It’s been more than a year of big grocery-store hauls in preparation for cooking, and more cooking, and … more cooking. During the pandemic, whether you were lovingly tending to your sourdough starter or simply boiling some water for another box of mac and cheese, many of us became intimately familiar with our kitchens. And as Hannah Giorgis wrote, professional chefs adapted their culinary skills to the moment, personally connecting with their audiences to share accessible home-cooking tips.
Some of those same chefs, and food media more broadly, also spent the past year reckoning with issues of racism and representation in the industry. While diversity efforts at major food magazines remain essential, people outside of legacy institutions have been doing the work for years to make the food world more inclusive. The chef and historian Michael W. Twitty’s The Cooking Gene and the chef and author Klancy Miller’s biannual print magazine, For the Culture, are just two more recent examples of smaller publications that celebrate Black people’s innovations in cooking.