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Mayonnaise & Breast Milk
Bon Appetit!
Welcome back, me.
I took a little summer break to focus on my tan.
Unfortunately my Scottish and Danish ancestry mandates an elmer’s glue complexion.
Speaking of white liquids you should try to avoid getting all over your hands, enjoy today’s issue.
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Mayonnaise & Breast Milk
A lot was lost in 2020.
A lot of big stuff.
Jobs. Grandmas. Whatever blindness to racial injustice that was left in America.
There was so much big stuff, we forgot about a lot of the medium stuff - remember the murder hornets?
And we forgot about a lot of the small stuff.
This story starts, for me, with the loss of something (relatively) small in 2020, a crazy five years for one internet chef, and a few lessons learned along the way.
In the few years prior to 2020, no one was doing YouTube better than the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen.
Somehow, they had compiled an incredible, scrappy team to start pumping out content that didn’t just feel like an old magazine in video form, but like the next generation of food network.
It was fun, and engaging. The characters were relatable. The shows were messy. There was real momentum.
Lesson 1: Don’t try to under pay your minority employees to save a few bucks. Don’t be racist.
Then, in June 2020, during what can only be described as the worst time in history to have a picture of yourself in brown face appear online, Adam Rapoport, the editor-in-chief of Bon Appetit had a picture of himself in brown face appear online.
This sparked a wave of public outcry among the BA staff.
They were underpaying and underprioritizing minority employees, and the pressure cooker was ready to blow.
Sohla El-Waylly (who is a badass) led a justified series of resignations that gutted the beautiful thing that was being built.
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It was absolutely the right thing, and though I was sad to see a special corner of YouTube fall apart, I have been thrilled to see so many of the original BA Test Kitchen staff thrive on their own path.
Since 2020, Sohla El-Waylly, Priya Krishna, Rick Martinez, Brad Leone, Molly Baz and more ex-BA staffers have unleashed an onslaught of fantastic cookbooks, content and cool stuff.
Lesson 2: Sometimes the same match that burns it down lights the path forward.
But none have had a stranger ride than Molly Baz.
Molly Baz was born in New York, and during college began working in kitchens to pursue a career as a chef.
She made her way to Bon Appetit in 2015 as a recipe tester and became a prominent voice on the BA Test Kitchen YouTube channel.
In 2020, following Sohla’s lead, Baz stepped back from video content, then fully left Bon Appetit later that year to focus on a Patreon-supported Recipe Club and her first cookbook.
From that point to now has been just under five years.
For Molly, I can only assume it has felt like 50.
Here’s the timeline:
March 2020 - Covid
2020 - Molly and her husband Ben move from NYC to LA.
June 2020 - The aforementioned shitstorm of racism and resignations.
November 2020 - Molly’s Recipe Club launches.
April 2021 - Cook This Book hits shelves and the NYT bestseller list in 2021, and is truly, honestly one of the best cookbooks on my personal shelf.
October 2023 - More is More, the second cookbook, hits shelves to similar positive reception as the first. This one also gets a lot of use in my house.
2023/24 - Molly and Ben announce they are expecting a baby, and Molly takes to social media with a refreshing honesty about the experience.
May 2024 - Molly is featured in a Times Square billboard campaign for Swehl lactation cookies.
May 2024 - The ad is taken down after being ‘flagged for review’ for inappropriate content, causing an uproar over double standards around women’s bodies in advertising.
May 2024 - The folks at seed.com use their own Times Square billboard space to bring back Molly’s ad in protest
June 2024 - Molly becomes the first pregnant woman to be on a cereal box
June 2024 - Molly gives birth to her son, Gio.
November 2024 - Ayoh!, a line of fancy sandwich mayo variant things comes out. I’ll take a second here to note that I bought them all and they are legit pretty good. Tuna salad made with giardinera mayo is a good thing.
January 2025 - Molly and Ben lose their house in the LA fires.
Lesson 3: Life is unpredictable.
Five years ago, Molly Baz was working from home like everyone else, filming her last video for Bon Appetit.
Did she know what the next five years would bring?
Probably not.
And the point of this entirely too long diatribe on Bon Appetit and Molly Baz, is:
Neither do you.
So go do something you want to do, because you want to do it.
Maybe that choice to be honest about what you’re going through will land you on a fruit loops box.
Crazier things have happened.
The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.
Happy birthday New Nouns
This is the final issue of year 1 of New Nouns.
I am genuinely curious what you think.
Why are you still here?
What do you want to see more of?
What do you want me to shut the hell up about?
Reply and let me know.
And here’s to a whole lot more.
be good
z
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