Introducing the Brenner Report

A newsletter about food and the food world

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Making it up as we go along

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Brenner Report #1

Our restaurant culture imperiled, we must learn to cook. But who will guide us?

The beginning of spring 2020 marked a pivotal and momentous change in Americans' relationship with food.

In the preceding quarter-century, as a culture we had become increasingly obsessed with eating out. In the last ten of those years, restaurants — in all their forms — took up an outsized space in our collective imagination. In fact, it was almost as though literally we couldn’t think about or talk about anything else.

Though it was part of an evolution that had been in the works since, well, really forever, an important chunk of it traces back to the last third of the last century. The Immigration Act of 1965 opened America to cultures that brought their exciting foodways to our shores. At the same time, Julia Child captivated us, farmers markets sprouted from Seattle to Los Angeles to Santa Fe and New York and international air travel (and culinary travel) became accessible to the masses. California Cuisine was born, Southwestern Cuisine became a thing and regional foodways around the country began to regenerate. In 1993, TV Food Network premiered.

The Age of the Foodie had dawned.

A whole generation grew up watching Emeril and Bobby Flay. Chef culture exploded, and everyone wanted to dine (or become a Famous Chef). International cuisines proliferated and thrilled, food trucks happened, Jonathan Gold won the Pulitzer Prize, and then eating joined dining as a cultural imperative. Chefs and bloggers (and eaters!) took to Instagram; everyone wanted to look at — and create — food porn. Chicago turned into a food city. Washington, D.C. turned into a food city. Portland, Oregon turned into a food city. Houston turned into a food city.

Where was cooking in all that? For the most part, it was left to the pros. Sure, many of us bought our vegetables and fruits at farmers markets, picked up chiles and masa harina at Mexican markets, shopped for rice noodles and fish sauce at Asian groceries. We owned paella pans and molcajetes, ice cream makers and immersion blenders. We bought cookbooks and actually cooked from them; some of us started food blogs. 

But compared to those who preferred to let others do the cooking (and clean up the mess), we were few. A look around at Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s told you everything. What were people buying most? Prepared foods. 

And when they weren’t, they were packing restaurants. 

By 2019, every self-respecting city had to be a food city. Restaurants everywhere were booming, including in the heartland: Dallas, Tulsa, Denver, Minneapolis. 

But the boom came with a difficulty: Restaurants had proliferated to the degree that few could keep staffed. All across the country, the skilled labor pool for both back of the house (chefs, cooks, dishwashers) and front of the house (servers, managers, bartenders) was stretched to the crisis point. We had too many restaurants — and in my city, Dallas, at least, not enough good ones. We were over-saturated, and it felt unsustainable. A restaurant bubble.

Kaboom!

Covid-19 blew up the whole thing, from Seattle to Miami, from Boston to Austin.

In mid-March in many parts of the country, restaurants closed. No more eating out. 

America put on an apron and started learning to cook. “Interest in online cooking tutorials, recipe websites and food blogs has surged,” wrote an NYU Stern School of Business professor in aNew York Times op-ed in April. Traffic to New York Times Cooking, Serious Eats, Washington Post Voraciously and Los Angeles Times Food, to YouTube channels like Food Wishes and chef-produced IGTV channels like Marcus Samuelson’s or Massimo Bottura’s — have no doubt exploded as well.

Oh, sure, people are ordering take-out and having food delivered, but restaurants pay a high price for services like GrubHub and DoorDash. With the razor-thin margins that are an existential threat to them in the best of times, how this will play out remains to be seen. Restaurants are struggling; a great many have had to close. Anyone who tells us what percentage of them will still be open a year from now is only guessing. The future of restaurants is a giant question mark. 

So cook we must, and if we fail to emerge soon from recession, or dive deeper into it, thrift will dictate that we continue to do so. 

If the images of sourdough loaves and summer sautés filling our Instagram feeds are any indication, we seem to be enjoying it (or at least we’re proud of our efforts).  

But there’s a lot to learn — especially for those of us who are learning from scratch. And so it seems exquisitely ill-timed that mainstream food media, where we’d want to look for guidance in a let’s-learn-to-cook moment, now has its own crisis to contend with. 

A seismic cultural shift

Concurrent with the Black Lives Matter movement, another cultural shift — related to righting racism and addressing cultural appropriation — has toppled the status quo. In May, the New York Times put its wildly popular cooking columnist on temporary leave following an interview in which she rebuked two women of color. In June Bon Appétit editor-in-chief Adam Rapoport resigned following discovery of photos showing him made up in brownface; the Rapoport revelation led to multiple accusations of widespread discrimination and racial inequities that reverberated through parent company Condé Nast, which also has Epicurious (Rapoport was editorial director) and an array of powerful YouTube cooking channels. A few days after Rapoport’s resignation, Condé Nast V.P Matt Duckor., who was in charge of video, was out (on top of complaints of racial discrimination in the videos, there were homophobic and racist tweets).

With the food media world still reeling from the Condé Nast revelations, just last week, Los Angeles Times Food editor Peter Meehan resigned from his post following accusations of verbal abuse and workplace harassment. That comes just a year after the Times put formidable new resources behind its food coverage, reviving its free-standing Food section that it had eliminated in 2012 (and which I led as L.A. Times Food editor from 2004 through 2007). 

Who will fill those positions of tremendous influence at Condé Nast and the L.A. Times? What will coverage look like? Will re-staffing happen as well? Who will show us where and what to eat, and help us learn to cook? All this comes as media companies are under extraordinary financial stress due to greater-than-usual advertising losses resulting from the pandemic.

Sure, there is a wonderful world of cookbooks out there, along with a whole internetful of useful cooking websites, inspiring cooking stories, excellent recipes, instructive videos. But there’s also a whole lot of junk — including recipes that don’t work (even from famous chefs), or that work but fall flat. (Cookbooks are full of those, too.) 

But that’s just the problem. There’s way too much of it, and we need reliable and trusted gatekeepers to create or curate great content. 

While it is unfortunate that the media implosion comes at such an inopportune moment, clearly disruption needed to happen; sooner would have been better, but much better now than later. 

So yes, this is a good thing.

Cooking is more than sustenance; it is also culture, and just as we Americans have drawn our cultural identity — and our sense of fun — from our relationship to restaurants, we have the opportunity to gain those things in our own kitchens, as we cook for our families, ourselves, and eventually (hopefully before too long) our friends. 

Just as travel, as well as exploring our own communities, can broaden our cultural horizons, so can cooking, which can (and should) be thrilling source of discovery. At a time when we feel the walls closing in on us, it can be the kind of delicious escape we desperately need. 

As the matter of who will be the gatekeepers of food media sorts itself out (or doesn’t), perhaps we’ll have to crowdsource curation. That means those of us who know something about cooking, or about food history, or about food culture will need to share resources with those who want to learn. Maybe we’ll want to create virtual cooking communities.

If you’re a cook, here’s a place to start: Choose one of your favorite cookbooks, mark a few of your favorite recipes and loan it to a neophyte friend. Or send them a few recipes (ones that you know work!) from your favorite cooking site. Or an IGTV cooking channel that does a great job.  Or offer to cook something together via video chat. If you’re not a cook and want to learn, ask a friend whose cooking you admire to share recipes or knowledge with you. They’ll be honored. 

With restaurants yanked out of our lives, we are left with a cultural void, as well as a recreational one. As we learn to cook, we’ll also be figuring out what we want to cook, and why. 

And that feels like an incredible opportunity. 

🐞

Worth a read

• Related to the media big bang, there are calls for John T. Edge, founding director of Southern Foodways Alliance, to resign. Eater’s Jaya Saxena runs it down with valuable context.

• “Brown chefs are expected to cook their own food, but white chefs can cook whatever they want,” writes Nayantara Dutta in “Reclaiming Indian Food from the White Gaze,” also on Eater.

• “Why Aren’t We Translating Food Media,” from Alicia Kennedy on Medium.

• “This Fourth of July, Consider Trump’s Lobster Fib” by Louis Menand at The New Yorker.

• “The Accidental History of the Hass Avocado,” from Daniel Ganninger on Medium.

What to cook this week?

• Today (July 6) is National Fried Chicken Day — a fine day to give Fried Chicken LudoBird Style a shot.

• And this may be burying the lede for many, but Tuesday, July 7 is World Chocolate Day. Think Brazilian Chocolate Cake or the Mexican-Chocolate “Situation.”

• At the New York Times, Sam Sifton feels like throwing dinner parties for his family; Eric Kim has some delightful-sounding quick kimchis and Clare de Boer has a cool method for turning frozen fruit into not-too-sweet soft-serve.

• Here in Dallas, it’s hot, which makes me want cold soup. I’ll be making up a batch of The Greenest Gazpacho. Last week, with tomatoes finally back in our lives, we drowned ourselves in Gazpacho Sevillano. Maybe I’ll develop a recipe for tarator, a cold yogurt-cucumber-garlic soup born in the Ottoman Empire.

• Anything else you’d like me to work on? I love cooking to order!

On my plate

• Point of Origin, the podcast produced by Whetstone, has an episode from May about Indigenous foodways in America. It’s at the front of my queue.

• I just started diving into Jessica B. Harris’ The Africa Cookbook, published in 1998. Harris’ gorgeously written introduction, “African Attitudes,” promises greatness within. I’m ashamed to say that Cooks Without Borders has given Africa short shrift in terms of coverage, and I’ve started putting together an essential reading-and-cooking list for myself so we can start widening our net. Marcus Samuelsson’s Discovery of a Continent is on deck. I’d appreciate recommendations!

Why I’ve launched this newsletter

I’ve started this newsletter for a few reasons:

• One is that I often hear from my friends and followers on social media that since I left journalism (nearly three years ago), they miss my writing.

• Another is I frequently find myself wanting to write about something that doesn’t fit into what we’re doing at Cooks Without Borders — social or health issues around food, dining trends, current events.

• More and more I feel like the stories we publish at Cooks Without Borders get buried under mountains of recipes — or that people looking for a baba ganoush recipe aren’t necessarily interested in reading about the cultural history of baba ganoush, what makes a good one and where in the world you find great ones.

• I’ve been craving a place to ramble — about cookbooks I’m excited about but haven’t yet reviewed, food stories that have inspired me, interesting eating experiences I’ve had.

• As covered in this debut edition, with so much great work being published online — along with all the cyberflotsam crowding it out — I thought it would be nice to round up the writing that captivates me. I’ll do that at the end of every newsletter.

Have a good week. Drop me a line at leslie@lesliebrennerconcepts.com.

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