Conde Nast Vows to Change its Ways, What is Bon Appetit's New Recipe for Success?
On June 8th, Adam Rapoport formally resigned as the editor in chief of Conde Nast’s major food publication, Bon Appetit. The announcement stemmed from a recirculating photo of a 2004 Halloween party that depicted Rapoport in a costume of what appears to be a Puerto Rican gang member or “papi”—as the caption reads. Within hours of its emergence, Rapoport made a statement on his Instagram, where he addressed his shortcomings as a privileged white male, an editor, and a human being. Soon enough, statements from other BA writers and editors—Carla Lali Music, Andy Baraghani, Molly Baz, Sohla El-Waylly, and Marissa Ross—exploded onto social medias. Lali Music changed her Instagram biography to “I will not appear in videos until my BIPOC coworkers are paid equitably. They lead, I follow;” Baraghani addressed a vine of co-worker Alex Delany using a homophobic slur; Baz explained the magazine’s corporate hierarchy based on oppression and inequity; El-Waylly revealed dealing with an atmosphere of tokenism as a person of color, as well as zero compensation for her work on BA’s Test Kitchen videos for Youtube; Conde Nast let Ross’s 2019 contract expire and cut her from salary to pay by the word. She said “I got to keep my title as Wine Editor but I’ve never had power at BA, that title is how they kept power over me.” Conde Nast quickly released a statement vowing to “dismantle racism” within their brands because “…the recipes, stories, and people we’ve highlighted have too often come from a white-centric viewpoint.” As agreed upon by various staff, the major media company will hire more freelancers of color, resolve pay disparity, and conduct anti-racist training. On paper, it sounds alright. But then I go back and read that Baz was told to stay quiet about the monetary details of her BA contract; that Rapoport made his previous, black and female editorial assistant clean his golf clubs and deliver shoes to his wife; and that Baraghani went three years without pay for his work on the brand’s Youtube videos. Yes, Conde Nast plans to make big changes, but it does not erase the damage that has already been done to its brands, its employees, and its readers.
I have considered that most of the food media I consume is created by white people. To compensate, I often seek out (because these pieces seem harder to find than those of white writers) the works of Osayi Endolyn, Soleil Ho, Kwame Onwuachi, Samin Nosrat, Priya Krishna, and Nicole A. Taylor. I have read books like An Edible History of Humanity, Notes From a Young Black Chef, The Ethnic Restauranteur, and the Potlikker Papers to further understand the cultural and culinary experiences of non-white individuals through history. I’ve barely scratched the surface, but I’ve learned enough to know that food and identity are inseparable. However, when it comes to readership and profitability, there is blatant erasure. Of course, selective and appropriated food narratives have always been used as a strategy to shape America’s dominant food culture. Corn, black-eyed peas, peanuts, sweet potatoes, coffee, and watermelon came to the U.S. by way of the transatlantic slave trade. The spice trade utilized the bounty of India for flavor and cash flow via teas, cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, black pepper, and turmeric. While tacos, tortillas, salsas, and guacamole are staples of the American diet, our president seeks to send their ambassadors “back to where they came from.” Early Americans were taught by native Americans that planting the “three sisters”—corn, beans, and squash—together would permit better yields and bountiful harvests, essentially providing the foundation for modern agricultural practices. While history reveals that “American foods” and “American people” are both complex and intermingled, we have organized ourselves based on difference rather than embraced it. Food media presents a similar story. Money, power, and privilege are the tools white people have used to create corporations with power structures strategically designed for the promotion of safer, more approachable, and polished representations of non-white races and their cuisines. You’ll see an Indian woman teaching you to make a curry (which isn’t even an Indian dish); a young, hip, Hispanic millennial revealing the hidden secrets of a corn tortilla; an Asian guy teaching you to marinate your meats “Korean-style” with soy sauce, green onions, garlic, and ginger. It all sounds so painfully familiar, offensive, and bland.
Photo from article in The Washington Post
The major voices in food media—white voices—have spent years shaping our food and restaurant preferences to make us ignorant of the American table’s broad and multidimensional scope. This is because companies like Conde Nast and brands like Bon Appetit have permitted the prolonged performance of non-white identities for likes, views, and subscribers. As a result, the clean and unfussy façade of unity, equity, and fairness exists to not only appease consumers but also exercise control over employees. (just look how happy everyone looks in those BA Test Kitchen videos! Working with Conde Nast must be great!) Hush-hush contractual agreements and tokenism fill a workplace with competitive relationships, imbalanced power dynamics, and unfair advantages. It is in this toxic moment that marketing and social responsibility clash. A writer’s work is published based on its employer’s perception of the dominant social, cultural, economic, and political ideologies of mainstream society. Thus alternative voices—from people of color, indigenous peoples, LGBTQIA individuals—are suppressed and ignored. Both tension and an awareness of this shady dynamic increases, but conversations and complaints are deterred by consequences of whistleblowing, pay cuts, or threats of contract termination. Thus power is distributed and maintained through an impenetrable wall of whiteness that asserts its content is based on the needs and desires of a target market. A story about street vendors being harassed by police? Too messy. A listicle about the ten best places to eat in Hudson Yards? Groundbreaking.
This approach in food media is a double-edged sword. It wounds both the employees of BA and also its readership. When only one side of a story gets told, other unique narratives are lost, and readers aren’t given the opportunity to think more critically about the world they live in. At Conde Nast, this strategy functions to limit the influence and scope of non-white writers to reinforce a corporate dynamic that justifies racism, sexism, pay discrepancies, and labor exploitation. Thus, when representation becomes more or less related to trend or relevance, it only adds insult to injury. In the wake of protests for black lives and justice for victims such as George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, food media took the opportunity to promote black-owned food businesses. While well-meaning, I can’t help but recall how surprised I was to see so many names of restaurants I did not know. Why did it take an unimaginable crisis-pandemic filled with unrelenting violence, sickness and death, civil unrest, and police brutality to finally shed light on the restaurants and cuisines of non-white peoples? Because white food media utilizes the power of sociopolitical movements to slyly disguise the years of racism and inequity it benefits from. Or so they think.
As a white female writer who once dreamed of working for BA, I am infuriated and confused. I ask myself: How much white food media have I consumed? How much have my tastes, ideas, and expectations been informed by a white and privileged agenda? Is my deep enjoyment and love of restaurants directly related to my own whiteness? Have I really never hypothesized that, depending on race, one’s restaurant experience could be totally different from another? I am deeply saddened by my failures as a diner and a white person of privilege. I am frustrated that there have been and still are non-white voices in food media struggling to be fairly compensated for their wonderful stories and perspectives. Tokenism and selective storytelling in food journalism does nothing for America’s food culture. Instead it traps us all in a white-washed world of California rolls, New Nordic tasting menus, CBD lattes and sought-after egg-sandos. And so a passage from Danny Meyer’s Setting the Table may offer some insight:
“Managers have a power over employees that creates a distinct imbalance in their relationship, and that power must be consistently and fairly imposed for the good of the restaurant and the way we do business. And team members are fully entitled to hold management to even higher standards, particularly in a company that embraces for itself the same character idea that it demands of others (218).”
At this point, I don’t think that a huge, public apology from a disembodied corporate entity is sufficient. I believe it will take much more to deconstruct an environment plagued by years of toxic workplace relations, microaggressions, and both blatant and subtle acts of racism. We know that saying, “With great power comes great responsibility,” but I also need to be infinitely more mindful of the media I choose to consume. I can’t trust that Conde Nast will live up to its promises, but I can worker harder to find resources created by members of the LGBTQIA community, people with disabilities, people of color, and indigenous peoples. I’ve shared these resources here as a starting point, and I only hope my list grows further.
PODCASTS:
The Sporkful
Episodes: When White People Say Plantation, A Reckoning at Bon Appetit, Can a Restaurant be for Everyone?
Meant to be Eaten
Point of Origin