The everyday foods demonized by Britain’s class wars
The Guardian
“It is perhaps in the domain of food that Britain’s sentinels of class stand guard the most sternly, dobbing people in for perceived culinary transgressions and demarcating what might, in a nod to Nancy Mitford, be called W (working-class) and non-W foods,” writes Jonathan Nunn. “It’s a bizarrely infantilising view, one that assumes that an interest in better or different foodstuffs is class treason and that puts people in clearly defined boxes, just as much as the identity politics that these commentators supposedly rail against.”
Do a restaurant’s good deeds absolve so-so food?
Gravy
“In recent years, a new kind of restaurant has emerged—one that attempts to combine destination-worthy cooking with a philanthropic calling,” writes John Kessler. “Jon Bon Jovi’s JBJ Soul Kitchen restaurants in New Jersey serve simple meals to paying customers and those in need. If someone can’t pay, they can trade their family’s meal for a work shift. Staplehouse in Atlanta … has been labeled the best new restaurant in America by Bon Appétit. All of its profits go to … a nonprofit foundation to help hospitality workers in need. No critic would subject JBJ Soul Kitchen to a review, while every ambitious critic in America jockeys for a table at Staplehouse. But … [a]t what point do you applaud the mission rather than critique the food?”
The food media’s culturally loaded ‘archive repair’ efforts
Columbia Journalism Review
“Last summer, as the country reeled from the murder of George Floyd and the police killing of Breonna Taylor, American food media went through its own race-related upheaval,” writes Navneet Alang. “For some media outlets, accountability meant a confrontation with their own archives … Critics … seized on the idea of archival repair, suggesting that it threatened the sanctity of the historical record … But if permanence is the defining characteristic of an archive, then the very nature of the Web—expansive but also impermanent, subject to content drift and link rot and the sudden, widespread deletion of whole online communities—undercuts it.”