I decided to write about Lucky Peach while sitting on the patio table of the house where I grew up. Then my mom, sister, and I ordered bao for dinner from a sleek place in my hometown called Bird & Bao, which they promised me was good. My steamed buns came filled with fried tofu, peanut sauce, and bean sprouts. They accidentally gave us two orders of a caramelized-to-the-hilt Brussels sprout dish. My sister ate cucumber salad drowning in a chili sauce that numbed my mouth with Sichuan peppercorn. I had to ask myself: Would this place exist in Patchogue, once an abandoned gastronomic desert, without the influence of this magazine and all its major players?

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My copies of Lucky Peach had been sitting in a plastic IKEA drawer in the garage of the house where I grew up. I hadn’t opened that drawer or the magazines in years, likely sometime after I stopped buying it in 2014. But there they’d been for years, in pristine condition, and whenever I come home I consider the drawer while I rummage through my dusty, makeshift storage space, and I decide to leave them untouched.

That was until last week, when I thought I should take another look at the first five issues of the quarterly, which began publication in 2011 and shuttered in 2017, and figure out what influence it had on me and food media at large, as well as how I understand it in light of revelations of abuse and cruelty on the parts of its top two men: the chef David Chang, and writer and editor Peter Meehan. I can’t dismiss their impact easily, but in the intervening years, I’ve lost sight of what the effects of their perspective really were—the best thing about the Lucky Peach voice was maybe its brashness, its certitude, even when it wasn’t in service to the best ideas or people. That allowed good writers room. Where’s that voice now? I can see, going back, that without my consciously realizing it, these essays were showing me how to write about food, especially in often showing me who I didn’t want to be.

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There is a dead animal on each of the first four covers of the magazine (I count hot dog as dead animal), which launched the same year I stopped eating meat. I can’t really remember how I felt reading it at the time; I know it didn’t challenge my decision to give up animal products but it did make me feel a bit sad that they couldn’t respect my or anyone else’s choice to do so. I guess I just wanted to be included in this kind of world, despite it having been created explicitly for men who love meat. But the influence I speak of is present in how I write about not eating meat. I saw the confidence of their voice and I mapped myself onto it—made it vegetarian, made it feminist. It took me a while though, because few editors let me write like myself.

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The first issue, “The Ramen Issue,” now sells for anywhere between $58 and $425 on eBay, and its most overarching purpose seems to be to get the reader to know Dave, as Chang is referred to: his habits, his likes, his intense dislikes, all the things that would lead to his robust Netflix presence. The only woman with a real presence is Ruth Reichl, whose own tenure at Gourmet had come to an end two years prior.

That is telling, because Lucky Peach, especially in this first issue, feels like a chef’s attempt to continue what Anthony Bourdain began in Kitchen Confidential and create a response to decades of food media driven by women and gay men whose work is in the dreaded “lifestyle” space, where only Ina and Nigella are respected. It’s an intense assertion of heterosexual masculinity—it just is. I’m not even being flippant here. On the first page of the first piece, by Meehan, a woman is described as a “tank.” Chang is set up for “insane success.” It’s all too on the nose.

One year before Lucky Peach launched, Adam Rapoport would go from style editor at GQ to editor-in-chief at Bon Appetit. He left that position only last year, amid revelations about the racist and toxic atmosphere at the magazine. In his role, he applied a men’s mag ethos to the food world.

Mari Uyehara writes in the essay “How Fashion Hijacked the Food World” from Women on Food that “the value system of fashion magazines, with a greater emphasis on trends, beauty, and consumerism, displaced the old practical ethos of cooking ones.” Though LP and BA still emphasized cooking, they did it while emphasizing the chef as an arbiter of taste and a very specific idea of cool that left a whole lot of people out. You were in, or you were out.

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As a recipe book and culinary encyclopedia of the topics it covered, Lucky Peach was superb. Many who read it at the time still reference it, and have pieces that have stuck with them for years and writers whose byline for which they always searched the table of contents. The one I remember best and think about often is the comedian and podcast host Marc Maron’s essay about his cast-iron pan. This was the piece for me. And there was fiction, poetry, and the translation I’m always going on about that should be a serious aspect of food publishing. The visuals tend to be if not always stunning, always novel. Lucky Peach did redefine what a food magazine can do. Unfortunately, it generally did so from a perspective that came crashing down like a ton of bricks, where the chef is a badass rock star, a heartthrob, not just a boss—and usually a bad one. One must cringe now, though from what I’ve been told, many people were already cringing then, especially women who’d worked in kitchens.

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The chef-lionizing in food media has been hard to put a stop to, though now we are trying to laud only chefs and other figures in hospitality whom we see as “good,” though we have little evidence to back this up other than taking their word for it. Chefs are still the defining force of how we discuss, rank, and understand food; I’ve said that should change with a metaphorical death of the chef, but what emerges in its place? We haven’t quite figured it out yet.

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A few years after Mario Batali—a friend of the Peach—became one of the few truly “cancelled” people, we see the widely lauded Edouardo Jordan being accused of similar behavior. Why is sexual harassment and assault so seemingly endemic to restaurant culture?

Bourdain is a major presence throughout the magazine’s run, as one would expect, and I’m reminded while reading of the times I heard him say that he didn’t intend his first book of food writing to inspire more toxicity in restaurants; that he would be mortified when young chefs would offer him cocaine. He didn’t mean to glorify that, he said. And while drugs aren’t amply present in Lucky Peach, a whole lot of fucking romanticization and bloviating go on about the work of being a chef. That romanticization has allowed for abuse. In that first issue, Bourdain, Chang, and Wylie Dufresne rant condescendingly about the concept of mediocrity. Gabriele Stabile writes that authenticity interests him more than “these hot-button notions of ethics and ecology.” It’s good to know some things never change, like how uncool it is to consider the health of our planet.

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A few years into my writing about food and after Lucky Peach shuttered but before he left the L.A. Times food section, I got an email from Meehan. “So I'm coming to you asking: what's a good big story we should do about veganism today?” he wrote. Validation from this crew, for me and for veganism. Nothing came of it, other than a later all-caps email about how Puerto Rico should be a state. (There was no inquiry into my opinion on the matter, which I’m sure you can infer.)

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After the first issue, the magazine gets more compelling, seemingly thanks to the influence of Rachel Khong, who came on as managing editor in issue two. The work of folks like Khong, Naomi Duguid, Hua Hsu, Jonathan Kauffman, John Birdsall, and many others broadened its scope beyond the navels of all those mononym chefs (Dave, Massimo, Rene, Ferran, etc.). It gets better and it gives some great writers big opportunities, yet it remained rooted in the mud of a chef culture that would only ever be exposed as more and more toxic in the ensuing years. As an archive, it is instructive: What questions should have been asked? Who was ignored here?

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Vittles editor Jonathan Nunn told me to be sure I read the piece of fiction in issue 5, “The Chinatown Issue,” titled “The Mother of All Cuisine,” which tells a story through emails of a fake writer’s search for a fake chef named Yun Ye Su who can prove that all European food is indeed Chinese. It is brilliant, both a send-up and love letter to the chef obsession of this magazine and its time—how myth is built and perpetuated in what is a small world with outsize influence; how the pursuit of food history is always a nerd’s errand; how much we trust chefs—we would follow them anywhere, when we probably shouldn’t. (It was Lucky Peach on mind when I biked with one down a highway.) Will the day come when chef profiles regularly interrogate the claims of chefs? When we let the artist and the boss coexist, in all its complications? When will we tease out that tension?

The energy of this short story is what we should be in search of, probably, in food writing: the absurd and the glorious, laughing at ourselves every step of the way because it is funny to revolve our lives around something everyone does every day. Lucky Peach did change the game, and perhaps its over-the-top glorification of the chef figure helped bring about its demise. No glory without the fall—is that a saying? What is clear now is that the game needs to change once again, in an as radical, self-assured way. Will it? I think it is, and none of these major players are involved.

This Friday’s paid subscriber interview will feature chef and writer Taffy Elrod, talking about growing up with health food, becoming a chef in New York, and moving to the Hudson Valley to open a pizza restaurant with her husband.

For paid subscribers, the second recipe of the month is sweet plantain rum cake with a walnut-maple oat streusel.

Annual subscriptions are $30; monthly, $5.

Published: Nada, baby.

Reading:My Struggle Book 3 with an interlude for César Aira’s The Divorce.

Cooking:Was craving Dishoom’s jackfruit biryani intensely, so made it again. Was craving chocolate-chip cookies, so made them. Was craving a nice mushroomy noodle stir-fry, so made that.