Celebrating queer chefs, authors, and food writers with Jesse Szewczyk's Tasty Pride

*In response to travel restrictions and social distancing due to COVID-19, this week's interview was recorded remotely and not in-studio. Thanks for listening.*

NEW YORK—This week, we're excited to welcome Jesse Szewczyk to Salt & Spine, the show on cookbooks.

Jesse Szewczyk is a New York-based food writer and stylist with bylines in outlets from Food52, The Kitchn, Tasty, and Jarry.

Jesse joined us in Pride Month to talk about his first cookbook, Tasty Pride: 75 Recipes and Stories from The Queer Food Community. In addition to bringing together queer voices for this cookbook, Jesse's publishers—Clarkson Potter & Tasty—also made a $50,000 donation to GLADD on the book's publication.

In today's show, we talk with Jesse about:

• growing up in the Midwest and becoming interested in food at an early age while cooking with his mother;
• what it was like to work in restaurant kitchens and food media as a young, gay man;
• representation of queer voices in the cookbook and food media industries;
• and the process of putting together this compilation cookbook.
  

Jesse dedicates the book to:

"All the queer cooks who have longed to see themselves represented in mainstream food media. We are in every restaurant, test kitchen, hotel, catering company, studio, and publication. This book and the stories within in prove that there is a seat at the table for all of us."

In addition to Jesse, we're joined by other contributors to Tasty Pride, including food writers John Birdsall, Aaron Hutcherson, and Eric Kim — and we hear from some of our past conversations with queer authors Lazarus Lynch and Julia Turshen.

* * *

More reading:

Read John Birdsall's piece from Lucky Peach:

‍

Read more from Eric Kim in Food52:

‍

Read a Q&A with Aaron Hutcherson in Jarry:

‍

Read Julia Turshen's piece in Eater on equity in cookbooks:

‍