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Epicurious, Giant Food, and the Foodie Bubble

A major supermarket’s in-house magazine is a taste of America’s everyday cooking.
Retro Spaghetti And Meatballs

In a recent State of the Union post, I touched on a little internet controversy involving Epicurious, a foodie-oriented recipe media company, which recently embarked on what it calls the “Archive Repair Project”: essentially, rewriting recipe intros, descriptions, or titles now deemed to be racially or culturally insensitive. Rod Dreher skewered it; I found its language to be performatively PC, but suspected that there were likely at least some real audience and SEO considerations—i.e., business reasons—behind it.

I also noted that part of what we were seeing was market segmentation. Epicurious readers may indeed find it culturally insensitive to refer to an unusual ingredient as “exotic” or to produce an Americanized mish-mash like “Asian noodle salad” (that recipe title was listed as an example of content in need of repair). 

Now it’s true that there can be an intersection between food and racism, and it’s also true that caricatures or stereotypes of foreign cultures can lead to complex and wonderful cuisines being viewed as low-end or lacking prestige. (One example of this is Filipino cuisine.) It’s even true that when such cuisines do get mainstream attention, it’s often because a chef from outside of that culture “discovers” it.

But Epicurious is going a step beyond acknowledging these dynamics, and outside of the rarified foodie world, characterizations like theirs don’t hold much sway.

This brings me to Savory, a recipe magazine published and given out by my local supermarket, Giant (Stop & Shop for Northeasterners), which is chock-full of recipes, well, just like the ones Epicurious is scrambling to “repair.” (Their full issue archive is available for free here.)

In that vein you’ll find things like “grilled steak with corn salsa” (quasi-Tex Mex), “grilled cucumber salad with spicy soy vinaigrette” (it features toasted sesame oil, soy sauce, and sriracha), and “sweet and sour chicken lettuce wraps” (featuring sweet-and-sour sauce alongside Basmati rice).  You’ll also find tips like perfect grilling for chicken breasts and hot dogs, curious pairings like “pasta salad with pepperoni and blue cheese,” cutesy preparations like “Easter egg cobb salad,” and economical recipes like those for “sheet pan dinners.”

Flipping occasionally through these magazines myself, I’ve found they do absolutely nothing for me. In fact, the kind of recipes they contain are almost like an unfamiliar cuisine. My first impression of Savory was that it was hopelessly outdated, a kind of midcentury throwback. But as I’ve thought about this, I’ve realized that feeling this way probably puts me in the minority. And I’ve also realized that my initial impression isn’t quite correct.

A few chicken breasts and frozen veggies thrown on a cookie sheet looks a lot more appetizing when you’ve got two or three kids. Conveniences that entail a certain loss in quality or taste are welcome if you’ve got limited time or a small kitchen or lack an excellent set of knives or broad assortment of cookware. Without access to a supermarket catering specifically to an ethnic subgroup, which are generally only found in metropolitan areas, you often cannot find the ingredients to make a lot of actual dishes from other cuisines.

These limited home-cooking options probably obtain for most Americans most of the time, even where I live in Northern Virginia. Savory is handed out here, too. It’s kind of similar to the still-limited restaurant options in much of the country’s rural and small-town settings. It’s not unusual in many places for pizza, Chinese takeout, or perhaps the more upscale “New American” to be the most “exotic” offerings in many places. The idea of having dozens of global cuisines to choose from is just not reality for a good chunk of the American population. Heck, having grown up in a heavily Italian-American region, I pretty much consider cardboard what millions of Americans still happily call “pizza.”

Now I’m not ashamed that my tastes in food are not exactly populist, and nobody else should be either. But with those preferences need not come elitism. In addition to genuine concerns over cultural or racial sensitivity in highfalutin food discourse, there’s also an unmistakable element of snobbery. Asian turkey meatballs are a little bit like McDonald’s or all-you-can-eat buffets, or a little bit like mass television. These are things for most people, most of the time, and they emphatically do not appeal to elite sensibilities.

It is easy for the foodie to imbue his choices with some sense of moral superiority, whether for health reasons or because he believes that worldliness is next to godliness. (The right, of course, has its own counter-version of this, as Rod Dreher brilliantly skewered in a 2012 feature titled “Porky Populism.”) Maybe I’m old fashioned, but it seems to me that so long as we eschew actually offensive stereotypes, the Latin maxim “De gustibus non est disputandum” applies here.

And the tastes suggested by Savory are much more representative of America’s tastes than the Epicurious archive, repaired or not. The vast majority of Americans aren’t cooking dishes on a regular basis that require visiting multiple supermarkets, or that employ tricky methods, or even that are genuinely unfamiliar. They’re ordering in, using meal kits, cooking basic dinners, and otherwise trying to eke out a little bit of time on a weeknight/worknight.

And that’s exactly the target market for Savory. Despite its surface-level throwback vibe and obvious marketing tie-ins (everything you need for every recipe is, of course, sold at Giant), it’s actually a sophisticated publication. Its commentary columns are perfunctory, but its recipes are elevated and refined in their own way.

They take extremely familiar, everyday preparations, devoid of any real methods or tricky steps, and use easy available ingredients in interesting combinations to liven up this basic fare. It isn’t 1950s cooking—it’s much better, and uses a much wider variety of ingredients. It’s borrowing of “foreign” ingredients is certainly not reflective of authentic dishes. It’s simply geared towards giving easy dishes a little twist. It might be lemon zest, or it might be sesame oil, or it might be smoked chipotles. But it isn’t making pastry cream or a scratch marinade with fermented tofu cubes.

This puts me in an interesting position. On the one hand, I can eye-roll at the politically correct vibe of Epicurious or the New York Times Cooking Facebook group (I belonged to it once; I no longer do). On the other hand, I quite honestly find sheet-pan dinners, BBQ cheddar meatloaf, and the heavy use of slow cookers more “exotic” than Vietnamese lemongrass grilled beef, duck confit (that’s duck meat slow-braised in duck fat), or salted preserved egg yolks.

If Americanization of global cuisines is, in and of itself, offensive, that doesn’t bode well for the supermarket’s ubiquitous “Asian,” “Hispanic,” or “International” aisle. But it’s worth realizing how far mainstream representation of global cuisines has actually come. The Chinese recipe blog Woks of Life has a post from 2014 noting that the “ethnic” aisle at the local supermarket evolved in just a few years to feature sriracha sauce and mirin. Those are old-hat for me. They might be exciting to a lot of Americans. You might even see those ingredients, or similar ones, in a Savory recipe.

Food is second only perhaps to religion in terms of cultural symbolism and meaning, and it should always be approached respectfully. But for the average American, recreating genuine, pedigreed dishes from international cuisines is generally a privilege or a hobby. For this large chunk of the public, foodie websites fill the same niche as Julia Child’s blockbuster book on French cooking did in the 1950s. It’s not a lifestyle, and it’s not a realm for political activism. It’s a chance to experiment and add a little bit of variety to an otherwise easy and simple routine.

Now, there’s really only one thing left to say: “Shut up and eat already!”

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