[Applause]
[Cheers]
>>SOLEIL HO: Hi!
Hey!
Cool!
Can you hear me?
Hi, hi everybody!
I was really nervous about defaulting to gendered words, so I was going through, like—
“Comrade” is nice.
“Fuckos” is better, but maybe not as nice. [Laughter]
R.I.P. Carrie Fisher.
But yeah, hi!
I'm Soleil Ho.
No, I'm not going to be singing karaoke this afternoon, wait until Punch Up the Jam gets
up here. [Cheers] Yes.
I’m going to talk to you today about what’s going on with me, if that's
cool.
I'm a restaurant critic and I’m in a really awkward time in my life.
So, this is my third time coming to XOXO.
During my first one, I was a chef at a restaurant in Portland but I was admitted to the festival
based on the podcast I did on the side called Racist Sandwich.
Some of you are familiar with it.
Thank you for listening, if you have.
In early 2016, my friend Zahir Janmohamed and I met at a dinner party here in Portland
and had a conversation about diversity in food media.
Stories like ours didn’t feel so common back then, stories that centered us as children
of refugees and immigrants, as queer people, as people who weren’t the hegemonic white
cis rich person who normally read food media.
We noticed that food journalism in those days often catered to people who thought the dishes
and foodways we grew up were bizarre, exotic, or savage.
Our food was something for other people to discover and explain in simple English.
And so the title of my talk, “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction: What happens when you become
the representation you’ve been fighting for?”
So here’s a mild example, this from a publication whose name rhymes with “FuzzBeed.”
[Laughter]
This was normal.
This was a piece about how hand pies are the hot shit right now.
“That's right.
We're talking hand pies!”
[Laughter] [Applause]
I think a lot of us know what those are and grew up with them,
and didn't think of them as a trendy thing..
So you feel that unease when you see that.
[Audience Groans]
So not limited to certain websites that, you know, whatever…
This is the New York Times, the Business section ran a story on bubble tea, really confused
about what the tapioca was.
And that was the piece. [Laughter]
So, yeah!
It makes you feel like an alien, and that's how Zahir and I felt every time we looked
at articles about food.
So we talked about all of that in our podcast for three years, I think 70-some episodes,
pushing for more diversity in food media, more stories by and about people whose foodways
and livelihoods had been marginalized and undervalued by a white supremacist, ableist,
heteropatriarchal capitalist culture.
Our podcast existed as a rebuke to the establishment, and we used the ideas of some cool people
like Edward Said, bell hooks, Krishnendu Ray, and others to inform our approach.
And Mikki Kendall, who we’ll all hear from tomorrow, was also a huge influence on the
way I thought about the cultural value of food.
She came up with the hashtag #foodgentrification, which is…
[Chef’s Kiss] …amazing.
Thank you, Mikki.
All of these are thinkers whose ideas could barely get a toehold in major food publications
until fairly recently.
These are some headlines that have come out in the past couple years.
The top one, “Breaking the Bubble of Food Writing: Cultivating Diverse Stories” ran
in NPR by Adrian Miller, @soulfoodscholar.
These are all their Twitter handles, I will not be offended if you whip out your phone
and follow all these folks because they’re very smart and very cool.
“How to Make Food Media More Equitable for Writers of Color.”
That was an editorial that ran on the James Beard Foundation's website, and they’re
a huge organization within the food media and food world.
“For Our Food Culture to Diversity, Our Restaurant Criticism Needs To, Too.”
So a lot of people have started talking about this.
They’ve been given platforms to talk about this.
We joined a whole bunch of folks like us who push for better representation among editors,
writers, and publishers.
We’ve emboldened each other to demand more from the industry that we love, all for the
sake of telling better, richer, stories.
I know I'm not telling you anything new.
I know that many of you in the audience are the only X, Y, or Z at your office.
The feeling of wanting things to be better, not just for you, but for all the potential
yous who’ve been scared off before is a familiar one.
Representation matters, we say, over and over again.
In our fight, we always felt like outsiders, lobbing rocks at fortresses, but then something
funny happened last year.
So last summer, the reigning restaurant critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, the biggest
newspaper in the Bay Area, announced his retirement.
We were all SO excited. [Laughter]
While we tried to encourage marginalized people to apply for staff positions to get
work elsewhere, getting someone in there would be a huge deal.
There are so many amazing qualified people at the tops of our heads whose hiring would
have made this a historical moment for the food world.
And I applied, too, for the hell of it.
[Laughter] But then things got more serious!
The paper asked me for an interview, and then I got... hired?
[Applause] [Woo!] [Yeahs!]
Thank you, which brings us back to the title of this talk.
[Laughter]
Thank you for laughing at my jokes, I love it! [Laughter]
So I got this amazing job at an incredible newspaper, which I'm so grateful
for.
And, I mean, I get paid to eat food.
How cool is that!
All my relatives think that I'm running a scam. [Laughter]
And I don't know how to explain this to them, so I just let them think that.
My friends in the food world were so thrilled, not only for me, but for us, our industry,
and what this meant for the future.
In a very abrupt reversal, I became the story.
So here’s a headline from a Washington Post profile of me that ran around the time that
I published my first reviews at the Chronicle.
It says, “Soleil Ho…” (that's me) “…is a young, queer woman of color who wants to
redefine food criticism.”
It was a lovely profile.
But, over time, I began to worry about what people saw in me.
Did my hiring represent a giant “Mission Accomplished” banner?
Were people, particularly people with the power to change things, feeling perhaps a
little too satisfied with this?
As if everything we pushed for in the past was now over?
Is this anxiety what I was inflicting on everyone else that I was boosting?
When you become the representation you’ve been working for, you become very aware of
all the agendas that intersect at your body.
I’ve appropriated this Peanuts illustration because it gave me anxiety to look at. [Laughter]
So you get to look at it.
I erased the fun saying on it because it was trite.
So. [Laughter]
Every day I feel pressure to be careful with my words, to not disappoint anyone
who sees a revolution in me, to fix a century of mistakes with my little weekly column.
So many people are watching.
People who have so much more hope in me than I do, and people who are hoping to see me
fail.
I’ve been compared to Jonathan Gold (R.I.P.), Ruth Reichl, another great critic, even Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez.
Some industry people have publicly fretted that I’d spell doom for white male chefs,
like I’d leap out of the pages of a newspaper and start cutting everyone’s dicks off. [Laughter]
I’ve become a site of projection for so many people, for good and for ill.
And I'm complicit in this too.
I have always been doing my day-to-day work, but I'm also responding to heartfelt DMs and
emails from writers, going on coffee dates with people who want to learn from me, guesting
on radio shows and podcasts to talk about the future of food writing, and doing talks
like this.
And yes, I'm already serving on my workplace's diversity committee, you're welcome. [Laughter]
I spend so much emotional energy and time on this other part of my job.
I keep saying yes because I didn't have mentors when I was just starting out, just other people
when I could commiserate with.
So what good am I if I don't pull other people up with me?
There’s so much that I'm bursting to talk about through the medium of restaurant reviews:
disability access, the racial wealth gap, assimilation.
But that also means that I have to work hard to get everything right.
To not just be able to articulate how and why an $80 steak falls short of the ideal,
but to also be able to share best practices in things like trans inclusivity with restaurateurs.
How can they be better? I need to know.
[Laughter] [Applause]
So these are all the reasons I'm problematic. [Laughter]
So, as any of my friends and family can tell you, I'm as disappointing and problematic
as anyone else.
I don't believe salads are food.
I used an airplane to get here.
Terrible!
I still forget to clean jars before recycling, I’ve never seen Cheers, my copyeditor was
really mad about that one.
And I hate horses, like, a lot. [Laughter]
I’m not perfect!
That's the point, right?
I still have so much to learn, and to quote the chef, Jeremiah Tower, ”I aim for the
crown, but I always know the guillotine is in sight.”
So go ahead and cancel me, I cancel myself.
[Laughter] I don't get to be just another restaurant critic.
I feel immense guilt every time I think, maybe I’ll take it easy this week and review a
pizza restaurant and just talk about how yummy the crust is, like anybody else would do.
I can’t just do the thing I get paid to do.
No, because this is what I asked for.
This was, in the end, my monkey's paw wish.
I get to herald in a change, but I also get to have insomnia about it.
This is a quote from Animal Farm.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to
man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
This is extremely 16-year-old kid of me, but I think about this quote from the novel Animal
Farm a lot lately.
In case any of you skipped class that day, it’s the scene at the end when the pigs
of the liberated farm enter negotiations with humans to ensure the farm's long term viability
as a commune.
The pigs wear suits, smoke pipes, and walk on two legs.
In short, they sold out.
I'm terrified of being seen as a sellout, of letting a little taste of power extinguish
that “me” that was so angry for so long.
But what’s worse than that, to me, is letting a little comfort convince me that respectability
can buy us all a seat.
Representation and seeing yourself reflected in your field and in popular media is a powerful
thing, but you have to also be aware of the danger of being commodified.
If I'm not careful, it’s easy to let other people decide who I am, based on what’s
politically useful for them.
It’s easy to forget who I am outside of that cage.
Right now, I'm trying to understand where that middle ground is for me, in particular.
How to maintain that power and platform, use it to pull our culture forward, and allow
myself the space to be the weirdo that I am.
So, this is a burden.
I carry it proudly.
In a time when despair and powerlessness can creep up on one's psyche, when horrible awful
things are just crouching in wait to ambush you every second...
I have anxiety, haha. [Laughter]
Yeah....
The key that I found is keeping your eye on something you care about, that you want very
deeply to become better, and focusing on that.
All I’ve ever wanted to do was to make more space for people like me in my little corner
of the world.
For now, that's what kept me going, through recording podcast interviews before my restaurant
job, enduring insults from people I once admired as heroes, constantly batting the sad and
angry thoughts that fly around my head at night.
If, one day, all of the stuff I’ve been saying about race and class and gender comes
up as obsolete or old-fashioned, my god, wouldn't that be a treat?
If all of my labors manage to move the needle even the slightest bit towards that future,
maybe then I’ll be satisfied.
But until then, at least I've got Fire Emblem to keep me centered.
[Laughter] [Applause]
Golden Deer, yeah. [Laughter]
So this is where the original version of my talk ended, on this note that’s basically,
I guess I'll work 'til I die!
[Laughter]
But my sister told me that was too depressing.
So here’s something maybe a little less sad, but still honest.
I want you to think about someone whose work inspires you, that pushed you to think harder,
be better.
Now when you feel up to it, I’d encourage you to take the time to let that person know
how they sparked a change in you.
Tell them what their work means to you, and what you’re going to do with that momentum,
with that energy.
That would do a lot to help them feel less isolated.
We are the grease in each other's engines, and we keep each other moving forward.
Thank you for hearing me out.
[Applause]