TAYLER MONTAGUE: Hey, everyone. Thank you for all staying. I’m gonna be doing a Q&A with Mayukh Sen, who wrote a book, Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America. Let’s clap it up for Mayukh, y’all.

[Applause.]

TM: So, I’m excited to just hop in. I’m gonna ask a few questions—hello, my name is Taylor, sorry I didn’t introduce myself—and then I’ll kick some to the audience… I know you have a background in film criticism, so I want to know about how you went from film criticism to food writing, and how cinema informed your writing process.

MAYUKH SEN: So, it happened by total accident. I grew up wanting to be a film critic. I hoarded Entertainment Weekly issues all the time when I was a kid. I was obsessed with the Oscars, all that stuff. But five years ago, when I was a 24-year-old freelancer, I got this offer to be a staff writer at a site called Food52, and I was like, “Ugh, food writing, I dunno.” It feels like the domain of these rich straight white dudes, and I’m just so not that in my sensibility. I’m, like, this queer brown kid, child of immigrants, yada yada, you know? But I needed a job and so I took it, and so that’s how food writing happened to me, but I have tried to kind of keep a pulse on—or rather keep in touch with whatever skills film writing endowed me with. I really gravitate towards films that are buoyed by strong performances, and I really love writing about the craft of a great film performance, especially a female performance. I feel as though I have absorbed a lot, or tried to absorb a lot of what I see in the most skilled performances, my favorite performances by actresses, and I try to apply that sort of artistry to my storytelling.

TM: I can see from the film we just saw, there’s themes of migration, there’s themes of cooking, and I wanted to talk more about your film program at large. And this film in particular, how it inspired you, or what made you choose it.

MS: Yeah, totally. So, this series—first of all, thank you Metrograph for having us—but this film series has been in the works for a few years, and I knew that I really wanted to have Black Girl (1966) as one of the films. One of the notions that I was trying to write against in this book is a really pervasive dominant narrative that I see in a lot of food media, and just the culture at large, which is this idea that an immigrant’s worth should be based on their productivity, and we see that play out here. You know, [scenes] where Diouana’s cooking, her employers lavish praise upon her cooking, yet they do not respect her humanity whatsoever. I saw something similar happening a lot in food media, especially around the time I got into the industry, I saw so many white-led, liberal-seeming publications peddle myths like, “Immigrants feed America” and “Immigrants get the job done,” which, to me, even if they are well-intentioned, feel as though they are centering a certain kind of consumer whom the American food media has privileged for so long. I wanted to write against that notion, and the best way to do that, I felt, within my very limited skillset as a storyteller was to tell the stories of each woman in the most granular way possible and really honor their labor in some way and understand what their creative impulses were and whether they were able to make a living doing that in America.

So—God, I feel like I may have lost track of your question here, but uh, that is why I chose Black Girl. There are so many striking moments that really puncture that whole myth I’m talking about. I also was attracted to putting this film in the program because, some of you may know this, but Ousmane Sembène based this movie on a real-life incident. There was a woman named Diouana who died by suicide after facing these sorts of really awful challenges at the hands of her employers, and this woman was essentially reduced to a footnote in history. She was just kind of a headline as you see in this film. I felt as though so many of the women I chose to write about in my book kind of had a similar fate befall them, and I kind of wrote against the fear that they would remain a footnote, basically. So that is another reason why I was constantly thinking about this movie as I was writing the book over the past few years.