A Pumpkin-Spiced Problem
On that Times profile of Half-Baked Harvest, and what we expect from amateurs-turned-influencers
I spent this weekend in the company of some of my favorite food folks at the annual Smithsonian Food History weekend (more notes on that in the recs), but as expected, much of our conversation focused on present-day food issues. Over many martinis, mussels, and meandering strolls, we debated everything from the ethics of collaboration, to work at the intersection of scholarly and popular food writing, to the assumptions of free labor offered by those that enter the academic world with extensive non-ac backgrounds. We also inevitably put our heads together on this week’s food media kerfuffle, the profile by Julia Moskin of Half-Baked Harvest creator Tieghan Gerard in this week’s New York Times. To say we felt conflicted about this piece is an understatement—for while a look behind the curtain of one of the most successful food blogs is always revelatory, several points within this post made it feel particularly off—as though the story wasn’t what Moskin found in her exploration of Gerard’s work and audience, but what she hope to and expected to learn about the expertise of popular food writers.
In the profile, the reader gets repeated hints of Moskin’s negative regard for Gerard, starting from the first line of the piece when pumpkin-spice-scented candles are lit upon Moskin’s arrival at Gerard’s compound in Colorado. (For the culinary cognoscenti, pumpkin spice is more tolerated than beloved, and more associated with “basic” aesthetics than with gastronomic sophistication. From the moment the match is struck, we know we’re not in for a piece about fine dining.) We learn over and over again how difficult it was for Moskin to write this profile—the year of background research and requests to Gerard’s representatives, Gerard’s decision to deviate from her originally promised recipes to make her signature chili and a fall salad, the challenge of finding contacts in the food world willing to go on the record.
But the disdain doesn’t come solely from Gerard’s unavailability, but what Moskin details as the tight lid she puts on both her business model and her biography. Moskin seems happy to repeat whispers of criticism rooted in the perceived disconnect between the cheese-laden comfort foods and Gerard’s body—as though the work of writing a casserole recipe and eating an entire casserole were both required parts of the food writing process. We also get reminders of how un-cheffy Gerard’s reputation is as a blogger and food personality—the emphasis on recipes that live in the crispy, cheesy valley between approachability and aspiration. These celebrities amplify said recipes over Instagram, and perhaps most importantly, the desire to prepare dishes for “thousands of women living between America’s coasts,” mostly devoid of influence from cuisines outside of the Western European and American canon.
The question we might be asking at this moment is whether this is an elitist profile, or simply a frustrated one. Is Moskin’s take on Gerard predicated on the disparagement of the ordinary home cook? Or is it about our expectation that anyone who offers themselves up as a culinary expert should have greater ambition than what’s cozily and readily accessible? It’s in her pivot to Gerard’s whiteness, and the (presumed) whiteness of her readership, that Moskin highlights a few key critiques of Gerard’s sloppy and (intentionally or not) disrespectful mislabeling of dishes with ingredients from non-white cultures, but it’s not even the inaccuracy that seems to garner the piece’s greatest scorn. It’s Gerard’s response—what Moskin calls “proudly inexpert”, based entirely on research from Internet sources rather than from cookbooks or culinary training, and perhaps worst of all, promising to “do more research” without ever actually changing her ways. The greatest shame that a self-made culinary figure can have, it seems, is the inability to reveal her epistemological evolution—or not to perform her constant, insatiable curiosity about the broader food world.
Did Moskin expect Gerard to share something insightful about the state of home cooking that she just couldn’t access? One of my colleagues reminded us that Moskin may have been assigned to cover the Half-Baked Harvest beat by someone else, sent on a mission to reveal Gerard’s inherent warmth and culinary creativity, and was thwarted by the amount of online criticism and gossip she encountered instead. But Moskin (whose writing I generally adore) is a skilled writer and exceptionally good at crafting nuanced, voice- and character-driven portraits of America’s greatest culinary talent. Her profile of Ina Garten perfectly encapsulates Ina’s talent as embodying both “the enthusiasm of a student and the authority of an expert,” explaining in sleight-of-hand how a Hamptons-based chef came to feel like America’s cool aunt. Similarly, Moskin’s take on Joanna Gaines of the Magnolia Table fame emphasizes that someone with no formal culinary or design training can still become a major superstar if her style finds a place in the internet zeitgeist and as a bridge between generations of home cooks. Both Garten and Gaines have carefully constructed their personas to shape and satisfy their audiences, and it seems that Gerard is likely doing the same…but Moskin doesn’t seem to have the same enthusiasm or generosity for parsing out what makes Half-Baked Harvest such a huge phenomenon. Though she usually excels in puzzling out what makes the newest stars in the culinary firmament so successful, Moskin’s formula depends on when she can draw a clear parallel between who she perceives the cook to be and how her audience responds to her.
So is Moskin’s take on Gerard proof of the inherent snobbery of food culture, or showing us through the absence of Gerard’s persona what we’ve come to expect from culinary superstars—to make their personal lives and identities as available to us as the recipes they churn out? In another Moskin piece, a tribute to the late great Julie Powell, Moskin writes of the beginnings of the food blogging era, in which one could capitalize on the audience for digital food content without having to be a fully-fledged authority or established persona. As Moskin wrote, “What Ms. Powell did possess was an understanding that starting out as a cook is a universal experience, and a voice that made every recipe sound like an adventure.” I’ve written about Powell’s legacy before for throwing open the culinary blogosphere, but I didn’t appreciate until reading the Gerard profile how much of the model Powell established was predicated on emotional and pedagogical transparency. On her original blog, she didn’t share photos of her body or even photographs of her food, but she shared, with breathtaking sincerity and side-splitting humor, the love-hate relationship she had with the kitchen. She narrated her failures, her triumphs, and most importantly, her evolution as a home cook.
There simply isn’t space for such evolution in the constant churning of what Moskin calls the “fire-hose new content,” or in the echo chamber that is online criticism around women’s bodies, appetites, aesthetics, and professional ambitions. There also isn’t much room for the paper of record to give full credence to someone who, despite her presumed incuriosity, has retained a powerful and loyal fan base of millions of readers. But such profiles nonetheless lay bare just how loaded the expectations are for anyone who dares to put themselves out into the culinary world as a purported expert—no matter how beautiful or how delicious her offerings might be.
Recommendation: This weekend I attended the ninth annual Food History Weekend at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (where I worked from 2014 to 2017), and was thrilled to be back in the company of my former colleagues. There were many great moments throughout the weekend—the delightful cooking demonstration by Sallie Ann Robinson, a fascinating talk with Mollie Kaufmann and Laura Hayes of World Central Kitchen, and a delicious evening exploring the legacy of women in the craft brewing industry (with great sips from numerous home and independent brewers, incorporating ingredients like sorghum, baobab, sweet potato, and persimmon into their brews.) But my favorite event was a program with Mariah Gladstone from Indigikitchen, an organization that seeks to celebrate and expand awareness of pre-colonization cuisine, with an eye toward food sovereignty and the restoration of cultural autonomy. Gladstone’s masterful storytelling as she took us through the preparation of a “Three Sisters Stew” (to which she added bison while offering a compelling distillation of the decimation and gradual recovery of the bison population) was completely amazing. Get her a book deal, stat, and a much bigger platform to share this knowledge with the world.
The Perfect Bite: My bucket list of DC food destinations is pretty short—a cup of coffee at Tryst, breakfast ful from Dukem, khao piak sen from Thip Khao—but I’m always happy to fill out the list when I come to town. We got up extra early on Saturday to stand in line in Petworth for breakfast tacos at La Tejana, with a small amount of anticapointment (after all, we had two Texans among us). But luckily the tacos were delicious—delivered hot to our hands and three to an order (I tried La Choripapa, the Super Duper Migas, and La Betsy), and dipped in cups of salsa and avocado crema, they were the perfect start to our DC weekend.
Cooked & Consumed: We accidentally started a tradition on Halloween that I’m calling “soup and stoop”. Before going out for Trick or Treating, we cooked up a big batch of vegetarian chili (loosely based on this recipe, but I upped the spices and added a big spoonful of cocoa powder) and served with cornbread muffins and a bunch of toppings (greek yogurt, shredded cheddar, cilantro, and diced watermelon radish). That fast-meal was an ideal cushion for the candy that followed, and for the wine that we enjoyed while handing out candy from the front porch (the “stoop” portion of the night).