I shouldn’t continue to be a downer so close to On Eating coming out, but last week, the Times reported on over a decade of abuse by Noma chef Rene Redzepi, and colleagues were talking about seemingly nothing else. I understand the gravity: The harassment faced by food workers is a wildly serious issue, whether they’re serving a World’s 50 Best tasting menu or working at your local tavern or they’re undocumented farmworkers. What chaps my ass is that only one of these is a big story.

Abuse in this industry becomes the hot topic du jour and gets splashy treatment when it’s a chef the food media itself has propped up as “important”—whose standards of “cool” have been the ones others have been judged by for years, even after Redzepi wrote about his own toxicity in Lucky Peach in 2015. In 2022, the Financial Times reported on the conditions and expectations faced in the kitchen and the effects throughout Copenhagen’s restaurant scene, writing, “In 2019, Noma employed 34 paid chefs, meaning that the best restaurant in the world relied heavily on unpaid labour to produce its food.” This reporting was seemingly what led to Noma paying interns, and then to the big announcement that they’d close because the fine dining business had become unsustainable once they did.

In 2023, chef Rob Anderson wrote in The Atlantic: “The truth is that the kind of high-end dining Noma exemplifies is abusive, disingenuous, and unethical. Chefs know it but continue to imitate Redzepi. The food media know it but continue to celebrate his kind of food.” Indeed, Redzepi was grandiosely referred to in the Times food section as having “spearheaded groundbreaking New Nordic cuisine” in January of this year.

It’s the celebration of this very kind of “cool” that makes people think they should take unpaid internships in expensive cities and work 80 hours a week and not make a fuss when they’re stabbed and humiliated by a “god of food.” You cannot make just anyone an untouchable creature of “cool” whose abuse can go on for years and years, at a profit: This is a calculated media effort, created by publicity dollars and endless access. When it goes awry because the guy was a dick all along—something he told everyone about himself—then it’s time for the solemn reportage.

But when farmworkers are facing ongoing crises and meatpacking workers are targeted by Tyson and teenagers working on hog farms die, these stories aren’t considered “food” stories. They go into sections marked “U.S.” and “Politics.” So who counts in food? Do there need to be tweezers involved? Are more people likely to have Tyson chicken in their freezer or eat at Noma (the most rhetorical question of them all)? Why does a story become siloed off from “food” because it’s not about consumption or celebrity? When does the story of “food” begin—when it enters the market?

Again, I am not diminishing this suffering nor the significance of the visibility it is now receiving, but it also feels like I’m being gaslit: Who even decided we were all supposed to care about what this guy does (there are so many of them that you can imagine whomever you like, and they’re not all men)? How do we do food writing that doesn’t prop people up in a way that makes workers uncomfortable for speaking up? How do we systemically protect workers, period, in the food system, as it employs over a billion people? How does it become cool to care about other people and not awards? How do we have noteworthy events that don’t require a $1,500 entrance fee on top of sponsorship by a credit card company? How do we burn the whole thing down and still have great food to eat? Are these questions one is allowed to consider? As the title of a Sarah Schulman piece that I cut out and pinned behind my desk asks, “How do criteria change?” I think considering these questions is a significant means of pointing us in the direction of such change.

When I went to Copenhagen last year, I knew that I was eating in the wake of Noma. I hadn’t tried to make a reservation because I’d read it had already closed down and I didn’t think about it again after that. Years ago, I would’ve wanted to eat there; I would’ve been desperate to touch the clout, to comprehend the cool. I got over that a while ago.

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I woke up the day after writing this to a “breaking news” alert on my phone, something I’ve come to brace myself for because one can’t know what kind of news might be coming these days. Yet it was just that Redzepi would be stepping away from Noma. I’m glad for those workers for whom this might be the start of some kind of accountability, and I wonder what could happen if such attention and rigor were brought to other situations in which food workers face abuse, harassment, wage theft. What does Redzepi stepping away mean to the barback in a minor city whose boss threw him to the floor by his neck? What does Redzepi stepping away mean to the diner waitress whose manager is taking from her tips? Will Redzepi stepping away do anything for the meat processing workers forced to work at ever higher speeds? I hope so.