MAYUKH SEN

I grew up wanting to be a film critic. I read Entertainment Weekly religiously as a kid and could name every Oscars best actress nominee from 1960 onward. I double majored in history and communication at Stanford and moved to New York in 2014 for family reasons right after graduating. My plan was to get a master’s in cinema studies at NYU Tisch, but given everything going on at home, I ended up not participating in the program. Instead I started freelance writing about film, television, music—every aspect of culture except food, basically. Fast forward to summer 2016 and an editor for Food 52 contacted me. They were looking to hire a staff writer who was not a “food person.” Someone who wasn’t necessarily super into cooking, but could instead write about food in a way that connected it to the broader culture. When I first got that email, I was like, “This is hilarious.”

I’d seen food writing as an occupation that was totally out of bounds for me because it seemed so racialized and classist in a way that would box me out. When I thought of food writers, I thought of stuffy white guys in suits. But I was 24 and really wanted a full-time culture-writing job, so when I got the offer I took it. I was also eager for the trust of an editor who would allow me to write deeper, reported stories rather than opinion-based pieces. Reporting was my way to correct my own...let’s call it “informed ignorance”...because my food knowledge coming into this industry was, like, sub-zero.

I knew who Julia Child was. I had kind of heard of James Beard. Reporting these pieces was my very public crash course in culinary education. As I said before, I think there’s this notion within our industry that you must love cooking or going out to restaurants to be able to do this for a living. I'm like, “Well, I fall into neither category so...” The thing is: There are other ways of telling stories about food. That's what’s going to make this whole world of food open up to broader audiences. I realized it's a real asset to come into this industry without knowing anything, because a problem I've noticed is that the more time you spend within it, the easier it becomes to speak to a very certain kind of reader—someone in the know—and as a result, food writing becomes siloed from the general culture and you really limit your audience in that regard. Approaching stories from an angle that is both sensitive and also kind of stupid is actually very helpful for the average reader.

During my early months in food media, I felt very alone because everyone around me, at least the people who were highly visible, were white. I was the only person of color on an editorial team of 10—all people whom I love dearly—but I really stood out in that milieu. I was writing from a different center of gravity—not only as someone born and raised in suburban Jersey, but also a queer, brown, child of immigrants. It was tough to relate sometimes, or feel as if I belonged, and I also had to deal with a readership who could be quite nasty to me because they saw this unfamiliar face and name on their beloved cooking site. There are so many inequities embedded within the media and food industry—especially from a race and class perspective. I definitely got a taste of that. No pun intended. So early on in my food writing career, I turned my gaze to figures in the food world who also came from marginalized communities. These were people of color, women, queer people, immigrants...sometimes people who fit under all those umbrellas. Seeking out their stories helped me make sense of my own place within this industry, because unfortunately it still is quite racist and discriminatory. It's not an easy place to be visible. What I aspire to do in my work is to impact the way that the general public think and talk about food.

One of my main motivations for writing my book is that I really want to disrupt this notion that “success” for immigrants in this country, especially in culinary terms, should equate to assimilation. Something I’ve heard from peers in my corner of the industry is that they want their people's food to be considered “American food.” And though I understand that impulse, I don't necessarily subscribe to it. I find that that sort of positioning just reinforces white supremacy in the sense that you are so passionate about servicing and satisfying the white consumer and gaining their approval. My question is, why does that even matter? Speaking in terms of my own identity, why does it matter if Bengali food is considered American food? Does it have to be? What does that even mean? A lot of the women I wrote about in my book resisted that idea very strongly. They were like, no, my food is not American. It's Jamaican. It’s Iranian. They wanted to preserve their identity through their cooking. One of the women I wrote about came to America during a time when people from her country of origin were vilified within American culture. Her whole project was to express her people's humanity through her cooking, and she really succeeded.

It’s a group biography of seven different immigrant women who were chefs, food writers, cooking teachers—a few of them were all three. Upon coming to America, these women celebrated who they were and where they came from through their cooking. This was a way to proudly own their identities, but many also faced discrimination and pressures to make their food palatable to an “American” audience, really meaning “white and affluent“ audience. Some really tried to placate the food establishment and play by its rules and then change the rules to some extent. Others acknowledged, “I can't really ‘succeed’ in this industry because I don't look like anyone. I don't have material advantages that make it easy, so I'm just going to do my own thing independently.” I find both trajectories aspirational, but I'm more interested in the latter.

There’s this idea of America as this glorious culinary melting pot—one where you can get a taco on one block and pakora on the next. My book does tell that story to some extent, but I want to shift people's understanding of how that came to be. I want to show that immigrants laboring to feed a supposed “us”—again, that “us” really being “the affluent white consumer”—faced enormous challenges in an industry that was designed against them. This idea of “immigrants feed ‘us’” and “immigrants get the job done”—it’s like, who are you centering here? I want to shift this consumer-focused gaze of food media to the actual people doing the work. The way that power looks within food media is static. And it needs to change.

This is going to sound cliche and maybe cringe, but my goal when I step out of my apartment is to be “visibly invisible.” My uniform is a grey, black or white T-shirt or sweatshirt with straight jeans, and if you open my shoe closet, it's just a cloud of white sneakers. I’m not a shorts person, so I stick to my 501® ’93 jeans even in the summer and they’re still super, super comfortable—very breathable and not too hot. Sometimes I go crazy and wear navy, olive or beige! But overall I dress very quiet and low-key.