Are The Food Media Demonizing Food With Mis-Placed Political Correctness?

An advertisement for banh Mi sandwiches is displayed as a customer exits a 7-Eleven store in Ho Chi … [+] Minh City, Vietnam, on Wednesday, June 20, 2018. For decades, Vietnamese have shopped, snacked and hung out at the countrys traditional markets: colorful, chaotic mazes of open air stalls where vendors hawk everything from fruits and vegetables, to sandwiches and sodas to the odd clucking chicken. Now a full-scale convenience-store flood is coming. Japanese-owned Seven-Eleven opened its first outlet in August. Photographer: Maika Elan/Bloomberg
© 2018 Bloomberg Finance LP
Like much else in contemporary society, the food media are trying to right wrongs in the way they are staffed and what their focus will be in the future. The result has been an admirable number of new appointments with an eye towards diversity. Last June the staffs of Bon Appetit and Epicurious (whose parent company is Condé Nast) co-published A Long Overdue Apology, and Where Do We Go From Here? after the resignation of Bon Appetits editor-in-chief Adam Rappaport when a deeply offensive photo of him mocking Puerto Ricans in costume appeared in the news. 
NEW YORK, NY – MAY 21: Adam Rapoport, Editor-in-Chief of Bon Appétit magazine and guests attend … [+] Bon Appetit and GREY GOOSE Vodka celebrate the launch of “The Grilling Book” at Le Bain & Rooftop at The Standard on May 21, 2013 in New York City. (Photo by Cindy Ord/Getty Images for GREY GOOSE)
getty
We have been complicit with a culture we dont agree with and are committed to change, said the apology. Our mastheads have been far too white for far too long. As a result, the recipes, stories, and people weve highlighted have too often come from a white-centric viewpoint. At times we have treated non-white stories as not newsworthy or trendy.. . . Black staffers have been saddled with contributing racial education to our staffs and appearing in editorial and promotional photo shoots to make our brands seem more diverse. We havent properly learned from or taken ownership of our mistakes. But things are going to change.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – FEBRUARY 11: Dawn Davis attends the world premiere of “The Photograph” World at … [+] SVA Theater on February 11, 2020 in New York City. (Photo by Steven Ferdman/Getty Images)
Getty Images
Indeed, within two months, Bon Appetit,  appointed a black woman, Dawn Davis, as the food publications new editor-in-chief, who, as a vice president at Simon & Schuster founded Inkwell Book Club online, celebrating Black authors. Before that, Davis had been the publisher of HarperCollins imprint Amistad Press, devoted to multicultural voices. 
Many other media, including the New York Times, have scrambled to recruit women, Blacks and Asian editors and writers in an applaudable attempt to diversify their food staffs, who will increase attention on international foods that might once have been written about by white authors with no connection to the traditions of a countrys food culture. But in their urgency to distance themselves from past errors, some media are adopting highly questionable, politically correct assertions that contend there is only one way to make a particular dish and the only person to write such an article must be verifiably from a particular region where everyone makes that dish a specific way.
Last week, David Tamarkin, the white digital editor of Epicurious, made his own mea culpas after a lot of consciousness-raising among the editors and staff by admitting that in the past, “We have purported to make a recipe better by making it faster,  or swapping in ingredients that were assumed to be more familiar to American palates, or easier to find . We have inferred [sic] (and in some cases outright labeled) ingredients and techniques to be surprising or weird. And we have published terminology that was widely accepted in food writing at the time, and that we now recognize has always been racist. 
WEST HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – JANUARY 24: Chef Marcus Samuelsson poses for a photo at the Primary … [+] Wave x Island Records Presented By Mastercard: One Love Hotel – Marley Brunch at 1 Hotel West Hollywood on January 24, 2020 in West Hollywood, California. (Photo by Jerritt Clark/Getty Images for Island Records)
Getty Images for Island Records
As a result the staff went through a trove of 35,000 recipes from Bon Appetit, Gourmet, House & Garden and Epicurious for offensive words that included authentic and exotic. Ironically, the highly respected black Chef Marcus Samuelsson, who was born in Ethiopia but raised in Sweden, was roundly criticized and forced to apologize for publishing a recipe in Bon Appetit for a soup named joumou adapted from his cookbook The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food, because the magazine referred to it as a Haitian staple that symbolizes the countrys violent liberation from its French colonizers. Samuelssons only crime was that he is not Haitian.
BOB BLUMER. 07.28.2006. Bob Blumer is the culinary adventurer known for his five seasons with the … [+] show The Surreal Gourmet. Currently he is in Toronto filming an episode of a new TV series to premiere in January called Glutton For Punishment. Shown here cooking the Teppanyaki style, a style he just learned a few days ago at Benihana at the Royal York Hotel.(Harrison Smith/Toronto Star) (Photo by Harrison Smith/Toronto Star via Getty Images)
Toronto Star via Getty Images
The problem with such re-casting or deletions is that the editors seem completely to misunderstand how food cultures form and evolve and why certain dishes are made certain ways only because of a lack of availability to kitchen tools or other ingredients. After all, ingredients like tomatoes, potatoes, corn, chile peppers, cocoa, pineapple, squash, vanilla and wild rice were native to America and only gradually entered into the food cultures of Europe, Africa and Asia that adapted them in their own ways. Portuguese traders brought the idea of tempura to Japan, while Japanese chef Nobu Matsuhisa created a new form of sushi in Peru. A Hong Kong chef created Singapore noodles in the 1950s. Benihana of Tokyo originated in New York.  Vietnamese banh mi sandwiches are correctly made with French baguettes, brought to what was then Indo-China in the 1860s. Hawaiians introduced to SPAM during World War II now claim it as their state food, and Austrian and Italians still argue about which came first, Wienerschnitzel or vitello alla Milanese. 
Close-up shot of a smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel in a Boichik Bagels paper wrap in Pleasant … [+] Hill, California, December 31, 2020. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)
Gado via Getty Images
Is the bagel an Eastern European food item or a Jewish-American one? And, further, are the quickly disappearing, firmer, denser bagels of a century ago in New Yorkonce called belly bombs the only ones Epicurious would consider giving a recipe for, despite bagels evolving into a lighter, moister variety that most people enjoy everywhere? And what of the variants made by traditional Jewish bakers in Montreal that are quite different from New York bagels? (So, too, is Jewish-American smoked salmon unknown to Jews in Europe.)
BOSTON – JANUARY 7: The alla diavola pizza, in the foreground, and the margherita pizza, in the … [+] background, at the restaurant MAST’ in the Downtown Crossing neighborhood of Boston. (Photo by David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
Boston Globe via Getty Images
The Neapolitan pizza alla Margherita, created by Raphael Esposito for Queen Margherita in 1864, became the template for pizzas there and in the U.S. (most Italians north of Naples had never heard of pizza until after World War II), and the official Neapolitan tradition is to make it by certain strict rulesas sanctioned by the Associazione Pizzaioli Europei e Sostenitorias to the ingredients in the dough (no fats allowed), which must be kneaded by hand, the diameter, the kind of oven, the temperature and so on. Yet the Neapolitan pie has a soft center that bears little resemblance to the crispy thin-crusted pizzas now ubiquitous in the world or the square Sicilian style. Would Epicurious refuse to print a recipe for the latter and insist on only hand kneading the former?
Tamarkins suggestion that making a recipe faster somehow compromises the integrity of a prepared food completely ignores how every food culture in the world now uses food processors and electric mixers. Coal-fired stoves were abandoned decades ago in Europe, and not all French or German or English bakers cook with wood-fired ovens any more. 
circa 1965: American chef Julia Child stands in front of a countertop, holding a whisk and a ladle … [+] by a mixing bowl, possibly on the set of her television series, ‘The French Chef’. (Photo by New York Times Co./Getty Images)
Getty Images
ay Chinese vegetables only be chopped with a cleaver, not a knife? I recall when the late Julia Child on her PBS TV shows back in the 1960s insisted the only correct way to whip egg whites was with a big wire whiskan outmoded French cooks idea Child herself soon abandoned. I also recall the late North Carolina food writer James Villas taking me to his favorite barbecue place in Charlotte, where he swore they still properly chopped the cue by hand with a hatchet, but there wasnt a hatchet to be found anywhere near the chopping block. 
TAIPEI, NEW TAIPEI CITY, TAIWAN – 2016/04/08: A woman selling spicy “stinky tofu” (fermented … [+] beancurd) with pork blood cake at the Raohe Street Night Market in Taipei, where many tourists and locals can enjoy an enormous range of street food. (Photo by Stefan Irvine/LightRocket via Getty Images)
LightRocket via Getty Images
Tamarkins disdain for recipes using ingredients that were assumed to be more familiar to American palates, or easier to find is an absurd example of p.c. overreaction. It would be exceptionally rare these days to find squirrel in Brunswick stew, game birds hung in barns until they turn green with rot or Sardinian cheeses containing worms (now forbidden by law). Since Bon Appetit (despite its own Euro-centric title touting a French connection) is, in fact, an American-based magazine published for an American readership, will all future recipes really insist its readers try to ferret out the potentially poisonous Japanese blowfish called fugu, which Japanese cooks train years to master? Or order what the Chinese themselves call stinky tofu from a Taipei market? And if you cant obtain the revered (and very expensive) poulet de Bresse, can one ever hope to make a decent roast chicken? Not too long ago, an American couldnt even buy true prosciutto di Parma, balsamic vinegar from Modena or buffalo milk mozzarella in this country.
TO GO WITH AFP STORY BY REMY ZAKA A photo taken on March 4, 2016 shows ingredients of the cassoulet … [+] displayed in the kitchen of Jean-Claude Rodriguez, head chef of the Chateau Saint Martin restaurant in Carcassonne. Despite the duck crisis, the cassoulet, the first French dish consumed in France, wants to defend a tradition born, according to the legend, during the Hundred Years’ War in Castelnaudary (Aude), and conquered a place in world gastronomy. / AFP / REMY GABALDA (Photo credit should read REMY GABALDA/AFP via Getty Images)
AFP via Getty Images
Of course, the idea that only a Sichuan chef should be allowed to write about a Sichuan dish with Sichuan ingredients or an Alsatian chef should be the only one to write about what goes into a cassoulet (even in Alsace, there are three types) is senseless. Should one forget about trying to make a Daiquiri without being shown how by a Havana bartender using only Cuban rum, long banned in the U.S.? Doesnt that fly in the face of Tamarkins distaste for the word authentic, when thats exactly what these editors are aiming for?
He and others in the food media have also tried to delete the words ethnic and exotic, whose dictionary definitions they obviously have not consulted. If you are an American it is no stretch or slur to think of monkey brains or cobra hearts (which Anthony Bourdain once wolfed down on TV) as exotic within the definition of being of foreign origin or of a uniquely new or experimental nature, as per The Random House Dictionary of the English Language. Jews and Arabs find the idea of western cultures eating pork both forbidden and disgusting, which the Condé Nast editors would find racist. 
ZITACUARO, MEXICO – JUNE 23: Diana Kennedy is an author and authority on Mexican cooking. A native … [+] of the United Kingdom, she started traveling in Mexico in 1957 with her husband, Paul Kennedy, who was a correspondent for the New York Times. Here shopping in a market close to her home June 23, 1990 Zitacuaro, Michoacan, Mexico (Photo By Paul Harris/Getty Images)
Getty Images
The fact is, many of the best, most knowledgeable food writers who have had the most influence in encouraging Americans to eat food from all over the world do not have the blood of those countries in their veins, beginning with Julia Child, who was not French; Paula Wolfert, who is not Moroccan; Elizabeth David, who was not Italian, and Diana Kennedy who is not Mexican. Apparently Bon Appetit and Epicurious would ban such authorities from their pages because they are all white people, albeit women, who could not possibly show the same intimate knowledge or soul for a cuisine as would a cook born in those countries. 
Which is, of course, a troubling form of reverse racism and implies that anyone eating a modified form of any cultures food makes one a racist as well, as if Tex-Mex or Chino-Latino are slurs against the food of the Yucatan or Canton. And if there are two chefs in Bologna who would agree on how to make lasagne alla bolognese, it would be a miracle.read more