“Where are the black food writers?” asks Toni Tipton-Martin.
A native Angeleno, author and community activist, Tipton-Martin has frequently wrestled with that question during her 31-year food-writing career. In the 1980s, the Los Angeles Times hired her as a food reporter. A few years later, she made history with the Cleveland Plain Dealer when she became the first African American woman to edit the food section of a major newspaper.
Being a food journalist of color was a lonely existence then, and is only marginally less so now, but Tipton-Martin, through her writing and advocacy, has been a leading voice in trying to change that.
At a time when museums are being held accountable by a variety of publics for every aspect of their operations — from programming and exhibition-making to financial support and governance structures — perhaps it is useful to look at parallel institutions that are doing similar work for guidance on alternative ways of working.
While some of these elements — group seating, shared entrees, preset menus — seem familiar, what’s novel is these restaurants’ underlying ethos: The goal is to bring people of all backgrounds together in this splintered time, to make eating out a collective enterprise. Communal dining, of course, isn’t new. But these restaurants are both more urbane and more ambitious than their forebears — places where the food, wine and design are considered so carefully that the casual, family-style service and ambience feel, at first, like paradoxes. The format seems theatrical, or at least experiential: In these establishments, customers aren’t only paying for the food but for the upending of dining-out conventions. Restaurants are, to some extent, valued for their predictability and consistency — in this new model, the element of surprise is part of the attraction.
In Secondhand, Minter starts with a strange question: What happens to peoples' stuff when they die? He answers the question in the first chapter — but this only opens a door into the hidden, multibillion-dollar industry of reuse. With grace, a keen eye for detail, an interesting cast of character that spend their life reselling used things, and the perennially curious mind of a great journalist, Minter takes readers from the backs of thrift stores all across the United States to small apartments and vintage shops in Tokyo, and from a truck in Mexico to an office in Mumbai, to show the inner workings of one of the world's largest markets. Along the way, he interviews many fascinating people who make a living buying, selling, and throwing away what others discard — or leave behind after their deaths — all while wondering what the future holds for this business in an era where consumers crave new things.
These essays shine with broken humanity and announce the arrival of a new voice in contemporary nonfiction, but they do so with heaps of melancholia and frustration instead of answers. That Perry can hurt us and keep us asking for more is a testament to his talent as a storyteller.