August 14, 2009

Rick Bayless caught between blogger and journalist crossfire charges of racism at Chicago Tribune's website

A firey feud between food critics and bloggers has ensnared Chicago celebrity chef Rick Bayless, with charges of racism being tossed around the Chicago Tribune’s online kitchen.

Just how did a Top Chef Master find himself at the center of a flame war? Naturally, it started with a blog post.

It all began when Teresa Puente — a blogger for the Tribune’s freelancer blog network, ChicagoNow — wondered about what’s up with all the fawning over Bayless for his Mexican cuisine? You know, because he’s white and there’s plenty of Latino chefs that could deserve some of the spotlight, too — especially since we’re talking about Mexican (i.e.: not white) food.

Something just bugged me that a white guy was gaining so much fame for his Mexican cuisine. I’m sure his love of Mexico is genuine and he does good charity work. I’m not saying he’s a bad guy, and he is a great chef. But why does the media make him the spokesman for Mexican food in the United States?

Great question! Maybe it’s because he’s a great chef? At least, that’s the gist of Tribune food critic Phil Vettel, who responded in his own blog post asking Puente to “hold the racism”:

Perhaps Ms. Puente would understand the ugliness of her argument if we switched a few ethnic identities. For instance, suppose I were to question the authenticity of an Italian restaurant because it had too many Mexican cooks? Is Harry Caray’s less of an Italian steakhouse because for most of its life the head chef’s name was Abraham Aguirre?

Like all good flame wars, it’s spilled over to include the voices of the Tribune Twitterati. The Tower’s Kathleen Pratt for Metromix tweeted Vettel’s response calling it “informed” and smacked Puente’s post as “uninformed.” She’s joined by Tribune’s Cheryl Bowles and Kevin Pang (*see update below) as well as WGN-TV’s Marcus Leshock in spreading the link around. And now Bayless himself has RTed the link, but avoiding adding further commentary about it.

Meanwhile, Puente has taken to Twitter herself and also posted a follow-up response on her blog, saying it’s too easy to label someone as a racist.

That may very well be, but it’s also too easy for the Tribune’s old guard to gang up on a contributing blogger on one of the newspaper’s side projects. This isn’t just any regular flame war, it’s a old versus new, salaried versus freelance, insider versus outsider turf battle being played out on the Chicago Tribune’s own home page, linking to both Vettel and Puente’s posts.

ChicagoNow’s an experiment billed as “the Huffington Post meets Facebook” as a means of generating more local page views to corner the Chicagoland market for local ad spends online. But what happens when the conflicts stop being externally based and start arising from within?

Tribune employees will surely use this as an example to show how bloggers paid by the pageview can’t replace “informed” opinions and bloggers are sure to use this as an example of the established journalists just “not getting it.”

The truth, of course, is somewhere in between. Bloggers see this as a chance for them to finally get paid for work they’re already doing elsewhere for free. But while the pajama pundits stand to gain, the paperweights have a lot to lose and the knives have come out.

(*) UPDATE: Kevin Pang sent me this message via Twitter: “RT’ing a post does not mean I endorse any one side, and certainly doesn’t constitute a “flame war” as you suggest.”