Hello, friends! I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted here on the blog (but if you follow me on Instagram, you know I’m not dead or anything). There’s a couple of good reasons for that. First, I had the honor of joining a dear friend in raising money for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Man & Woman of the year competition. It was a grueling but extremely rewarding task, as our team took home the coveted title of Woman of the Year, raising over $256,000 for blood cancer research over the course of just ten weeks. You can read more about us here.
The second reason why I haven’t posted in some time is that I’m having a bit of an identity crisis. I don’t mean me personally; I mean that every blogger has a voice and I’m having trouble finding it. Perhaps, I’ve never really had one that was truly my own. Reviewing my IG feed and the blogs that I follow (or that are advertised to me anyway), I can’t help but notice a very common “voice”: That of the over enthusiastic white twenty or thirty something female who is, at best, completely oblivious to, or, at worst, unconcerned with, the world that is slowly unraveling around her. Every recipe post is about some “life changing” salad, or a “SUPER-AMAZEBALLS” pasta dish. Each post is so extra that nothing is special or meaningful. And in reviewing my own previous posts, I realize that I have contributed to the hyperbolic white (literal) noise in the food blogging space.
I’ve felt this way for quite some time. But at first, I believed that I was just being too hard on myself. That I was allowing “the patriarchy” to make me feel like I didn’t have something valuable to say. But let’s be real: I’m a fucking trial attorney, for god’s sake; nobody puts this baby in a corner. So, no, that conclusion is some privileged bullshit. Upon further reflection of my feelings and the world at large, I began to forget about the blog entirely. It’s not that the blog itself didn’t matter anymore; it’s that what I was doing with it didn’t.
And then my heart broke because the world lost a person that I never knew personally, but who I grew to know through his travels around this beautiful and complicated world.
As everyone knows, on June 8th of this year the universe lost the most humble and eloquent storyteller of the human condition that ever was: Anthony Bourdain. In the weeks following his death, I immersed myself in as many painful and beautiful stories written by the people whose lives he touched in some way. One in particular stuck with me. It was an in memoriam piece by Phillip Dmochowski entitled “One Last Piece of Advice from Anthony Bourdain.” You can find it here.
In it, Dmochowski recounts the podcast interview that he, along with Helen Hollyman, conducted of Bourdain a few days before in 2016 at Bemelmans bar in New York City. The interview was recorded (all 4 hours of it) and Dmochowski felt compelled to listen to it again shortly after Bourdain’s death. On that cold winter night, in a dark inconspicuous bar, as Bourdain sipped on a Bombay Sapphire martini, he imparted the following advice:
“Look, as dim a view as I have of the future right now, and it’s pretty goddamn grim… And it’s not exclusively an American problem, we’re seeing the rise of authoritarianism and strongman leaders everywhere…Don’t be a hashtag activist.”
Yes.
His words stunned me into consciousness. Without personally speaking to me, Tony revealed to me the reason why I was feeling icky about my blog: I was being a fucking hashtag activist. I see the shitstorm around us and have strong opinions about it; but my privilege allows me to sit down and think about a cool new recipe for a salad with farro and mint dressing instead of actually going out and doing something to quell the shitstorm. How the fuck is that recipe going to do anything meaningful for the world?
I want this blog to take a new direction. I want to talk about food and politics. I want to focus on stories about women and people of color. Immigrants. The displaced. Those who want to help in any way possible. I want to give a platform to people whose stories need to be told through a culinary lens. Whether that’s as a blog post or a podcast, I can’t say. And for those reading this, thinking to themselves “ugh, keep politics out of food, Trish,” you could not be more wrong. Food is politics and politics is food; you’re either not aware of it or you’re choosing to not think about it. I, of course, will continue to post recipes and photos because, hey, a girl’s gotta eat. But it’s not going to be the focus of The Petite Gourmande anymore.
Readers, here’s my call to action: If you know persons of color, women, or immigrants who are doing interesting things with food, or simply have a beautiful experience to share about food, shoot me an e-mail. I want to share their story.
Until then, let’s all try to take the hashtag out of activist.