Curried Carrot Coconut Soup with Cilantro Pesto

Cookbook writer and New York Times columnist Alison Roman recently became the subject of controversy after comments she made in an interview with The New Consumer, regarding food and lifestyle entrepreneurs Marie Kondo and Chrissy Teigen, went viral.

“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!””

“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.”

The interview was unnecessarily mean and casually racist, but much of it was also an exercise in boundary-making, it illustrates how we determine who should be taken seriously and who can be dismissed. But what does it mean to distinguish valid ways of selling work from selling out in a capitalist society? Capitalism forces most of us to exchange our work for money while reducing the value of that work to its profitability; but, if we want to be treated with respect, we have to simultaneously appear to be guided exclusively by values that are external to capitalism: artistry, intellectualism, integrity, meaning, authenticity. It is but one of capitalism’s countless contradictions; double binds we are all forced to navigate. It’s the career equivalent of a woman’s imperative to be effortlessly beautiful, to have just woken up like this. Sell yourself, but authentically and without obvious strategy or design.

The New Consumer interviewer suggests of Roman that “as a one-woman media brand, she has smartly attached herself, for years, to two of the leading titles in food media — the New York Times and Bon Appetit — to build audience and credibility.” Smartly? This ludicrous statement reminds me of someone I once knew who credited their study-abroad summer in Italy to their unique appreciation for travel. As if the reason the rest of us weren’t spending our summers making pasta on Mediterranean rooftops was that we hadn’t thought of it; we didn’t understand how experiencing the world could enrich our lives; we lacked their discerning standards of quality. If your career isn’t going the way you want it to, consider attaching yourself to the New York Times. Like smart people do.

Making distinctions between those who sell their work smartly and those who sell out erases the fact that we are all pigs rolling in the same capitalist shit. Even those who adopt an anti-capitalist stance; who actively fight to tear the system down, until it actually crumbles, everyone’s got to roll. Opting out of the capitalist imperative to sell one’s labour entirely is not a viable option - for anyone - when our subsistence is completely dependent upon and interconnected with the lives and labour of everyone else.

But, for people with the right amount and combination of advantages - wealth, cultural capital, connections, opportunities, white skin, good luck, family that is willing and able to help if necessary - compromising integrity for the sake of financial security or survival is unnecessary. It’s easier to strive for a career driven by integrity alone when you are at a safe distance from the harsh consequences of failing to meet capitalism’s demands: poverty, homelessness, hunger or simply facing the terrifying possibility of a future without the means to provide for yourself. When you try to distinguish yourself from those who sell out or those who don’t sell themselves smartly enough, you are mistaking the advantages you have had in life, accidents of birth, for something unique and special about you.

This is a way of looking down on others for having to labour without glamour, prestige or sophistication. That might mean producing a line of cookware for Target, but more often it means doing the necessary, but thankless, forms of drudgery that most people have to do, at least for a time, either to make their way in the world or just to survive. I’ve waited tables and poured pints and worked the cash at a convenience store; if I could have turned that work down, dismissing it as Roman does as “fine for other people, but it won’t work for me,” I would have. But that choice was not available to me. I assume people who have to stock supermarket shelves or work the line at a meat packing plant or spend all day every day picking tomatoes, bent under the hot sun, would also prefer to be doing something else. But such a choice is surely not available to them, either.

The interview reveals that Roman is working on a cookware product line, but unlike Teigen’s, mass produced and sold at Target, hers will be a limited-edition capsule collection modeled after vintage kitchen tools, produced in collaboration with a high-end cookware startup. This particular boundary drawn between selling out and selling yourself smartly is so fine it collapses in on itself. The casual racism of choosing two non-white women to use as foils in this way is hard to deny, especially when Gwyneth Paltrow was right there, mentioned but not similarly criticized in the beginning of the interview. Goop shills exorbitantly overpriced pseudo-scientific nonsense trinkets; a much more likely candidate for criticism on the grounds of unscrupulousness. But, part of the work done by boundary-making that separates those who should be taken seriously from those who can be dismissed is to police and limit the ways that non-white women can monetize themselves to help maintain the privilege white women experience, by default, when non-white women are excluded from prestigious professional spaces.  

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Roman’s cookbook Dining In has been a go-to when I want to make simple food with reliable recipes; I enjoy her work. But, I always felt her brand relied too much on cool-girl hot takes about how this-or-that innocuous thing that brings people joy, like sweet potatoes or pumpkin pie, isn’t really good after-all, and I bristled at her recent comments about there being too much recipe content on the internet - as if there was only room for hers. I brushed these reservations aside without much thought. Partly because I’m reluctant to criticize women who are brash or loud or aggressive or any other thing that takes up space in the world and makes noise. Women shouldn’t have to be likeable to be respected, though that doesn’t mean it’s cool to be a jerk.

It’s also partly because I know that when someone calls me or something I like out, it’s possible that I’m the one who is wrong and they’re the one who is right; I have no pretensions to coolness or infallibility. But I’m not above pretension. I sort of get what Roman might have been trying to say about aspiring to rise above that which you perceive to be mediocre. But maybe those feelings are best kept to yourself; especially if the only way you can think of expressing them is by specifically naming other women to tear down, publicly, especially when you are white and those other women are not, and everyone is operating in a space that centers white voices and perspectives.

And perhaps my willingness to overlook what some saw clearly as problematic is also because, like Roman, I am a white woman. I understand that it takes time and effort to educate yourself about the privilege of whiteness; listening and de-centering yourself and your feelings can be challenging when you are criticized. Going beyond an “I’m sorry if your feelings were hurt” non-apology to understand and acknowledge the harm done by your words or actions can be embarrassing and uncomfortable. Remaining ignorant and getting defensive is easier. But white women, including myself, need to do better. Feeling uncomfortable is okay and it gets easier the more you do it, it’s nothing compared to actually experiencing racism.

There are only a small number of positions of power and visibility in any field and they are not filled meritocratically. Ideally, the people who end up in these positions - say, for instance, biweekly contributors to The New York Times - would be representative of everyone, but, until they are, white women who find themselves with these positions should, at the very least, be willing to do the work required to fill them responsibly.