Among the vast array of videos on social media, clips centered on food and beauty are undoubtedly two of the most prominent — though not the only — categories of content.
It drifted into my consciousness that other people didn't eat rice because they weren't from Savannah and Charleston, but we ate rice because that's where our family was from..When you were a kid, did you go from Philadelphia to the Lowcountry to visit family?.
We never went to visit anybody.We didn't really have family left.My father had one sister who still lived in Savannah, although she was not one of the cooking Erwins.
The cooking Erwins all lived in Miami, so we went there sometimes.. My mother was born in Philadelphia, but her parents were from Charleston.When they moved to Philadelphia, it was my grandmother, my grandfather, my great grandmother, and my great aunt.
I found out much, much, much later that my great-grandfather was alive until the seventies or eighties, when I thought my great-grandmother was widowed.
Instead, she just left his sorry ass.Before then, it was common practice for brands and publications to hastily approach us for work during key celebratory months in the year, most notably Hispanic Heritage Month, Black History Month, or the Lunar New Year.
And that's something that mainstream food media still needs to sit with and unpack.. BIPOC food creators shouldn't have to be well-versed in only one kind of cuisine and be pigeonholed by our nationality or background.We shouldn't be tokenized as the official voice of a cuisine we grew up with.
We need to see a variety of Black and brown hands preparing and cooking all kinds of food online, the same way white food personalities do: Going viral outside of our own communities and embracing all of the professional successes and opportunities that come with it.In the meantime and until that happens, we'll be in our own little intersectional corners of the internet, creating recipes and cooking without the fanfare of becoming the new, trendy social media darling.(Keep screen awake).