Photo by Martin Schoeller/AUGUST.
Earlier this week, my new friend Ben and I were on the topic of our favorite meals. I was telling him about how I was still thinking of a meal we’d eaten days ago, of fresh bread and olive oil paired with edam cheese and red wine. Such a spread is already satisfying in its simple, unfussy nature, we agreed, but becomes something altogether more nourishing when shared with good company.
This Tuesday marked the second anniversary of Anthony Bourdain’s death, the great chef and greater thinker whose contributions are too innumerable to list, and whose suicide two summers ago still feels like yesterday. Coincidentally, the same day, Bon Appetit editor-in-chief Adam Rapoport resigned after an offensive photo of him resurfaced online. “Our mastheads have been far too white for far too long,” reads the apology letter published by the Bon Appetit and Epicurious staffs on their joint site’s homepage. “As a result, the recipes, stories, and people we’ve highlighted have too often come from a white-centric viewpoint.”
In a 2016 interview, Bourdain said that racism is the most important issue within the food industry, and that no one is talking about. He questioned why there aren’t more African-American chefs and cooks in mid- to high- range restaurants in an industry that’s “always been open to everybody, notoriously so.”
Some culinary endeavors, such as baking bread when a pandemic arises, or preparing a ratatouille upon re-watching Pixar’s 2007 cinematic masterpiece of the same name, are as much a means of escapism—to prepare the thing for the sake of it—as they are about arriving at an end result. “Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay,” Bourdain wrote in the indelible opener to his 1999 New Yorker essay, “Don’t Eat Before Reading This.” The line strikes a different chord over twenty years later as we’re only beginning to collectively reckon with how deeply systemic racism is entrenched within our society, how it subtly pervades even that which sustains us. As we at Country Roads put together our July issue on cuisine, we’re paying attention to all the ways we do (or don’t) think about food and looking deeper, as we like to say, at who is allowed in the kitchen and why, and asking you, dear reader, to do the same.
