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Meet the White People Behind 'Thug Kitchen'

For over a year, the anonymous authors behind the blog Thug Kitchen entertained their audience with a mixture of healthy recipes and profane ejaculations with a borderline cringey "thug" affectation. Reddit loves it. Gwyneth Paltrow thinks it's hilarious and good. Now, the faces behind Thug Kitchen have been revealed: and they're a couple of white people in California.

If you watch their brand new cookbook's preview, you can catch them making a cameo at about 1:26.

An intrepid writer for recipe giant Epicurious tracked down Matt Holloway and Michelle Davis in their Hollywood apartment, where they were preparing roasted beer and lime cauliflower tacos (a recipe they'd later post on their blog). Here's how Holloway talks in real life:

"There were these paragraphs where the writer would wax poetic about recipes," says Holloway. "The lifestyle, the food—we couldnt identify with anything that was out there."

The idea behind Thug Kitchen, I guess, is that it gives its readers instructions on how to make healthy vegan food using simple recipes and fresh ingredients, plus a lot of "motherfucker" and "aw yeah, bitch." There's also invocation of the word "thug," a word recently most frequently associated with white people denigrating the black victims of violent crime. Richard Sherman of the Seattle Seahawks, famously christened a "thug" by some commentators after yelling about football during a post-game interview, famously said that "thug" is a new way to call somebody the n-word.

And now Thug Kitchen by Michelle Davis and Matt Holloway is a book.

http://jezebel.com/meet-the-white-people-behind-thug-kitchen-1640479775








Thug Kitchen: A Recipe in Blackface


hen I first clicked through the recipes at Thug Kitchen, a tongue-in-cheek, vegan cooking blog served up with a heaping side of expletives, I imagined a calorie-conscious, gangly young black man who’s particularly vehement about clean eating, insistently tapping recipes into his blog while Dead Prez reverberates in the background. He has a good eye, too, as he complements such recipes as “Roasted Brussels Sprouts With Quinoa and Motherf--king Cranberries” with Pinterest-worthy pics and the tagline, “Eat like you give a f--k.”

With African Americans especially plagued with obesity and the accompanying stressors and diseases, it was a refreshing idea that a young black man would be the purveyor of not just healthy eating but vegan cuisine at that, a leap that some health-conscious folks might find it difficult to make, given the restrictions on eggs and dairy in addition to meats.

More Auntie Fee than Chef G. Garvin, the blog would likely discourage trading recipes word for word with your mom. Still, I was inspired. To me, Thug Kitchen could have helped whip up a healthy eating movement akin to those of the natural-hair purists or, say, Black Girls Run— which are all uplifting healthwise for black folks and enforce a positive message for us. Would Chef G. Garvin or Chef Roblé feature the up-and-comer? Might he be cooking with the Neelys one day?

With more than 51,000 followers on Twitter, a couple of endorsements from Gwyneth Paltrow and a new cookbook released to much fanfare, the mystery blogger behind the well-trafficked site was poised and ready to emerge from the shadows and join fellow next-level black entrepreneurs.

An Epicurious profile revealed one astonishing caveat, however: The Thug Kitchen creator isn’t exactly a black entrepreneur—or black at all.

In the spirit of Thug Kitchen language, what the f--k?

The blog is actually the brainchild of a white man and white woman who started it in August 2012 on Tumblr.

“Months later, after a bit of detective work and a fair amount of sweet-talking, I found myself driving through East Hollywood on the way to sample some dairy-free ice cream from Scoops, blasting Gucci [Mane’s] ‘Lemonade’ with the windows down. I was rolling with Michelle Davis and Matt Holloway, both 29, aka the pair behind Thug Kitchen,” reads Matt Duckor’s profile of the duo, which revealed the pair’s identity for the first time.

Le sigh.

It would be the same if one discovered that Suri’s Burn Book was actually ghostwritten by Suge Knight. Or if the Rev. Jesse Jackson was secretly the one behind those abhorrent People magazine tweets from last week.

Is it really any coincidence that the Thug Kitchen bloggers waited this long to reveal their true identity? They had to know that it would be incongruous and wouldn’t fly if they told readers from the beginning that they were white.

Their recently released commercial is full of white people, young and old, touting the benefits of eating healthy thanks to the cookbook. One woman says that she is no longer lazy about the food she gives her family: “Now that I have the Thug Kitchen cookbook, I don’t play that s--t anymore.”


Really?

It’s deceptive and feels a lot like the latest iteration of nouveau blackface. It stirs up the same anomalous feelings one has when one sees a tweet from an Iggy Azalea fan account dubbing her and Macklemore the queen and king of rap.

http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2014/09/thug_kitchen_a_recipe_in_blackface.html