#another funny thing happened someone called me weird and racist for saying cool beans

[eebie]

I WAS WRONG!!! IT WAS ALL AN ELABORATE JOKE. THEY WERE NOT FOURTH GRADERS LOL after i won the game and we went back into the lobby one of them came up to me and said we have something to tell you And they turned on their mics and they were all HIGHSCHOOLERS. they played the part so well I was stunned because they had me completely fooled dude

[agentlereckoning]

What I think about Alison Roman

Any Gen-Z’er with a Twitter account has probably seen the latest Gen-Z Icon Controversy, i.e. the one involving Alison Roman. In case you’re not caught up on its details,  the tl;dr is that The New Consumer (which appears to be a one-white-man show of an online publication steered by a former Vox and Business Insider employee named Dan Frommer) published an interview with Alison last Thursday — an interview where Alison, when asked about the difference between “consumption and pollution” (as if there even is a material difference), said:

“I think that’s why I really enjoy what I do. Because you’re making something, but it goes away.

Like the idea that when Marie Kondo decided to capitalize on her fame and make stuff that you can buy, that is completely antithetical to everything she’s ever taught you… I’m like, damn, bitch, you fucking just sold out immediately! Someone’s like ‘you should make stuff,’ and she’s like, ‘okay, slap my name on it, I don’t give a shit!’

....

Like, what Chrissy Teigen has done is so crazy to me. She had a successful cookbook. And then it was like: Boom, line at Target. Boom, now she has an Instagram page that has over a million followers where it’s just, like, people running a content farm for her. That horrifies me and it’s not something that I ever want to do. I don’t aspire to that. But like, who’s laughing now? Because she’s making a ton of fucking money.”

This is the quote that most people who’ve followed this drama have latched onto, and I’ll come back to discussing it in a moment. I’m really not sure why the interview was published at all, other than for a publicity or financial boost during these times, because I don’t think anything worth hearing was uttered by either the interviewer or interviewee. Moments in the interview seemed either tone-deaf or trivial to the point where I wondered why they were included at all. Early on, for example, Alison laments that she hasn’t been making enough money during this pandemic. (She does not live in want of money.) Later she half-jokingly complains that her public persona has been reduced to “anchovy girl”, ostensibly because she often uses them in her cooking. (She does, and often proudly owns that fact, which makes this complaint pretty uninteresting.) But the point of this interview was meant to be, I think, a rumination on how Alison would turn her belief that she “isn’t like the other girls” into practice.

It’s a common thing to desire, I think — this ingenuity balanced with relatability, and I think seeking this balance is what propels so many people my age. Few things are more embarrassing to us than unoriginality, than being a carbon copy of someone else, yet few things are scarier than social rejection. We don’t want to like the same things as everybody else, but we want at least some people to like the things that we like. I think it’s what drives certain subcultures to exist in the first place, the way that subsections of people can congregate around something or someone, reveling in each other’s presence but also in knowing that they are, in fact, just a subsection of the greater population. 

This mentality is, admittedly, sort of what drove me to like Alison Roman in the first place. For background: the first time I cooked a recipe of hers happened unwittingly; in December 2018, I saw the recipe for the salted chocolate chip shortbread cookies that became known as #TheCookies (Alison’s virality can be encapsulated by the fact that all of her most famous recipes have been hashtagged, e.g., #TheStew, #TheStew2, #ShallotPasta or #ThePasta), but I made them without knowing that Alison was the person behind the recipe. The cookies were good (though I think any recipe with over two sticks of butter and a pound of dark chocolate is bound to be good.) At some point about a year later, I watched a YouTube video published by NYT Cooking where she made her white bean-harissa-kale stew, and I thought she was funny and really pretty and, like me (I think), had a fastidious yet chaotic energy that I always thought made me awkward but made her seem endearing. Alison’s recipes taste good, they come together really easily, and you don’t need special equipment or a lot of kitchen space to execute them. It’s why I’ve committed at least three of them to memory, just by virtue of making them so often. I liked her recipes so much that, for over three months, one of my Instagram handles was inspired by one. But I also liked her, or wanted to be like her, or some combination fo both. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to be her friend, or that I didn’t aspire to her lifestyle of Rachel Comey clothes, glistening brass hoop earrings that cost 1/4 of my rent, regular trips to downtown Brooklyn or Park Slope farmers’ markets or small butcher shops where the purveyors all knew her name, an always-perfect red gel manicure, the capacity to eat and drink luxuriously and seemingly endlessly and to have the money for a yoga studio membership to help her stay slim anyways. 

Of course all of those things are signifiers of social class more than anything else. But in oligarchical, consumerist societies, what is expensive and what is good become two overlapped Venn diagram circles, and I have not yet reached a level of enlightenment to be able to fully tease the two apart. And while I would never drop $425 on a jumpsuit, no matter how pretty I think it is, I could crisp up some chickpeas, stir in vegetable stock and coconut milk, and wilt in some greens, and act like my shit was together. I liked Alison because when I first started liking her, she hadn’t yet risen to the astronomical level of digital fame that she enjoys now, and by making her recipes, some part of me believed that I would be inducted into a small group of her fans who, by serving up her dishes, telegraphed good taste.

This idea of “good taste” is a complicated and racially charged one. Alison is white; she lives in one of the whitest neighborhoods in Brooklyn (maybe even all of New York City); her recipes cater to a decidedly young, white audience. I think another reason why her dishes hold so much Gen-Z appeal, beyond their simplicity and deliciousness, is because they sit at the perfect intersection of healthy-but-not-too-healthy and international-but-not-too-international. Her chickpea stew, for example, borrows from South and Southeast Asian cooking flavors, but you wouldn’t need to step foot into an ethnic grocery store or, god forbid, leave Trader Joe’s, to get the ingredients for it. The shallot pasta recipe calls for an entire tin of anchovies, and you get to feel cool and edgy putting a somewhat polarizing food into a sauce that white people will still, ultimately, visually register as “tomato sauce and pasta” and digest easily. All of the recipes in her cookbook, Nothing Fancy (which I received as a gift!), are like this. She doesn’t push the envelope into more foreign territory, probably because she doesn’t have the culinary experience for it (which is totally fine — I never expected her to be an expert in anything except white people food), and probably also because if she did push the envelope any further, her book, with its tie-dyed pages and saturated, pop-art aerial shots, wouldn’t have been as marketable. 

That’s what’s unfortunate — that white people and white-domineered food publications have been the arbiters of culinary taste in the U.S. for centuries. I’m thinking about Julia Child, about bananas foster being flambéed tableside and served under a silver domed dish cover, about the omnipresent red-and-white-checked Better Homes & Gardens cookbook, about Guy Fieri and Eric Ripert and Ina Garten and the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen. I’m thinking about how white women have long been the societally accepted public face of domestic labor when it was often Black women who actually did that labor. It’s Mother’s Day today, and I’m thinking about how, in middle school, I’d sometimes conceal my packed lunch of my favorite dishes my mom made — glass noodles stir-fried with bok choy, cloud ear mushrooms, carrots, and thinly sliced and marinated pork; fish braised in a chili-spiced broth — so that my white friends wouldn’t be grossed out, and so that I wouldn’t have to do the labor of explaining what my food was. 

And I’m thinking of that now-notorious Alison Roman quote. To be fair, Marie Kondo and Chrissy Teigen do have large consumer and media empires, which have become profitable and which require huge teams of people to sustain. Both of them probably do have large amounts of money at their disposals. What’s weird to me is that Alison accuses both Marie and Chrissy of “selling out” because they each branded their own lines of purchasable home goods, yet Alison herself said in that very same interview that she had also done that very thing. It’s just that Chrissy’s line is sold at Target, while Alison’s, according to her, is a “capsule collection. It’s limited edition, a few tools that I designed that are based on tools that I use that aren’t in production anywhere — vintage spoons and very specific things that are one-offs that I found at antique markets that they have made for me.” I suppose it’s not “selling out” if it caters to the pétite bourgeoisie. I don’t know if Alison is explicitly racist, since I don’t know if she called out two women of color simply because they are women of color, or if she genuinely just so happened to select two of them. But that she feels like she has the license to define things as “selling out” based on who the “selling-out” behavior caters to reeks of white entitlement. 

There’s also an air of superiority with which she describes how she would market her product line:

That would have to be done in such a specific way under very intense standards. And I would not ever want to put anything out into the world that I wouldn’t be so excited to use myself.

She says this right before talking about Marie Kondo and Chrissy Teigen, accusing them of being lackadaisical and unthoughtful (”okay, slap my name on it! I don’t give a shit!”; “people running a content farm for her”) when she likely has no idea what the inner workings of either of their business models are. To be sure, it could very well be true that Marie and Chrissy have handed off these aspects of their brands to other people. But for Alison to assume that they have, and that her own business management style would, by default, be better because she would retain control, is egotistical. 

Alison ends the interview by proclaiming that her ultimate goal is to be different from her contemporaries. She says, 

To me, the only way that I can continue to differentiate myself from the pod of people that write recipes, or cookbooks or whatever, is by doing a different thing. And so I have to figure out what that is. And I think that I haven’t ultimately nailed that. And I’m in the process of figuring it out right now.

I expect that her path to “differentiation” will contain riffs on the same iterations of preserved lemons, anchovies, canned beans, and fresh herbs that she’s always relied on. I expect people will still think she’s cool, because that’s easy to achieve when her recipes and aesthetic are a series of easy-to-swallow-pills,  when she tells the cameraman not to cut the footage of her accidentally over-baking her galette, and when being a white creative and working among mostly white colleagues means that she’ll get a lot of latitude. I expect she’ll continue to sell out, which is completely fine, so long as she’ll be candid with herself and actually call it selling out. 

And I want to learn recipes from a chef who looks like me, and I want that chef to be “marketable” enough to achieve Alison’s level of fame. I want people of color to get to decide what recipes deserve their own hashtag. I want Alison Roman to be emotionally okay, because Twitter backlash can be vicious. And I kinda want to buy Marie Kondo’s drawer organizers now. 

[silverichorr]

Survey, Like it’s 2014

I haven’t done something so silly and self indulgent in a while. I have a plate of homemade pizza rolls, I just finished an audiobook, and I’m ready to go.

Last person you watched a movie with? Omg. Probably Liam, and I haven’t watched a movie with him in at least a couple of months. #LDRLife

Have you been disappointed in the past three days? Yeah. I was going to go camping with my co-worker this weekend, and the weather really pooped out on me :/.

What will you be doing in the next 2 hours? Probably sleep, maybe embroider more or watch more “Community.”

Is your birthday in February, October, or May? No.

Do you have a good relationship with your ex? I was just chatting with Veronica about this. I haven’t spoken to him in six years, and I would love to catch up with him sometime — but I know that isn’t going to happen.

What windows are open on your desktop right now? Actually, just this one.

When is the last time you yawned? When I FaceTimed a sleepy Veronica.

Are you someone who hates to read? If I am, I’d probably be terrible at my job.

Who did you last get high with? Omg. This answer is FINALLY going to change next weekend. Probably Tracy, Harrison and Veronica (Veronica is a famous lass on this survey!).

Does your mother have a sister? If so, what’s her name? They’re not worth mentioning.

When was the last time you had brownies? Oooo. I think during my work convention.

What’s something you hear right now, besides music? The hum of my fan, the sound of me chewing (I love these pizza rolls so much).

Is it warm outside? The humidity will end me.

Last time you spoke to the person you have feelings for? I was texting him all afternoon. I felt really comfortable and cute today, and I’m happy I got to tell him :).

What does your last text in your inbox say from a girl? Ma girl Emilie: “I love this,” referencing a photo with immense horse-girl energy.

At what age do you want to have your first child? LMAO.

Do you ride a bus regularly? Only when I’m traveling to home or Ith.

Does/did your school require uniforms? Nah. Damn, maybe I’m getting too old for these surveys if they’re asking about me going to school ...

Do you live alone? Until next month, yes.

What is your favorite food to eat for lunch? Lmao, whatever is going bad in my fridge. I had bean salad for about three days in a row this week, and it was actually quite good.

When was the last time you were out of your home town? I think the better question would be the last time I was IN my hometown, and that would be the weekend of my birthday when I got to see Liam and Nicole and Sam and Lucas and Shannon and Darwin and my heart was so full.

What was the last little kid show that you watched? Do you normally watch this show? Ooooo. Not sure. Maybe Spongebob? Fucking classic.

If you had to eat breakfast tomorrow morning, what would you eat? Ha, probably going to eat tofu and beans bc I have nothing else to eat. That or oatmeal.

Would you rather read the newspaper, watch the news, or read the news online to learn about current events? LMFAO. As a journo, I don’t feel comfortable answering this question. Let’s just say I have strong opinions on all mediums.

Have you ever touched a cow? I worked with one on the ranch; she was v good.

What was the last essay you wrote about? Ooof. Probably my sword-fighting one. Though I did write other long-form pieces for work last year I was quite proud of.

Do you call the ice cream topping “jimmies” or “sprinkles”? Sprinkles.

Is there a particular race that you find more attractive than another? Nah, son, bc I’m not a racist shit. But gingers will always hold a special place in my heart.

You have to come up with a new name for your fake ID, what name do you choose? Yup. Feeling old again. I’ve also never had a fake.

Have you ever had a churro? Yes? Why is that a question?

Do you like the idea of promise rings in relationships? I mean. I’m low-key poly so ... 

What’s the next movie you’ll watch in theaters? Not sure.

Other than yourself, who was the last person that took a picture of you? Probably Tina.

Who were the last people you hung out with? Taylor! Unexpected friendship.

How many people are you talking to online right now? Wow, presumptuous.

Are you part of an organization that helps out other people [in any way]? That’s what nonprofits are all about.

Where was the last place you went shopping? That really nice antique shop near me.

So what do you plan on doing this weekend? I’m probably going to clean and cook and sew tomorrow, like the domestic fuck I am. Idk when I got so into traditionally fem stuff, but I love it.

Who was the last person you gave money to? Probably Nicole, tbh.

Are you going to get your driver’s license this year? OMFG.

Do you plan on dressing up for Halloween this year? Not sure the protocol on that one.

Who was the last person of the opposite sex to hug you? My old adviser from uni.

The last person that made you angry, did you tell them? Hmmm. Maybe my parents? Maybe Liam? Regardless they know, lmao.

Do you pay with cash, credit/debit, or checks most often? Debit bc fuck cash.

Have you ever slept in the same bed with the last person you kissed? Lmfao. We have/are going to be living together. He’s such a good bed buddy.

Do you remember who you liked three months ago? Lam!

Would you ever be a stripper? I’ve thought about it. it would be good money and a workout. I’m not sure if I can deal with the men, tho.

Is there a guy that knows a lot about you? Well ....

How many guy best friends do you have? Oh, I love my dude friends. They remind me men can be p cool sometimes.

Do you know anyone with a really weird name? Yep! I don’t want to call them out here, tho.

Is there someone you just can’t imagine your life without? Nicole and Liam, 100%.

Do you still talk to the last person you kissed? Absolutely. I haven’t kissed anyone else in a little while, and I’m OK with that.

Do you think anyone has feelings for you? Ha. I hope so if he’s moving in with me again.

If you were in the hospital on life support, would the last person you kissed visit you? Why does it matter if I kiss them????? I love kissing people I’m not romantically involved with!

Your ex is walking next to you, with their new partner, what do you do? I just would like to casually catch up. I feel like Liam meeting him would satisfy some of his curiosity, too.

Are there things in your life that you’ll never be able to get over? Oooof. Don’t even.

It’s 2 in the morning and you get a text message, who is it most likely? Lmao, Nicole bc she doesn’t understand a socially acceptable sleep schedule.

Are you good at giving directions? Just give me a map.

Ever cried while you were on the phone with someone? Lmao, story of my life.

Did you cry from a text last night? Surprisingly, no.

Do you think the last person you texted cares about you? I’ve only texted friends today, so yes, all of them.

Would you kiss the last person you texted? Nicole, so ... eh, maybe.

Can you count your serious relationships on one hand? Are you supposed to be calling me out or something? Bc I only have two, but they’re both decently long.

Name something great that happened today. I woke up early and exercised with a bunch of people!

Where did you get the shirt you’re wearing right now? Cotton On; it has a “Twin Peaks” quote on it — which I didn’t know about until years after owning it — and it blows Liam’s mind, which I think is really funny. I guess I’ve had this shirt since 2012 or 2013. Damb. I love this shirt.

Do you know anyone with the same name as you? I met her for the first time last year! I was drunk af, but I immediately friended her on fb. I haven’t spoken to her since.

Do any of your friends dislike each other? No bc then they wouldn’t be friends.

What are you doing right now? This?

You can get a puppy or a new car. Which do you choose? Definitely a car bc I desperately need one. Plus a car is much more expensive, so what’s even the question here? If I really didn’t need a car, I’d take the new one, sell it, and make one pup v happy.

Do you wear a belt with every pair of jeans? Never.

Everyone has that one relationship they would do over & change something right? I mean ... do they?

What was your first thought when you woke up today? "I shouldn’t go to boot camp. Fuck it, let’s go.” No ragrets.

Did you have a good weekend? I’m having a nice weekend :).

Are you close with anyone you never expected to be close with? Yeah, actually. Nicole, for sure. But I’m so beyond happy we’re such good friends.

Do you have a hard time letting go? Literally my existence.