Reply All - #173 The Test Kitchen, Chapter 2

Episode Date: February 12, 2021

Chapter 2, “Glass Office”: Years later, in 2018, a new wave of people of color arrives at Bon Appétit. And when their white bosses don’t understand the problems they’re facing, those people will decide to fix the place themselves. Check out: Jesse Sparks’ portfolio Elyse Inamine’s Instagram Ryan Walker-Hartshorn’s website and Twitter A reported story by Priya Krishna Christina Chaey’s 2016 manifesto following Bon Appétit’s pho video release. And here’s Christina’s Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, this is Alex Goldman. I'm one of the hosts of the show. I'm speaking to you on behalf of the entire reply-all staff. We wanted to give you an apology and a bit more context about the story you're about to hear. This episode is part of a series called The Test Kitchen, which was reported by Shrethi Pinnamennemanani and is about the structural racism and toxic work environment at the Food Magazine, Bon Appetit. Days after the publication of the second episode in what was supposed to be a four-part series, former colleagues of ours at Gimlet publicly described multiple instances

of troubling behavior from both Shruthi and my longtime co-host PJ Vote. These accounts prompted a reckoning on our team about the work culture at Reply All, and they also left us asking whether we could continue to air this story without interrogating ourselves and what has unfolded at Gimlet.

We now understand that we should not have published this series as reported, and the fact that we did was a systemic editorial failure. We are not going to be continuing the series, and PJ and Shruthy have both decided to leave the Reply All team. I and the entire team know that making Reply All, getting to tell people's stories for a living, is a huge privilege. We also know that we let a lot of people down and made a lot of mistakes. We are very sorry for our many failings. We're sorry to our colleagues and our former colleagues we hurt.

We're sorry to you, our listeners. and of course, we're sorry to the people who spoke to us for the Bon Appetit's story. We plan to find a way to get to the bottom of what went wrong here, both with the series and with our show. And once we fully understand it ourselves, we also want to tell you as best we can what happened. As we contend with everything, we are placing the show on pause. Thank you for listening, and here's the episode. Welcome to Chapter 2 of our series, The Test Kitchen. If you haven't heard the first episode, you should do that.

I said at the beginning that the reason I find Bonapeteeth worth talking about is not because it's unusual, but because I think so much of what went wrong there is fairly typical. And that is especially true of Chapter 2, which begins in 2018. Bon Appetit will make its first baby steps towards diversity. Anna Wintour, who at the time was Condi Nass artistic director, she has started telling top managers to hire people of color for open positions. And the story of what happens when those people show up. of it is unique. This is a story of how things so often go in media. If you work in media, and frankly, in a lot of other industries, you've either seen this story or been a part of it. If you haven't seen it, you were definitely part of it. So, let's get started. Chapter 2, Glass Office. It's been five years since the events of our first chapter. Five years since

an earlier generation of people of color were drawn to Bon Appetit, because they'd seen in its pages something new and fresh. Since then, the shininess and allure of Bon Appetit had only gotten brighter. Condonast had left behind its offices in Times Square and had taken over several floors of the new One World Trade Center building, the Freedom Tower,

this imposing crystal spire in downtown Manhattan with super-fast elevators called Skypods. The deal was reported to cost $2 billion, and, according to an article before they moved, quote, Condonast executives drilled down to the finest details to understand the building in the site, pondering what would happen if, for instance,

a Ralph Lauren wanted to pull up to the building in a limousine. Bon Appetit was situated in two floors in that building. Again, test kitchen on one floor, editorial in another. And in the eight years since Adam Rappaport had taken over the magazine, its stature in the food world had grown and grown. This was a place where the magazine's personalities were now stars in their own right. They had changed the whole idea of what a food magazine was. It almost like from the outside perspective, it's like they didn't feel like they needed to follow the rules.

That is Elise Sinamine, who was joining from a different food magazine. She said that everybody considered the Bonap staff, the cool kids. Bonap was elusive just as somebody working in food media. Like, you know, you go to, like, press events, you go to, like, restaurants. You typically meet, like, other people at other food publications. But until I worked at BA, I'd never met anyone else from BIA. I knew kind of coming into it that it was very much going to be a space where, like, people were friendly, but not everybody was going to be friends. That's Jesse Sparks, another new hire.

Like Elise, he walked in knowing that being considered cool at Bonap would be just as important as his actual resume. I knew that when I had my interview with Adam, I would have to dress up. I knew that he'd be having an eye out for, like, the way that I dressed, what I was wearing, whether it was stylish or cool or not. I think one of the weirdest things that I realized is like, oh, my Instagram feed isn't very good. Like, I need to take, like, better photos of my food. This was the face of the next wave of people of color who are going to try to storm the beaches of Bon Appetit. Elise is Japanese-American, Jesse's black and queer. They're not immigrants.

They're American millennials who'd grown up on the internet. And they weren't coming from the restaurant world. They'd both studied media. Take Jesse. He'd gone to a top journalism school at 23. he had worked at more newspapers than most 30-year-olds, and underneath his very hip style, green-died hair and perfect glasses. Jesse was a genuine news geek.

I was the kid in high school who, when the New York Times dropped the Snowfall Interactive. I lost my mind. I was like, that's the pinnacle. I want to do that one day. Yeah, no, I was that kid. I had to look this up, but the Snowfall Interactive was, like, apparently a very innovative multimedia project. The Times published nine years.

ago. Like I said, real news geek shit. But Jesse wasn't just a geek about newspapers. He was also a geek about the actual news industry, which meant even as a teenager in Texas, he'd read stories about Kande's bad workplace reputation. When I was in high school was when Kande was making headlines for treating their interns poorly. And like, I literally remember the case of the two roommates who were interns at Conday and were like sharing a bed in a cheap apartment just because they couldn't afford to like have their own rooms just because they were making so little and working so much. So, but that's just me as someone who did a lot of industry research and was like, tried to be as intentional as possible.

One of the reasons I wanted to talk to Jesse was to understand why people like him took jobs at places like Condon asked. Jobs that they accepted with the knowledge that those jobs might be very painful. And the reasons for Jesse, at least, are complicated. What Jesse will tell you is that money was tight in his family, and his mom had sacrificed a lot to support her son's journalism dream. She had driven their high school newspaper team to journalism conventions all summer. And so knowing the opportunity that even a short stint at Condé represented, it would be hard to turn down. Editorial assistant at Bon Appetit. Besides, when Jesse went in for his interview, the senior editor he talked to really made him believe that Bonapetit knew that it had a problem with whiteness and was ready to change.

I'm curious, like, what gave you that impression? Was it, like, explicitly said? It was explicitly said. So, like, people were able to actually point to different ways that they had actually made some strides in bringing about certain changes, one of which was, like, healthish in the way that it was kind of working to center more people of color and more communities of color and queer folks. but there was a lot of hope, and it seemed like there was a lot of structural change happening. Maybe that sounds like a pretty standard moment from a job interview, a white manager selling the place to a young black candidate.

But in that moment, the seed of much confusion and pain is being planted. Because when Jesse heard the phrase structural change, he heard a promise that Bonapete was about to undergo a serious renovation. It had been a home thus far built to make its rich white editors comfortable. And now that they've invited people like Jesse, people from different backgrounds, they were going to modify the place to make it comfortable for people like him. That kind of renovation is not what Bon Appetit would actually deliver. And even though Jesse walked in the door armed with skepticism, the gap between promise and reality would end up being hard on him. He first started to see the scope of the problem at the monthly ideas meeting, which is where people would pitch stories for Bon Appetite.

Like, give me a sense of the room, actually. Where did you guys do your pitches? So we would pitch in this conference room that was kind of in the corner of the World Trade Center, right? You're just in this towering building, all glass exteriors. So you're looking out immediately into the Hudson. You're looking out over all the buildings. So you feel this pressure, right? Where it's just you in a room full of white people.

It was a room with a very similar energy to the 2 p.m. kitchen tastings downstairs. A bunch of mostly white people competing to impress other more senior mostly white people. And Adam Rappaport was in those meetings. The whole editorial staff, they would sit around a big table and one by one people would pitch their ideas. Like there's a new restaurant on the side of a cliff, but you can only get there via rope or a new spicy Moroccan donut. I'm making these up. Each person had a time limit. They had to make their pitch in just 90 seconds.

And the top editors would analyze these ideas in front of them. Like, is this going to be exciting for our readers? Adam could be heard, often saying, I don't want just an idea. I want a strong point of view. And I remember being, like, so scared going into them. Sometimes I would, like, go in and, like, have, like, a script almost for myself. Because I realized, like, the pitch meeting wasn't just, like, an exchange of an idea. It's, like, a performance.

Like, you're here to sell your story. I've been at a million of these pitch meetings for radio. And what they're really about when you are a junior person is study. the room. Learning what the hive mind of this place thinks is boring or brilliant. What was the back issue that everyone agrees was a solid goal totally out-of-the-box idea? And this is where Jesse started to see that something was up. People kept referencing like past stories that they'd done. So they kept on referencing like the sandwich issue, which I was just like, okay, cool. And like, just for context, the cover of the sandwich issue is like a multi-layer peanut butter.

and jelly sandwich, which is just like, not everybody cares about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches like that. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, whatever. Jesse was going to pitch something that the people that he knew would be really excited to see it, Bon Appetit. Like, I wanted to do a digital recipe story about beef patties, right? Like Jamaican beef patties? Yeah.

So Jesse does it. He makes the pitch. And it was just like audibly, tins, audibly quiet. Like, with other people's pitches, it was like very. conversational. It was very chill. It was just like, oh, we'll just keep on thinking about it. And then like, on to the next person. Elis from her corner was having similar issues. Like, I remember pitching a story about hot pots and feeling I had to like just explain so much more for like why to do it. And it was interesting is Adam really liked it. But it just like

never ran because, and like this is where part of it is. It's like, I don't know why. For the White people in this room, I have talked to them, these are not big moments. Junior employees were pitching their beginner pitches. Of course, they weren't going to light the room on fire. They'd learn and get better. But to these junior employees, people of color, these moments felt huge. Nobody in this room understood what it was like to be them in this space. It felt like being an alien.

I was kind of looking around the pitch room and just being like, okay, it's a lot of white people who are all smiling and seem nice. but like it all feels very like, like I'm from the South. I'm very used to nice white people, capital N, capital W, capital P. So it's just like a lot of people are very comfortable just like giving you the pleasantries, but not always prioritizing the follow-up.

The problem was that while Jesse had spent years studying how he might fit into a place like Kande, Condé had not spent years wondering how they might accommodate Jesse. And so now his discomfort was his. problem. Remember Adam's original sin, putting white people at the top of the place who saw the world the way he did? This now meant that if Jesse felt weird or bad, there was no one with power that he could go to, who he knew would understand what was going on. The only people with power to fix the problem were the white people on top, who were not experiencing this problem. So they had

no plan and no urgency, and the fixing would fall instead to people like Jesse. This dynamic exists at so many companies. It has certainly happened where I work. And this chapter is about what happens when the people with the least amount of power try to fix a place and the toll that it takes on them. About Appetit, the first person to take on this DIY renovation was a woman named Ryan Walker Hartshorn, Adam's executive assistant. She'd started the company about six months before Jessie and Elise. And for a while, she was the only black person in editorial. And one day early on. The same senior editor who had hired Jessie asked Ryan if she was doing okay. She made a comment about like my demeanor or something. I don't know if I wasn't happy enough

and I was like, well, I'm not depressed actually. I just have a hard time walking around the World Trade Center and seeing people who look like me underrepresented in your offices, but overrepresented as your building staff. Like cleaning, cooking for you, like all. all of these things. And it's like, those are my friends. Those are a lot of my friends at the World Trade Center. And that was really getting to me. And that was only 2018.

And I just started there. I was like, the freedom tower, my ass. This place is oppressive as fuck. Couple things about Ryan. This was her first office job. She just graduated the previous year out of Stanford. And in her job interview with Adam Rappaport, it had been Ryan asking Adam questions, stuff like, how does social justice fit into Bon Appetit's editorial agenda?

She wasn't here just for a CV. She cared about stuff. All that to say, completely in character for Ryan to be that honest with the senior editor. And the senior editor actually responded pretty well. She said diversity was something they were working on. And a few days later, she reached out to Ryan. I remember that she slacked me to ask me to come into her office to help her with something. And I got really excited because I was.

was like, we just had lunch. We just talked about this diversity stuff. Like, is this for real? Like, I get to, maybe she's going to let me do something or, wow, great. And I was like, sure, I'll be there. Like, one second. I go over there. And she asks me to clean out the small conference room for her meeting and like organize some stuff. And I was like, okay. Yeah, I mean, that was it. For Ryan, the message was, you're here to be an assistant. Your job is not diversity. But not long after that, Jesse arrived. And now there were two black people. They could work together on this. And it really worked because Ryan had the administrative insights. So she, because she was managing Adams calendar, she knew what was going on in ways that, like, I might not because I was filing

expenses or I was in working on editorial stuff. And then I would be able to provide Ryan editorial context for what was happening like with the magazine. Those were the ways that we were kind of informing each other and then kind of brainstorming from there. With a little bit of intel, Jesse and Ryan were able to start picking and choosing battles to take on. Like, remember how in the last chapter, Yuan De's hands never appeared in food photos in the

test kitchen? Ryan and Jesse didn't know about Yawande, but they noticed the same issue that the hands in the magazine were almost always white. So they started to push to change that. They figured you've got to start somewhere. Why not start with something small and easy? But at a place as white as Bon Appetit, there's no such thing as small and easy. It's a white industry. So what the fuck do you expect, right? So you have like your white food stylist, you're white, you have all of the staff of Bon Appetit, which is white. And, you know, we don't have a budget to pay models, which is bullshit or hand models. And it's all last minute. So they're like, we just don't have any time to like think it out.

and then it just all happens and it keeps happening. And I'm like, okay, why don't we create some sort of like system on Slack where we can create a group with folks that, you know, might want to be featured in the magazine for whatever reason? Like, oh, like other black and red people who can come and use their hands. Yes, yes. So that's how that started. That's so, can I just say, it's like I didn't think about how much work it actually takes just to do something simple even like that, which again is like a superficial change. but it's like a start. But even that is like coordination. No, the blacks were coordinating. Let the record be known.

Ryan and Jesse are pulling off these small coordination coups, like ad hoc fixes. But pushing for them, rather than making them feel powerful, it was constantly reminding them how powerless they actually were. Ryan was Adams assistant. And in 2018, Jesse wasn't even a salaried employee. He was getting paid 20 bucks an hour, no health care. And the two of them were going to Adam, the person in charge of their livelihoods, and trying to hold him accountable for making the place less racist. And often, the experience would end up being demeaning.

Like, Jessie told me about this argument that they had towards the end. Ryan had written an article for the magazine about black-owned restaurants in D.C. And Elise, the Japanese American editor, had edited it. And now the two found themselves haggling with Adam over this one choice. Ryan wanted to capitalize the B in Black. While it was going through the editing process, Ryan Elise kept on capitalizing the B in black. But Adam kept on questioning it

and just being like, I don't think this is the right call. I'm not sure. I'm just hesitant. I just want to know what other people are doing. Like, what is David Revnik doing? And it's just like, this has nothing to do with David. This is nothing to do with the New Yorker. I was just like, okay, well, like, why don't we just set up a meeting?

Their tiny diversity crew put together a whole presentation arguing for this change. Like, they went to the heads of copy and research at Kande to talk about updating the Bonapete's style guide. I had printed out multiple articles and examples to cite of other people that have made this change. And then the entire time I was talking, I looked over and I saw that Adam was on his phone. The cherry on top is Anna Wynn. mentors, right-hand women, Christian Mac, is sitting in there with us all. Wow. Damn. Okay. So this is serious and everyone is actively listening. Adam Rappaport

got on his phone and started scrolling the entire time that Jesse was speaking. It was the most disrespectful thing I have ever seen or experienced. I was almost about to like cut Jesse off and have him start over. And it was just like, sir, this is a meeting with other corporate people. This is a meeting with like heads of departments. Like I, Elise, and I were all in that meeting and like each of us were talking and making great points. And it was just like you're not paying attention or engaging at all. So then it was just like, well, why am I even wasting my time right now?

A lot of people, white, not white, junior, senior, described scenes like this about how at meetings Adam would often just be staring at Instagram. on his phone or he'd get up and start pacing around the room or putting around with his golf balls. He had ADD and he was pretty open about it. But still, the white editor-in-chief, Instagramming through the staff diversity meetings. Not great. And there was this other thing that multiple people have pointed out to me, which is that it really seemed like Adam just did not love being told what to do by junior employees, even if he understood that that work clearly needed to be done.

In March of 2019, however, an opportunity would present itself in the form of a different, more senior person of color. An Indian American writer named Priya Krishna, a rising star in the food world. Before coming to Bonapit, Priya had worked at the other hipster food magazine, Lucky Peach, which had its own bad work culture. And Priya left that place badly affected by what she'd experienced there. In fact, when Bonapitifet offered her a job, she'd turned it down and said she would want to come work in the office but only on contract. I remember distinctly thinking, don't get too involved with this workplace,

because remember what happened last time, thinking to at Lucky Peach. Lucky Peach. I remember thinking this is a gig. Come in, do your work, leave. These people don't have to be your best friends. I never imagined myself getting as involved as I did. I have to say from talking many, many hours to you, Priya,

I feel like, of course you can't do that. Like, that's not who you are at all. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Like, that was the sort of fundamental flaw in my plan. Like, I can't not get involved. I am a meddler. Like, that laugh. That is the Priya laugh.

It's always the same one. She punctuates every about to be painful Bon Appetit's story with that dark laugh. Because, of course, Priya would end up meddling. And the thing that would make the problems of this place clear to her is her work on video as an on-screen talent on the very popular Bon Appetit YouTube channel. We're going to spend the entire next chapter on video and what it did to Bon Appetit. But for now, just know that Priya ended up seeing what was wrong with Bonapetit. And she went to talk to her boss, the deputy editor.

I basically said, I don't think this is a very good place for a person of color to work and our content feels really white. It was like she knew. that what I was saying was correct and she had just been like waiting for someone to say the words and I was like, what do you think about making this part of my job like diversity and inclusion?

Like keep in mind, I'm not trained in anti-racism or implicit bias. I was just like, I have to do something. So I was like, what about if I started an initiative and met with every single department and had them set goals

and they were super into this idea off the bat. I want to take this moment to zoom out. Past this white editor that Priya is talking to, past Adam Rappaport even. We're in mid-2019 now, almost two years after Condé Nast had first indicated that diversity was a priority. The things that companies actually want to prioritize, they tend to put money behind. Condé had not done that with Bon Appetit. There was no real money here for equity training, no effort to provide Adam with a coach or a consultant or workshops to educate him. top executives were not holding people like Adam accountable for inclusivity.

They were rewarding them for traffic and ad dollars. In 2019, the big concern at Bon Appetit was just budget. They'd been told to cut about a million dollars in costs. So pressed between bosses who said they wanted diversity but didn't want to pay for it, and junior staffers who Adam didn't seem to be able to pay attention to, Priya raising her hand was very convenient. Bon Appetit added diversity consulted. to Priya's title and scraped together from somewhere else in the budget, 500 bucks a month to pay for her work.

It was extremely ad hoc, and it was communicated in a very ad hoc way. Like, there was no announcement, not even an email about Priya's new responsibilities. She wasn't told that she was picking up work that Ryan and Jesse had already started, and they were not told about her. It was weird because it was just like, oh, well, like, so what does that say about the work that we've been doing? But it was also like so, so we were just so happy to have her too. Because it was just like, Priya's lovely.

And we were happy to have more people invested who were actively had the authority and the responsibility to change things. So it was it was that split thing where like you're just so happy to have another person there who gets it. But also your heart breaks for them because you know that they're kind of being set up to fail. This easily could have been a fight. But to everybody's credit, it was not. Priya and Jesse and Ryan would end up working together. Priya would even fight to have Ryan paid for some of the diversity work that she was doing. Jesse says though, even back then, in that moment, the main thing that he could see was just that Priya was essentially walking into a trap.

It looked like power, but it wasn't. And even someone like Priya, who Adam seemed to take really seriously, in a role like this best case scenario, she'd end up being ignored. That's what Jessi's he thought. But something happened soon after that gave Priya what looked like a sudden infusion of real power. The deputy editor went on maternity leave, and Priya was chosen to cover for her. She wouldn't just be diversity consultant. She'd be filling in for Adam's deputy editor, number three on the masthead. After the break, a new era at Bon Appetit. Welcome back to the show. So a lot of the stories about Bon Appetit and all the ways it doesn't change. But here's a moment to notice something. We're in late 2019 now, and this position that Priya will be

covering, deputy editor. Not long ago, it had been held by Andrew Nolton, the guy with the drink in his hand, telling people their food smelled funny. And now it's going to Priya, a person who is so impatient and anxious to make things better for people of color. She loses sleep at night over it. And this for her was the first time in a while that she was starting to feel optimistic. I was like, this is really exciting. This is like an opportunity for me to like, make some real change. Like I get a big glass office. You know, like it was very,

I was really excited going into this. Priya had some ambitious plans. Like, she wanted to make space for more diverse stories. One of her goals was for Jessie to write a feature. And there was this other thing. Condon asked, as a company, had been increasingly, obviously, out of touch with the world that was changing its ideas

about what was actually cool and what was actually appropriate. Like, you might remember. remember in 2017, Vogue featured a giant spread of white supermodel Carly Closs dressed as a geisha. That was for their diversity issue. Bon Appetit had its own versions of that gaffe. Like, in my head, if you pick a year, I can usually tell you what embarrassed apology Bonapete had had to issue. Like, I think of 2016 as the Fah year. That's when they put out an apology titled About That Fah video. The video in question was a PSA from a white chef

explaining how people were eating their fah wrong. My approach is to start by putting a few slices of jalapino in the bowl. Next thing I'm going to do is squeeze as much lime as they give me in the soup because they never give you enough lime. Grab some Thai basil. The internet lost its mind. Part of it was that he was white. Part of it was that the chef kept comparing fah to ramen.

Part of it was that his advice contradicted what actual Vietnamese people were saying about fah. But if you're going to put hoison and sarache in your soup, please taste your broth first, and please don't do it in front of the chef. Even talking to people at Bon Appetite Today, they still refer to this as Fugate. But screw-ups like that kept happening, where Bonap would think it was a good idea to filter non-white foods or non-white neighborhoods through some white writer, always with this sassy, no-it-all attitude. And it's very interesting to me because I was like, oftentimes the voiciest articles were like told, from a very white, condescending, somewhat ignorant point of view, but Adam's just prized voice above all so much. It felt out of touch, and people online were getting sick of it.

And so Priya wanted to lend a finer touch to the magazine. She was going to help lead a Bon Appetit that was actually sensitive to other cultures. Right off the bat, though, one of the first stories she got handed as deputy editor was something she thought was going to be a problem. The first essay that landed on my desk to edit was a story in which we had sent a white writer who doesn't speak French to a like a party for Vintners in France. The story made no sense. The writer somehow managed to like also like offend French people. When Priya first told me about this, it didn't sound that bad.

Of all the sins of Bon Appetit, offending French people seemed minor. But then I read the article. It starts with the line, quote, Let's get one thing straight. I know very little about wine. End quote. The writer then spends multiple paragraphs explaining the actual Bon Appetit pitch process for the story that you're reading, how he knew it was a half-baked idea and he expected the editors to reject it. But then they told him, no, we will pay to fly you to France so you may drink a lot of wine.

And he does. And he gets drunk. It was the kind of article that a decade ago maybe he might have read as charming. the bumbling American drinking his way through wine country. But Priya thought it felt outdated, the kind of thing that would annoy people online, an American gawking at a foreign culture. I don't know.

I very much felt it. Like, felt like the ignorance towards French culture. And I like, I literally just like, how can we run this piece? And I was like made to feel like I was insane for saying this. Elise, the Japanese American editor who pitched that hot pot idea, she told me that the wine story ended up on her desk too. Oh my gosh.

This story also just. drove me insane. Yes, because I remember there was a day where Priya couldn't work on it or something. I remember I had the file while during the clothes. I had it for like literally just the day. I was like, okay, so then I just like read it and I remember reading it. I was like, this story is crazy. Like, I can't believe this got a sign. The resources that that one wine story got made them all think about their pitches that had been politely ignored to death. And that was just the first issue Priya edited, the beginning of many battles to come. She had walked into this position with lofty ideas about making space for new kinds of stories.

But she was being handed piece after piece of just like Bon Appetit Standards. I remember I had to edit a story about Opry Ski in Montreal. I had to edit a story about a seafood place in Martha's Vineyard that one editor really loved. And I made such a big stink of it to like the main editor. that she like went to Adam and Adam just like completely shut it down and was just like, no, we've already shot the story. It has to go in. Jesse would be sitting at his editorial desk, just quietly watching these back and forts. So many of the doors are all glass. So you can always see who is in different meetings. You can, even if you're just walking by, you can see who's at the table.

Like, it's no secret that like Adam was loud. In a lot of ways, you could hear people being shot down or people being politely redirected. So I saw her raising the flags, raising the concerns, and constantly going to Adam's office being like, what is this and why? For the people in the diversity crew, what it felt like was Bonapete was this place that had promised a bunch of people of color,

it was ready to renovate, and now was running around saying, like, wait, wait, don't move that. That's my grandmother's couch. Like, this magazine at its start had been made to fit Adam's idea of cool. And now it was, hard to criticize that magazine without seeming like you were criticizing Adam himself.

Like he would very often get defensive in these meetings when I would try to say things critical of Bon Appetit. I remember we had a meeting in the editorial site about what is what on brand means. And a bunch of us brought up that like on brand for Bon Appetit usually means like a skinny, beautiful, like white chef that serves like natural wine that has like natural wine at their restaurant. And natural wine is such a good. Goodness, somehow.

Yeah. Adam, like, really pushed back on that instead of, like, taking a step back and, like, questioning, like, oh, if my staff feels this way, maybe there's a big issue. Of course, it wasn't the whole staff that felt that way. The most senior editorial people were white and had been there a while. They didn't really want to stir things up with their boss. And in a way, all of this is just another expression of Adam's original sin. Sure, the white social club had invited in some new members, but the coin of the reds. there was still about being liked by Adam.

Adam, like, I remember said in an interview, like, I hire people who I'd want to hang out with. Like, that was very much his operating mentality. I always felt like he didn't know what to make of me because, like, for that very reason, I feel like Adam was just, like, constantly deciding whether or not he actually wanted to hang out with me. I mentioned in the last episode that even though you won't hear Adam in this story, I've talked to him, pretty extensively. And when it comes to the events of this chapter, there is not a lot that he disputes. He was on his phone too much. He didn't always listen to Priya. But he did suggest one edit. He thinks that Priya and Jesse and the others, they changed the magazine more than they saw.

Of course, it is an Adam's best interest to say that, but I didn't have to take his word for it, Because I sort of lost my mind last year and started buying these back issues of Bon Appetit off eBay. The floor of my apartment is currently a giant grid of 10 years of Bon Appetit covers. I can see the invention of Adams Magazine, the Gwyneth Paltrow cover. I can see the era where all the Asian recipes were written by white writers. I can see the arrival of Alison Roman, her gorgeous red-stained berry pies on the cover. The Jesse Ryan Priya era. That one snakes around the leg of my couch.

I have to say, the later issues of that era, like from beginning of 2020, they are very different. You see it as soon as you open the magazine. Like, you can even take the issue with the Martha's Vineyard Story. In that same magazine, there's also a piece on a Hmong restaurant in Minneapolis. There were recipes from a black chef who explored the connections between African and Appalachian food. In Ryan's story, the Be in Black. did get capitalized. And Jesse got his future story, a few actually. I think the reason that Priya and her crew doesn't easily remember these victories is because

the cost of winning them felt so humiliating. That is the flavor that overpowers these memories. What they remember is all the haggling, the feeling of a long negotiation with a brick wall. Whatever stories they were able to add, the core of what the magazine was stayed the same. a magazine for white people told from an almost completely white perspective. Here's Ryan talking about how exhausting it all was for Priya. You know, when the people at the top are undermining everything she says, when she's leaving Adam's office in tears with her shoulders hunched and just like exhausted and we go meet in the prop closet and she's like, I can't do this anymore.

And then on top of that, you have people on staff also undermining her because they're taking after the actions of the people up top of, top. And there you have a lot of people talking shit about the work that she's doing. Filling in for Julia, that job brought me to like such a dark place. Like doing Julia's job made me want to quit Bon Appetit, period, and just like walk away from it all. Because it was just the amount of time I would cry in my office. Because I was filling in for Julia, I like got to use her office, which at first was very exciting. I have this shiny glass office at Kandai Nass.

You feel like you've made it. It also has a clear door. So to cry in that office, you have to like really crouch down into a corner and like just accept the fact that people are just going to see you cry as they walk by. And that was normal. That was like a pretty regular part of my existence. It was just like this idea that I think a lot of people in the office thought that I had power, thought that I had influence. But I didn't. I didn't have any of that.

Jesse's deep suspicion in the end turned out to be right. It was a trap. But there are so many of these traps. Talking to different people of color at Bon Appetit, it felt like whatever strategy anybody used to try to leverage power, these different strategies would mean that those people just got burned in a different way. I want to tell you one last story about one more of these people. Christina Che.

Christina's Korean American, and she's, started off at Bonapetit as an assistant web editor. She started much earlier than Priya, Jesse, or any of them. She sort of belongs to the previous generation, actually, the people of the first chapter. And Christina, too, had her own moments of frustration and discomforts. And she tried to address them in her own way. Like, one of the big ones for her was actually Foggate in 2016. That video had horrified her. She had taken it upon herself to write this long piece, a manifesto about how Bonapetit had deeply stretched. screwed up, and she asked to have that manifesto published on the website. The deputy editor

ignored her email, and when she tried to escalate it to Adam, he told her, manifestos were not a bon appetit format. She showed me that draft from 2016. And it's just so funny. It's so funny looking back and reading this. It's like seeing baby Christina in her dreams. I know, I know. But you know what's so funny is that like I had buried away that chapter of my life to the point where I had actually even after the events of June and beyond really started to kick in I had forgotten that I had written this thing and why is that you think I think part of the reason is that there's just something really biting about the low blow of a no response email That was in 2016.

And since then, things had actually changed for Christina. She'd left the magazine. She'd come back, taken on a higher-ranking job, associate editor. She was closer to Adam now, the one real currency of power at Bon Appetit. And Christina had developed a whole menu of strategies for getting his attention, for gently guiding him away from saying some dumb thing. With Adam, I think there was always, the priority was always make sure it comes off kind of more like a joke than serious, you know? Make sure it comes off more like a sort of ha-ha moment

with a friend being like, oh, Adam, like you can't say that. Oh, like if you're criticizing him, it's more jokey than serious? Yeah, because that was the humor is a way in, right? It's not the way you want to be in, but it is a way more in than you'd be able to get without it. These kinds of moments could be tricky. They could be uncomfortable. But they were working. Christina was getting stories in the magazine.

She was getting covers. She no longer felt like an outsider. She was a part of Ben Appetit. And so when this new generation showed up, talking about everything that was wrong with the place, it felt surprisingly personal to her. When someone like Priya came in, there was very much a feeling of being very territorial

and being sort of like, you know, sort of who are. you to say these things about my team and my work and ultimately me. Christina usually would just sit silently through these diversity meetings. She didn't get involved. But after everything blew up in the summer of 2020, after the scandal at Bon Appetit, after the summer's protests, Christina had this shock of revelation. Like, wait, why had she been on the other side of the table from Priya?

It felt like waking up from a bad drug trip, left with the feeling that you've done something very wrong. She felt like the blame for everything that happened at Bon Appetit belonged to her. The way that I experienced that and internalized that in those months after the summer felt really hard to truly, there was truly like a not insignificant amount of time when I think I felt as equally responsible for everything that had happened as someone like Adam. even though like I mean obviously you had truly no power like truly compared to Adam but that's where I think it gets really complicated because I think that um I don't know if you've had any conversations around this idea of soft power no I haven't it's something that I've thought about a lot it's something that has come up in conversations I've had with people since but you know I I think that the atom currency, you know, the power of being liked by atom, that's the soft power. I think the problem with soft power, like the way you're describing it, is that if you use it for something important, like challenging atom or forcing change, like it goes away. Yeah, I mean, because it's not real.

So I make my point. I don't know if you actually had power. Even now, Christina's left with real anger with herself, for the complicity, for not being on the right side or making the right choices. But I have to say, of all the people in this chapter, I identify with her the most. The company where I work, Gimlet, had its own version of these problems. The white people who ran the place hired people of color, promised them change that never quite seemed to materialize. a group of employees tried to fix the place themselves, and eventually things ended up as these things often do,

in a union drive. Plenty of people joined that fight. I did not. To the extent I talked about it, I talked about the way that their fight was stepping on my toes. It took eight months of reporting on Bon Appetit for me to see how wrong I was about all of that. And if I'm honest, I'm still processing the anger that I feel toward myself.

I wish I'd made different choices. But I also think that ideally, employees shouldn't have to make those kinds of choices at all. Choices like that end up defining our jobs when the people in charge have not done theirs. Because after all, they are the ones with the real power. A bon Appetit. After all that the diversity crew went through,

there was this one moment where you could see the power at the top with perfect clarity. The moment happened last May. After police killed George Floyd, one big advertiser, Procter and Gamble, would threaten to pull their ad dollars from one Condonass brand, Vogue, if their magazine remained as white as it was. Within a week as if by magic, the company had put together a solid diversity strategy with real teeth and real money behind it. That's all it took. A horrific killing and a stern email from the maker of Crest's toothpaste. Before I leave you this week, let's just celebrate one person's victory.

Remember Jesse, who we open the chapter with? He's an editor at Eater Now. He's doing well. I asked him what marks if any Bon Appetit had left. And he said that there's really one thing he notices. Like any time I might have to do things that don't always feel like they're within the scope of my job. That might be really irksome.

And like, nine times out of ten, that's a response to like stuff that happened at BA. I'm just being like, okay, is this actually like an issue? or is this just like a small annoying thing? It's really, it's so really just like a toxic relationship, like a romantic toxic relationship. Wait, is that me or is that like the thing that that person did to me? And it's just like because you were really intentional after the breakup of just like processing

and really talking it through like both with yourself and with a qualified and acceptable like mental health professional and friends and everything. You're just like, okay, no, I'm. I know who I am, I know where I'm at, and I know that I don't have to carry that package anymore. Because it would never mind to carry in the first place. It was nice of me to offer, but that was not something that they were owed. It was not something that should have been required of me.

And I know that now. So, yeah. Good on you, Jesse. Good on you. It's just like, at the end of the day, I got a job where I make twice as much as I did before. You know, I have health care. I have, like, my own apartment. Like, I have my dream job.

Like, all of this was, like, if you want the hallmark of it, like, yeah, sure, it looks like this is the romantic's happy end. But, like, my life is still going. My story is still going. So, in the next installment of the Test Kitchen. All of a sudden, we have this beautiful new kitchen. We were the envy of everybody. We walk in and you're like, yeah, I'm a badass, right? Like, we're on the 30th floor, and I'm in this really amazing kitchen, and fuck you, everybody else.

Video arrives at Bon Appetit. I felt like one night I went to sleep, and then I woke up and everyone was famous. There was the video monster. What happens to a workplace like this when you film it and put it on the internet? Hello! Today on it's live, it's getting weird. It just worked a lot because it was like cheers for like cooking videos. Like it got to the point I just, I didn't trust the video team anymore.

This episode was reported by me, Shrithy Pinnamadamy. It was edited by PJ Vote with additional editing by Stephanie Fu and Ashley C. Ford. Reply All is hosted by Emmanuel Jochi, PJ, P.J.V. and Alex Goldman. Our show is produced by Fia Benin, Damiana Marquette, Anna Foley, Jessica Young, and Lisa Wang. Our creative director is Tim Howard. We were mixed by Rick Kwan and Kate Balinski. Our show is fact-tracked by Ben Phelan. Music by Mariana Romano, Luke Williams, and Tim Howard. Huge thanks this week to our guest editors, Brendan Klinkenberg, Risha Kish Heirway, and Simene Nasrat. Thanks also to Lydia Pahlgren and Emily Wen.

And thank you to the current management of Bonapete, was so supportive towards employees of color who wanted to talk to us. And O'Meel's Donek, who kindly let us roast his wine story for a full radio minute. You can listen to our show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening.