I’ve decided to send these out on Sundays instead because they’re long [insert “can’t stop won’t stop” GIF here] and I feel bad thinking I might be distracting you from real work on a weekday…
I wasn’t entirely interested in getting into the Sqirl thing (tldr: a hipster LA restaurant & jam brand (and White restaurateur) is accused of selling mouldy [1] jam and mistreating employees), but in a nerd-ily morbid way, I enjoyed analysing the way this Eater article was written. I appreciated that they made some (though not much) space for Koslow’s statement, but the article was mostly criticism regarding ownership of recipes created by staff while employed at Sqirl. As the article itself acknowledges, what people create while employed remains property of the business – this isn’t a Sqirl-only practice, it’s an industry-wide practice. As for the recipe that is described to be “straight out of the mind of Jessica Koslow”, why did Eater not question Food52’s writers and editors themselves for writing that very sentence? Or if that was the impression Koslow gave while being interviewed (if she was even interviewed), why didn’t the interviewer dig into that and ask something to the effect of, “did your team have any part in creating this dish?” I have no interest in defending Koslow – my only concern about this flurry of exposés is that it’s become a witchhunt, rather than a much wider, more important call to overturn the systems that allow behaviour like this to fester. Behaviour such as food journos assuming head chefs come up with all the ideas, employment contracts that write people out of their creations, food hygiene laws so strict and outdated that it forces people to go “underground”, wages so low – yet so essential – that employees are scared to speak up even if a reporter asks. These exposés are much needed, not for the superficial notion of “cancelling” people, but for the rethinking of ingrained systems that only benefit the people who make them.
Of course, you can’t dismiss individual action – Kostow and the likes of her can’t be absolved by simply blaming the system, and – here comes my brusque segue – let’s talk about individual action in “green” movements of the minute – zero waste and plant-based alt-meat.
A lot of environmental messaging at the moment is about your actions as an individual – use less single-use plastics, eat less meat (especially factory-farmed), reduce and reuse etc. – and while I am undoubtedly a card-carrying member of the “be the change you want to see in the world” school, plastic production continued to increase globally with no signs of abating. Indeed, most developed markets are “free” and the market forces reflect our individual choices, ie. more plastic is being made because we’re using more of it, but it’s also because governments, in general, have decided that industries are allowed to manufacture it. If individual behaviour in free markets was all that mattered, we’d still be puffing on cigarettes as if women’s suffrage depended on it. The tide was changed on tobacco because governments stepped in, began restrictions on advertising, made warning labels compulsory, prohibited smoking in certain areas, instituted taxation and limited imports. None of these could have been implemented nor enforced by individuals.
I follow more “green” influencers on Instagram than is good for my health (the irony), and for the most part, the posts I see go on and on about personal choice, encouraging a zero waste lifestyle and plant-based eating. Pretty pastel reusable coffee cups and retro, undyed cotton net bags sold by zero waste stores are so on trend, honey. This approach is complicated. One way to raise awareness and get buy-in for a cause it to make it hip. I know this first hand, from trying to make people come to an outdoor market, rain or shine, to what? Buy organic vegetables, just about the most boring way to spend a Sunday (remember this was 2012 in Hong Kong, when the only outdoor markets selling vegetables were wet markets that people sent their helpers to). I’m not ashamed to say that I had the express goal of making it “hipster”, so that younger people with disposable income would hopefully come to view shopping for responsible food as a matter of course. But the flip side of this is that this kind of messaging is still reliant on the individual’s desire to consume – to keep depleting the world’s limited resources, to keep throwing things in landfill. At the end of the day, it’s still working within a flawed system. If the powers that be want waste reduction and responsible farming to remain a niche, and industrial, short-sighted policy to be the norm, that’s what we’ll get – including unmanaged waste streams and nutrient-poor industrial food that’s responsible for up to 61% of all deaths globally and almost half of all healthcare costs related to chronic disease.
The lowered GHGs of alt-meat made from plants might seem virtuous, but alt-meat is still firmly part of the industrial food system. Industrial food takes cheaply grown [4], mostly monocrop inputs with little care for the long-term destruction of soil, air and water (be they plant, meat or fungi [2]) – and heavily processes them, stripping them of whatever nutrients are left, and most of the time, incorporates additives that make them taste better, and ensures they can be shipped stably throughout the world and stay on shelves without spoiling [3]. In the shadow of the “save the world” halo is the same system as meat-based industrial food – reliance on VC money printed and distributed by the 0.1%, lack of transparent manufacturing processes, perpetuation of industrial farming, questionable health effects (eg. badly processed vegetable oils), and their business models include the active courtship of fast food chains, a key piece in the industrial food landscape known for making the poorest people sick. Yes, the GHGs per meal are lower, but it continues to perpetuate a system that is at the root of environmental destruction in the first place. Individual action is great, and we need to keep pushing for it, but we are, and can still only, be operating within the boundaries that were set for us.
One of the arguments for alt-meat is that it’s a step in the right direction, and by rejecting it, you’re “making the perfect the enemy of the good”. I don’t buy it – alt-meat can’t be called good because it’s 100% complicit in the old rules of industrial production and debt-based funding that is causing so much suffering. We need to be aware that voting with your dollar is still consumerism (with all the problems of the current economic system attached – eg. infinite debt, central bank bail-outs for everyone except for regular people), and will only go so far – alone, it will not save us. We need an institutional shake-up for there to be any real change, so if you fancy yourself a greenfluencer or are on a moral high horse about eating only plants and generating less rubbish, but you aren’t questioning institutions, you should check that you aren't just living that ~lifestyle~ because it's trending.
What I’m reading
The Third Plate – chef Dan Barber’s 2014 book. There’s little that us food and sustainability nerds don’t already know and believe, but one key takeaway for every chef and restaurateur is Barber’s realisation that farmers shouldn’t be growing what chefs (and the industry) demand; chefs should be cooking what the land demands in order to keep soil healthy and continue growing.
How Food Media Created Monsters In The Kitchen – a valid critique about the restaurant-media ecosystem, with a few things missing, such as the lack of understanding about how “media” works (people not in the industry often think of “the media” as this monolithic illuminati-esque thing, but an individual writer’s power is limited, especially a freelancer). Firstly, it takes just one short email from an editor to kill your pitch or even your already-filed story, secondly, most freelancers don’t have legal protection against libel suits, thirdly, non-head-chef sources can be hard to access, especially as journalism requires on-record reporting (which exists for a reason, sure, but is also a challenge), fourth (fourthly???), journos in general, but freelancers especially, are paid peanuts (SCMP has paid HK$2.50 per published word for as long as I have freelanced for them, which is about 10 years). That’s why so many “exposés” that do make it through are stories that are already open secrets in the industry. This isn’t an excuse of course, but also why independently published blogs, newsletters and even Twitter feeds that are relatively free of these restrictions and have the potential to benefit writers directly have value, despite their shortcomings.
Not food-related, but an Instagram account I’m grateful for right now is @thefakepan, which illustrates incidents of police brutality and flaws in the justice system in relation to (mostly) Black lives in comic format. I’m learning a lot. My heart aches for every story (and there are plenty more out there), but it also keeps my belief in the need for systemic change alive.
News-ish/Gossip
A third wave of Covid-19 has hit Hong Kong, prompting another series of inexplicable restrictions by the government, most relevant to the F&B industry being that restaurants have to be closed at dinner (but can do takeaways). I guess the idea is to cut down on social interaction overall by reducing the hours we’re mingling, but with everyone still having to go to work, have lunch, dinner pick-ups and deliveries, social gatherings pushed to daylight hours, and getting takeaway to eat outside restaurants, how much it will help remains to be seen, but how much it hurts is immediately visible. I don’t envy restaurateurs right now.
There’s a social media spat regarding a newly opened restaurant in Hong Kong, and I’ve been debating whether to add it in. I’ve decided not to, because there’s honestly nothing new to say. For every opinion on the Internet, there are fifty other people ready to comment. All that amounts to is a whole lot of typing. (Oh don’t you worry, I often wonder if I should be polluting the Internet with my opinions too…)
“The only thing more frustrating than slanderers is those foolish enough to listen to them.” - Criss Jami
Things I ate
I’m in quarantine, but #mamaleungkitchen at The Grand Hotel Leung is keeping me well fed! Yesterday, I learned how to smoke chicken in a wok (some cooked rice, tea leaves and rock sugar on a bit of foil at the bottom of the wok, with a trivet on top for your meat or whatever you’re smoking – we had soy sauce spring chickens).
I’ve also started cracking open some bottles I’ve brought back to NZ, including Pong Dang, a Sauvignon Blanc pet-nat by Kindeli, a natural wine (in this case: organic/organic conversion, sulphur-free, unfined and unfiltered) from Nelson, the top of the South Island. It was juice-like and incredibly clean; simple, but good for a summer’s day.
These newsletters are loooooong reads, so thank you for taking the time. If you found it interesting, share it with someone:
[1] After about a week of reading “mold”, because America, it feels almost cathartic to add that totally unnecessary “u” back in. Thank you, English, you non-sensical global language.
[2] Fun fact: fungi are not plants!
[3] Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against technology that prevents people from dying from eating spoiled food, but like, if we focused on building local food resilience and food security, and stopped relying on shipping 90% of our food from all around the world (90% of Hong Kong’s food is imported. NINETY PERCENT), we wouldn’t have to worry so much about having to keep nutritionally-poor, food-like substances in a non-poisonous state on a shelf for 18 months. Thomas Friedman and his “World is Flat” mentality needed to be canned before he even wrote the darned book (see what I did there?).
[4] If your argument is “we need cheap food for people who can’t afford it”, I want you to think about: a) the fact that the world produces enough food to feed everyone already, but it isn’t distributed properly, b) we throw out around 30-40% of our perfectly good food, again, evidence that we have enough food, we just choose to waste it; c) smallholder farms that feed smaller, local communities have been pushed out – people who could once feed themselves and make a bit of money on the side with the excess harvest now work in jobs that pay them minimum wage (or worse) with neither time or land to grow food, and are hence forced to eat the cheapest, fastest food. They can’t afford it because they were pushed into not being able to afford it. The powers that be took away people’s land, knowledge and ability to grow food. That’s f*cked up, and you should ask yourself why you feel saintly saying you want cheap food for them but not yourself.
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