On the task at hand for BA Test Kitchen video fans like me
Issue 169: The Bon Appétit Test Kitchen video series, like the show The Office, constructed a fantasy of a goofy, happy workplace. Here's how I'm grappling with it.
Hello! Welcome to Nosh Box, a lunchtime-ish food newsletter that hasn’t yet made it past the halfway mark of season 6 of The Office.
Read yesterday’s dispatch: I seriously hope you're not bleaching your fruit
As Bon Appétit implodes over revelations of its toxic and racist culture, I’ve seen several food writers on Twitter (whose work I read and greatly respect!) say that they’ve never watched BA’s Test Kitchen videos before. As I mentioned in Nosh Box a few days ago, I have watched the videos — not just that, but I’ve sought them out, cooked recipes from them, spent hours ignoring the work I should be doing to watch Claire Saffitz finally nail baked-from-scratch Pop Tarts.
I’m reminded of sociologist Bethany Bryson’s research on symbolic exclusion, the way people construct certain identities around what they dislike or eschew. That what we reject says just as much about us as what we embrace. An exemplar of this comes from musical tastes, she argues, with the phrase “Anything but heavy metal…” Bryson argues that this language, usually racially coded, is used to frame the rejected cultural phenomenon as being in a distinct (and typically socially inferior or flawed) status position from the speaker. It’s a seminal theoretical framework for anyone who’s ever asked, “What does it say about me that I don’t like bananas?” Or, more saliently, fast food, or avocado toast, or chicken korma.
A few of the writers I’ve seen remarking that they avoid BA videos are people of color, and I can see why they might choose not to consume media that’s whitewashed. Over the past few days, I’ve spent a lot of time interrogating why I did choose to embrace these videos, despite being well aware of their shortcomings. I’m not saying these writers claim they’re superior to me; I’m saying I have work to do: What does it say about my identity that I did not reject Brad, Claire, and the gang for this?
I think those of us who have actively watched and enjoyed BA videos need not to pretend we haven’t — need not to pretend we’ve been “right all along” — but instead do the work of grappling with why the series has been problematic.
The Test Kitchen videos were unique, especially when they first began, because the internet was saturated with overhead-shot Tasty-style videos, in which disembodied hands prepare a dish often without narration. By contrast — and this is why I personally enjoyed them — the Test Kitchen videos are distinctly personality-driven, significantly longer, and edited in a fun, tongue-in-cheek way that not only keep in but capitalize on blemishes and mistakes.
Several writers, including San Francisco Chronicle food critic Soleil Ho, have noted that the Test Kitchen shows seem to portray a chipper workplace not unlike the show The Office. Goofy colleagues in a fun workplace, talking-head-driven comedic nuggets, standing around shooting the breeze while ostensibly working.
The Office is a scripted, fictional show that’s not without its own problems. BA Test Kitchen chefs did not sign up to be actors in an imaginary paper-obsessed universe. (And in fact, some BA staffers of color were barred from entering the kitchen at all, per Business Insider’s Rachel Premack.) The form itself encouraged BA Test Kitchen viewers to laugh off the racial and power imbalances that were glaringly apparent.
An example? Take Sohla El-Waylly, the BA editor who’s been particularly vocal about the magazine’s toxic environment. She’s one of few chefs of color on the Test Kitchen shows and is frequently called upon to fix white chefs’ mistakes or educate them about basic ingredients that the show exoticizes.
She has to help Claire temper chocolate (might I remind you, Claire went to pastry school at École Grégoire-Ferrandi in Paris), has to help Brad pronounce turmeric (I mean, come on. The show gives her a chyron that says “Sohla El-Waylly / Dialect Coach,” which is… yikes), has to advise Chris on toasting spices, has to explain starch chemistry to Carla, has to basically salvage Molly’s attempts to make a tortilla big enough for an ostrich egg breakfast taco… the list goes on. These are things BA chefs should know how to do!!! Just imagine if a non-white chef appeared on literal Bon Appétit without being able to carefully explain and flawlessly execute their dish.
And the show portrays her as cheerfully and graciously lending this expertise, despite the fact that her job description did not include video. So to also find out that she wasn’t getting paid for these video appearances — let alone the extra labor she had to put in to help the compensated editors do their literal jobs — is appalling.
In an insightful article in Vice, Bettina Makalintal breaks down the “myth of the happy workplace,” both at BA and The Office’s Dunder Mifflin:
The love for the show perpetuated the illusion that a toxic workplace can be laughed at and lived with.
The Office has funny moments, but in a way, it led society astray. It suggested that a bad boss who makes clumsy, insensitive comments and makes life hard for employees can be a point of humor, instead of a toxic presence that could be booted.
In the article, which is absolutely worth reading both for fans and newbies to BA’s YouTube series, Makalintal dives into Test Kitchen stan culture, an term that originated in largely Black and queer online communities to describe fervent, unrelenting fandom. She explains how the cult of personality that surrounded BA Test Kitchen chefs got us to this point:
When we laud any product or person to this extent and make it an object of cultural obsession, it becomes easier to ignore the flaws and the parts of the conversation that don't fit what we want to see. This is true for the Test Kitchen, which could never really have met the inflated expectations of goodness that stan culture built up around it; people saw the perfect workplace because they wanted a perfect workplace. The problems at BA are institutional, but stan culture allowed people to compartmentalize the Test Kitchen as something separate and authentic.
Can the BA Test Kitchen videos be saved? Personally, I hope so.
I find it refreshing to see chefs work hard to make something, maybe stumble, get frustrated, have to get creative. As a food nerd, I like seeing cooks come together and use their unique strengths to troubleshoot each other’s challenges. It’s a reminder that we, as home cooks, also don’t have to achieve the instant and solitary perfection sold on Food Network, for example. We can screw up. We can ask for help. But this privilege has to be afforded to everyone at Bon Appétit, not just upper-class white chefs.
Obviously, BA does not have a monopoly on this ethos, and Black chefs are carving out their own niches that I want to write more about in future issues of Nosh Box. (Tabitha Brown’s vegan cooking series on TikTok, for example, is a new favorite of mine.) What BA does have is arguably the biggest video platform in food media.
The authenticity that Makalintal says BA stans ascribe to the Test Kitchen can be a goal only if we can trust that the magazine (and Condé Nast, its corporate parent) steps up, instead of tokenizing, erasing, whitewashing, and underpaying.
We need new faces, new voices, new recipes, new perspectives, new leadership. We need a BA Test Kitchen series that honors — and pays — for the fact that its chefs are not TV actors but real people, living in a real world that’s messy and racist and economically unjust, cooking for an audience that might not be able to order specialty ingredients or spend 3 days on a single recipe or even eat dinner tonight. The dynamic where white cooks ask their colleagues of color to put in unpaid labor to fix their mistakes or educate them on other cultures must stop. If this all means pushing subpar cooks off the channel to make room (looking at you, Alex Delany), it’s worth it.
The Bon Appétit Test Kitchen videos constructed a fantasy I wanted to believe was real, even though I knew it was a facade. As I think about Bryson’s theories of symbolic exclusion, I don’t think having avoided BA videos necessarily makes a person better than those of us who enjoyed them. However, now saying “Oh gosh, I knew I was right to ignore those videos!” to buttress your own identity performance is not the move — and is meaningfully different from the food writers I’ve referred to, who are incisively pointing to the serious flaws that kept them away. And as I keep thinking through my own feelings, I know I don’t have all the answers. We all have different tasks ahead of us.
