Itxu Díaz: The Machismo of Melons and Other Recipes
I won’t hide. I celebrate Epicurious’s decision to remove racism from its culinary dishes.
I consider it unacceptable that there was an Asian Noodle Salad among their recipes. What were they thinking? How humiliating, and what a savage attack against Asians and their noodles. As a proportionate response, perhaps Xi Jinping should bomb the magazine’s headquarters in retaliation for this thunderous racism.
Luckily, the magazine’s new management has decided to rename the recipe Cold Rice Noodle Salad, thereby eliminating the racist allusions.
I can finally sleep now, after so many restless nights, drowning in a sea of tears, all because of these painfully humiliating noodles for Asians.
There’s still much to be done.
In order to speed things up, I have been reviewing other recipes and am terrified by the proliferation of hatred and segregation found in the old Epicurious cookbook and its famous Bon Appétit, which began in the ’50s — a pernicious decade in which satanic things were filmed like “Cinderella,” where several disempowered girls compete for a nauseating male and show multiple signs of caligynephobia, or “Sleeping Beauty,” where Disney objectifies princesses, stereotypes witches and promotes pandemics by normalizing the kiss.
This is just a tiny sample of the violence and gastronomic discrimination that I have found in Epicurious:
The magazine says that “the best eggnog has no eggs in it” and it seems to me a macho provocation of terrible taste, in addition to horrible discrimination against conventional milk punch. If the magazine wants to make eggnog without eggs, my suggestion, to avoid offense, is to call it Not Eggnog.
But Condé Nast magazine makes more than a slip-up when it comes to eggs; it is a whole organized campaign of egg harassment.
Without the slightest objection, it titles one of its articles “How to Tell if an Egg is Bad,” subliminally hinting that something that has come out of a female hen may be bad, which may cause many adolescent eggs to feel excluded and later fall into alcoholism, drugs, poverty, sexual debauchery and organized crime.
Worse still is when the recipe book defines horchata as a Spanish drink that “dates back to the Moorish invasion.” As a Spaniard, I feel frightened by such an offense, the most degrading of all Islamophobic comments.
In Spain there was no Moorish invasion. What happened is that people from North Africa (we should never call them “Moorish”) went on vacation to this beautiful peninsula, to give white flowers and traditional sweets to Christians and greet them with kisses, only to receive in return a savage response full of hatred, barbarism and racism, typical of the white heterosexual male. The tiger nut milk is not to blame for this revolting attitude.
Although it may seem hard to believe in the middle of the 21st century, the cookbook also contains a recipe called Concubine’s Chicken, even though this is ridiculously macho, homophobic, queerphobic, poultryphobic and concubinephobic.
What is Epicurious to judge the young Yang Guifei that way, who inspired the name of the dish after doing I don’t know what in the emperor of Chang-an’s bedroom?
I also found a recipe for Chipotle Pork Loin that you can’t even read without a feeling of disgust. In the opening lines, the cook already proposes murdering a pig with the help of a third person — it says, “ask your butcher to cut it into steaks.”
I consider it unacceptable that in 2021 we continue to propose to our readers that they chop up pigs or chickens without worrying the least about their feelings or incentives for participating in the recipe.
Then they try to wash their dirty conscience by proposing “87 Best Vegan Recipes,” in which they do not hide their passion for extreme violence either: “butchering the lettuce” (lachanophobia), “dicing the mushrooms” (mycophobia), and “taking two good melons” (good heavens!) are forms of cruelty incompatible with a diverse society.
Epicurious’s list of culinary offenses could go on forever.
From my humble pulpit, without fear of reprisals, I demand the immediate censorship of the current Epicurious, the dismissal of all its cooks and that the group’s leadership be brought to justice for exalting machismo, blatant racism, Islamophobic behavior, the attempted murder of a pig, homophobia, vegalophobia, vaccinophobia and possible possession of chemical weapons (let’s not forget that traces of chili, cayenne and wasabi have been detected in his kitchen).
Epicurious’ reactionary cookbooks must be burned in the public square, in the most exemplary way possible, as part of the UN’s 2030 Agenda.
Finally, I also demand the dismissal of director David Tamarkin. From now on, a young, transgender, vegan cauliflower — if possible, of Asian origin — must exercise the management of the magazine.
This article first appeared on The Western Journal en Español.
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