Culinary Conquistadores
On the limits of the show and tell model of cultural education and a comforting lentil picadillo.
The tension of the “Cultural Diversity Day” is probably familiar to anyone who has ever been a minority student at a small, private school. Almost always with the obligation of bringing in a treat as part of the presentation, it can be either an exciting opportunity to showcase a part of your life that is special to you or a terrifying situation in which you are put in the vulnerable position of having to be the official spokesperson for your culture. During my second grade “Holidays around the world!” presentation about Three Kings Day, I got into some hot water when I had to explain to my classmates in my predominately white Catholic school why the biblical wise men left presents for me and no one else. That afternoon when I relayed my classmates’ concerns to my mother, she panicked at the idea that I would discover that three strange men were not in fact coming to Tampa, Florida at night to feed their camels the fistfuls of grass I had left in a shoebox outside my bedroom. The best explanation she could come up with was that the Three Kings only liked Puerto Rican children, a harsh blow to my classmates that was softened only by the homemade pillows of guava pastelitos I had brought for my presentation. My classmate David, the only Black child in the class, also found himself in a precarious position. When the teacher scolded him for bringing a pack of Chips Ahoy as the “cultural treat” for his presentation, he had to explain that his family didn’t actually celebrate Kwanzaa, and in those pre-Google times had no clue what one eats on Kwanzaa.
For anyone who follows food media closely, the last year has felt like Groundhog Day, where we are each day living out the contemporary adult version of Cultural Diversity Day. At the time of writing this, I found on the home pages of various major food media players recipes for Mojo Picon and Sambal Goreng Tempe (Bon Appetit), Borek and Kkakdugi (Serious Eats), Chochoyotes (Epicurious), and Ensaimadas and Mesakas (Food52). Meanwhile while the store on Milk Street’s website is currently highlighting a curated selection of Wasabi Company Mayonnaise, Irish Black Butter, and Big Island Bees 'Ohi'a Lehua Honey. On the social media accounts of any of these entities, you will find freelancers of all backgrounds presenting dishes from their respective cultures along with a brief explanation about their significance. It’s worth noting that the owners/founders, and primary financial beneficiaries, of all of the aforementioned sites are white.
While this trend in food media had been long in the making, it wasn’t until about a year ago that a noticeable shift happened. While the country as a whole was dealing with a racial reckoning in the summer of 2020, the food media had its own specific wakeup call after Bon Appetit’s reaction to Black Lives Matter protests sparked a chains of events that eventually lead to the downfall of its popular Test Kitchen. At the height of its popularity, the BA Test Kitchen, through its magazine and Youtube series, presented a group of attractive, smiling faces of all different colors belonging to a seemingly close group of impossibly cool friends supporting each other. Once the veil was lifted, fans were upset to learn that the Test Kitchen was not this fantasy liberal utopia but actually much closer to the ugly reality the fans were trying to escape in the first place. In retrospect, it seems absurdly naive to be surprised that Conde Nast, the parent company of Bon Appetit, was a ruthless workplace with pretty egregious pay policies, casual racism, workplace bullying, and tokenism.
While the lens was primary focused on Bon Appetit during the reckoning within food media, it was clear that the reverberations of the Test Kitchen’s downfall were felt across various publications and sites. You could practically hear the collective “oh shit” of editors at NYT Cooking, Serious Eats and the like as all publications started scrubbing their sites of inaccurately named dishes or improperly credited recipes and scrambling for freelance work from writers from different backgrounds.
It hard to criticize the current shift in how we talk about food. After all, positive changes, such as looking at food from a non-Western lens or learning about the political and historical origins of certain dishes are all undoubtedly moves in a positive direction. After a year of being confined to our small spaces, the ability to travel, explore and learn through food and cooking has been a bright spot for many, including myself. But at the extremes it sometimes feels like we have created the culinary version of one of those around the world cruises that wealthy old people take, where you get to make a few stops for a short bit in each continent, sampling as much of the sanitized culture as you can get in a couple days before getting back to the boat to move on to the next thing. One needs to only flip through any popular food magazine to wonder if cultures only exist for us to beautifully curate, consume, commercialize, all under the guise of “appreciation,” until we have had enough and get to go home. The question always remains, who ultimately is profiting from this exploration? Are we fostering better understanding, respect and appreciation for that which may be unfamiliar to ourselves? Or have we created what I like to call “Culinary Conquistadores” where other cultures are here for us to pick and choose what we like and leave the bad stuff behind. Writers like Illyanna Maisonet and Bryan Ford have to bare their souls to gain mainstream interest in their stories and recipes. Writers like Claire Saffitz get to be your tour guide through recipes that call for halvah, miso and black tahini without ever having to reveal much about herself (not a dig at Saffitz, but rather the media and publishing industry). The idea that whole world is at our fingertips and we are free to consume each and every bit of it as long as we read a few educational paragraphs first seems also to miss the mark.
Another thorny issue that has arisen is that of companies, content creators and media groups taking advantage of people’s good, albeit ambiguous intentions to “do better.” There are the brands that capitalize on a cause for the sake of diverting criticism. I think of the recent Black History Month initiative between Uber and Marcus Samuelsson, to give grants to a select few Black-owned businesses. Considering how disastrous delivery apps have been for small businesses, you have to wonder who ultimately is actually benefitting from an initiative like this. Then there are the various Instagram and Twitter accounts (whom I won’t name here) that have developed sizable followings from calling out others for bad behavior in a way that often comes across as more of means of clout building than an effort to actually rectify real problems or stimulate productive conversations. My personal favorite trick that I’ve seen used by quite a few food influencers after a fall from grace is the creation of content for which proceeds will go towards a race-based charity as a means to building back goodwill and maybe upping subscription/follower counts that can later be leveraged for promotional deals. None of these actions are inherently bad things, but maybe we should be honest with ourselves that the stated purpose of such efforts is actually just a secondary benefit, and often these actions are more a means to demonstrate to your consumers that you’re one of the good guys.
There are real conversations to be had about the intersections of race, nationality, culture and food, but they are more complicated conversations than what we seem to be willing to have. Having someone of El Salvadoran decent talk on your stories about how to make pupusas is one thing. Talking about the working conditions for the many Central American meat plant workers that produce the ingredients we use for recipes is another. I’m not someone who necessarily believes that every bit of media needs to go into politics or history of every dish. There is a place, I believe, for lightheartedness, frivolity and distraction. But if you’re going to go present yourself as an agent of change, you can’t avoid the queasy conversations.
All this to say, the show and tell method of cultural education may work for children, but if the adults want to really truly learn about other cultures beyond a superficial level, or have serious conversations about the people our current food system exploits, it is on us to seek out that content. There are plenty of independent writers, video creators, podcasters etc. that are doing that work every day. If our intellectual curiosity or sense of social justice starts and stops with the “Cultural Diversity Day” provided to us by the mainstream players in food media, we let down the very people we say we want to support, and shrink our worlds further while doing so.
Recommendations
Normally I would leave this list for the end, but for the sake of flow, I’m including them here as they are all good reads about the issues I talk about in this month’s essay.
This essay by Zoe Yang explains the phenomenon of the opportunism and wokewashing that has emerged from the current moment much more eloquently than I can.
I’ve been a fan of Reina Gascon-Lopez for a while now. Her essay "How Viral Recipes Shut Out BIPOC Food Creators" explores the world of the ubiquitous feta pasta or quesdilla folding hacks and questions why we are willing to not only accept, but elevate mediocrity from from certain producers over others.
Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter is always a welcome arival in my inbox Monday morning, but I particularly enjoyed this essay about food and travel tv.
In Inventing Eataly, Inventing Italian Cuisine, by Sean Wyer, the author explains how much of what we call Italian food is more a construct that serves the purpose of selling the idea of Italy than it is reflective of an actual cohesive cuisine.
This one about the idea of the Global Pantry, by Navneet Alang, is about a year old, but it still rings very true today.
Hits and Hiss
French onion soup is one of those recipes that I’ve always told myself I was going to learn to make, but never actually had the patience to try. This month I made the French Onion soup from Kenji Lopez- Alt’s The Food Lab, and it lived up to all my extravagant dreams. The method of carmelizing onions (reduce first, then carmelize), was a game changer. While is didn’t save me time, it did significantly reduce the amount of time I actually had to spend stirring the onions.
I generally find the virality of Alison Roman’s recipes puzzling, not because they are bad (they aren’t!) but I don’t know what kind of marketing magic make some of her recipes completely take over my feed. I am a couple years late on trying “The Cookie,” a chocolate chunk shortbread that went viral a couple years ago, but I was looking for a crunchy chocolate cookie to make for my mom and decided to try it out. The verdict? With a few adjustments, I enjoyed the end result, but I am still completely baffled on how this cookie got deemed The Cookie.
Recipe: Lentil Picadillo
Picadillo is one of those comfort foods that is always satisfying. In an effort to make a healthier version, I replaced the ground meat with lentils. My sofrito is not traditional, but its the recipe I came up with while living in places where I couldn’t find the ingredients for a more traditional recipe. Call it a Fauxfrito if you will.
Fauxfrito/Sofrito
In a blender or food processor, blend together 1 cubanelle pepper, 1/2 bunch cilantro, 1 small onion and 3 cloves of garlic until finely chopped.
Picadillo
In a large pan, heat 2 tablespoons olive oil over medium heat. Add the Sofrito and cook, stirring frequently, until the liquid has evaporated and the sofrito has darkened (around 5 min). Add 2 1/2 cups cooked brown lentils and stir to coat. Add in 1/4 cup of tomato sauce, 1 cup of water, 1/4 cup roughly chopped pimiento stuffed manzanilla olives plus a tablespoon of olive brine, tablespoon of capers (optional), 2 tablespoons of raisins (optional) and 2 chopped boiled eggs (also optional). Stir together and reduce heat to a simmer. Cook, stirring occcationally, until most of the liquid reduced (about 10 min).
You can serve this in many ways. Buy some empanada disks and make yourself some baked empanadas stuffed with this picadillo, or top with mashed potatoes or sweet potatoes and a sprinkling of cheese and put under the broiler for a pastelón-style dish. It also tastes great of its own with side of rice and sliced avocado.
Serves 4