Trader Joe's is finally changing that exoticizing branding
Issue 190: And Alicia Kennedy asks, is the chef-as-hero a dead concept?
Hello! Welcome to Nosh Box, a lunchtime-ish food newsletter whose meal schedule is… really off.
Read last Thursday’s dispatch: Revisiting the broken/not-broken food system question, urban ag edition
Longtime readers of Nosh Box know I love Alicia Kennedy’s Monday newsletters, so before I talk about Trader Joe’s, I want to share a snippet from her essay today on the way chefs are revered as singular creative heroes, often erasing the hard work of people behind the scenes. Is it time to proclaim “the death of the chef” and move toward new, community-focused models of feeding each other?
She writes:
We know that restaurants, as we once understood them, should probably no longer exist if they cannot keep people safe from viral contagion, paid a living wage, and free from harassment and abuse. Where does that leave the restaurant—do they suddenly become as culturally significant as a hardware store, or do they transform into something else altogether, with chefs as keepers of community and stewards of knowledge rather than icons?
And an update on what Trader Joe’s is doing with their packaging
A couple weeks ago, I talked about a petition calling on Trader Joe’s to end its exoticizing alter egos — Trader José, Trader Giotto, Trader Jacques, and Trader Ming, for example; attached to Mexican, Italian, French, and Chinese foods, respectively. The petition was started by a rising high school senior (!!!) who, I thought, clearly captured the problem here. She wrote:
The Trader Joe’s branding is racist because it exoticizes other cultures - it presents “Joe” as the default “normal” and the other characters falling outside of it - they are “Arabian Joe,” “Trader José,” and “Trader Joe San.”
The common thread between all of these transgressions is the perpetuation of exoticism, the goal of which is not to appreciate other cultures, but to further other and distance them from the perceived “normal.”
Well, Trader Joe’s finally responded, telling the NYTimes that they’d actually started planning to make this change awhile ago.
“While this approach to product naming may have been rooted in a lighthearted attempt at inclusiveness, we recognize that it may now have the opposite effect — one that is contrary to the welcoming, rewarding customer experience we strive to create every day,” said Kenya Friend-Daniel, the company’s national director of public relations. “With this in mind, we made the decision several years ago to use only the Trader Joe’s name on our products moving forward.”
The word “may” is doing a lot of work here. Might it have been lighthearted? Might it have the opposite effect? Who can say, really. Very fine arguments on both sides. You’d think, if TJ’s had actually started the process several years ago, they’d have done it with some sense of urgency… but apparently not.
So when will these changes be finished? Unknown.
“I don’t have an exact date but we expect to have the work completed very soon,” Friend-Daniel said.
And now…
A quality Tik Tok pun to finish out the “is it cake” discourse once and for all:
Finally, a reason to read the terms and conditions:
And an important announcement:
Tomorrow, we’ll be talking about food sovereignty, land control, and new movements to address racial gaps in ownership. See you then!
