For the second week in a row, the food section of the New York Times has featured a prominently placed article about a white man devoted to extensive complaining about his supposed failings when it comes to race or gender progress.
Each article was by the same reporter, Kim Severson.
Last week the target was Thomas Keller, the chef known for his French Laundry and Per Se restaurants. Wrote the Times:
In an era when authenticity, cultural appropriation and gender and racial imbalance in the kitchen are on the minds of many cooks and diners, Mr. Keller's style of dining and the largely white, male crew of young chefs he mentors are inviting targets.
Preeti Mistry, 40, a classically trained chef with a modified Mohawk who cooks elevated Indian street food at her Juhu Beach Club in Oakland, Calif., and her new spot, Navi Kitchen in nearby Emeryville, was in culinary school when she discovered Mr. Keller's "French Laundry Cookbook." It had become an instant professional and spiritual guide for cooks of her generation.
In 2004, she visited the French Laundry. At the time, she thought it was the most amazing meal she had ever eaten. She even got to shake hands with Mr. Keller. "I left feeling like I just met Drake or something," she recalled.
But now? She views fine dining as disingenuous, built from a system steeped in oppression and hierarchy in which women, gays and other minorities — whether customers or cooks — are not treated the same.
"It's essentially haute couture, and we know haute couture appropriates from minorities and urban communities," she said. Chefs as powerful as Mr. Keller, she said, have a responsibility to address those issues. "You need to go on your woke journey."
This week the Times' chosen target is John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance. Writes the Times:
Even some fans find his take on Southern history wrapped in too much romance, his style too ego-driven or his perspective sometimes skewed by his race, gender and power.... Although his staff is mostly women, Mr. Edge has also been assailed over how he portrays the role of Southern women in the kitchen. Ms. Purvis, the editor, took the alliance to task in an article she wrote last year for the magazine Bitter Southerner. She posited that men were the new carpetbaggers of Southern food writing, calling them "a barbecue-entranced, bourbon-preoccupied and pork-belly-obsessed horde of mostly testosterone-fueled scribes from outside the region of my birth."
Nathalie Dupree, the Southern cooking doyenne and a founder of the foodways alliance, put it another way. "He has indisputably done a great deal for Southern food, but it has been primarily directed at his concept of Southern food, which is by definition male," she said. "There is little emphasis on familial food, the stuff of everyday living, what it is like to fix three meals a day for one's family as many women did, both black and white."
Mr. Edge, whose new book includes Ms. Dupree in a chapter on the cooking teachers of the New South that emerged in 1980s, tried to remedy matters with a 2013 symposium centered on women at work. (I was a paid participant, arguing in favor of cake over pie in a Lincoln-Douglas style debate against the noted pie advocate Kat Kinsman.)
Mr. Edge has also been chided for paying too little attention to the story of poor whites in the South, notably by the Appalachian food writer Ronni Lundy, another founder of the alliance.... Nicole A. Taylor, the Brooklyn author of "The Up South Cookbook," was raised in the same rural part of central Georgia as Mr. Edge and has clashed with him over issues of race and power.
I'm not saying the dining section or Times food writers should ignore genuine controversies of race or sexism, particularly if the controversies are grounded in sensible grievances rather than imagined ones. But in both of these cases, the race and gender related criticism takes up so much of the space of the profile that at least this reader came away with a sense that the newspaper had an ax to grind. Is there any white male profile subject in the Times who wouldn't get this level of negative scrutiny? It's one thing if the subject is someone who is actually an active racist or sexist. But in each of these cases, neither Mr. Edge nor Mr. Keller is accused of anything like that. Rather they are just judged by critics to be insufficiently "woke." As a result, the balance and tone in each story seemed off. Instead of balanced journalistic profiles, the articles came off like doctrinaire attempts to hold each man accountable to some unattainable Times standard of perfect contemporary consciousness on race, gender, and other "oppression and hierarchy" issues.
It's one thing to have this tendentiousness on the Times editorial page or even the front page. But when the identity politics start taking over the food pages, it's off-putting to readers who don't share the Times eagerness to subject every person and topic to this "oppression and hierarchy" lens.