Where do we go from here? With Rax King
Welcome to #EmerilHive, a weeklyish newsletter by Becca Thimmesch. This week, I’m introducing a new series I’m calling Where Do We Go From Here? where I talk with people I admire in the food industry about what’s wrong with it and how we can be better.
Rax King isn’t the type of food writer with a set of pre-designed Instagram story templates or nine pairs of Rachel Comey clogs (Rachel: call me). She’s never been one to shy away from the personal, or the political, or the un-aesthetic, instead striking the improbable but perfect balance of “wrenching essay on Guy Fieri” and “frequent mirror pics in Old Bay bikini top.”
(is the bikini top currently in my cart? mind your business)
This interview was part of my final assignment for Ashlie Stevens’ food writing course, which I highly recommend. She helped build back up my confidence in returning to the Hive, so you owe her for my continued haunting of your inbox. I spoke to Rax during an extremely frazzled lunch hour last week, her voice sweet and reassuring as I fumbled with multiple elements of interviewing basics. I wanted to present our entire conversation below, edited for clarity.
In Storebought is Fine, you mix a healthy reverence of food celebrities with sharp doses of criticism and reality. What’s your ethos when it comes to covering celebrity chefs?
I think that’s something I haven’t always been the most responsible about--I’m as prone to celebrity worship as anyone else. The essay I’m probably best known for, about Guy Fieri and my ex husband, that’s an example of reverence towards a celebrity chef and what that chef can mean to me personally, without mistaking it with who they are as a person, an employer, and a public figure. That’s probably the only healthy way to have a relationship with a public figure--recognizing that they are just that, a figure, not someone you know. They’re wearing makeup and reading a script, not talking to you directly. They’re celebrities, they have more money and influence than we have. You have to remember that. If you’re going to admire a celebrity, which is unavoidable, you have to do so with a degree of remove.
The last few months have kind of shown that a lot of food people have this really delicately curated online persona and they’re making room for social justice in it but like, it’s still very curated--whereas you give at least the appearance that you’re very unfiltered. Do you do any level of curating? How do you feel about the others in the industry that do?
I will say, I probably have one of the least curated social media presences of anyone I know because I continue to insist on thinking that no one is paying attention to me or what I say. It is curated in that I don’t say anything that would really embarrass me or my loved ones, but it’s all pretty natural to me.
I do think that it’s pretty obvious when someone’s social media presence is unnatural and when they’re performing for an audience. And I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing to go on a food writer’s twitter and be able to tell that they’re acting somewhat unnaturally, that’s part of being famous. But there’s definitely this icky feeling of seeing people that have only started caring about social justice issues in the last few months. It doesn’t feel good to see that someone you admire has only started talking about these issues now that they’re having a moment and they fit with their posts. These are issues that have been really important to me my whole life, so while I don’t think we can hold it against people who just started getting involved, it feels a little gross the way some people have folded social justice issues into their personal branding because it’s marketable or because they don’t think they can get away with not posting about it anymore.
There’s obviously a real reckoning going on right now about how food media has propped up celebrity to a detriment--how can the industry move forward? What do you see as a better future for food media?
So, I think there are some food writers who have been doing good work on this for a long time and are rightly getting more attention for it now. Tejal Rao is doing good work covering restaurants without lionizing those at the helms, and really centering a worker’s perspective. Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter is a good example of food writing that isn’t explicitly social justice writing but is because that’s the way they’ve chosen to write. I hope we’re able to refocus the spotlight on people who are doing that work and less the work of worshiping at the altar of another hot young chef.
But I also think that, even though people are already doing this valuable work, and they do have platforms and readers, at the end of the day it’s a band-aid solution to just talk about what the problems are in the industry. It’s what Alex Green would call the “Having Conversations Industrial-Complex”--it’s easy to say you’re having a conversation and think the job is done. But the pandemic has thrown into relief how fucked up and inequitable the food industry is, and even though so many writers are doing a good job spotlighting that, the spotlight isn’t enough. People need to be paid, we need to rethink how kitchens operate. If the food industry never changes, food media never changes. Having tough conversations is a tenth of what needs to be done.
Speaking of how kitchens operate, how do you feel about the slate of restaurant reopenings?
Oh, I think it’s fucked! I don’t think anything should be reopening on the scale that it is--anywhere--right now. We’ve dropped the ball on pandemic response at every level, but it’s particularly fucked the way restaurants are responding. Being a restaurant worker doesn’t lend itself to social distancing. There are just certain things that, whether the diner knows or would like it, need to be touched in a kitchen. You have to touch meat to tell if it’s done. Restaurant work is full of stuff like that, which cannot be scaled to meet pandemic obligations. People simply need to handle stuff that you’ll then put your mouth on. For customers, it’s less safe. For workers, it’s flagrantly unsafe. Most kitchens are tiny, poorly ventilated areas. There’s no part of cooking or eating in a restaurant that can be safe under pandemic procedures, but everyone’s just acting like it’s fine.
Even if COVID doesn’t kill you, it can wreck you for a completely unknown amount of time. But we’re willing to risk workers’ lives for the experience of being served. People are looking to feel normal, and they’re used to being waited on and having the dance of dining in going a certain way, but it doesn’t feel fun to be anywhere anymore, and we’re just gonna have to face that at some point: you should be having a bad time if you’re going to go out.
Shifting gears a bit, I’d like to talk a bit about disability and illness in the food world. You and I both struggle with GI illness issues--how do you balance loving food with being sick?
It definitely sucks, especially now that very few public restrooms are open. But I’ve been fortunate in the sense that my trigger foods are mostly not foods I like so much. My major problem, though, is that I’ve wanted to go vegan for a long time because it seems like the most ethical choice for me personally, but I can’t do it because a lot of vegan protein fucks up my system and so it’s fairly impossible for me to have a nutritious diet while vegan, which tears my shit up. There’s this major food lifestyle change that I would love to be able to make that I just can’t fucking make because I have this illness that I’m gonna have for the rest of my life, and that sucks, you know?
(I, Rebecca, do know)
Speaking more broadly, what would a disability justice lens look like in the food industry for you?
I worked in restaurants for ten years. There’s a culture in restaurant kitchens where you never call out, you never sit down, maybe you get a two minute bathroom break once a shift. And you’re expected to live your whole life that way. I was living with undiagnosed Crohn’s Disease while I worked in restaurants and it was a nightmare. I was always sneaking to the bathroom and worried I was going to get caught or be fired. It sucks shit. Restaurants need to get their labor practices under control if they’re going to survive.
There’s this attitude in food media, that’s sort of being phased out, that chefs never take a sick day and we admire them for it. We think of it as a positive trait that only true chefs have that they’re so obsessed with work that they never take a break. We never acknowledge that they don’t take breaks because the culture doesn’t allow it, but it’s not admirable that a person can’t admit to being too sick to work.
So many people in the service industry get into it because it’s relatively easy to get hired, you don’t need a degree, you just need to be able to do the work. And once you’re hired they just wear your body down until you can’t work anymore, without remorse. And you have to keep going and smile and act like you’re not tired so you can make tips. That’s why substance abuse is so bad in the industry--at a certain point you can’t do your job if you’re not a little drunk or a little high.
Restaurants employ people, they need to start by recognizing that people need to go to the bathroom and sit down occasionally and take sick days.
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Emeril Update
none! Enjoy your week everyone!