The Good Old Days Were Good For Who, Exactly?

A few months ago, I came across a video, thought it was bullshit, left a comment, and promptly forgot about it.

Then, on a sunny Wednesday last week, a friend sent it to me and said: “I think this is BS, but I want your take - you’re the food person.” That’s how it came back into my orbit. I’m the food person in my friend group. What follows is what I said to her, just in many more words.

So for some reason, I can’t embed the video, but I’ll describe it to you. A chef with 330,000 followers on Instagram posted a video saying:

On the surface, it sounds like a reasonable take. He misses an era when food critics had more credentials, more expertise, more genuine understanding of what they were eating. I get the argument. I don’t agree with it, but I’ve heard it a million times.

But look a bit deeper at the video itself and it becomes clear, the distinction he’s drawing isn’t so clear or impartial.

The golden age he’s mourning is illustrated with photos of only old white people. Anthony Bourdain. Ruth Reichl. Mimi Sheraton.

The current era, the era of decline, the era of people who “went from eating McDonald’s to being able to afford a good restaurant” is illustrated with a grid of young, diverse faces. Black creators. Asian creators. Hispanic creators. Women. You know, the poor people who don’t know about food because they have only eaten McDonald’s.

It doesn’t even matter if he’s conscious of it or not. He didn’t have to say “I miss when food media was whiter. and richer” He just showed us using nostalgia.

Not just a feeling - a tool. It sells. It moves people. It taps into something emotional and primal: the sense that things were once better, simpler, safer, and that someone is responsible for why they aren’t anymore. The food and beverage industry has known this for years. Super Bowl ads use it to sell you phones and Wi-Fi. Politicians use it to win elections.

“Make America Great Again” is, in and of itself, a nostalgic slogan.

That is the entire mechanism. You don’t have to name a specific era. You just imply that one existed - that somewhere back there, things were great - and let each person fill in their own version of what great looked like. That flexibility is what makes it powerful. Different generations, different losses, same sentiment driving them to action.

When my dad was a kid, in the middle of a life-threatening asthma attack, he was turned away from a segregated hospital. He almost died.

When my dad traveled as a child, they relied on tools like the Green Book - a travel guide that existed because this country was hostile enough to Black people that you needed a directory just to find places that would serve you and not get you killed.

Early food writing in the United States was “the work of the highly educated, largely white elite” that “often left out any mention of Black contributions” (from my book, American Soul). In a segregated country, where were those respected critics eating? Not at the restaurants listed in the Green Book. Not at the places my dad stopped at on road trips through an unsafe America.

The coverage felt authoritative. It felt knowledgeable. But it was covering a slim slice of what dining in America actually looked like. That was by design.

We know how the media machine works. Chefs who get write-ups are more likely to win awards. Those write-ups and awards beget more write-ups and awards, and it becomes a self-serving, closed-loop system.

I’ve said this for years, and I’ll never stop saying it: if the vast majority of creators were men instead of women, we would never have made it socially acceptable to talk about them the way that we do now, with this sense of disdain and disgust.

But that’s not our reality.

Instead, we’re in the midst of a rapidly changing media landscape where legacy institutions have withered in the face of decentralized media. Social media and influencing are a threat to that closed-loop, self-serving media machine.

The same machine that made Noma the most famous restaurant in the world, despite relying on unpaid labor for years and alleged abuse of its staff.

The same machine that saw awards ceremonies cancelled after 2020 when they realized they had not a single Black winner.