Why Bon Appétit’s Guide to Buying “Saffron You Can Feel Good About” Leaves Brown People Feeling Bad
When Bon Appétit apologized for discriminatory practices at the magazine back in June, it vowed that it was “committed to change” — but two months later, Bon Appétit still hasn’t challenged the racist structures that permeate its work culture. Shortly after, former editor-in-chief Adam Rapoport resigned after a photo from his past exposed him in brownface. In the last week, several journalists of color have left the magazine’s video series for the lack of equal pay in comparison to their white colleagues. It’s against this backdrop that, bafflingly, Bon Appétit decided to publish a story about buying Iranian saffron consumers can “feel good about” — a story that perpetuates the exact kind of devaluation of non-white culture and labor Bon Appétit claims it’s working to repair.
In “Where To Buy Saffron You Can Feel Good About” staffer MacKenzie Fegan advises well-intentioned foodies to avoid purchasing saffron from Iran — where the US has imposed sanctions for years. Instead, under the auspices of providing Afghan women with job opportunities, she naively guides readers to support companies founded by former US soldiers who invaded Afghanistan. On the surface, the article aims to provide millennials tips for “ethical consumption,” yet in a gaping neglect of geopolitics, the piece includes only a cursory reference to the United States sanctions on Iran, failing to grapple with the consequences of what amounts to, in effect, a decades long boycott on Iranian goods that have economically crippled the country. Indeed, the reference to sanctions only serves as a foil for Fegan’s critique of the failure to accurately label the product’s country of origin. As she notes, because of the embargo on Iranian goods, even saffron labeled as Spanish could (gasp!) be from Iran.
Any discussion of the effects of sanctions on Iranian saffron production is entirely ignored. Instead, Fegan begins from the premise that the consumption of Iranian saffron is ethically compromising. This fundamentally disregards the politics that make saffron already difficult to obtain, namely the aggressive foreign policies against Iran. For Iranians, the experience of life under sanctions makes painstakingly obvious the fact that American consumption does not exist in a vacuum and affects the lives of working people, including saffron farmers in Iran, a population the article wholly neglects. This omission is especially alarming during the global pandemic when the harm of sanctions on Iranian people is intensified, making medical resources, sanitization products, and other basic necessities even more difficult to access.
As Nasim Alikhani, chef and restaurant owner of Sofreh Brooklyn, states, “We need to hold Bon Appétit and the editors of this piece accountable for not mentioning the violence of sanctions and instead glossing over the issues of trade embargoes. While saffron is not unique to just Iran and our cuisine, it is a staple of Iranian food.”
90–94% of the world’s saffron comes from Iran, where it is grown mostly in the northeastern Khorasan region, which also includes parts of Afghanistan. A painstakingly intimate human endeavor, the harvesting of saffron requires the most delicate form of labor and attention. The spice comes from a purple flower which must be hand-picked. Aromatic and full of bright golden color, saffron is used to make dishes across Iran, with local variety too. Saffron is integral to the bright yellow color of tahchin, northern Iranian kateh, and to the jeweled zereshk-polow. Its subtle taste strikes through khoresht-e gheimeh bademjan and can be used to make a range of desserts including paloodeh Shirazi, sholeh zard, or saffron ice cream. Its use in Iran goes back to the 10th century BC, making it a part of Iran’s culinary and agricultural history, and carrying with it a sense of decadent ritual. And so, when a magazine like Bon Appétit highlights the ingredient without citing the ingredient’s historical and cultural use, it participates in an act of cultural erasure, reproducing the violence of sanctions.
Fegan’s piece wholly neglects the rich historical and cultural heritage of this ingredient. While Fegan purports that her focus on Afghan saffron production excludes Kashmiri saffron production as well, her discussion of Iranian saffron production (which she refers to as “by far the largest”) poses Iran as some kind of super-producer of saffron, duplicitously funneling it to other countries like a cartel. For Fegan, the US military policies that prohibit Iran from marketing and exporting saffron on its own terms seem to bear little importance on the actual politics of American consumption. In her framing of the problem, it is as though the political issue is that Iranian saffron doesn’t seem to abide by the ideology of the American ‘slow food’ movement; she even reassures her reader, “you can even grow your own!” There is no need to pit the production lines of Iranian, Afghan, Kashmiri, or Spanish, etc, saffron against each other, especially given Iran and Afghanistan’s shared history, one that is wholly ignored by the firm divisions imposed by the article.
In fact, Fegan’s purported intention of giving consumers “transparent” saffron options is riddled with misconceptions. The brands that she endorses have troubling blind spots in their marketing. For instance, the US-based Burlap & Barrel, describes its saffron as “muskier, and more savory depth.” Hanif Sadr, chef and founder of northern Iranian brand, Komaaj, noted in an interview that this distinction is a misleading one. “The company tries to differentiate the taste of saffron produced in Afghanistan and other countries without considering that western Herat in Afghanistan and eastern Khorasan in Iran practically share the same terroir! Technically, the saffron produced in those regions are very much the same. Unfortunately, while borders separate people, we cannot divide one specific terroir into two different geographical regions.” In reproducing false differences based more on marketing than on real differences in taste, the piece also misrepresents the agricultural conditions of the ingredient’s production and fails to situate it within the popular food cultures from which it emerges. For a magazine whose purpose is to provide both context and food cultural commentary, Bon Appétit fails at both of these tasks. And in line with Fegan’s ethical inquiry, how can we feel good about that?
A discussion on the ethical conflict of American consumption, especially one that focuses on saffron, needs to be placed in a broader conversation about American policies towards Iran: policies that have made it impossible for Iran to market and export saffron freely. Rather than interrogating the sanctions against Iranian people and the geopolitical ideology that undergirds them, Fegan’s article reproduces the logic of sanctions by accepting the violence of this militaristic policy.
She advises the American consumer side-step the lack of “transparency” created in producing saffron that could potentially be from Iran. Instead, she recommends several companies based out of the US, one of which, “Rumi Spice,” was founded by former US soldiers in Afghanistan. The company is an example of the ongoing occupation of Afghan land by American imperial forces. But this piece isn’t the only time Bon Appetit has endorsed this company whose founders have former links to the US military. In an article published in May entitled “Where You Buy Your Spices is Just As Important As How You Use Them” on the relation between spices and ethics, Fegan again promoted “Rumi Spice.”
What remains suspicious is why Bon Appétit has, on multiple occasions, advertised a product founded by US military officers who continue to occupy Afghanistan; this lack of transparency certainly casts doubt on the magazine’s ethical commitments. As renowned San Francisco-based Chef Hoss Zaré states: “This is the biggest paid advertisement for a corrupt company that disrespects both the Afghan people and the Iranian saffron industry.”
Appropriated by former US soldiers, the name “Rumi Spice” is an egregious act of co-opting both Iranian and Afghan culture. “Rumi Spice” packages Afghan resources created by Afghan women’s labor under the name of the 13th century poet Mawlana, a literary icon revered across the Persian speaking world. This distortion of culture coupled with the exploitation of resources and labor is then packaged neatly under the liberal banner of feminist saviorship, something, allegedly, Fegan and her readers “can feel good about.”
Unsurprisingly, Bon Appétit takes the bait, endorsing the product as an ethical choice that supports “women’s empowerment.” Feminist critic and literary scholar Gayatri Spivak famously coined the phrase “white men are saving brown women from brown men” with respect to the way the British justified colonizing India. This mentality continues today in the ways that it has informed US foreign policy in both post-911 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and in the way companies like the aforementioned “Rumi Spice” extends its control over Afghanistan’s resources while claiming to provide opportunities for women. Saving women has long served as a justification of imperialist politics, much of which always fails to account for the decades-on wreckage inflicted on Afghan people, land, and culture by the US military. And of course, this purported “feminism” ignores the saffron farmers in Iran, many of whom are women, who suffer at the hands of crippling sanctions.
While there have been countless declarations of solidarity for Black Lives Matter (many of which have remained in the realm of symbolism), there has been minimal if any reflection on how domestic police violence is linked to military violence abroad. Claims to racial justice and equality must be extended to all peoples, cultures, and traditions. Normalizing US military violence whether through war, sanctions, or continued occupation masqueraded as feminist empowerment will never be in the service of the people whose lives are ravaged by these conditions. In addition to the article’s total lack of engagement with the effects of sanctions on Iran, its promotion of a saffron company founded by former US soldiers who invaded Afghanistan is within the logic of neocolonial American policies that continue to extort Afghanistan’s people and resources under the guise of white feminist saviorship. Endorsing these companies both undermines the continued effects of the war in Afghanistan on Afghan people and the material violence of sanctions against Iranians. Bon Appétit’s performative politics around racial equality is haunted by the company’s repeated failure to take an ethical stand where and when it counts.
Donna Honarpisheh is a PhD candidate in the department of Comparative Literature and the Program in Critical Theory at UC-Berkeley. Her areas of research include Iranian aesthetics, postcolonial theory, and cultural studies.
