The Racist Sandwich podcast serves up a perspective you don't often hear: food – how we consume, create and interpret it – can be political. Journalists and radio producers Stephanie Kuo and Juan Ramirez interview chefs and purveyors of color, tackling food's relationship to race, gender and class in their bi-weekly podcast that pushes the boundaries of food media.
Anyone in Portland can tell you that we've been experiencing a huge increase in restaurants and bars this year. What we sought to find out in this episode was whether that same increase has meant more opportunities and financial stability for food service workers—the people who form the backbone of our growing service economy.
On this episode, we explore food from a slightly different angle. We talked with Amy Lam, associate editor at BITCH Magazine and co-founder of the group "Portland Creatives of Color" — which is the reason why we met and started this podcast in the first place. Amy talked to us about her relationship with food, and how the gendered expectations she was raised with shaped the way she sees cooking. From there, all three of us share what it means to be writers and children of immigrants at the same time.