Enormous New Yorker profile of Alison Roman, by Lauren Collins. I clicked so fast and so hard. I read it while making use of a relatively sleep-full night, while carrying baby (and, later, the contents of Eataly) on bus to subway, subway to bus. (People are freaking out about Omicron. Public transit is now more double-masked than unmasked. I myself broke out one of the higher-tech models for the occasion, and may have overbought at Eataly in anticipation of I don’t even know what at this point.)
But what new information emerges? Roman didn’t enjoy being cancelled; this much was guessable. It’s still murky exactly how her New York Times column ended (the who-dumped-who). And for all the information Collins adds and compiles, there’s not really much pushing back against—or supporting!— the vague and largely unsubstantiated claims that Roman is A Problematic.
Maybe I should write a book ala the 1990s-early-2000s articles/books revisiting Paris Hilton, Monica Lewinski, etc, except about Lena Dunham, Alison Roman, etc. Hmm. Moving on…
Yes, at this point everyone who has been following this story knows that Roman came across as rude-at-best in remarks about Marie Kondo and Chrissy Teigen in an obscure-then-viral interview. But what else? There has to be something, right?
Collins interviews Roman’s professional colleagues, “women working in the food world; some were white, others were Black and brown.” What does she find?
“Two themes emerged: the sense that Roman was both a product and a perpetuator of structural racism in food media, and a wish that her sense of social responsibility was commensurate with the size of her platform.”
Again: what exactly happened here? Mention is made of a “bro tone.” In other words, Roman doesn’t hedge. That quality was once the height of feminist bravado but is, I guess, unfashionable.
There’s only one concrete crime, apart from The Interview and #TheStew. (The chickpea recipe that resembles various dishes from different parts of the world and apparently ought to have credited all of them.) It is this:
“‘Rice has always seemed like filler to me,’ she wrote in 2016’s ‘Dining In,’ dismissing the world’s second most important cereal crop as though she were swiping left.”
Honestly what. I say this as someone whose rice cooker is going on almost continuous loop. If one food writer expresses insufficient enthusiasm for one ingredient, this is racism? Against which group(s)? With the exception of fries and latkes I could give or take potatoes. Sorry not sorry. DeCecco’s gain.
Roman’s great crime—one only comprehensible in retrospect, as it was invented almost solely in backlash to her personally—was not citing sources for recipes. Not as in recipe plagiarism, but as in, not ethnographically delving into the origins of each dish and ingredient in, say, a newspaper column recipe:
“Roman was speaking the language of social justice, but she wasn’t crediting the cultures from which she drew certain techniques and ingredients.”
And: “Roman was willing to sound off on almost anything—why not a few words about the origins of turmeric?”
The answer is not obscure. Nor is it that Roman is racist against turmeric-eating populations. Is she? I have no idea! But there’s another, more sensible, explanation:
““Compared to a lot of women in our field and industry, I am definitely on the quieter side of politics, but that’s mostly because of my educational level.””
That detail, Roman’s “educational level,” is buried in the piece. Prior to entering the food world, “She bounced between community colleges.” While I cannot say I’ve surveyed all of them, my sense is that many of Roman’s critics—and, to include myself, broadening out to, observers of the eternal Affaire Roman (wait no, that suggests Polanski…)—have like 12 PhDs in overanalyzing things. Roman herself may physically resemble the kind of Brooklyn woman who spent her 20s in grad school but that is not her story.
Writes Collins: “Roman often presents herself as less informed than she is, or maybe ought to be.” For example: “She has little to say about the sustainability of tuna.” Roman’s error seems less about privileged obliviousness than some tricky combination of advantage and disadvantage, such that due to her appearance and personal style, she comes across as the sort of person who would have the cultural capital to discuss things in a way that, ultimately, she’s not.
The entire current trend in food writing, in the Times and beyond (but especially the Times), is best understood as anti-Roman backlash. As apologies and Do Betters addressing the Roman misdeed. And that newsletter, written in my head before the New Yorker story appeared, will prob be next up.
Honestly AR being the victim of the eternal assumption that every white woman is either a PhD in English Language Composition, a nurse, a teacher, or an idiot famous for being attractive is fitting. I do think one of the things men get away with WAY more is just being stupid. Like if AR did the exact same things but was a white man the reaction would just be "ya, makes sense, let's move on".
Great piece (in spite of the anti -Irish slur 🤣).