mango curry

thug kitchen: eat like you give a f*ck (2014)

Welcome to Thug Kitchen, bitches. We’re here to help. We started our website to inspire motherfuckers to eat some goddamn vegetables and adopt a healthier lifestyle. Our motto is simple: EAT LIKE YOU GIVE A FUCK. And why not? You eat three times a day. That seems like an adequate amount of fucks to give on a daily basis. But why does the transition from the drive-thru to homemade meals seem so fucking impossible? Maybe it’s because the people who tell you how to cook healthy food come off as so fucking phony. There is an aura of elitism surrounding eating well, and so many people tend to associate health with wealth. As we learned how to cook for ourselves, we couldn’t identify with these beautiful bloggers in their big-ass kitchens waxing poetic about fennel pollen as they stirred up their chanterelle-studded sauces. FUCK. ALL. THAT. We live in the real world.

We don’t need theories to explain why people choose convenience foods over home-cooked meals; we’ve been there. We grew up like most people: Dinners never took more than 10 minutes to heat up and everything was centered around meat and slathered in cheese. We accepted the idea of eating shit because we legitimately thought it was how food was supposed to be. With our parents busy at work and our attention focused on Ninja Turtles, we didn’t fucking bother to learn how to cook for ourselves. This was a time when companies were coloring ketchup purple and teal for whateverthefuck marketing campaign they were running. Potato chips had a goddamn disclaimer on the bag about how the oil might cause anal leakage. What the fuck, right? Those were some dark days in food. We didn’t think we had enough time or money to learn how to cook real food for ourselves, so we willingly ate that fucking nonsense. So, no, we didn’t grow up in wheatgrass-covered huts on some hippie commune. We are your next-door neighbors and somewhere along the way, we learned to eat right. And you can too. Virtue untested is no virtue at all or some shit like that, right? — Michelle Davis (aka Thug Kitchen)

I apologize for the ridiculous length of this pull quote. Part of me wants to write this whole fucking post in Thug Kitchen’s cartoonishly profane voice, but I’ll spare you the second-hand embarrassment. I just need you to get the full gist of what Thug Kitchen was all about when they attempted to anonymously publish Thug Kitchen: Eat Like You Give A F*ck. They wanted to be seen as irreverent, unpretentious, that they didn’t care what the snobby food establishment thought about them. Above all, they wanted to be seen as authentic. Lol.

For anyone not deep in the food blog trenches a decade ago, I’ll provide a brief rundown. Some of this chronology is coming from my own addled elder millennial memory, but I’m also lifting a lot from Matt Duckor’s iconic 2014 Epicurious profile, “Thug Life: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Masterminds of Thug Kitchen,” released a week before their cookbook came out. For some diabolical Condé Nasty reason, Epicurious removed any trace of this profile from their website, but it can still be found on the Wayback Machine.

peekaboo

Thug Kitchen had started just a couple of years previously as an independent vegan food blog. It had modestly chugged along, steadily growing more due to the virality of its eye-catching pre-social media food memes (mostly on Tumblr) than the deliciousness of its recipes.

For example (hopefully children are in the other room):

You must understand the type of humor popular in the late Obama era. 30 Rock had ended in 2013. Trump was elected in 2016. This was basically all we had in between. So, our enterprising little thugs were developing recipes and dropping dank memes in relative obscurity until April 4, 2013, when a certain Academy Award-winning actress turned wellness influencer mentioned them on her up-and-coming newsletter. Goop has also scrubbed much of their content from the internet (I wonder why?), so here’s another link from the Wayback Machine.

This wasn’t a profile. It wasn’t even a paragraph. It was just two memes:

followed by the simple caption. This might be my favorite thing ever.

Thus was the power of Gwyneth in 2013. A few weeks later, after Paltrow mentioned Thug Kitchen on The Rachael Ray Show, their traffic “went through the roof” and they signed a book deal. Everything was coming up Thug.

Fast-forward a year. The book’s about to come out and the elitist food media are asking them to do press to promote it. There’s only one little problem. No one knows who Thug Kitchen actually is. He/she/they are reluctant to show their faces. Now why would food bloggers (not the most inherently glamorous, mysterious crew) want to be more anonymous, more obscure than their natural lot in life dictates. There are only two possible reasons. One is that they are a public figure (a famous actor or politician, or maybe a Michelin starred chef) who are doing this as a lark, a little side project. Think Lorde’s onion ring review Instagram account. The second reason is that they are, for some reason, ashamed of their appearance. Anyone who writes the sentence “Virtue untested is no virtue at all or some shit like that, right?” should be ashamed of themselves no matter what they look like. But we’re either in some sort of Quasimodo situation, or there’s something else about their appearance they don’t want to reveal.

Eventually, Duckor was granted permission to visit the mysterious Thug Kitchen and interview its creators. The authentic desire for fame and approval had eventually superseded any cynical self-preservation instinct. Duckor describes driving around the neighborhood of East Hollywood with Michelle Davis and Matt Holloway, then both 29, learning about the inception of Thug Kitchen. Davis, until recently a cashier at a health food store (Lassens? Erewhon? I need to know) did the recipe development and blog posts. She was Thug Kitchen’s voice. Holloway, an amateur photographer and former assistant at a production company, took the pictures.

What a cool story, right? Two enterprising, talented young people, with few connections to the insular food world, had built something from the ground up that resonated with a big audience. They were bringing accessible, healthy food to a swath of the population that would normally be turned off by any mention of veganism. In Duckor’s profile, there is no explicit mention of Davis’s and Holloway’s race. But there is a photo that would instantly change everything.

Apologies for the poor photo quality. This cursed image has been absolutely eradicated from the World Wide Web. Who are these people’s lawyers? I’m a bit afraid I might get a cease and desist from Davis, who rebranded Thug Kitchen as Bad Manners before starting her Substack, Stir The Pot. So, she’s basically a peer of mine. Hi Michelle, you wouldn’t sue a colleague, would you?

The reveal of Davis’s and Holloway’s pale visages caused an immediate backlash. I don’t have to explain why “thug” is a loaded term. Though the word has Hindi origins—“thuggee” means criminal or swindler—it was used in the UK in the 19th century to denigrate Indians, and it soon traveled across the Atlantic to be weaponized against Black people, especially young working-class Black men. The graph here shows the American usage spiking dramatically in the 1970s, following the Civil Rights Act. This is also roughly when openly saying the N-word became verboten among “polite” white society. So “thug” became a convenient substitute.

This might have stayed a minor food world scandal if not for the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, less than two months before Duckor’s profile of Davis and Holloway came out. The protests in Ferguson reignited the shock and anger following Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012, and Oscar Grant’s murder in 2009, and the murders of thousands of other young Black men who were called “thugs” by the police, by their teachers and neighbors, by white (and Black) presidents alike.

So, the negative response to Thug Kitchen’s unmasking was swift, and it broke through into the mainstream. Oakland-based Bryan Terry, author of Afro-Vegan: Farm Fresh African, Caribbean, and Southern Flavors Remixed, wrote on CNN.com:

It’s no coincidence that Thug Kitchen’s admirers often imagined the “voice” of the site to be that of shrill, vulgar and often uproariously funny black men like actor Samuel L. Jackson or rapper Ghostface Killah, and not that of actor Robert De Niro or Hells Angels founder Sonny Barger. The contrast drawn between the consciously progressive dishes shown and the imagined vulgar, ignorant thug only works if the thug is the kind of grimy person of color depicted in the news and in popular media as hustling drugs on a dystopian block, under the colorful glow of various burger stands, bulletproof take-out spots or bodega signs. “Those kind of people,” the visual gag suggests, “intimidating you into… preparing arugula or tempeh? How absurd, how shocking, how hilarious!”

While the cultural significance of Thug Kitchen’s proto-cancellation isn’t funny at all, the particulars of Davis and Holloway’s idiocy are extremely funny. If they actually attempted to mimic Black speech, they did an extremely bad job. Their version of AAVE is mostly just using a lot of swear words. The culturally specific slang is few and far between, and most of it — “dope” makes several appearances, as does “dropping knowledge” — recall earnest 1980s conscious rap rather than contemporaneous 2010s stars Future and Young Thug.

Gallingly, Davis and Holloway didn’t drop the Thug Kitchen name until 2020, after yet another “racial reckoning” following George Floyd’s murder. On June 16th, amidst a sea of black squares, pots and pans, and self-righteous masking pleas, they posted an announcement on Instagram, conceding to the culture, belatedly burying the corpse of Thug Kitchen six years after its cultural relevance had already died.

Holloway and Davis in 2020. Older, but not wiser.

You’ll recognize the cover’s mid-2010s post-Vice b*d*ss design from the similarly cringe Peter Meehan book I wrote about back in February. Since I’d recently made veggie burgers, lasagna, and enchiladas, I decided on the mango curry, even though it doesn’t have a creatively thuggish moniker. The “warm the fuck up minestrone” was tempting for the name alone, but minestrone in May can get a food blogger 5150’d.

Neither Matt Duckor, Bryan Terry, or any of the other critics who rightly admonished Davis and Holloway chastised them for perhaps their greatest sin: being recipe developers living in Los Angeles’s Thai Town (the biggest Thai neighborhood outside of Thailand) who base their mango curry dish on a restaurant from fucking San Diego. (Now they’ve got me swearing.) Look, I’m sure “Thai Village” or whatever is a fine spot, but you guys have Ruen Pair and Sanamluang and Sapp Coffee Shop and Jitlada right outside your doorstep. It’s humiliating.

I made their dish as directed, though I used a tablespoon of oil rather than a teaspoon, and I added two mangoes instead of one (I like mangoes). Sidenote: any cookbook author who tells you to sauté this many vegetables in a teaspoon of oil might possibly have a slight eating disorder. I ramped up the ginger and garlic a bit, but I purposefully did not ramp up the two meager tablespoons of red curry paste. I also, against my better judgement, did not add a thai chile, a serrano, or any other drop of capsaicin. I wanted to witness for myself how mild, how weak, how San Diego, how white this curry actually was. I mean, even Melissa Clark adds a chile.

live and learn: don’t take pictures of your curry when it’s still steaming.

And boy is it mild. My Thai Kitchen curry paste, bought from Glassell Park’s notoriously skimpy on Asian ingredients (but great for Mexican and Armenian food) Super King, wasn’t registering. But, to give Davis (and Thai Village) credit, the mangoes add a lovely sweetness, and the dry-fried tofu retains a bit of texture, even after simmering in the sauce. This is a perfectly tasty meal, palatable to 5-year-olds and 95-year-olds alike, full of healthy veggies and rich coconut milk. If anything it shows that, even in its most bastardized and whitewashed form, Thailand has one of the world’s great cuisines. But, as far as “giving a fuck” about making an impression, “giving a fuck” about adding a bit of heat, “giving a fuck” about stepping out the door of your apartment and actually experiencing what Thai food tastes like (sorry, I can’t get over the irony of these morons living in THAI TOWN), Davis and Holloway are, in the words of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr, a “gang of thugs peddling a warped ideology,” and they will never prevail.