The best food content on (mostly) Hulu and YouTube
So much of who we are is what we eat - and the food shows we watch!
In April of this year, I shared a long-winded post about some of my favorite food content. It was hard to narrow it down to 5 and some change. In the seven months since, we’ve gone through another lockdown and I took time off work, which means I’ve had a lot - and I mean A LOT - of time to gorge on new food content. Here’s my list of new favorites!
The Next Thing You Eat - Hulu
It should come as no surprise to anyone that this was right up my alley. The Next Thing You Eat is Dave Chang's newest docuseries in which he talks about the future of food. In each of 6 episodes, Dave and a bunch of his food-conscious friends (where's Meehan?) tackle a culinary issue to shed some light and debunk a few myths. AI, climate change, the pandemic, real estate, population overgrowth, overconsumption and more will continue to have an undeniable impact on the things we eat and will be eating 30 years from now. Rising CO2 levels affect the fish you can make sushi with, increasing automation in the food industry means entry-level jobs are disappearing, rising rents in metropolitan areas are driving restaurateurs to the outskirts and climate concerns are impacting just about every link on the food chain. Chang approaches each of these questions with his trademark pop-culture-profuse irreverence while offering many sides of many coins, allowing you to make of the information given what you will. Decentralization, degrowth as well as an ecocentric approach all seem to be a part of a solution. Interestingly, concerns over sustainability and food security are also likely to give rise to unprecedented leaps in culinary innovation. We can't say for sure what our diets will look like by 2050 but we can expect to see a few new things on the table: lab-grown meat, vertically-farmed lettuce, roasted crickets, DNA-engineered smoothies.
Taste The Nation (Hulu)
After catching her on First We Feast’s Snacked, I wanted to see more Padma Lakshmi and was delighted to discover a 10-episode food series she’s the host of. Taste The Nation takes us across the nation of, you’ve guessed it, America, to seek out the food and the stories that have shaped the country. Unsurprisingly, Padma finds herself in immigrant and Indigenous communities more often than not, as she eats burritos at the Mexico-US border, shares anecdotes with friends and family about dosa and zips through San Francisco with comedian Ali Wong to understand what in the world chop suey is. Most encounters ultimately veer into conversations about immigration, assimilation, belonging and erasure as we’re repeatedly compelled to conclude that no food culture is monolithic. Padma is an exceptional listener and treats all of the stories she tells with care and compassion.
There’s a four-episode holiday special that just came out that I have to look forward to. Will report back in the next post!
High on the Hog (Netflix)
Much like Taste The Nation, High on the Hog is interested in uncovering the source of what is now considered mainstream American food. A lot of the answers can be found in African and African-American cuisines, the roots of which are intentionally muddled by history. Food producer Stephen Satterfield takes us from South Carolina to Benin to retrace the steps food took before they were assimilated, appropriated or erased. The first episode, “Our Roots”, is arguably the most haunting, as it follows Satterfield to a memorial site remembering the slave trade. There’s no way to truly do justice to this episode - or to the whole show really - since so much of what makes it special is the perspective from which it’s told, a perspective free from a white gaze. It’s a way of telling Black history through food, a way of expanding your palate’s horizons, a reminder that narratives once muzzled, can be reclaimed and retold.
FEATR (YouTube)
Coming at us straight from his kitchen in Manila, Erwan Heussaff (husband to Filipina-Australian multi-hyphenate Anne Curtis) has rebranded his formerly-eponymous channel. FEATR stands for “Food, Encounter and Travel” and gives the creator and his growing pool of collaborators a chance to explore more things under a single banner. Since rebranding, Erwan’s team have launched exciting new series such as Pandemic Kitchens, focusing on food businesses that sprung, grew or mixed things up over the past year and Fiesta in a Box, an online reality competition in partnership with Youtube. Perhaps more excitingly though, Erwan has been collaborating with internet food celebrities of Asian or mixed heritage such as Marion Grasby and Inga Lam and challenging them to virtual pan-Asian cook-offs. What’s not to love? Erwan is as personable as ever and is dedicated to bringing Filipino food stories to the fore - I’m here for it!
*
And that’s a wrap on this edition! Most of these are all still very US-centric, I know, perhaps because that’s what resonates the most with my own intersections or perhaps because Americana dominates my news feeds - maybe both! At any rate, let me know if there’s any good food content you’ve seen of late that you’d recommend I catch up on.