Wokeness is a dish better never served — but it’s taking over restaurant criticism world
By Steve Cuozzo
August 26, 2020
The Hollywood Oscars went woke not too long ago, and now, so have the so-called Oscars of the Food World — the James Beard Foundation’s annual restaurant and chef awards. Identity-politics lunacy now rules the venerable organization once devoted to celebrating the great American bounty.
The JBF stunned foodies last week when it announced it wouldn’t announce its award winners for 2020, supposedly due to the disruptive impact of the pandemic. But New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells this week uncovered the main reason: Although some black chefs were nominated, there was none among the 23 unidentified winners.
Never mind that Beard winners are chosen in polls conducted among thousands of food specialists all over the nation.
The JBF won’t name any winners in 2021, either, to allow the foundation to conduct “a comprehensive internal and external review to address any bias” and to “align the awards” with “equity and diversity,” according to a news release.
The joys of food and cooking no longer matter much in establishment perceptions of the culinary arts. Good luck trying to learn how to tell one tomato from another. The discourse increasingly resembles a college curriculum built on “intersectionality” and the evils of American capitalism.
It’s worse: The JBF will tap an “outside social-justice agency” to help it eliminate “systemic bias.”
The JBF went into a tailspin after it named Clare Reichenbach as its new chief executive in 2018. British-born Reichenbach admitted having no culinary background beyond her home kitchen, a curious choice to head up the distinctly American institution founded by James Beard, the original celebrant of great American cuisine.
Yet the JBF is hardly alone in embracing the woke catechism. Eater.com recently posted a “socially conscious shopper’s guide” to coffee and tea and noted, “Our daily cup owes everything to our colonial, slave-built economy.”
San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Soleil Ho banned from her vocabulary any number of innocuous words that might be taken as “microaggressions” — for example, “addictive” for anything delicious, because it might somehow offend minorities for who knows why.
The most unforgivable sin is “cultural appropriation.” If you’re a non-Guatemalan who dares to cook Guatemalan, you’re dead meat.
Last year, the well-meaning, non-Chinese owner of a small Chinese cafe downtown saw her career ruined by the woke mob. Eater.com accused her of “racist positioning” over the wording of an ad about lo mein. The Twitter mob piled on. Her apologies weren’t enough to save the restaurant.
The editor of Conde Nast title Bon Appetit was forced out this year over a 16-year-old photo that purportedly showed him wearing “brownface” at Puerto Rican-themed costume party. He denied he had altered his face color, but a staff mutiny sealed his fate.
The mob next struck the mag’s popular test-kitchen video site over a pattern of “cultural insensitivity” that allegedly included underpaying nonwhite contributors. Heads rolled. Bon Appetit’s new digital restaurant editor writes that it isn’t enough to talk about “the intersectionality of food, politics, race, class and gender” only when it’s “convenient.” Intersectionality must be made a primary theme.
The great chef Thomas Keller was excommunicated for calling it an “honor” to be named to the White House’s Economic Council for Restaurants, formed to support the coronavirus-ravaged industry. There was much chortling when the pandemic forced him to close his Hudson Yards restaurant TAK Room. While Grub Street critic Ryan Sutton was careful not to cheer its demise, which caused “scores of hardworking people .?.?. losing their livelihoods,” he wrote that it “shouldn’t have opened in the first place.”
Chefs who are in vogue tend to be political and racial provocateurs. New Orleans-based Tunde Wey, whose stunts have included charging white customers twice as much as nonwhites, recently posted an Instagram essay in which he rooted for the death of the whole restaurant industry for its “racist” practices.
GQ magazine published a flattering profile of Wey in 2019. The article won an award this year for best media profile from — guess where! — the James Beard Foundation. From now on, chefs and people who simply love great food without political axes to grind are just chopped liver.
scuozzo@nypost.com
https://nypost.com/2020/08/26/wokeness-is-taking-over-the-world-of-restaurant-criticism/
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