Yet Krishna herself believes there is still a long way to go. “I have been told so many times that my Indian food isn’t click-y, that it won’t get page views,” she says in an email, “and then I see white cooks and chefs making dishes that are rooted in Indian techniques and flavors, calling it something different, and getting a lot of attention.”
Her experience speaks to the assumption that food media’s readership is always white, as if the audience is unfamiliar with or intimidated by what, to many of them — to us — are in fact quite ordinary things. “I love that people’s pantries are getting more global,” says Krishna, “but I do hope that when people cook with them, they take the time to educate themselves about the origin of these ingredients, rather than treating them as ingredients in a vacuum, divorced of their context.”
The idea that we need to pay attention to where things come from is certainly true, but it’s a mantra that can take you only so far: If cultural forces like BA or Roman are necessary to popularize new-to-white-people ingredients, then only part of that dynamic changes. In the attention economy, those who garner attention will always have more sway, and even in 2020, the collective unconscious wants what it wants.
