"We struck a balance without even realizing it"
An interview with Apoorva Sripathi on our work to bridge the niche and the universal, shift perspectives, and track creme brulées
We’re so honoured to have been hosted by the brilliant for a conversation about FFJ shared with paid subscribers of her newsletter, shelf offering, last week. Apoorva wrote for our first issue, MILK, and we always look forward to receiving her smart, tender, and honest essays in our inbox.
If you’ve ever wanted us to spill the tea on how FFJ started, how we choose our issue themes, what it’s really like to run an online publication, and much more (apparently our original interview came out at 11k words!), Apoorva has generously allowed us to syndicate the interview for our paid subscribers as well. We hope you enjoy our conversation; it begins with an introductory note from Apoorva.
Apoorva: Feminist Food Journal(FFJ) editors Isabela Vera and Zoë Johnson were my guests last week. Started amidst the pandemic, the magazine regularly publishes accessible, incisive (and necessary) writing on food and culture at the intersection of global feminist perspectives. Whether it’s Isabela’s latest piece on her reckoning with family identity and relationships or Zoë’s illustrations, their work is thoughtful, personal, and vital.
Over the course of an hour and spanning three time zones, we chatted about friendly Canadian energy; their approach to research; sex, consumption, and liberation; and finding a voice in the crowd of online food publications. As the video call unfolded (and so did the laughs), it was clear that this felt like a warm and inspired conversation between old friends. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. Brace yourselves, this is a long, long read.
Apoorva: Hi Isabela and Zoë, thank you so much for being here and Happy New Year.
Isabela & Zoë: Happy New Year and thank you for having us.
Apoorva: What are some of your fondest memories cooking and eating and how did that contribute to what you do now?
Zoë: It's a very good question. I'm trying to think of one perfect memory. I grew up in a household that very much revolved around the kitchen… my mum was an amazing cook, and I always cooked with her growing up. I remember doing all kinds of fun kitchen projects and learning how to make bread. Sometimes I wonder how much of it is like real memory, and how much of it is I've seen a picture of myself making bread [laughs] as a little kid at the table covered in dough.
I also think that travelling… so when I was small, I was incredibly shy, like, painfully shy, I wouldn't talk to anybody except my parents. When I was in grade three, we went on a year-long trip to Asia, Europe, and Egypt. I remember on that trip my parents were like, okay, you got to be brave enough to order your own food. And so those experiences of being in the restaurant and trying to get over this big fear of talking to this stranger, but also being in a place where you're sharing food and talking to people about food…
I remember the cafes that we used to always go to became important micro communities in these specific moments. Of course, we weren't there for that long, but especially, I think, travelling with a kid, people were extra extra nice to me. So I remember particularly, I spent my ninth birthday in Egypt, and the cafe that we used to go to always played Shaggy’s ‘Angel’. The people that worked that were so kind and so generous and sharing all kinds of different food cultures with me, going out of their way to share their food. I remember they got me a birthday cake as well. I think food has been an important through line on everything that's happened in my life.
Isabela: Yeah, so like Zoë I definitely grew up in a house where food was like the central organising principle of everything. And my mom is also an amazing cook. I did not grow up cooking with her; my brother did. But we grew up generally just completely obsessed with eating and talking about what we were eating. For my mom, food was also the central organising principle of her house as well. So showing her love to us through food was something she learned from her mother who was completely food obsessed and wanted to be Julia Child reincarnate [laughs] as the Canadian version.
I ate a lot of Chinese food growing up. Zoë and I are both from Vancouver, but I'm from the suburb that is about 75% Asian actually, and I grew up eating a lot of Chinese food, a lot of Cantonese food, especially. So some of my warmest food memories is like Sunday, after soccer games, it's rainy, as always, it's the winter and going for potstickers. And sitting around the lazy Susan in very loud, tiny, busy, busy restaurants. My mom, when I was 13, took me to Europe. She offered me the option of having either a bat mitzvah or going to Europe, and I was like: Europe! I was just blown away by all these foods that I never really tried before. Since I grew up eating a lot of Asian food, not so much European foods, I remember having like my first crème brulée, my first cassoulet, and just absolutely losing my mind. And I kept a little journal ranking all the creme brulées that I ate on that trip [laughs].
Apoorva: You should write about that…
Isabela: I know! I want to but I don’t know where that journal is! I would love to be able to find that and track those creme brulées down again.
Apoorva: That sounds wonderful. I get it, I also ate European food quite late. I want to ask how you guys met? And how did FFJ come about? But also why did it come about? Did you find that food writing just largely lacked a feminist focus or did you think that it wasn't taken seriously enough?
Zoë: I moved to Berlin in 2019, and before I moved there my partner and I were originally planning to spend just a few months, but I secretly had hopes for longer. So I started looking at like what kind of jobs would be available, saw a job at a consulting firm that looked really perfect, applied for it and got an email back from Isabela saying, Hey, we'd love to have you in for an interview. [I] went through a very long and protracted interview process, eventually got hired, and I'm convinced to this day, it's because Isabela saw Vancouver on my CV and was like, yes, another Vancouverite! However, on my first day, Isabela was like, I'm leaving. I'm getting the hell out of here. Welcome. Good luck to you. Goodbye [laughs].
Isabela: Yeah, I was like welcome to Zoë, this is a great place to work. I’m quitting! [laughs] That was January 2020. Then things got a bit hairy in March, and I thought maybe I should stick around a few more months. Because it was not clear what was going on with the pandemic. I will say I was very excited when I saw that Zoë was from Vancouver [laughs].
Apoorva: Did you know you’re hiring your replacement? Was that what it was?
Isabela: I did. I mean, I didn't say that to anyone. But I had an eye towards that. And I felt we could use the injection of some friendly Canadian energy in the office [laughs]. But she also did have relevant experience; it wasn't only pure geographic nepotism. Actually it was work at a journal that she'd done previously, so that's also maybe a good springboard into why Zoë and I [are] working together and why FFJ. Because Zoë also worked as a research assistant or [rather] an editorial assistant at a journal focused on agriculture.
But I did eventually quit, and I went on sabbatical. It was around that time that I started doing a postgraduate certificate in food system studies, and I was getting very interested in all things food, personally and professionally. I took some time off and did a permaculture course in Chile, where my father was born. I also went to work on a farm in Austin, Texas, which was very interesting experience. It was nice, obviously the days were full, but I also had much more time to kind of just read and dream than I'd had at the consulting firm where we met previously.
I was going back and rereading a lot of the classics, say like Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma; Dan Barber, The Third Plate. And I was just feeling like women's voices were really underrepresented in a lot of these narratives about what the future of food should look like, which I found was ironic and also problematic given that women are feeders of families, feeders of societies, making up the majority of small scale farmers… it was with an eye towards that I was like, okay, something is missing here. And I remember writing Zoë, a message from Patagonia, with no service, going around in this permaculture centre, trying to get 3G [to write to Zoë], I think we should start a magazine focused on the intersections of food and feminism. And Zoë said okay, it sounds good. Zoë studied food systems in her undergraduate degree, and I also have a background in journalism. So it seemed like a cool project to put our heads together and bring to life.
Apoorva: So you guys kept in touch even after you left?
Isabela: Oh, yeah. Well, we became friends very quickly, which is the benefit of hiring Canadians [laughs]!