agentlereckoning

[agentlereckoning]

What I think about Alison Roman

Any Gen-Z’er with a Twitter account has probably seen the latest Gen-Z Icon Controversy, i.e. the one involving Alison Roman. In case you’re not caught up on its details,  the tl;dr is that The New Consumer (which appears to be a one-white-man show of an online publication steered by a former Vox and Business Insider employee named Dan Frommer) published an interview with Alison last Thursday — an interview where Alison, when asked about the difference between “consumption and pollution” (as if there even is a material difference), said:

“I think that’s why I really enjoy what I do. Because you’re making something, but it goes away.

Like the idea that when Marie Kondo decided to capitalize on her fame and make stuff that you can buy, that is completely antithetical to everything she’s ever taught you… I’m like, damn, bitch, you fucking just sold out immediately! Someone’s like ‘you should make stuff,’ and she’s like, ‘okay, slap my name on it, I don’t give a shit!’

....

Like, what Chrissy Teigen has done is so crazy to me. She had a successful cookbook. And then it was like: Boom, line at Target. Boom, now she has an Instagram page that has over a million followers where it’s just, like, people running a content farm for her. That horrifies me and it’s not something that I ever want to do. I don’t aspire to that. But like, who’s laughing now? Because she’s making a ton of fucking money.”

This is the quote that most people who’ve followed this drama have latched onto, and I’ll come back to discussing it in a moment. I’m really not sure why the interview was published at all, other than for a publicity or financial boost during these times, because I don’t think anything worth hearing was uttered by either the interviewer or interviewee. Moments in the interview seemed either tone-deaf or trivial to the point where I wondered why they were included at all. Early on, for example, Alison laments that she hasn’t been making enough money during this pandemic. (She does not live in want of money.) Later she half-jokingly complains that her public persona has been reduced to “anchovy girl”, ostensibly because she often uses them in her cooking. (She does, and often proudly owns that fact, which makes this complaint pretty uninteresting.) But the point of this interview was meant to be, I think, a rumination on how Alison would turn her belief that she “isn’t like the other girls” into practice.

It’s a common thing to desire, I think — this ingenuity balanced with relatability, and I think seeking this balance is what propels so many people my age. Few things are more embarrassing to us than unoriginality, than being a carbon copy of someone else, yet few things are scarier than social rejection. We don’t want to like the same things as everybody else, but we want at least some people to like the things that we like. I think it’s what drives certain subcultures to exist in the first place, the way that subsections of people can congregate around something or someone, reveling in each other’s presence but also in knowing that they are, in fact, just a subsection of the greater population. 

This mentality is, admittedly, sort of what drove me to like Alison Roman in the first place. For background: the first time I cooked a recipe of hers happened unwittingly; in December 2018, I saw the recipe for the salted chocolate chip shortbread cookies that became known as #TheCookies (Alison’s virality can be encapsulated by the fact that all of her most famous recipes have been hashtagged, e.g., #TheStew, #TheStew2, #ShallotPasta or #ThePasta), but I made them without knowing that Alison was the person behind the recipe. The cookies were good (though I think any recipe with over two sticks of butter and a pound of dark chocolate is bound to be good.) At some point about a year later, I watched a YouTube video published by NYT Cooking where she made her white bean-harissa-kale stew, and I thought she was funny and really pretty and, like me (I think), had a fastidious yet chaotic energy that I always thought made me awkward but made her seem endearing. Alison’s recipes taste good, they come together really easily, and you don’t need special equipment or a lot of kitchen space to execute them. It’s why I’ve committed at least three of them to memory, just by virtue of making them so often. I liked her recipes so much that, for over three months, one of my Instagram handles was inspired by one. But I also liked her, or wanted to be like her, or some combination fo both. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to be her friend, or that I didn’t aspire to her lifestyle of Rachel Comey clothes, glistening brass hoop earrings that cost 1/4 of my rent, regular trips to downtown Brooklyn or Park Slope farmers’ markets or small butcher shops where the purveyors all knew her name, an always-perfect red gel manicure, the capacity to eat and drink luxuriously and seemingly endlessly and to have the money for a yoga studio membership to help her stay slim anyways. 

Of course all of those things are signifiers of social class more than anything else. But in oligarchical, consumerist societies, what is expensive and what is good become two overlapped Venn diagram circles, and I have not yet reached a level of enlightenment to be able to fully tease the two apart. And while I would never drop $425 on a jumpsuit, no matter how pretty I think it is, I could crisp up some chickpeas, stir in vegetable stock and coconut milk, and wilt in some greens, and act like my shit was together. I liked Alison because when I first started liking her, she hadn’t yet risen to the astronomical level of digital fame that she enjoys now, and by making her recipes, some part of me believed that I would be inducted into a small group of her fans who, by serving up her dishes, telegraphed good taste.

This idea of “good taste” is a complicated and racially charged one. Alison is white; she lives in one of the whitest neighborhoods in Brooklyn (maybe even all of New York City); her recipes cater to a decidedly young, white audience. I think another reason why her dishes hold so much Gen-Z appeal, beyond their simplicity and deliciousness, is because they sit at the perfect intersection of healthy-but-not-too-healthy and international-but-not-too-international. Her chickpea stew, for example, borrows from South and Southeast Asian cooking flavors, but you wouldn’t need to step foot into an ethnic grocery store or, god forbid, leave Trader Joe’s, to get the ingredients for it. The shallot pasta recipe calls for an entire tin of anchovies, and you get to feel cool and edgy putting a somewhat polarizing food into a sauce that white people will still, ultimately, visually register as “tomato sauce and pasta” and digest easily. All of the recipes in her cookbook, Nothing Fancy (which I received as a gift!), are like this. She doesn’t push the envelope into more foreign territory, probably because she doesn’t have the culinary experience for it (which is totally fine — I never expected her to be an expert in anything except white people food), and probably also because if she did push the envelope any further, her book, with its tie-dyed pages and saturated, pop-art aerial shots, wouldn’t have been as marketable. 

That’s what’s unfortunate — that white people and white-domineered food publications have been the arbiters of culinary taste in the U.S. for centuries. I’m thinking about Julia Child, about bananas foster being flambéed tableside and served under a silver domed dish cover, about the omnipresent red-and-white-checked Better Homes & Gardens cookbook, about Guy Fieri and Eric Ripert and Ina Garten and the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen. I’m thinking about how white women have long been the societally accepted public face of domestic labor when it was often Black women who actually did that labor. It’s Mother’s Day today, and I’m thinking about how, in middle school, I’d sometimes conceal my packed lunch of my favorite dishes my mom made — glass noodles stir-fried with bok choy, cloud ear mushrooms, carrots, and thinly sliced and marinated pork; fish braised in a chili-spiced broth — so that my white friends wouldn’t be grossed out, and so that I wouldn’t have to do the labor of explaining what my food was. 

And I’m thinking of that now-notorious Alison Roman quote. To be fair, Marie Kondo and Chrissy Teigen do have large consumer and media empires, which have become profitable and which require huge teams of people to sustain. Both of them probably do have large amounts of money at their disposals. What’s weird to me is that Alison accuses both Marie and Chrissy of “selling out” because they each branded their own lines of purchasable home goods, yet Alison herself said in that very same interview that she had also done that very thing. It’s just that Chrissy’s line is sold at Target, while Alison’s, according to her, is a “capsule collection. It’s limited edition, a few tools that I designed that are based on tools that I use that aren’t in production anywhere — vintage spoons and very specific things that are one-offs that I found at antique markets that they have made for me.” I suppose it’s not “selling out” if it caters to the pétite bourgeoisie. I don’t know if Alison is explicitly racist, since I don’t know if she called out two women of color simply because they are women of color, or if she genuinely just so happened to select two of them. But that she feels like she has the license to define things as “selling out” based on who the “selling-out” behavior caters to reeks of white entitlement. 

There’s also an air of superiority with which she describes how she would market her product line:

That would have to be done in such a specific way under very intense standards. And I would not ever want to put anything out into the world that I wouldn’t be so excited to use myself.

She says this right before talking about Marie Kondo and Chrissy Teigen, accusing them of being lackadaisical and unthoughtful (”okay, slap my name on it! I don’t give a shit!”; “people running a content farm for her”) when she likely has no idea what the inner workings of either of their business models are. To be sure, it could very well be true that Marie and Chrissy have handed off these aspects of their brands to other people. But for Alison to assume that they have, and that her own business management style would, by default, be better because she would retain control, is egotistical. 

Alison ends the interview by proclaiming that her ultimate goal is to be different from her contemporaries. She says, 

To me, the only way that I can continue to differentiate myself from the pod of people that write recipes, or cookbooks or whatever, is by doing a different thing. And so I have to figure out what that is. And I think that I haven’t ultimately nailed that. And I’m in the process of figuring it out right now.

I expect that her path to “differentiation” will contain riffs on the same iterations of preserved lemons, anchovies, canned beans, and fresh herbs that she’s always relied on. I expect people will still think she’s cool, because that’s easy to achieve when her recipes and aesthetic are a series of easy-to-swallow-pills,  when she tells the cameraman not to cut the footage of her accidentally over-baking her galette, and when being a white creative and working among mostly white colleagues means that she’ll get a lot of latitude. I expect she’ll continue to sell out, which is completely fine, so long as she’ll be candid with herself and actually call it selling out. 

And I want to learn recipes from a chef who looks like me, and I want that chef to be “marketable” enough to achieve Alison’s level of fame. I want people of color to get to decide what recipes deserve their own hashtag. I want Alison Roman to be emotionally okay, because Twitter backlash can be vicious. And I kinda want to buy Marie Kondo’s drawer organizers now. 

[agentlereckoning]

On gray hair

Every time I look in the mirror I see my six or so gray hairs. The most noticeable one sprouts from the exact middle of my head, and comes in curly, strangely. When I showed my mom, her reply was, “Oh, I started going gray in my early twenties, too.”

I’m not upset about graying. I think it looks fine. Graying also doesn’t bring about any dread about my mortality; at the end of the day, I know I’m 23. What weirds me out about it is that when I think of my gray hair, I inevitably begin comparing my life’s timeline with my mom’s. She sees her first gray hair at 20; so do I. She graduates from college at 22; so do I. And that’s basically where the similarities end: at some point in college, she and my dad meet in their college library; I know I will never meet a significant other in any library. My mom married my dad when she was 27, and two years later, they moved to Gainesville, Florida. And there’s no parallel in my life for that, not just because I’m not yet 27, but because I don’t see myself marrying by 27, and will likely never know the toils of transplanting your life to a foreign and sometimes hostile country and making a life for yourself there. In my head, my parents’ marriage and immigration to the United States are two intertwined events: I think they got married before immigrating so that their lives would be less nightmarish here. Being a married couple facilitated both of their abilities to come here and get to stay here, and probably facilitated their ability to put their money in a joint bank account and sign their first American lease together and file their taxes jointly. Because of these things, their marriage seemed equally driven by both love and pure practicality. I don’t know if I could ever let pure practicality guide my marriage decisions — and I don’t have to, which makes me feel very lucky. I have the luxury of being able to marry whenever (if ever) I feel like it’s the time, and not when life’s pressures push me in that direction.

My life’s timeline also diverges with my mom’s because my mom is not queer. My queer realization story is similar to many other people’s, I think — I knew that I had experienced sexual attraction to women, and knew that I’d always felt more emotionally connected to women. (My first day of fourth grade was the scariest year of elementary school because it was my first time having a male teacher.) But I didn’t start acting on any of this until I was 21, when I broke up with my boyfriend in my fall semester senior year and started flirting with and swiping on women, which felt right and safe to me. I didn’t tell anyone, not because I was shy to, but because I didn’t feel the need for a fanfare-ish coming-out event — it was just a facet of my persona that I decided I’d treat like any other facet, and being openly queer wasn’t going to affect how my friends treated me, or how I treated myself, so it made no material difference.

Because my parents are either still trying to understand my queerness (my mom), or are unaware of it (my dad, since I think telling him would affect how he treats me), sometimes I feel like they’re, intentionally or not, imposing their lives’ timelines onto me. “When you’re in law school, you’ll meet a nice boy,” my dad has said more than once. My mom thinks dating apps are the worst way to meet people. I think they both secretly wish I would’ve met some boy at Yale and moved with him to New York in some saccharine, swaddled alternate life they’ve dreamed up for me. I think they don’t understand that the vast majority of cis-het men at Yale occupy at least one of the categories of being too self-absorbed for a relationship; being a “moderate Democrat”, which really meant “Republican but I want girls to swipe right on me”; being dependent on the non-men in their lives for every ounce of emotional support; or already being in a loving and monogamous relationship. (I’m not bitter!) I think they don’t understand that I’m still trying to figure out who I like, and that that process began less than a year and a half ago. I think they don’t understand that I’m on square one, maybe square two, of figuring out how to move about my romantic life, and getting married is at least two dozen squares away in my mind, if it’s even on the timeline at all. 

But it’s too hard to explain all of that to them. So instead, I just smile and nod when my parents talk to me about what I should do about my dating life. I’m just letting the gray hairs come in. And I’m trying to stop thinking about timelines.

[agentlereckoning]

Also — these Trader Joe’s knockoff Takis are ok but not as good as regular Takis, so ultimately a disappointment. But they’ve also become my go-to snack this past week.

[agentlereckoning]

On routines and their absence

I don’t write very much in any structured sense, which is to say: I don’t keep a journal. I started a blog and stopped adding to it within a month. I’ve never published anywhere. I’ve never even let strangers read my personal writing, save for college essays from over five years ago that I can’t bear to read now, and the one time I wrote a “spoken word poem” that some D.C. local radio station let me read into a microphone. 

I’m currently in my parents’ suburban Pittsburgh home and between jobs, which is to say: there’s barely a semblance of structure to my life right now, beyond what’s carved out by the sun rising and setting every day. What remains of a daily routine is sparse. In the morning, usually between 8:00 and 9:00, I’m woken up by our dog barking at the robins and sparrows in our backyard. If it’s not pouring rain, I go for a run around my neighborhood. I’m lucky in that I can still venture outside in this way without risking spreading or contracting the coronavirus: Pittsburgh is itself a sprawling city, the suburbs are even more so, and the one I live in borders on rural. When I’m running on the road, I see maybe five to six cars total and rarely another pedestrian. Upon coming home, I shower, put on normal clothes (staying in pajamas makes me feel sluggish), brew a pot of coffee for myself in our paper-filter Mr. Coffee drip machine, and make myself a meal. Later in the day, I’ll take myself for a walk outside, where I try to just spend time with my thoughts or music, but sometimes get distracted by Instagram or Twitter or texts. I eat a snack and another meal later in the day. Once a week I’ll go out and grocery shop for my family.

That’s the extent to which my day-to-day life runs on any sort of schedule. In the interim hours I’m scrolling through my social media feeds in some compulsive attempt to stay on top of the news and stay connected to people in my life; I’ve become so accomplished at the New York Times crossword that I can usually complete Monday through Wednesday puzzles in less than ten minutes, sometimes less than five; I’m listening to the same songs on loop. Sometimes someone on Hinge will send me a message, and if I’m feeling in the mood to commiserate or flirt with strangers, I’ll respond. 

To be sure, this unoccupied time I have in solitude, where I am fortunately cared-for and safe, is a boon. I’m lucky that my entire family and everyone I’m close to remains healthy, and that I am not spending my time paying visits or making calls to hospitals on their behalf. I’m lucky to have the peace of mind that I will be starting a new job soon (though I’m still ironing out the details of a specific start date). I’m lucky that my unemployment money from New York State is coming in a steady (though slim) stream. I’m lucky that my friends have cell phones and Internet access and are good at responding to texts and want to Facetime. 

That I feel compelled to add more structure to my life is definitely a product of having lived most of my life in a regimented way. My experience is not an uncommon one — I’m just talking about going to school for years and working a full-time, nine-to-five job. But because I’m coming off a job where I was valued (and paid) for my ability to create and knock out to-do lists every day, and because I’ve spent 23 years in a society governed by schedules and measures of productivity, I think I’m conditioned to believe that having a more rigidly-scheduled day will be more personally fulfilling. 

So I’m starting a blog, again, with some hope that by publishing weekly, I’ll have something to pass my time, and I’ll have a place to lay out my thoughts on a platform unrestricted by 280-character limits or the requirement that you upload a photo with your words.

I don’t know how I’m going to spend these next few weeks and months, but I called this blog “A Gentle Reckoning” because I know I want to move about life, these days, with a discerning eye towards issues I care about, while at the same time, treating myself and others with care and compassion. I don’t want to take the opportunistic, productivity-obsessed path and “use this time as a chance to improve myself” (as some articles have suggested). Self-improvement seems like a futile endeavor when the whole world is grieving, and when everything is so precarious that the earth can be torn away from under anyone at any moment. 

But I know that I love to write, and it’s one of the few skills I have where I feel like I can hang my hat on being at least decent at it. I’m not pressuring myself to churn out profound thinkpieces, or make incisive political statements, or even put out one entry a week if I can’t summon the energy to do it. My only hope is that this can be a therapeutic and liberating exercise for me. My grander hope, though I’m not expecting it, is that someone will read my writing and feel any emotion, however small or large or positive or negative, toward it — and maybe text me to let me know that my writing affected them. That would be super cool.

Anyways, we’ll see how this goes. So long, take care, and thanks for reading.

-Bianca