#8 Priya Krishna on food journalism and her powerful exit from Bon Appétit
Pod with CNN's Mitra Kalita, startups, and sparks
Welcome to Trailblazers! We bring you trailblazing by and for South Asians every other Monday. Visit our IG, FB, and LinkedIn, and archives.
Campaign Trail🇺🇸blazers
We have to address the elephant (or donkey) in the room. We’re just 24 hours away from better understanding the future of this country. For the last of our Election series, we caught up with the South Asian trailblazers running for office in 2020. They have a message for you:
Credits to our Growth Lead, Alisha, for helping bring this project to life!
Catching Fire 🚀 your news roundup
🇺🇸 Biden works to win Indians in India West op-ed
“And as we value the Indian-American diaspora, we’ll continue to value the U.S.-India relationship. For Donald Trump, it’s photo-ops. For me, it’s getting things done.”
It’s a strong and 11th hour ode to the Indian-American constituency. Throughout the piece, Biden emphasizes his ties to the community and policy agenda as it relates to priority topics for this group: immigration and foreign policy. The content and decision to write the piece signal the increasing importance of Indian voters, in this election and moving forward.
⚙️ Indian startups take center-stage from TechCrunch
Y-Combinator is one the world’s foremost startup accelerators. Its portfolio of companies boasts the likes of Airbnb, DoorDash, Reddit, and several other apps sitting on your phone. In the accelerator’s most recent batch of startups, a trend became apparent: a nontrivial number of the companies were Indian-owned and operated.
This piece highlights the winners and the burgeoning venture capital scene that’s increasingly dedicating dollars to startups in the country — an estimated $10 billion in 2019.
📰 French cartoons spark protest in Pakistan
The name Charlie Hebdo might sound familiar from 2015. It’s a satirical French magazine, and in 2015, there was a shooting in its offices that resulted in 12 casualties at the hands of al-Qaeda members.
The magazine is back in the news as republished caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad have stirred controversy and violence. Last week, a teacher who shared the drawings was decapitated by a young student. In response, France’s President Macron paid tribute to him and took a hardline around free speech, which has enraged Muslims around the globe. In Pakistan, people have taken to the streets, calling for the boycott of French goods. This is the latest in a growing schism between the minority communities in the country, within and beyond its borders. Read more from the AP and the NYT.
Hot off the Pod 🎧 S. Mitra Kalita, Senior VP at CNN
Subscribe to know when the pod drops tonight. Mitra is a media veteran who currently serves as Senior Vice President at CNN Digital.
In this episode, we talk about Mitra’s journey through journalism: from serving as Managing Editor of the LA Times, Executive Director of Quartz, to Founding Editor of Mint, an Indian newspaper. We discuss the longstanding challenges facing newsrooms, and the litany of experiences she’s had in this world: from winning Pulitzers to managing the “fake news” cycle. We also dive into her why. Mitra shares what drew her to media in the first place, and we also get a glimpse into what’s next for her: she recently announced her forthcoming departure from CNN to pursue community media ventures.
Fireside Chat 🔥 Priya Krishna, Food Journalist
Priya Krishna is a contributing food writer for the New York Times, the New Yorker, and other prominent news outlets. She’s also the author of two cookbooks, Indian-ish, one of the top cookbooks of 2019, and also Ultimate Dining Hall Hacks, a college-themed cookbook. Priya’s also a YouTube personality, known for fashioning her famous dishes on video for the Food Network and Bon Appétit’s Test Kitchen channel. As many of you know from a previous newsletter, Priya exited the Conde Nast-owned video platform this Summer, in response to pay inequities for its PoC contributors.
What gave way to you writing your cookbook, Indian-ish?
When I certainly got Lucky Peach, my Indian identity was not at all front and center for me, until the head of our publication was working on a vegetable cookbook. And I remember looking at the lineup of recipes and thinking, ‘Why are there no Indian recipes in a vegetable cookbook?’ So I emailed him and he said, well, find me some so I sent him a bunch of my mom's recipes. He loved them so much, he put them all in the book.
The editor of that book also really loved my mom's recipes and basically said, ‘I love how your mom's recipes are like rooted in Indian culture, but feel very accessible and show me how accessible the cuisine is. I like how quick, simple, yet flavorful your mom’s food is. And so I pitched a cookbook, saying that I was just going to document my mom's recipes. I said I wouldn’t translate them because no one needs to make Indian food accessible when it already is accessible. Millions of people are making it every single day. And that's how the book came about. I don't think I fully knew what it should be or expected what it was going to be. But the more I worked on it, the more it just felt great.
You left Bon Appétit due to pay inequities. How did you think and feel about that decision?
Frankly, it was really scary. It was terrifying. I had felt really unhappy there for a long time but was afraid to lose that platform which has millions of subscribers — it is really, really scary to walk away from all that. But I remember like talking to my colleagues, Sohla and Rick, and we decided to believe that opportunities would come our way. We decided, that in that moment, it was more important to make a statement, and show people that we are not willing to be underpaid. We need to walk away and trust that that will be fine. But that's the thing — it takes a tremendous amount of privilege to walk away. You need to have savings in the bank among other things, and all three of us were thankfully in the position to be able to do that. We all trusted that other opportunities would come our way, and they have. We're really grateful for that.
The pod with Priya drops in the next issue!
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Hope you enjoyed this issue. And remember to take a beat this week — it’s sure to be a long one.