Who Wins When Food Media Debate ‘Selling Out’?
How the Alison Roman controversy reveals major problems with food and capitalism
This was first posted as the May 11 newsletter, “From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy.” You can sign up here.
It’s funny: People seem to want food folks to shut up if they’re not soothing them with dressed-up mac and cheese or bucatini, but they also ignore bodies of work in order to make big, ignorant proclamations saying food media is nothing but white people eating fancy food.
What is it that people really want from food writing — the easy stuff, or the difficult stuff? Can both happen simultaneously? If so, how? That’s what I’m trying to work through, to figure out where I fit and why I do this.
The one controversy that most people are likely familiar with is cookbook author and prolific viral recipe writer Alison Roman doing an interview in which she says she certainly does not want to emulate the careers of Marie Kondo or Chrissy Teigen, whom she perceives as selling out, slapping their names on things, and creating content through a “farm.” Never mind that these are the ways of capitalism and that Roman herself is working with a brand to recreate vintage spoons, which sounds quite a bit like slapping your name on something in order to sell it: Why did she…
