April 6, 2021 • 44 mins
Team Rebel Eaters Club is excited to share an episode of a podcast we think you'll like from our friends at America's Test Kitchen.
Proof is a podcast that explores the weird and surprising backstories about food. In this episode, an epic journey into a curious, unexamined corner of the food world.
In John Birdsall’s 2014 article, "America, Your Food is so Gay,” he describes a particularly indulgent cheese burger as "unflinchingly queer.” For reporter Chad Chenail, this sparked a journey of self-discovery through queer theory, all in an attempt to answer the question: What is the Queerest food?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hi everyone, it's Virgin. It's been a minute, but I'm
excited to share an episode of a podcast I think
you'll like, called Proof, from our friends at America's Test Kitchen.
Proof is a podcast that explores the weird and surprising
and funny backstories about food. They don't give you recipes,
(00:23):
or profile celebrity chefs or interview cookbook authors. Instead, they
go into the curious, unexamined corners of the food world
and tell stories that change the way you think about food.
This episode you're about to hear it takes to you
on a crash course through queer theory and culture to
answer the question what is the queerest food? You'll want
(00:46):
to stay tuned for the amazing ending. Let's listen from
Proof the search for the queerest food. It started when
I read this article America Your Food is So Gay?
By John Birdsall. This is our friend Chad shan I.
(01:08):
He writes America's Test Kitchen Kids podcast Mystery Recipe. Today,
he's here with a very different story. Mister Birdsall won
a James Beard Award for his twenty fourteen article, which
ran in The Lucky Peach. In it, he describes how
three gay men James Beard, Richard Olney, and Craig Clayborne
were fundamental to the development of American food culture. In
(01:31):
the intro, mister Birdsall describes a particularly decadent cheeseburger as unflinchingly,
unapologetically magnificently queer. But to be honest, I didn't see it.
This cheeseburger, which he calls the lou Burger, just didn't
read all that queer to me, and so it got
(01:54):
me thinking, what is the queerest food? Hey? Check, can
I just break in here? What do you mean when
you say queer food? Well, food is food, right, and
so it isn't gay or straight or anywhere else on
the queer spectrum. But when mister birds All described the
burger in his article as magnificently queer, he was using
(02:17):
it as a way of describing the queer culture of
the moment. Okay, so if you're trying to answer the
question of what is the queerest food, there might be
just a little bit of creative license going on. More
than a little bit, Yes, putting queer culture onto a
cheeseburger it's a little much, But honestly I became obsessed.
(02:41):
I mean, it can make some concepts that are pretty
complex instantly more approachable to talk about. Also, just to
say upfront, I'm gay, let me back up, actually, high,
I'm Chad. My pronoms are he him, I'm a cis
gendered white gay man, and I'm gayer than a rainbow bagel, which,
by the way, isn't that hard because rainbow bagels aren't
(03:04):
that gay? Okay, Well, then where do you even begin
your journey to find the queerest food? First things first,
I began by clarifying my terms, because words are important.
The Dry Dictionary definition of the word queer in the
way that I'm using it for this story is relating
(03:24):
to a sexual or gender identity that does not correspond
to established ideas of sexuality and gender, especially heterosexual norms. Basically,
anyone who isn't cis gendered and straight. It is purposefully
vague so as to be inclusive. When I use the
word gay, and when mister Birdsall does in his article,
(03:45):
he's specifically referring to homosexual men. But being gay is
just one flavor of being queer. Okay, So if pies
are queer, then maybe apple pies are gay apple pies
or pie, but not all pies or apple right, yes,
and then sometimes you can get a scoop of ice
(04:05):
cream on top, or whipped cream or caramel. The possibilities
are endless. And now I want apple pie with ice cream.
But I think I follow great. Yes, yes, you definitely
do so. Before we grab our spoons and eat this
story straight from the cart in, let me say this.
This whole concept is a little bit silly. I get that,
(04:27):
but I'm going to take it very seriously from here
on out. So what is the queerest food from America's
test kitchen. I'm Bridget Lancaster and this is proofd okay, Chad.
(04:54):
I am going to hand things over to you for
the rest of the episode. The control room is yours,
and I'm really excited to see where this queer food
question takes you. Thank you, Bridget. My name is John
Birdsall and I'm a writer in Oakland, California, and my
pronouns are he him. John has a book coming out
(05:15):
called The Man Who Ate Too Much, The Life of
James Beard strongly recommend. In his article America, Your Food
is So Gay, John describes growing up with these neighbors,
a gay couple named Pat and Lou. I had grown
up with these sort of uncles. You know, I wasn't
related to them, but I called them my uncles. We
(05:37):
grew up in a suburb of San Francisco, and so
we could sort of see their backdack from our backdack
and would wave. Pat and Lou became fast family friends,
and like many a queer neighbor, they also became occasional
babysitters and the lue Burger. You know, on those nights
when they baby sat for us, Lou would pack these
(05:59):
incredibly rich, you know, expensive delicious greens like blue cheese
and dijon mustard and caramelized onions. John goes on to
describe these salty cheeseburgers that he could only eat half
of before feeling sick, but he loved every bite. It
was really a statement about appreciating pleasure in a way
(06:21):
that was detached from the kind of nutritional minded cooking
that my mother did. You know, in a society where
there were lots of rules and strictures, this burger had
no rules at all. Believe me when I say, I
am fully onboard. Right. An indulgent, juicy burger just slathered
(06:42):
in cheese and love is the sort of rebellious antithesis
to the nuclear family meal that being gay in the
seventies was all about. The lue burger was a kind
of middle finger in the face of a balanced dinner,
and it paved the way for today's food to be
queer in all the ways that it wants to be.
But it does feel just a little bit dated. So
(07:04):
I asked John what he thought the queerest food of
this moment might be. Wow. Wow, that's a really good question.
That is a really good question, Thank you, John. The
lue burger was a metaphor, a rebellious and indulgent delight
which expressed its joy through expensive cheese. In fact, but
(07:27):
a lot has happened since Pat and Lou are stuffing
burgers full of decadence in the nineteen seventies, And to
figure out what the queerest food of today is, we
need to make sure that we're all ordering off of
the same menu. The changes in queer culture since nineteen
seventy have not come easily. Change happened because of generations
(07:50):
of queer activists and leaders, specifically black transwomen and other
queer black indigenous people of color. Change happened because Stonewall
was a riot we know it was another raid when
all of a sudden we heard a crash. Somebody do
rocked with the window. Change happened because trans women of
color fought for my rights that night and for years
(08:12):
and years after, women like Sylvia Rivera and Marcia P.
Johnson donning I want my gay right now. I think
at that time the gay bright and sisters goddam rights
and espectly the women. Change happened because artists like Keith
Harrying and writers like James Baldwin used their platforms to
(08:32):
speak about issues like marriage equality years before it would
finally be passed into law. You think you had the
right around the right, shout anybody else who Oh, she
should marry? H should love. Change happened because activists like
Larry Kramer spent their lives fighting as the HIV and
AIGE crisis derailed a generation of queer people. Plag we
(08:55):
are in the middle of a fucking cloy and you'll
behold like. The change happened because these people and so
many others fought, rioted, and legislated their way to a
better world. A better world where I am alive and
free to put my queer energy towards the not at
all silly journalistic pursuit of finding the queerest food as
(09:21):
one siss white raisin and a beautifully queer trail mix.
I know, if I'm going to tackle the question this big,
I am gonna need some help. Oh my god, this
is so cute. So you want to end like a
list form where I can just like say it to you.
I started at the queer watering Hole social media. My
(09:41):
friend Arian immediately sent me a list Aryan is queer
and non binary uses they then pronouns and is an
absolute delight. My number one all the time being a
black American is fried chicken. I'm talking about life seasoning
and just flour and just you know, hot fried chicken,
(10:05):
like it makes you have to eat it with your
hands in a particular like way, like you know, because
it's just like so it's just gayum thick boys, gay
gay yummy thick boys. They love mashed potatoes or French
fries or some sort of like tater situation with cheese
on top of it. Cis, maybe let's just put like,
(10:28):
let's just put the potato family as like three like
strawberries always you say the word strawberry in a sentence
next to your man, Where are we at? What are
we doing? You know? So this is a very very
(10:49):
promising start. But how am I to know when I
found the answer? I needed something like something like a
rubric food rubric, A queer food brick. Queer Food Brick
trade mark twenty twenty. The first column on the queer
food brick? Is this a metaphor? I think the queer
(11:11):
food I'm looking for has some deeper symbolic meaning behind it,
like the lue Burger. And while I've never enjoyed mashed
potatoes more than I do, right in this very moment,
I had to keep searching. With the lue Burger in
my heart. I put on my journalism hat and I
hit the streets. Or I was about to, and then
(11:33):
COVID happened, so I hit the Internet, otherwise known as
the land of awkward hellos. I can you hear me?
I can't hear you. I'm not muted. Ow hi Hi.
(11:53):
I started by asking more of my queer friends what
they thought the queerest food was. I'm kevy. Pronouns are
a day them and I definify somewhere between queer and
by I'm Alice, my pronouns are she her, I identify
as lesbian and we are married. Amazing. So if we're
(12:15):
talking about queer food, what is the first thing that
comes to mind? That was pretty a media talk me through.
This is not a new idea, Nancy. An amazing podcast
from WNYC all about queer culture recently had a whole
(12:35):
thing about ice coffee and how queer it is. It's
sort of hard to pin down exactly how it started,
but regardless of how or when ice coffee became queer,
it certainly is queer now for many reasons, and one
of them is signaling. I think queer culture is very
much about the hidden signals of how to identify someone
(12:59):
who is like you without having to say anything or
risk anything. And I think ice coffee has kind of
become one of those things that's like a back pocket
hanky or not wearing box or backpacks or subarus or
glitter or overalls. Sorry farmers, you can just look at
(13:21):
someone and kind of now, oh, that person's like me.
This type of signaling is so important to the queer community.
There have been many times where I've walked into a
bar and had no idea if any of the men
in there, or even attracted to my gender, never mind
little one me. Too often, it doesn't feel safe to
approach someone and start flirting without some type of indication
(13:44):
that they won't react negatively or with violence. There is
a long tradition of these nonverbal cues. These signals like
backpocket handkerchiefs, a way to recognize other queer people. Ice
coffee now being one of them. I think we claimed this,
the gays claimed the ice coffee, you know, being someone
(14:06):
who can drink something cold when it's really cold out,
it does make you feel colder, but there's this sense
of pride that yes, I'm queer and I can do
this and I can put up with it and it's
not a big deal. Yeah, I don't have the luxury
of choosing the temperature of my coffee. Like we will
(14:26):
suffer for the thing that we love and we have,
so this is not that big of a sacrifice. Yeah yeah, yeah,
I hear that so hard. Let me sit my ice coffee.
Cheers to our badge of honor love A good queer cheers.
(14:47):
Ice coffee certainly checks many boxes on the queer food brick.
For one, the experts aka the legendary queers over at
Nancy agree with us. It holds a metaphor for the
queer experience ants and it's signaling, and in that, it's
all about suffering for what we love. But if we're
getting technical with this, and of course we're getting technical
(15:10):
with this, ice coffee isn't a food, one simple but
fundamental column of the queer food brick, it must be food.
I'll repeat that for any queers listening. Ice coffee is
not a food. Please eat something for breakfast? Hello, Hi, Edward,
(15:35):
This is Edward. His pronouns are he him? Can we
do a lightning round real quick? Yeah? Bagels? No bagels
with locks and cream, cheese, yes, samon, yes, swimming upstream?
Just watch out for the bear peppers some of them.
(16:00):
How about like stuffed peppers with like ground beef? Yeah? Yeah,
are you kidding, honey, I'm a stuffed pepper with ground beef.
But if we went on like this for far too long,
I'll spare you if I say, what is queer food? Like?
What jumps out at you? What comes to mind? First?
(16:21):
I feel like pasta is because pasta is like the
queer experience of being closeted ride. Pasta is the person
who's not comfortable to be who they are, and then
you put them in hot water aka college or like
alcohol or like whatever it may be, and they're shown
(16:44):
this like a whole new world of like heavy cream sauces.
Pasta definitely checks off some boxes on the queer food brick.
The transformation of it, this slow absorption of your surroundings
to really cook and become what you're meant to be.
That's an a plus metaphor if I've ever tasted one,
(17:04):
and it definitely is a food. Yeah, I mean, honestly,
I think it's the crux of the episode. Like, maybe
take what I said and work around it. The third
column then might read does this describe a shared experience?
Coming out is absolutely a shared queer experience. Just by
(17:25):
living in a heteronormative world, we are very often forced
to announce ourselves as queer in order to feel seen
and get to live openly. But as far as food
metaphors go, this slow absorbing of our comfortable hot water
bath isn't quite working for me. Pasta is predictable and
(17:46):
gradual and hard to mess up. It's the same every
time boil the water. Seven to ten minutes later, you're
done perfectly, a'll dente. But coming out certainly isn't predictable,
you know. I think about my queer siblings in the
trans community. Coming out for trans people is something different entirely.
It's layered and sometimes constant for a lot of people.
(18:10):
It's something that happens every day at each new job,
in each new relationship, and it looks different every time.
So if not pasta where two, next, one answer I
seemed to get again and again was some type of
baked good, cookies, cakes, that kind of thing. It was
(18:32):
a whole direction that I wanted to explore, and so
I reached out to someone who sits right at the
intersection of a queer representation and baking. I'm Michael chock Cravati,
my pronouns he and him, and I identify as a
gay man, a gay baker because I was one of
the contestants on The Great with His Bake Off twenty nineteen.
Michael was the contestant who cut his finger three times
(18:56):
in the first five minutes of the first day. Become
be slow, be confident, it's gonna be fine. It's gonna
be fine. I just, oh my god, I've done it again.
I'm so sorry, Michael again, for goodness sake, this is
so stupid, which made him instantly my favorite one friend
(19:16):
that I had talked to about this early on, we
sort of spiraled and started talking about cooking shows and
reality TV shows. Yeah, I think it's amazing, especially if
you look about even ten years ago, if you had
a gay character existing on reality TV, it was a story,
it was a really big deal. You'd see these gay people,
or these chans people, or these queer people going through
(19:38):
really challenging situations. And now we're moving into a place
where we are just equal. And that sounds so simple,
but especially on bake Off, you think about my season
like we were just seen as the same as everybody else.
And I mean the very, very very last scene of
that entire series was David kissing his partner Nick on
(19:59):
the lips and giving him a hug. And for that
to be one of the most watched television programs in
Britain and walked across the world as seeing as this
normal thing on such a popular program, That's incredible. And
I think representation is so important because how are we
supposed to feel whole, included and comfortable in our own skin,
(20:22):
and so we can see people like us in the
world around us. From Pat and Lou waving from their
back deck to David kissing his partner on the Bacoff finale.
These moments of gay men being visible are so important
for people like me to feel like there's room for us.
Imagine the world we could live in if queer, black,
(20:42):
Indigenous people of color had as much opportunity for representation
as I did. But I digress. We're here to talk
about queer food. I mean, the first that pops into
my mind is a rainbowcake because obviously, because obviously, but
I got thinking a bit about just there where about
(21:03):
especially things like The Great British Bake Off or in America,
the Great Britist Baking Show. It's so popular with the
queer community, and I think that's probably because it's just
a show about kindness overall. I think that's why it's
so popular, Like it Israel's TV, but it's it's doing
something domestic and everyone's being kind to each other, and
(21:23):
I think that's kind of lovely. And I think a
lot of the queer experience is craving family and craving
safe spaces and craving domesticity in a certain sort of sense.
While a rainbow cake might be a bit on the nose,
there's something here. There is this idea within the queer
community about chosen family. Many queer people aren't born into
(21:47):
accepting and understanding families, and so a lot of queer
people need to seek out that kindness community and family elsewhere.
I see a lot of this idea in baking. Baking
is in many ways an act of care. You often
share what you've made with other people. Right you make
batches of cookies, cupcakes by the dozen. You're not supposed
(22:09):
to eat an entire cake by yourself, or so I'm told.
Somewhere on my Queer Food brick, there's a line about care,
about kindness, about showing each other love, but no offense
to Michael. I can't possibly end the story by saying
a rainbow cake is the queerest food. Queers love many things,
(22:31):
but cliche is not one of them. And so I
added love to the Queer food brick, and I moved on.
After the break, Chad continues on his quest to find
the queerest food. Before the break, Chad had reached another
(22:51):
dead end in his search for the queerest food. Okay,
back to you, Chad, Thank you Bridget. While I haven't
yet found the perfect queer food, my queer food brick
was growing. I knew this item needed to be a food,
a metaphor, something for the queer experience, and something containing love.
(23:14):
So I kept asking around. My name is oro Wise,
and I use she her pronouns. I live in Brooklyn.
I am the culinary curator for Queer Anga que trans
Wellness Collective, and I am also a coordinator of FIG
Food Issues Group. I would say that in terms of
(23:34):
the queerest food, I think that what that would be
would be things that are hybrid that meals and foods
and ways of eating that exists between more traditional and
conventional spaces. I actually just wrote a piece with my
dear friend Kim Choo about a para TiVo and kind
(23:56):
of thinking about that in some ways as queer food
or a queer food ritual because it takes place in
between day and night, in this cuspy time. This cuspy
time where a pair of TiVo takes place, fits well
with what the word queer is starting to mean to me.
(24:17):
To me, the word queer, in all of its enormity,
is really celebrating this hybrid outside of more traditional and
conventional spaces. I added it to the queer food brick
and moved on. I'm Raddideta, I use the VM pronouns.
I'm a two spirit renegade, artist, educator, and community builder. Well,
(24:44):
when I first read your question, like tropical fruits came
to mind because they're so like the outside never matches
the inside, and it's always like a surprise on the inside,
and like you can neveragine what it's gonna taste like
based on what the outside wore the inside look like,
(25:05):
and it's just like a bunch of contradictions, a bunch
of contradictions that might be exactly what never felt right
about the lue Burger. Thelue Burger was so upfront and
who and what it was indulgent. But as queer people,
we often grow up putting on a mask, some sort
(25:26):
of external guys, not acknowledging who we are on the inside.
In our most formative years, many of us grow appeal
to disguise the fruit underneath, punintended, and even after coming
out or being outed, that learned behavior is very deeply
ingrained in our identities. Being queer as complicated well you
(25:50):
know where I'm from. In Brazil, there's like hundreds and hundreds,
maybe thousands more fruit varieties than anywhere else in world,
and so I'm always discovering new fruits, things I've never
ever heard of. There's always something new which feels so
(26:11):
queer to me. And then there's some other ones that
I don't even know their names, that are like from
the jungle and have to like know how to even
eat them, how to even open them and stuff. I
had always thought that I had a pretty clear grasp
on what it meant to be queer. I had encountered
just about every fruit that there could possibly be, hadn't I. Well,
(26:35):
queerness to me is like really undefinable because it's different
for every person, and I think for most people different
every day and sometimes every moment. You're constantly defining or
not defining yourself for yourself, and it's like really empowering
(26:57):
ourselves to like not be what's the word contained? There
are over three hundred native varieties of fruit in Brazil alone.
I can name like fifteen fruits total. My vision of
the queer community has been the equivalent of a stop
(27:18):
and shop produce section. But what does that mean, for
this story, how can I possibly figure out the queer's
food When I'm just one fruit in the world's largest
produce section. I can't possibly distill every experience. I suddenly
feel like I'm on an episode of Nailed It. In
(27:40):
case you don't have your ex's Netflix password anymore. Nailed
It is a competition show hosted by the beautiful and
talented Nicole Buyer, where these amateur home bakers compete and
try and recreate a gorgeously decorated cake. At this moment
reporting this queer food story, I feel like I'm Season two,
(28:00):
episode five, where they're building these giant rattlesnake cakes. Okay,
here we go, two hours on the clock, thousand dollars
on the line, it's time to know. At our slow
slow It's like the clock is ticking down and I'm
(28:23):
realizing I don't actually know how to build a snake cake.
Com I'm having a hard time keeping my head erect.
At this point, I forget the queer food brick. Should
I even be asking the question what is the queerest food?
Is this premise wrong? Altogether? It's like the giant head
(28:45):
of my rattlesnake cake is falling off and I'm diving
for the panic button. Paddock, Y, I need help. Hello. Sorry,
I was saying hi and still muted. No, You're fine.
Why Hi, I'm assuming lad of this out. You assumed wrong?
(29:06):
Matthew Matthews pronouns are he and him. What comes to
mind when I talk about like walking down a path
of queer food. The one dish that like I came
up with as a dish, it's called law. Are we
called it law? It's like this ground beef dish. It's
probably what you get at a thaie restaurant that always
like conserved, like with lettuce, they call it let us wraps. Typically,
(29:29):
like as I become more comfortable with being mixed race
within the queer community and you know, really cherishing my
tie identity and tie dishes that specifically resonate with me
and kind of feel true to my m intersectionality. Yeah,
when Matthew is talking about intersectionality here, he is specifically
(29:51):
talking about the intersection of his racial identity and sexual orientation.
Our society has many categories of identities, things like sexual orientation,
gender identity, race, class, nationality, and disability to name the
big ones, and all of these identities are interconnected. The
(30:11):
beautiful buffet that is the queer community is as diverse
as it is as a direct result of all of
our intersectional identities. Being queer is what we have in common,
but there are still so many ways we can be different,
and those differences make the queer community so amazing. But
where there are differences, there is often prejudice. So I'm
(30:34):
mixed race, i am tie in German, and that's something
I've definitely struggled with with. Being queer is just like
experiencing racism within the queer community and just how hard
that was when you know, you think it's a community
that's gonna open you with loving arms. Each of our
identities comes with either privilege or disadvantage. My identities are
(30:59):
at the intersection of so much privilege. I am gay
and that isn't always easy, But I'm also white and
assist gendered man. The intersections of some people's identities make
them the target of exacerbated disadvantage or hate, which is
why it is so important to say here that black
(31:21):
translives matter. For Matthew, because of intersectional identity, his queer
food had to honor both his queer anti identities. The
simple idea of just like a dish that reminds me
of home and home is true to me and for
me my identity as I'm queer, I'm tie and so
(31:43):
it just feels like a dish that like just feels
like me in a dish wrapped up in lettuce, wrapped
up in lettuce. Yeah. According to my Queer Food Brick
Trademark twenty twenty, the queerest food has to be food.
It has to be a metaphor, it has to be
(32:04):
of or relating to the queer experience. But the queer
experience is so diverse, it's so tied to personal journey
and intersectional identity and uniqueness and magic, that I'm beginning
to realize the queerest food can't possibly exist. Maybe I
can't answer the question what is the queerest food, but
(32:29):
I can certainly try and figure out what is mine.
Maybe my headless rattlesnake cake is salvageable, after all, you
know what, that's a good cake. Thank you, You're welcome,
all right, thank you. Of course, the lue Burger wasn't
the queerest food for me. I didn't grow up eating it.
(32:52):
Maybe my queerest food was something I did grow up
eating or at least something tied to my early coming
out days. Okay, so, hi Johnny Cortez. My pronouns are
he his? And I'm gay? And how do we know
each other? Oh? And we? What should I say? We
(33:14):
were in a relationship? And how do I word this?
This is very important? It's my introduction. We dated in
high school, child and I dated in high school. Johnny
was my first boyfriend. It was one of those high
school relationships that was absolutely perfect until it stopped being
(33:37):
absolutely perfect. But that first love is a memorable thing.
Do you remember, Oh gosh, do you remember where our
first date was? I really don't. For some of us,
at least, I tried to get him at least to
think of a food that might sum up our relationship. Honestly,
(33:57):
I can think of a specific food that reminds me
of you lot. What is that? It actually reminds me
of your mom a lot, because she would make it
for me. This is so funny. She would make it
for me when I would just be like chilling out
your house. I don't know where you were, but I
would just be there like all the time, and she
would always make me tuna fish sandwiches on some sort
(34:19):
of like really good thick bread. But she'd use a
miracle whip and she'd toasts the bread. Oh, what is
queer about sandwiches? What's queer about sandwiches. It's a kind
of like a party in your mouth. Like it's like
all of the best things in life. It's like the best.
(34:39):
It's like the carbs, it's the cheese, it's the meat.
There is definitely something to this. A sandwich is layered
with multiple different parts, all being celebrated, working together to
make one solid lunchtime staple. They're complex, there's so many
options and varieties. There's something here. I had one more
(35:04):
question left to ask. Did you like my mom more
than you liked me? Yeah, that's allowed, it's fair. She's great.
She's great. I'm just kidding, But I do still think
about your mom. Off. Then that's when it hit me.
What made this sandwich so special to Johnny was the
(35:26):
care and the love that my mom put into making it.
It was a way my mom showed him that she
cared about him even when I wasn't around, which is
so sweet. It's almost my perfect queer food. There's just
one little bitty issue I just don't love sandwiches. It's
(35:48):
picky and lame of me because this metaphor is so
adorable and so perfect, but they just aren't my favorite.
But in thinking about the food my family would make
me growing up, I realized the perfect answer had been
sitting right in front of me the whole time. My
dad sent it to me on day one when I
(36:08):
first posted this question on social media. Hello, Hello, Hi,
how's it going? Good? Is it needs to be facetimer?
Is this good? No? This is great? Perfect, perfect. I
didn't do my makeup today, Dad jokes, what's going on, Junior? Yeah,
so you know that I'm working on a story that's
(36:29):
trying to answer the question what is the queerest food? Yep?
I had posted this on Facebook and you had sent
in an answer. Can you tell me what that answer was? Yes?
I said the crunch rep Supreme? Yep, the crunch trap Supreme.
And what is a crun trap supreme? For anyone who
hasn't had one before? Oh, it's a little slice that
(36:50):
happened comes out of Castle Bell. Picture a taco, a
standard taco in a hard shell filled with whatever meat,
let us tomato, cheese, And when you eat that it
always falls apart. So to keep it together, you place
it inside the very middle of a what's the bread
does it's not the heata bread, is it? Yeah, the
(37:10):
heat bread tortilla, but close enough. You put in salo cream,
you put in cheese, and everything stays together. It's just
wonderful and the flavor is phenomenal. It's just wonderful. A
little sice of heaven called the crunch rap supreme. So
what makes you think of a crunch rap supreme when
I talk about queer food. When you look at the
(37:31):
crunch wrap, you see no crunch involves in it, So
how do you call it a crunch rapt It's just
almost like a pocket sandwich, and when you start eating it,
there's a surprising inside. It's just the oddest thing to
me to go from a sandwich looking item to a
taco and no time at all. I thought of the
crunch rap because you look at it and you see something,
(37:53):
and if you like it or you don't like, you
judge it by the look, just like you would homosexuality. Somebody,
as you and i've been in the city before, we
say this really flamboyant gentleman walking down with a yellow leotard.
Just the look at him very unique. But you start
judging now, and now there's where you're going the wrong way.
(38:15):
So the crunch raft looks one way on the outside
and on the inside it's a taco, which is something
everyone wants to eat. So I guess my point was
judging by the looks, you have no idea what's inside.
It's outside an interior don't always align. It's a contradiction.
The outside never matches the inside, and it's always like
(38:36):
a surprise. It looks like a pocket sandwich, as my
dad so eloquently explained, with something inside that everyone wants
to eat. It's a kind of like a party in
your mouth, Like it's like the carbs, it's the cheese,
it's the meat. It exists in this kind of in
between space, not quite a taco, not quite a burrito,
(39:00):
not really a sandwich. Things that are hybrid that meals
and foods and ways of eating that exists between more
traditional and conventional spaces. Whether he realized it or not,
my dad served me up a response that checked all
the boxes. It's a food, a hybrid existing in between.
(39:24):
It's accessible. A metaphor for my queer experience, and it
is uniquely personal to me. My dad is talking about
the crunch raps that he used to make for us
at home, or to first thought it, we used to
have tacos, and we like tacos. Well, we stopped as
a family, you guys stopped eating them because it was
such a chore. So when I saw the crunch wrap,
(39:46):
I got excited. I wanted to make one at home,
so I tried. I tried before you guys came to
visit on your days to visit, and the thing just
kept falling apart. So I didn't know how to keep
it frying, how to keep together. I needed to weigh
it down with something, and as a troubled shooter, I
looked around and I found a really heavy candle, big
(40:09):
heavy candles. I placed the candle, after cleaning it, of course,
on top of the crunch trap, and that kept the
weight down to the entire surface group cook. Well, from
my perspective, it was this thing that I knew that
I really liked, and then I had a dad who
went out of his way to figure out how to
make it for us, and so that was just like
a really nice thing. That's how I saw it. Was
(40:30):
just like you knew we loved it, and so you
learned how to make it so that we could have
it more often. That crunch trap was away. My dad
showed me what family was all about. You figure out
how to give the person you love what they want,
even if it means making pocket sandwiches out of fajita
bread using big, heavy candles. It was a simple act
(40:51):
of kindness through food and it meant everything to me.
I love that. That's really nice, and it was so
nice to see her sponsor felt really validating, and I
felt really lucky to have grown up in a household ware.
I was taught to try the cruntrap supreme and not
judge it based on how it looks on the outside. Well,
(41:13):
that is a two way learning experience. Because I did
grow up in a small town. We had a couple
of gay families, but we're very sheltered. And as I
grew up with you, I learned more and more to
not think about the topic of homosexuality. Just look at
that person and you love that person. And for me,
(41:34):
it was a piece of cake to go through all
of that. I'll be honest with you, chat, I think
you might have been six or seven, when I called
my brother Steve and I asked him about that. I said,
how would you know? And Steve said to me, what
does it matter? And I'm like, there you go. That
just sends that story, so I didn't have to think
after that. That was really a help for me. Shout
(41:54):
out to Uncle Steve for knowing how to handle that
question so long ago. It made such a different and
I think for that reason, for a lot of other reasons,
the cruntrap is where I'm ending the story. I think
it is the queerest food that I can think of.
You know, it's a very like fond, happy, loving childhood memory.
Well that's excellent. That really, uh, you know, not knowing
(42:16):
that it really makes me feel good. I do feel
good about what we did as we grew together. But
that's a nice, little, nice little chat. Thank you, Yeah,
thank you. Sure, maybe when I come visit, we can
make some cruntraps. Define that sounds cool, and when you
bring your baking skill that This story was brought to
(42:40):
us by Chad shana I and be sure to check
out The America's Test Kitching Kids podcast Mystery Recipe with
your Young Chefs at Home. Thanks to everyone that we
spoke to for this great story, and if you'd like
to donate to Ura Wise's group queer Anga, We've put
a link in our show notes and if you want
to learn more about this story, then please visit our
website that's www dot America's Test Kitchen dot com slash Proof.
(43:06):
Go check it out and if you like Proof, then
be sure to subscribe wherever you listen so you'll get
brand new episodes as soon as they drop. And while
you're there, why not leave us a rating or write
us a review. It really helps other people find the show.
Proof is hosted and produced by me Bridget Lancaster. Our
executive producer is Caitlin Kelleher. Sarah Joyner is our managing producer.
(43:29):
Associate producer Caroline Ricord. Scoring, sound design and mixing by
Matt Pointon of Ultra Violet Audio. Brian Campbell of Signal
Sounds composed our theme music. Additional music by Kyle Forrester
and Jordan Pearson. Post production supervisor is Hen Margolis. Our
production manager is Diane Knox. Thanks to Marie soladav for
consulting on the script. Jack Bishop is Chief Creative Officer
(43:52):
of America's Test Kitchen. David Nussbaum is our CEO. Thanks
again to our sponsors Kohler, Oxomokos Creamery, and the Town.
Doc Proof is a production of America's Test Kitchen.
Hi everyone, it's Virgin. It's been a minute, but I'm
excited to share an episode of a podcast I think
you'll like, called Proof, from our friends at America's Test Kitchen.
Proof is a podcast that explores the weird and surprising
and funny backstories about food. They don't give you recipes,
(00:23):
or profile celebrity chefs or interview cookbook authors. Instead, they
go into the curious, unexamined corners of the food world
and tell stories that change the way you think about food.
This episode you're about to hear it takes to you
on a crash course through queer theory and culture to
answer the question what is the queerest food? You'll want
(00:46):
to stay tuned for the amazing ending. Let's listen from
Proof the search for the queerest food. It started when
I read this article America Your Food is So Gay?
By John Birdsall. This is our friend Chad shan I.
(01:08):
He writes America's Test Kitchen Kids podcast Mystery Recipe. Today,
he's here with a very different story. Mister Birdsall won
a James Beard Award for his twenty fourteen article, which
ran in The Lucky Peach. In it, he describes how
three gay men James Beard, Richard Olney, and Craig Clayborne
were fundamental to the development of American food culture. In
(01:31):
the intro, mister Birdsall describes a particularly decadent cheeseburger as unflinchingly,
unapologetically magnificently queer. But to be honest, I didn't see it.
This cheeseburger, which he calls the lou Burger, just didn't
read all that queer to me, and so it got
(01:54):
me thinking, what is the queerest food? Hey? Check, can
I just break in here? What do you mean when
you say queer food? Well, food is food, right, and
so it isn't gay or straight or anywhere else on
the queer spectrum. But when mister birds All described the
burger in his article as magnificently queer, he was using
(02:17):
it as a way of describing the queer culture of
the moment. Okay, so if you're trying to answer the
question of what is the queerest food, there might be
just a little bit of creative license going on. More
than a little bit, Yes, putting queer culture onto a
cheeseburger it's a little much, But honestly I became obsessed.
(02:41):
I mean, it can make some concepts that are pretty
complex instantly more approachable to talk about. Also, just to
say upfront, I'm gay, let me back up, actually, high,
I'm Chad. My pronoms are he him, I'm a cis
gendered white gay man, and I'm gayer than a rainbow bagel, which,
by the way, isn't that hard because rainbow bagels aren't
(03:04):
that gay? Okay, Well, then where do you even begin
your journey to find the queerest food? First things first,
I began by clarifying my terms, because words are important.
The Dry Dictionary definition of the word queer in the
way that I'm using it for this story is relating
(03:24):
to a sexual or gender identity that does not correspond
to established ideas of sexuality and gender, especially heterosexual norms. Basically,
anyone who isn't cis gendered and straight. It is purposefully
vague so as to be inclusive. When I use the
word gay, and when mister Birdsall does in his article,
(03:45):
he's specifically referring to homosexual men. But being gay is
just one flavor of being queer. Okay, So if pies
are queer, then maybe apple pies are gay apple pies
or pie, but not all pies or apple right, yes,
and then sometimes you can get a scoop of ice
(04:05):
cream on top, or whipped cream or caramel. The possibilities
are endless. And now I want apple pie with ice cream.
But I think I follow great. Yes, yes, you definitely
do so. Before we grab our spoons and eat this
story straight from the cart in, let me say this.
This whole concept is a little bit silly. I get that,
(04:27):
but I'm going to take it very seriously from here
on out. So what is the queerest food from America's
test kitchen. I'm Bridget Lancaster and this is proofd okay, Chad.
(04:54):
I am going to hand things over to you for
the rest of the episode. The control room is yours,
and I'm really excited to see where this queer food
question takes you. Thank you, Bridget. My name is John
Birdsall and I'm a writer in Oakland, California, and my
pronouns are he him. John has a book coming out
(05:15):
called The Man Who Ate Too Much, The Life of
James Beard strongly recommend. In his article America, Your Food
is So Gay, John describes growing up with these neighbors,
a gay couple named Pat and Lou. I had grown
up with these sort of uncles. You know, I wasn't
related to them, but I called them my uncles. We
(05:37):
grew up in a suburb of San Francisco, and so
we could sort of see their backdack from our backdack
and would wave. Pat and Lou became fast family friends,
and like many a queer neighbor, they also became occasional
babysitters and the lue Burger. You know, on those nights
when they baby sat for us, Lou would pack these
(05:59):
incredibly rich, you know, expensive delicious greens like blue cheese
and dijon mustard and caramelized onions. John goes on to
describe these salty cheeseburgers that he could only eat half
of before feeling sick, but he loved every bite. It
was really a statement about appreciating pleasure in a way
(06:21):
that was detached from the kind of nutritional minded cooking
that my mother did. You know, in a society where
there were lots of rules and strictures, this burger had
no rules at all. Believe me when I say, I
am fully onboard. Right. An indulgent, juicy burger just slathered
(06:42):
in cheese and love is the sort of rebellious antithesis
to the nuclear family meal that being gay in the
seventies was all about. The lue burger was a kind
of middle finger in the face of a balanced dinner,
and it paved the way for today's food to be
queer in all the ways that it wants to be.
But it does feel just a little bit dated. So
(07:04):
I asked John what he thought the queerest food of
this moment might be. Wow. Wow, that's a really good question.
That is a really good question, Thank you, John. The
lue burger was a metaphor, a rebellious and indulgent delight
which expressed its joy through expensive cheese. In fact, but
(07:27):
a lot has happened since Pat and Lou are stuffing
burgers full of decadence in the nineteen seventies, And to
figure out what the queerest food of today is, we
need to make sure that we're all ordering off of
the same menu. The changes in queer culture since nineteen
seventy have not come easily. Change happened because of generations
(07:50):
of queer activists and leaders, specifically black transwomen and other
queer black indigenous people of color. Change happened because Stonewall
was a riot we know it was another raid when
all of a sudden we heard a crash. Somebody do
rocked with the window. Change happened because trans women of
color fought for my rights that night and for years
(08:12):
and years after, women like Sylvia Rivera and Marcia P.
Johnson donning I want my gay right now. I think
at that time the gay bright and sisters goddam rights
and espectly the women. Change happened because artists like Keith
Harrying and writers like James Baldwin used their platforms to
(08:32):
speak about issues like marriage equality years before it would
finally be passed into law. You think you had the
right around the right, shout anybody else who Oh, she
should marry? H should love. Change happened because activists like
Larry Kramer spent their lives fighting as the HIV and
AIGE crisis derailed a generation of queer people. Plag we
(08:55):
are in the middle of a fucking cloy and you'll
behold like. The change happened because these people and so
many others fought, rioted, and legislated their way to a
better world. A better world where I am alive and
free to put my queer energy towards the not at
all silly journalistic pursuit of finding the queerest food as
(09:21):
one siss white raisin and a beautifully queer trail mix.
I know, if I'm going to tackle the question this big,
I am gonna need some help. Oh my god, this
is so cute. So you want to end like a
list form where I can just like say it to you.
I started at the queer watering Hole social media. My
(09:41):
friend Arian immediately sent me a list Aryan is queer
and non binary uses they then pronouns and is an
absolute delight. My number one all the time being a
black American is fried chicken. I'm talking about life seasoning
and just flour and just you know, hot fried chicken,
(10:05):
like it makes you have to eat it with your
hands in a particular like way, like you know, because
it's just like so it's just gayum thick boys, gay
gay yummy thick boys. They love mashed potatoes or French
fries or some sort of like tater situation with cheese
on top of it. Cis, maybe let's just put like,
(10:28):
let's just put the potato family as like three like
strawberries always you say the word strawberry in a sentence
next to your man, Where are we at? What are
we doing? You know? So this is a very very
(10:49):
promising start. But how am I to know when I
found the answer? I needed something like something like a
rubric food rubric, A queer food brick. Queer Food Brick
trade mark twenty twenty. The first column on the queer
food brick? Is this a metaphor? I think the queer
(11:11):
food I'm looking for has some deeper symbolic meaning behind it,
like the lue Burger. And while I've never enjoyed mashed
potatoes more than I do, right in this very moment,
I had to keep searching. With the lue Burger in
my heart. I put on my journalism hat and I
hit the streets. Or I was about to, and then
(11:33):
COVID happened, so I hit the Internet, otherwise known as
the land of awkward hellos. I can you hear me?
I can't hear you. I'm not muted. Ow hi Hi.
(11:53):
I started by asking more of my queer friends what
they thought the queerest food was. I'm kevy. Pronouns are
a day them and I definify somewhere between queer and
by I'm Alice, my pronouns are she her, I identify
as lesbian and we are married. Amazing. So if we're
(12:15):
talking about queer food, what is the first thing that
comes to mind? That was pretty a media talk me through.
This is not a new idea, Nancy. An amazing podcast
from WNYC all about queer culture recently had a whole
(12:35):
thing about ice coffee and how queer it is. It's
sort of hard to pin down exactly how it started,
but regardless of how or when ice coffee became queer,
it certainly is queer now for many reasons, and one
of them is signaling. I think queer culture is very
much about the hidden signals of how to identify someone
(12:59):
who is like you without having to say anything or
risk anything. And I think ice coffee has kind of
become one of those things that's like a back pocket
hanky or not wearing box or backpacks or subarus or
glitter or overalls. Sorry farmers, you can just look at
(13:21):
someone and kind of now, oh, that person's like me.
This type of signaling is so important to the queer community.
There have been many times where I've walked into a
bar and had no idea if any of the men
in there, or even attracted to my gender, never mind
little one me. Too often, it doesn't feel safe to
approach someone and start flirting without some type of indication
(13:44):
that they won't react negatively or with violence. There is
a long tradition of these nonverbal cues. These signals like
backpocket handkerchiefs, a way to recognize other queer people. Ice
coffee now being one of them. I think we claimed this,
the gays claimed the ice coffee, you know, being someone
(14:06):
who can drink something cold when it's really cold out,
it does make you feel colder, but there's this sense
of pride that yes, I'm queer and I can do
this and I can put up with it and it's
not a big deal. Yeah, I don't have the luxury
of choosing the temperature of my coffee. Like we will
(14:26):
suffer for the thing that we love and we have,
so this is not that big of a sacrifice. Yeah yeah, yeah,
I hear that so hard. Let me sit my ice coffee.
Cheers to our badge of honor love A good queer cheers.
(14:47):
Ice coffee certainly checks many boxes on the queer food brick.
For one, the experts aka the legendary queers over at
Nancy agree with us. It holds a metaphor for the
queer experience ants and it's signaling, and in that, it's
all about suffering for what we love. But if we're
getting technical with this, and of course we're getting technical
(15:10):
with this, ice coffee isn't a food, one simple but
fundamental column of the queer food brick, it must be food.
I'll repeat that for any queers listening. Ice coffee is
not a food. Please eat something for breakfast? Hello, Hi, Edward,
(15:35):
This is Edward. His pronouns are he him? Can we
do a lightning round real quick? Yeah? Bagels? No bagels
with locks and cream, cheese, yes, samon, yes, swimming upstream?
Just watch out for the bear peppers some of them.
(16:00):
How about like stuffed peppers with like ground beef? Yeah? Yeah,
are you kidding, honey, I'm a stuffed pepper with ground beef.
But if we went on like this for far too long,
I'll spare you if I say, what is queer food? Like?
What jumps out at you? What comes to mind? First?
(16:21):
I feel like pasta is because pasta is like the
queer experience of being closeted ride. Pasta is the person
who's not comfortable to be who they are, and then
you put them in hot water aka college or like
alcohol or like whatever it may be, and they're shown
(16:44):
this like a whole new world of like heavy cream sauces.
Pasta definitely checks off some boxes on the queer food brick.
The transformation of it, this slow absorption of your surroundings
to really cook and become what you're meant to be.
That's an a plus metaphor if I've ever tasted one,
(17:04):
and it definitely is a food. Yeah, I mean, honestly,
I think it's the crux of the episode. Like, maybe
take what I said and work around it. The third
column then might read does this describe a shared experience?
Coming out is absolutely a shared queer experience. Just by
(17:25):
living in a heteronormative world, we are very often forced
to announce ourselves as queer in order to feel seen
and get to live openly. But as far as food
metaphors go, this slow absorbing of our comfortable hot water
bath isn't quite working for me. Pasta is predictable and
(17:46):
gradual and hard to mess up. It's the same every
time boil the water. Seven to ten minutes later, you're
done perfectly, a'll dente. But coming out certainly isn't predictable,
you know. I think about my queer siblings in the
trans community. Coming out for trans people is something different entirely.
It's layered and sometimes constant for a lot of people.
(18:10):
It's something that happens every day at each new job,
in each new relationship, and it looks different every time.
So if not pasta where two, next, one answer I
seemed to get again and again was some type of
baked good, cookies, cakes, that kind of thing. It was
(18:32):
a whole direction that I wanted to explore, and so
I reached out to someone who sits right at the
intersection of a queer representation and baking. I'm Michael chock Cravati,
my pronouns he and him, and I identify as a
gay man, a gay baker because I was one of
the contestants on The Great with His Bake Off twenty nineteen.
Michael was the contestant who cut his finger three times
(18:56):
in the first five minutes of the first day. Become
be slow, be confident, it's gonna be fine. It's gonna
be fine. I just, oh my god, I've done it again.
I'm so sorry, Michael again, for goodness sake, this is
so stupid, which made him instantly my favorite one friend
(19:16):
that I had talked to about this early on, we
sort of spiraled and started talking about cooking shows and
reality TV shows. Yeah, I think it's amazing, especially if
you look about even ten years ago, if you had
a gay character existing on reality TV, it was a story,
it was a really big deal. You'd see these gay people,
or these chans people, or these queer people going through
(19:38):
really challenging situations. And now we're moving into a place
where we are just equal. And that sounds so simple,
but especially on bake Off, you think about my season
like we were just seen as the same as everybody else.
And I mean the very, very very last scene of
that entire series was David kissing his partner Nick on
(19:59):
the lips and giving him a hug. And for that
to be one of the most watched television programs in
Britain and walked across the world as seeing as this
normal thing on such a popular program, That's incredible. And
I think representation is so important because how are we
supposed to feel whole, included and comfortable in our own skin,
(20:22):
and so we can see people like us in the
world around us. From Pat and Lou waving from their
back deck to David kissing his partner on the Bacoff finale.
These moments of gay men being visible are so important
for people like me to feel like there's room for us.
Imagine the world we could live in if queer, black,
(20:42):
Indigenous people of color had as much opportunity for representation
as I did. But I digress. We're here to talk
about queer food. I mean, the first that pops into
my mind is a rainbowcake because obviously, because obviously, but
I got thinking a bit about just there where about
(21:03):
especially things like The Great British Bake Off or in America,
the Great Britist Baking Show. It's so popular with the
queer community, and I think that's probably because it's just
a show about kindness overall. I think that's why it's
so popular, Like it Israel's TV, but it's it's doing
something domestic and everyone's being kind to each other, and
(21:23):
I think that's kind of lovely. And I think a
lot of the queer experience is craving family and craving
safe spaces and craving domesticity in a certain sort of sense.
While a rainbow cake might be a bit on the nose,
there's something here. There is this idea within the queer
community about chosen family. Many queer people aren't born into
(21:47):
accepting and understanding families, and so a lot of queer
people need to seek out that kindness community and family elsewhere.
I see a lot of this idea in baking. Baking
is in many ways an act of care. You often
share what you've made with other people. Right you make
batches of cookies, cupcakes by the dozen. You're not supposed
(22:09):
to eat an entire cake by yourself, or so I'm told.
Somewhere on my Queer Food brick, there's a line about care,
about kindness, about showing each other love, but no offense
to Michael. I can't possibly end the story by saying
a rainbow cake is the queerest food. Queers love many things,
(22:31):
but cliche is not one of them. And so I
added love to the Queer food brick, and I moved on.
After the break, Chad continues on his quest to find
the queerest food. Before the break, Chad had reached another
(22:51):
dead end in his search for the queerest food. Okay,
back to you, Chad, Thank you Bridget. While I haven't
yet found the perfect queer food, my queer food brick
was growing. I knew this item needed to be a food,
a metaphor, something for the queer experience, and something containing love.
(23:14):
So I kept asking around. My name is oro Wise,
and I use she her pronouns. I live in Brooklyn.
I am the culinary curator for Queer Anga que trans
Wellness Collective, and I am also a coordinator of FIG
Food Issues Group. I would say that in terms of
(23:34):
the queerest food, I think that what that would be
would be things that are hybrid that meals and foods
and ways of eating that exists between more traditional and
conventional spaces. I actually just wrote a piece with my
dear friend Kim Choo about a para TiVo and kind
(23:56):
of thinking about that in some ways as queer food
or a queer food ritual because it takes place in
between day and night, in this cuspy time. This cuspy
time where a pair of TiVo takes place, fits well
with what the word queer is starting to mean to me.
(24:17):
To me, the word queer, in all of its enormity,
is really celebrating this hybrid outside of more traditional and
conventional spaces. I added it to the queer food brick
and moved on. I'm Raddideta, I use the VM pronouns.
I'm a two spirit renegade, artist, educator, and community builder. Well,
(24:44):
when I first read your question, like tropical fruits came
to mind because they're so like the outside never matches
the inside, and it's always like a surprise on the inside,
and like you can neveragine what it's gonna taste like
based on what the outside wore the inside look like,
(25:05):
and it's just like a bunch of contradictions, a bunch
of contradictions that might be exactly what never felt right
about the lue Burger. Thelue Burger was so upfront and
who and what it was indulgent. But as queer people,
we often grow up putting on a mask, some sort
(25:26):
of external guys, not acknowledging who we are on the inside.
In our most formative years, many of us grow appeal
to disguise the fruit underneath, punintended, and even after coming
out or being outed, that learned behavior is very deeply
ingrained in our identities. Being queer as complicated well you
(25:50):
know where I'm from. In Brazil, there's like hundreds and hundreds,
maybe thousands more fruit varieties than anywhere else in world,
and so I'm always discovering new fruits, things I've never
ever heard of. There's always something new which feels so
(26:11):
queer to me. And then there's some other ones that
I don't even know their names, that are like from
the jungle and have to like know how to even
eat them, how to even open them and stuff. I
had always thought that I had a pretty clear grasp
on what it meant to be queer. I had encountered
just about every fruit that there could possibly be, hadn't I. Well,
(26:35):
queerness to me is like really undefinable because it's different
for every person, and I think for most people different
every day and sometimes every moment. You're constantly defining or
not defining yourself for yourself, and it's like really empowering
(26:57):
ourselves to like not be what's the word contained? There
are over three hundred native varieties of fruit in Brazil alone.
I can name like fifteen fruits total. My vision of
the queer community has been the equivalent of a stop
(27:18):
and shop produce section. But what does that mean, for
this story, how can I possibly figure out the queer's
food When I'm just one fruit in the world's largest
produce section. I can't possibly distill every experience. I suddenly
feel like I'm on an episode of Nailed It. In
(27:40):
case you don't have your ex's Netflix password anymore. Nailed
It is a competition show hosted by the beautiful and
talented Nicole Buyer, where these amateur home bakers compete and
try and recreate a gorgeously decorated cake. At this moment
reporting this queer food story, I feel like I'm Season two,
(28:00):
episode five, where they're building these giant rattlesnake cakes. Okay,
here we go, two hours on the clock, thousand dollars
on the line, it's time to know. At our slow
slow It's like the clock is ticking down and I'm
(28:23):
realizing I don't actually know how to build a snake cake.
Com I'm having a hard time keeping my head erect.
At this point, I forget the queer food brick. Should
I even be asking the question what is the queerest food?
Is this premise wrong? Altogether? It's like the giant head
(28:45):
of my rattlesnake cake is falling off and I'm diving
for the panic button. Paddock, Y, I need help. Hello. Sorry,
I was saying hi and still muted. No, You're fine.
Why Hi, I'm assuming lad of this out. You assumed wrong?
(29:06):
Matthew Matthews pronouns are he and him. What comes to
mind when I talk about like walking down a path
of queer food. The one dish that like I came
up with as a dish, it's called law. Are we
called it law? It's like this ground beef dish. It's
probably what you get at a thaie restaurant that always
like conserved, like with lettuce, they call it let us wraps. Typically,
(29:29):
like as I become more comfortable with being mixed race
within the queer community and you know, really cherishing my
tie identity and tie dishes that specifically resonate with me
and kind of feel true to my m intersectionality. Yeah,
when Matthew is talking about intersectionality here, he is specifically
(29:51):
talking about the intersection of his racial identity and sexual orientation.
Our society has many categories of identities, things like sexual orientation,
gender identity, race, class, nationality, and disability to name the
big ones, and all of these identities are interconnected. The
(30:11):
beautiful buffet that is the queer community is as diverse
as it is as a direct result of all of
our intersectional identities. Being queer is what we have in common,
but there are still so many ways we can be different,
and those differences make the queer community so amazing. But
where there are differences, there is often prejudice. So I'm
(30:34):
mixed race, i am tie in German, and that's something
I've definitely struggled with with. Being queer is just like
experiencing racism within the queer community and just how hard
that was when you know, you think it's a community
that's gonna open you with loving arms. Each of our
identities comes with either privilege or disadvantage. My identities are
(30:59):
at the intersection of so much privilege. I am gay
and that isn't always easy, But I'm also white and
assist gendered man. The intersections of some people's identities make
them the target of exacerbated disadvantage or hate, which is
why it is so important to say here that black
(31:21):
translives matter. For Matthew, because of intersectional identity, his queer
food had to honor both his queer anti identities. The
simple idea of just like a dish that reminds me
of home and home is true to me and for
me my identity as I'm queer, I'm tie and so
(31:43):
it just feels like a dish that like just feels
like me in a dish wrapped up in lettuce, wrapped
up in lettuce. Yeah. According to my Queer Food Brick
Trademark twenty twenty, the queerest food has to be food.
It has to be a metaphor, it has to be
(32:04):
of or relating to the queer experience. But the queer
experience is so diverse, it's so tied to personal journey
and intersectional identity and uniqueness and magic, that I'm beginning
to realize the queerest food can't possibly exist. Maybe I
can't answer the question what is the queerest food, but
(32:29):
I can certainly try and figure out what is mine.
Maybe my headless rattlesnake cake is salvageable, after all, you
know what, that's a good cake. Thank you, You're welcome,
all right, thank you. Of course, the lue Burger wasn't
the queerest food for me. I didn't grow up eating it.
(32:52):
Maybe my queerest food was something I did grow up
eating or at least something tied to my early coming
out days. Okay, so, hi Johnny Cortez. My pronouns are
he his? And I'm gay? And how do we know
each other? Oh? And we? What should I say? We
(33:14):
were in a relationship? And how do I word this?
This is very important? It's my introduction. We dated in
high school, child and I dated in high school. Johnny
was my first boyfriend. It was one of those high
school relationships that was absolutely perfect until it stopped being
(33:37):
absolutely perfect. But that first love is a memorable thing.
Do you remember, Oh gosh, do you remember where our
first date was? I really don't. For some of us,
at least, I tried to get him at least to
think of a food that might sum up our relationship. Honestly,
(33:57):
I can think of a specific food that reminds me
of you lot. What is that? It actually reminds me
of your mom a lot, because she would make it
for me. This is so funny. She would make it
for me when I would just be like chilling out
your house. I don't know where you were, but I
would just be there like all the time, and she
would always make me tuna fish sandwiches on some sort
(34:19):
of like really good thick bread. But she'd use a
miracle whip and she'd toasts the bread. Oh, what is
queer about sandwiches? What's queer about sandwiches. It's a kind
of like a party in your mouth. Like it's like
all of the best things in life. It's like the best.
(34:39):
It's like the carbs, it's the cheese, it's the meat.
There is definitely something to this. A sandwich is layered
with multiple different parts, all being celebrated, working together to
make one solid lunchtime staple. They're complex, there's so many
options and varieties. There's something here. I had one more
(35:04):
question left to ask. Did you like my mom more
than you liked me? Yeah, that's allowed, it's fair. She's great.
She's great. I'm just kidding, But I do still think
about your mom. Off. Then that's when it hit me.
What made this sandwich so special to Johnny was the
(35:26):
care and the love that my mom put into making it.
It was a way my mom showed him that she
cared about him even when I wasn't around, which is
so sweet. It's almost my perfect queer food. There's just
one little bitty issue I just don't love sandwiches. It's
(35:48):
picky and lame of me because this metaphor is so
adorable and so perfect, but they just aren't my favorite.
But in thinking about the food my family would make
me growing up, I realized the perfect answer had been
sitting right in front of me the whole time. My
dad sent it to me on day one when I
(36:08):
first posted this question on social media. Hello, Hello, Hi,
how's it going? Good? Is it needs to be facetimer?
Is this good? No? This is great? Perfect, perfect. I
didn't do my makeup today, Dad jokes, what's going on, Junior? Yeah,
so you know that I'm working on a story that's
(36:29):
trying to answer the question what is the queerest food? Yep?
I had posted this on Facebook and you had sent
in an answer. Can you tell me what that answer was? Yes?
I said the crunch rep Supreme? Yep, the crunch trap Supreme.
And what is a crun trap supreme? For anyone who
hasn't had one before? Oh, it's a little slice that
(36:50):
happened comes out of Castle Bell. Picture a taco, a
standard taco in a hard shell filled with whatever meat,
let us tomato, cheese, And when you eat that it
always falls apart. So to keep it together, you place
it inside the very middle of a what's the bread
does it's not the heata bread, is it? Yeah, the
(37:10):
heat bread tortilla, but close enough. You put in salo cream,
you put in cheese, and everything stays together. It's just
wonderful and the flavor is phenomenal. It's just wonderful. A
little sice of heaven called the crunch rap supreme. So
what makes you think of a crunch rap supreme when
I talk about queer food. When you look at the
(37:31):
crunch wrap, you see no crunch involves in it, So
how do you call it a crunch rapt It's just
almost like a pocket sandwich, and when you start eating it,
there's a surprising inside. It's just the oddest thing to
me to go from a sandwich looking item to a
taco and no time at all. I thought of the
crunch rap because you look at it and you see something,
(37:53):
and if you like it or you don't like, you
judge it by the look, just like you would homosexuality. Somebody,
as you and i've been in the city before, we
say this really flamboyant gentleman walking down with a yellow leotard.
Just the look at him very unique. But you start
judging now, and now there's where you're going the wrong way.
(38:15):
So the crunch raft looks one way on the outside
and on the inside it's a taco, which is something
everyone wants to eat. So I guess my point was
judging by the looks, you have no idea what's inside.
It's outside an interior don't always align. It's a contradiction.
The outside never matches the inside, and it's always like
(38:36):
a surprise. It looks like a pocket sandwich, as my
dad so eloquently explained, with something inside that everyone wants
to eat. It's a kind of like a party in
your mouth, Like it's like the carbs, it's the cheese,
it's the meat. It exists in this kind of in
between space, not quite a taco, not quite a burrito,
(39:00):
not really a sandwich. Things that are hybrid that meals
and foods and ways of eating that exists between more
traditional and conventional spaces. Whether he realized it or not,
my dad served me up a response that checked all
the boxes. It's a food, a hybrid existing in between.
(39:24):
It's accessible. A metaphor for my queer experience, and it
is uniquely personal to me. My dad is talking about
the crunch raps that he used to make for us
at home, or to first thought it, we used to
have tacos, and we like tacos. Well, we stopped as
a family, you guys stopped eating them because it was
such a chore. So when I saw the crunch wrap,
(39:46):
I got excited. I wanted to make one at home,
so I tried. I tried before you guys came to
visit on your days to visit, and the thing just
kept falling apart. So I didn't know how to keep
it frying, how to keep together. I needed to weigh
it down with something, and as a troubled shooter, I
looked around and I found a really heavy candle, big
(40:09):
heavy candles. I placed the candle, after cleaning it, of course,
on top of the crunch trap, and that kept the
weight down to the entire surface group cook. Well, from
my perspective, it was this thing that I knew that
I really liked, and then I had a dad who
went out of his way to figure out how to
make it for us, and so that was just like
a really nice thing. That's how I saw it. Was
(40:30):
just like you knew we loved it, and so you
learned how to make it so that we could have
it more often. That crunch trap was away. My dad
showed me what family was all about. You figure out
how to give the person you love what they want,
even if it means making pocket sandwiches out of fajita
bread using big, heavy candles. It was a simple act
(40:51):
of kindness through food and it meant everything to me.
I love that. That's really nice, and it was so
nice to see her sponsor felt really validating, and I
felt really lucky to have grown up in a household ware.
I was taught to try the cruntrap supreme and not
judge it based on how it looks on the outside. Well,
(41:13):
that is a two way learning experience. Because I did
grow up in a small town. We had a couple
of gay families, but we're very sheltered. And as I
grew up with you, I learned more and more to
not think about the topic of homosexuality. Just look at
that person and you love that person. And for me,
(41:34):
it was a piece of cake to go through all
of that. I'll be honest with you, chat, I think
you might have been six or seven, when I called
my brother Steve and I asked him about that. I said,
how would you know? And Steve said to me, what
does it matter? And I'm like, there you go. That
just sends that story, so I didn't have to think
after that. That was really a help for me. Shout
(41:54):
out to Uncle Steve for knowing how to handle that
question so long ago. It made such a different and
I think for that reason, for a lot of other reasons,
the cruntrap is where I'm ending the story. I think
it is the queerest food that I can think of.
You know, it's a very like fond, happy, loving childhood memory.
Well that's excellent. That really, uh, you know, not knowing
(42:16):
that it really makes me feel good. I do feel
good about what we did as we grew together. But
that's a nice, little, nice little chat. Thank you, Yeah,
thank you. Sure, maybe when I come visit, we can
make some cruntraps. Define that sounds cool, and when you
bring your baking skill that This story was brought to
(42:40):
us by Chad shana I and be sure to check
out The America's Test Kitching Kids podcast Mystery Recipe with
your Young Chefs at Home. Thanks to everyone that we
spoke to for this great story, and if you'd like
to donate to Ura Wise's group queer Anga, We've put
a link in our show notes and if you want
to learn more about this story, then please visit our
website that's www dot America's Test Kitchen dot com slash Proof.
(43:06):
Go check it out and if you like Proof, then
be sure to subscribe wherever you listen so you'll get
brand new episodes as soon as they drop. And while
you're there, why not leave us a rating or write
us a review. It really helps other people find the show.
Proof is hosted and produced by me Bridget Lancaster. Our
executive producer is Caitlin Kelleher. Sarah Joyner is our managing producer.
(43:29):
Associate producer Caroline Ricord. Scoring, sound design and mixing by
Matt Pointon of Ultra Violet Audio. Brian Campbell of Signal
Sounds composed our theme music. Additional music by Kyle Forrester
and Jordan Pearson. Post production supervisor is Hen Margolis. Our
production manager is Diane Knox. Thanks to Marie soladav for
consulting on the script. Jack Bishop is Chief Creative Officer
(43:52):
of America's Test Kitchen. David Nussbaum is our CEO. Thanks
again to our sponsors Kohler, Oxomokos Creamery, and the Town.
Doc Proof is a production of America's Test Kitchen.
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