increasingly becomes rather than simply appropriates the "ethnic." But to speak of a mainstream North American culture that isn't neatly "white" in both its logic and its aesthetics is to envision something that doesn't yet exist, and that we don't know how to articulate.

In the meantime, I find myself searching for food media that reflects me. Yes, as a North American urbanite with a global pantry and a New York Times subscription, Roman's work certainly fits the bill sometimes. But that quest has also belatedly led me to Ranveer Brar. An established chef with experience in both the U.S. and India, he runs a YouTube channel focusing broadly on Indian cuisine, but mostly food from Brar's own Punjabi heritage, which I share. A tall, handsome man with a wry presence in front of the camera, Brar likely has his share of fans who are drawn to him by desire, subconscious or otherwise.

But his content is also closed off to people who don't speak Hindi, and reaffirms my lingering suspicion that some cultural difference is insurmountable: that ideals of kitchens and food and life in Brooklyn and Toronto and New Delhi are different, regardless of how the 21st century has both shrunk and intertwined the world. And it seems these divides will remain until cooks and chefs of color finally push their way into the mainstream. It's almost as if we're waiting for something to catch up - that the cuisines and ingredients we've become so familiar with now have to sort of seep into our bones, become a part of us, have stories and myth accrete in layers over time.

Aspiration is about wanting, and what I want from food media isn't a bone thrown in my direction, but simply more: more representation, more diversity, more sense that the mainstream isn't just accommodating me, but instead making room for me. What I want as we head into the 2020s is - God - isn't it time yet? I just want more.
is a technology and culture critic. Disclosure: Chrissy Teigen is producing shows for Hulu in partnership with Vox Media Studios, part of Eater's parent company, Vox Media. No Eater staff member is involved in the production of these shows, and this does not impact coverage on Eater.
is an Ignatz-nominated cartoonist and illustrator living in Brooklyn, NY. She grew up in Orlando, FL and graduated from the School of Visual Arts with a BFA in Cartooning & Illustration in 2016.

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Alison Roman, Bon Appétit, and the 'Global Pantry' Problem

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In the age of the global pantry, ingredients like turmeric, tahini, and gochujang have finally shaken off their hitherto "exotic" status. But it's white recipe developers like Alison Roman and many of the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen stars who have had viral success using them.