The “Thug” can’t take the heat and is getting out of the kitchen.
“Thug Kitchen,” the popular cooking site, podcast, series of books and even a potential restaurant concept — in which delicate vegan recipes aimed largely at a White audience are paired with indelicate instructions written as if by a Black hip-hop crew — is undergoing a name and content change, according to Los Angeles-based founders Matt Holloway and Michelle Davis.
Holloway, who’s from Houston, and Davis, both White, issued a statement on thugkitchen.com that they’ve seen the error of their Julia Child-meets-Ja Rule culinary ways which some critics deride as “digital blackface.” They’ve defended their approach in the past — including a 2017 appearance at Austin’s South by Southwest — but, apparently, the tumult and cultural re-examination of the George Floyd moment has gotten to them.
“When we first launched Thug Kitchen in 2012, we wanted our name to signal our brand’s grit in the otherwise polished and elitist food scene,” they write. “Over the years, as our critics pointed out the racist connotations of two white people using the word ‘thug,’ we tried to contextualize it by talking about our backgrounds and our beliefs.
“We realize, however, that whatever our original intention, our use of it reflected our privilege and ignored the reality that the word is assigned to black people in an attempt to dehumanize them. That’s (messed) up and not at all what we want to stand for. We apologize. We recognize we need to do better.”
They go on to state that the name of the company and website will change and the titles of previous cookbooks will also be altered. Also, they will re-evaluate the content of each book.
“These changes are underway but will take a little while longer while we finish the work,” they conclude. “We’re serious about being advocates for change and that starts with us.”
Holloway and Davis originally wrote anonymously and many assumed that “Thug Kitchen” was penned by a young, black hip-hop head who liked to cook.
As Veg News explains, “Many followers believed that the blog’s creator was a POC and the use of the term ‘thug’— a racially charged descriptor often used to criminalize POC — was an honest attempt to redefine the race-coded word in order to promote veganism to communities of color. In 2014, before the publication of the blog’s first book, ‘Thug Kitchen: Eat Like You Give a F—-” an interview with Epicurious revealed that Holloway and Davis were two white people living in East Hollywood in Los Angeles.”
Take, for example, this edited introduction to their recipe for snap pea and radish rice noodles with peanut pesto: “You’re not still (messing) with some mayo-soaked pasta salad, right? Because that (expletive) always gets left in the sun for the wasps. (Expletive) all that. Whip up a bowl of these next level noodles and start spring with SOME G-D RESPECT FOR YOURSELF.”
Their book titles include “Thug Kitchen Party Grub: For Social (MFers): A Cookbook” and “Thug Kitchen 101: Fast as (Bleep)” The podcast is titled “Forked Up.”
One of TK’s harshest critics was Black vegan chef Bryant Terry, author of “Vegetable Kingdon: The Abundant World of Vegan Recipes,” who, in a piece for CNN, notes he too was intrigued and amused at first.
But then came the big reveal.
“Certainly, swearing isn't exclusive to African-Americans,” he continues. “But many of the site's captions, usually dreamed up by Davis to accompany Holloway's striking visuals, rely heavily on phrases from black rap lyrics, stand-up routines and films, which eventually went mainstream…And that's a problem.
“It's no coincidence that Thug Kitchen's admirers often imagined the ‘voice’ of the site to be that of shrill, vulgar and often uproariously funny black men like actor Samuel L. Jackson or rapper Ghostface Killah, and not that of actor Robert De Niro or Hells Angels founder Sonny Barger. The contrast drawn between the consciously progressive dishes shown and the imagined vulgar, ignorant thug only works if the thug is the kind of grimy person of color depicted in the news and in popular media as hustling drugs on a dystopian block, under the colorful glow of various burger stands, bulletproof take-out spots or bodega signs.”
When asked, for a 2018 bluebrry podcast, why they decided to take the approach they did, Holloway responded, “We wanted to be really aggro with like the, the tone because like, I mean we uh, we, we say this all the time, but like eating healthy and taking care of yourself and cooking a meal for yourself, like take that (expletive) seriously and we, we want to grab the audience and like shake the (expletive) out of them and be like, eat a (expletive) salad, like I'm worried about you.
“Like, yeah, Michelle's from the Bay and I'm from Houston, like the, these, these sort of like Malibu cookbooks are not like reflective of us.”
cary.darling@chron.com
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June 20, 2020 at 06:55AM
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Popular Thug Kitchen cooking site to change name - Houston Chronicle
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