Alison Roman Is on Leave From the NYT. Is This the Outcome We Wanted?
ICYMI, NYT food columnist, former Bon Appétit senior editor and millennial foodie favourite Alison Roman messed up earlier this month when she made disparaging (and racist) comments about Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo while discussing what she wants for her own brand. It was a wild ride: first, she apologized badly in a series of tweets, then she posted a much more thoughtful apology to all her social platforms (which, let’s be honest, a crisis comms pro probably wrote), now, she’s on temporary leave from the Times.
Here’s what happened:
On May 7, New Consumer published a fawning interview with Roman, in which she came off like… well, an asshole. A selection of quotes:
At first, it’s just your garden-variety obnoxious privilege. “I’d rather stay small and always be myself,” she tells the writer, Dan Frommer. “But at the same time, I do need to figure out how to turn this into money. I have everything that I need. I have a wonderful apartment that I love so much. I don’t have any student debt — I don’t have any debt. I am just myself. I don’t have a mortgage. I don’t have kids. I’m very free.
And that said, I would love to buy a house upstate. I would love to have a garden in that house. I would love to not have to work out of my home. I would love to have a second space for that. And then I’m like, ‘oh, does that ruin the charm?’ Does that ruin the brand if I have a studio that’s somehow nicer than where I live?’ But I don’t have a dishwasher and it’s a third floor walk-up and these floors are old and I can’t take it anymore.”
But then she gets into what kind of lifestyle brand she’d want to have, and what kind “horrifies” her… which seems to be the type run by Asian women. First, she comes for Marie Kondo, saying, “Like the idea that when 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!’ That’s the thing — you don’t need a ton of equipment in your kitchen to make great food. ‘For the low, low price of $19.99, please to buy my cutting board!’ Like, no. Find the stuff that you love and buy it. Support businesses and makers. It feels greedy. Unless something just simply didn’t exist that I wish existed, but that would make an inventor, which I’m not.”
(Funny story. When people rightfully pointed out that that “please to buy my cutting board” line sounded like it was mocking Kondo’s accent, Roman posted a—frankly, kind of ridiculous—explanation about how it only sounded racist, but was actually a reference to an inside joke. The writer said in a separate comment thread that he’d removed it because it was being misinterpreted. Now, it’s back with a lengthy editor’s note explaining that Roman “used a comedic voice to conjure what sounds like a tacky infomercial pitch” and she never mocked Kondo’s accent.)
Next up, Chrissy Teigen, who, Roman implies, has sold out. “Like, what Chrissy Teigen has done is so crazy to me,” she says. “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.”
A few things: in the same interview, Roman plugs her own product line, a capsule collection with a cookware start-up. (I guess those products are okay.) She demonstrates an ignorant at best, racist at worst misunderstanding of Marie Kondo’s approach. And it’s interesting that, when she reaches for examples of people she doesn’t want to be like, Martha Stewart, Wolfgang Puck, Rachael Ray, Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson are nowhere on the list. Just… two Asian women. Cool, cool.
The internet was displeased—though some people, like Business of Fashion’s executive editor, thought this was “the most interesting thing [she’s] ever read about [Roman’s] ambitions.” (Sigh.)
Then, Roman did a terrible job of handling the criticism.
(Again, she literally promoted her own upcoming product line in the interview.)
Then, Chrissy Teigen replied… and dropped a bomb.
Roman apologized, but it wasn’t great. First, it was inauthentic and a non-apology. Also, there’s a weird implication in the second tweet that Chrissy is taking Roman down, somehow? And I guess Marie Kondo doesn’t get an apology, because she’s not the executive producer of Alison Roman’s show.
At this point, it’s Friday night and Roman has done an excellent job of escalating a bad interview into an internet obsession. As more people take notice, more revelations pop up.
Over the weekend, several people write about the “feud.” (Though, ugh, this wording fully minimizes what happened, which is a white woman criticizing two Asian women for… uh, being successful, I guess?) The best tweet thread was from Claire Willett, who broke down all various issues at play, from “the ways white women are blind to racism that isn't, like, Big Obvious KKK-Type Shit” to “the… Aspirational Domesticity-Industrial Complex, where privileged white women serve as the face and brand for labor which is actually being performed by people of color.” Go read the whole thing; it’s very good. The best article is on Pajiba, where Roxana Hadadi gets into Roman’s history of culinary appropriation, which is important context. (Interestingly, Ahmed Ali Akbar tweeted about Roman, Yotam Ottolenghi and how common ethnic erasure is among celebrity chefs the day before this all went down. That’s also worth your time, FYI.)
Which brings us to May 11, when Roman posted a lengthy apology on Twitter and Instagram. It says a lot of the right things—but it seems pretty obvious that a PR person and/or a crisis communications expert has helped her understand exactly what she did wrong, because it’s a very different approach to her previous apology.
But while there’s a lot of talk about how she wants to learn and do better, it’s short on exactly what that means. So… I’ll be interested to see exactly how her behaviour changes. If it changes.
A couple of hours later, Teigen replied in a tweet thread that referenced her own mistakes, saying “eventually, I realized that once the relatable ‘snarky girl who didn’t care’ became a pretty successful cookbook author and had more power in the industry, I couldn’t just say whatever the fuck I wanted. The more we grow, the more we get those wakeup calls.”
I’m genuinely curious what this means for Roman’s show… and I think we should be super clear that, while it seems that Teigen is letting Roman off the hook for some of what she said, that doesn’t mean the wider problem of racism in the lifestyle space has been solved.
On May 20, Eater published a piece by Navneet Alang that delved into exactly this problem. “Only whiteness can deracinate and subsume the world of culinary influences into itself and yet remain unnamed,” Alang writes. “It’s a complicated little dance of power and desire: The mainstream is white, so what is presented in the mainstream becomes defined as white, and—ta-da—what you see in viral YouTube videos somehow ends up reinforcing a white norm, even though the historical roots of a dish or an ingredient might be the Levant or East Asia. You might say whiteness works by positing itself as a default. You might also say that this sucks.”
So, when it comes to Alison Roman, there are two things happening: first, there’s her problematic language, which Willett parsed as “a white woman accidentally lift[ing] the lid on the way white women talk to each other about women of color behind their backs.” But there’s also her space in the pantheon of white culinary stars who benefit from their use of “exotic” ingredients while still maintaining the racist power structure that allowed them to succeed. I’d argue the solution to both problems is institutional change—which is why I’m cautiously optimistic about Roman taking a temporary leave from the Times.
There are rarely real consequences for people who say and do racist things. Neither the paper or Roman have commented on the reason or duration of this leave, but it’s difficult not to make a connection between this situation and her suddenly missing byline. Cancel culture isn’t actually a thing, but even if it were, this isn’t it. This is actually what’s known as facing the consequences of your actions. So yeah, maybe Teigen “[doesn’t] like this one bit” and is “doing what [she] can (off Twitter) to make that known.” But that doesn’t actually matter, because the problem here was way more than just saying mean things about a celebrity.
I do think it would have been nice to see Roman actually deliver on the promises she made in her second apology. What does it actually look like for a person who has said something racist—and benefited from a racist system—to unlearn those attitudes, uplift POC and balance her own ambition with equity and justice? We don’t have a ton of models of that kind of outcome, so I truly don’t know. And yes, it’s also not fair that Roman has to take a leave while Bret Stephens still has a job.
But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong that Roman has experienced repercussions for her behaviour. It means we need more people to do the same.