We can’t just cancel Alison Roman.
Not if we’re white women claiming to be “Team Chrissy” feminists.
Naysayers is a collection of stories about when and how we say NO. In this case, I’m saying no to cancel culture — at least when white women use it as a cop-out instead of calling one another in.
For those who aren’t familiar, quick context: NYT food writer and cookbook author Alison Roman recently criticized both Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo in an interview for The New Consumer. The quotes were then amplified on Page Six; they made great gossip fodder because they were oddly mean-spirited and, it turns out, hypocritical. Teigen responded with a few tweets. Roman tweeted an alarmingly bad first apology, then issued another one tonight; Teigen has since written an incredibly gracious response.
Hey Alison,
This afternoon you issued a second apology to Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo after being dragged online for your comments about them and your first attempt at an apology.
(Sidenote: Want to get better at apologies? Some places to start: Read these thoughts from McKensie Mack, exhibits A and B; maybe listen to this podcast with Brene Brown and Harriet Lerner, too.)
I almost decided not to publicly post the note below, because I read Chrissy Teigen’s tweet that she “doesn’t agree with the pile-on” and “just wants this to be over.” But you promised to read every piece of feedback that anyone sends you. So I will send you this.
Alison, here is a timeline of how you came to occupy space on my phone and in my brain.
- Last year I gamely cooked #TheStew after it became impossible to ignore the viral hype. We liked it fine, as we like most recipes that begin with sauteeing vegetables in garlic and ginger with spices, then adding coconut milk. I remember thinking “I’m pretty sure many South Asian women have been following this formula forever,” and raising my eyebrows a little at the fawning accolades you’d received. But I moved on. I entirely missed the hullabaloo when Brown folks called you and the Times out, and then you doubled down, insisting it was not a “curry,” and the NYT adjusted their intro. (If you haven’t read the Pajiba.com piece linked here, please do.)
- In the fall, I listened to your conversation with Julia Turshen on her Keep Calm and Cook On podcast. Some of what you said rubbed me the wrong way, but I chalked those feelings up to internalized misogyny. Here you were, a successful and hardworking woman, being amplified by Turshen, who uses her time and platform with care. (Most of her podcast guests have been writers and chefs of color, people working in food justice and community gardens, and so on. In hindsight, I think I lazily granted you “aspiring intersectional feminist” status by association. Quite a leap.) If others called you “brassy” or “mean” or “unapologetic,” and you embraced that brand, maybe I — a notoriously conflict-avoidant person who aspires to a life of Shine Theory — should follow you more closely. If Julia Turshen thought you were worth following, I could follow you on Instagram. So I did.
- Before Christmas, swept along the social media currents, I thought a lot about gifting your newest cookbook to my sister. I talked myself out of it. It was too trendy, I thought. Surely someone else was getting it for her. Then…she gifted it to me! I found myself energized as I paged through the book, drawn in by the photos and the flavor/texture combinations. My husband and I made one of your menus for New Year’s Eve at home and felt festive. Then my daughter and I added it to the stack of cookbooks we sometimes page through together, in between “Anupy Aunty’s” Vegan Indian Cooking and “the bread book.” I want you to really hear this: you, with your blonde hair, bold red lip, and fair white skin, became part of my impressionable two-year-old’s idea of who gets to be an authority on food and cooking. That toddler is, depending on whom you ask, second or third generation Indian American.
- Then my sister visited for Valentine’s Day weekend. During the kid’s naps, we cooked three of your recipes. We inhaled them while devouring the entire season of CHEER. Those sensory memories are burned in me. That comforting, buttery cocoon we created, with your salmon and sweet potatoes and chocolate cookies, was the very last visit we had with any long-distance family before COVID-19 swept the States. My sister has since made those dishes for her Los Angeles roommates; when she sent me a pic, I felt flooded with sadness— and with gratitude for those nourishing February memories.
But over the course of that year or so, Alison, I didn’t realize I was giving you any more thought than any other food and media personality. Yes, your photos and captions were fueling my Instagram feed and sometimes my grocery lists, but so were Samin’s and Molly’s and Deb’s. I didn’t know I had any emotional investment in you until I sketched out that timeline today.
Then came this weekend.
On Saturday, in a big Facebook group where we swap recipes and cooking advice, I saw that someone had posted “Anyone following this Alison Roman drama?” with a screenshot of this Chrissy Teigen tweet:
Hundreds of comments followed and the post was only a couple of hours old, so I read on. Members of the group were breathlessly declaring themselves “Team Chrissy,” many proudly coming out of the woodwork to say that they’d never really liked your recipes to begin with. (Related: these tweets from Roxane Gay.)
After a quick skim of all this, my first response was irritation — but not at you exactly. It was “Great. Ugh. How nice for the media to have a story that isn’t about Coronavirus. Now we get to waste unnecessary energy that we can’t afford right now watching two women with huge followings pitted against each other. And the dudes who own things like Page Six will be the only winners.”
My daughter woke up. I made her a snack.
I briefly forgot about all of this.
And then my friend P. texted me. She’s the only other IRL friend I know who’s in this Facebook group. She cares deeply about justice and food and helping others to learn.
She told me this was all bumming her out, and educated me on some nuances I’d missed, and shared these threads which I hope by now you’ve read:
- A bunch of tweets from Claire Willett, like the ones here and here.
- And then these, from Osayi Endolyn.
I really hope you will read and sit with both of those links, and then act accordingly. You’re a creative person.
I’m not going to lie. I stewed. (Groan, I know.) Another “problematic fave” to add to the mental pile. I had to take a little time to formulate my thoughts. I almost did the thing well-meaning white women do too often, which is “spend some time thinking about this” and then let their perfectionism get the best of them. (For more on perfectionism and white supremacy, see the first two pages of this Tema Okun article.)
And then my sister-in-law, another P., sent me these two pieces, also essential:
- Alison Roman, the Colonization of Spices, and the Exhausting Prevalence of Ethnic Erasure in Popular Food Culture (the one I linked above, from Pajiba.com)
- What Happens When a Brown Chef Cooks White Food? (a throwback from GQ)
Alison, it’s not lost on me that it took the work of women of color to light a fire under my ass to put aside other things and really engage with all this today.
At the end of the day, I think I do have some responsibility to engage with you, white woman reader to white woman writer (who says she’s inviting this feedback).
I don’t think Chrissy Teigen does. I think it would be 100% understandable if she just cut all ties and “cancelled” you, if that’s the boundary that felt best for her. But you and I both know that she would be punished if she did.
Last three things:
First, you don’t get to cop out of conversations about race and cultural appropriation by saying you don’t have a culture. White people do have a culture. As a starting point, please spend some time with Ijeoma Oluo and Robin DiAngelo, as others have suggested.
Second, in addition to inviting people to email you feedback, I hope you’re proactively seeking out new food writers and media-makers of color whose accounts you could follow, learn from, and perhaps sometimes share with full credit. On your favorite platform: the aforementioned Anupy Singla and the aforementioned Osayi Endolyn | GBBO stars Nadiya Hussain and Chetna Makan | writers Charlene Carruthers and Eve Ewing | food and nutrition journalist Toni Tipton-Martin | baker, cookbook author, photographer Jerrelle Guy. (Thank you for helping me realize that I was missing out on the joy of following Chrissy Teigen on Instagram, btw!)
Last thing: you know Shine Theory, that concept I mentioned earlier? As Aminatou Sow (whom you name-drop as your friend in the original piece) and Ann Friedman have taught us over and over, Shine Theory isn’t just about cheerleading other women, all other women, at the surface level. It’s about calling each other in when we need one another to do better.
Thanks for reading,
Julia
—
Julia Smith writes for Dandelions and very occasionally for her own newsletter, Here for You. Have feedback? Want to submit a story to Naysayers? Email julia@juliaconsults.com.
