Bon Appetit embroiled in another diversity controversy

December 3, 2020 by
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Bon Appétit magazine keeps shooting itself in the foot. The venerable magazine’s downward spiral began in June when editor Adam Rapoport resigned after images surfaced of him wearing blackface at a party. This was soon followed by accusations of inequitable treatment of BIPOC staff members by BA’s parent company. Several members of the BA Test Kitchen resigned in protest. The magazine began to right its ship in late August when it named Dawn Davis to be its new editor in chief, but the good press didn’t last long.

The latest controversy comes after BA published a so-called soup joumou recipe earlier this week, written by Chef Marcus Samuelsson. Critics claimed the recipe was an example of cultural appropriation. Soup joumou is a historically and culturally important Haitian dish, however, BA’s discussion of the soup’s history was almost an afterthought. (Somewhat ironically, the only other recipes for the soup in the EYB Library, like the version from Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street pictured above, are also from white authors.) To add insult to injury, the soup did not resemble traditional interpretations of the dish, trading the customary beef, plantain, and potatoes for coconut milk, cinnamon sticks, and candied nuts.

What’s more, one of the initial three authors credited in the recipe, Yewande Komolafe, said via Instagram that she was not involved in the recipe development. “I didn’t write this recipe,” she wrote on her Instagram Story. “And I definitely didn’t write those headnotes. I did not submit this to @bonappetitmag or @marcuscooks and will request that they take my name off of this.” Komolafe did work on other recipes in Chef Samuelsson’s recent book The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food.

BA has removed all authors except Samuelsson and tweeted an apology: “We’ve updated the name and headnote of this recipe to accurately reflect that this pumpkin soup from chef Marcus Samuelsson is inspired by the historic Haitian soup joumou, excerpted from his cookbook The Rise. We apologize for misrepresenting this recipe.”

Category: Antipasto

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7 Comments

  • Vanessa  on  December 4, 2020

    Still struggling to understand the difference between “cultural appropriation” and “inspired by”. Since the soup in BA has the same ingredients as in Rise, it appears that Marcus Samuelsson has previously published this group of ingredients under the name of “soup joumou”. Did what was “inspiration” to Samuelsson turn into “appropriation” by BA, given that they published the same recipe with the same name as he did? Commenter outrage seems to center on the ingredients …. dishing out blame to BA for passing off this collection of ingredients as Soup Joumou, though they very clearly state that the recipe is Samuelsson’s.

  • CHRat  on  December 6, 2020

    Could it also be a matter of misrepresentation and poor fact checking? Is Marcus Samuelsson white?

  • Vanessa  on  December 7, 2020

    Mr Samuelsson is black. The cookbook in which the recipe is published is focused on Black food. It is supposed to be a truth-telling that reveals “Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food”.

    I don’t have the cookbook and haven’t read the headnote in that book.

  • ICUStat  on  December 23, 2020

    Why can’t we just let food be…food? Call anyone who continues to use the words “cultural appropriation” and “food” in the same sentence crazy and move on?

  • ekontrovitz  on  December 23, 2020

    This is just ridiculous. Since when did we start forbidding people of one “culture” cook food from another. I’m of Italian heritage but I cook dishes from all over the world, and you know what, I also change ingredients if I don’t like it or don’t have it. Sometimes I get creative and jump off in a different direction from the recipe, and I write it down in my personal recipe book. By your idiotic definition I’ve “culturally appropriated” it. Given that this country cultural and racial intermarriage is common who’s to say who belongs to which culture. I swear the more I see this kind of “woke” nonsense the more I think creativity will disappear entirely! This is why cooking magazines will not survive. I only get two now because I’m sick of being lectured. I just want recipes I can work with.

  • LD57  on  December 25, 2020

    I agree 1000% with ekontrovitz and ICUStat. Why is it wrong to admire another culture’s food ( or music or art) enough to try to replicate it and enjoy it? No need for BA or F&W to lecture their readers; I’m sure most of us are already fans of other cultures’ cooking.

  • Mapi  on  December 26, 2020

    I have always thought of cuisine as a constantly evolving, ever entiching and inclusive thing. Take Gullah Gee Chee cuisine, for instance: West African cuisine adapted and including South American ingredients… and what a yummy cuisine it is!
    Now it seems you can’t take inspiration from another culture’s recipes, changing and adapting them to your tastes and the ingredients available to you, without being accused of cultural appropriation. I call this an involution, and a dangerous one. Ideology should be kept out of the kitchen.

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