The Future of the Food Magazine? Four Teenagers May Have the Answer

And not that that’s wrong, but there are so many more aspects to the food trade. So I’m like, “Okay, where am I going to go?” Even though a lot of us are interested in food, and a lot of us do want to take this route, we want to utilize the education that we’ve been learning for all this time. Since if you’re going to do something different, then we don’t want it to look like something we got from years prior or something we had last year, like [the theme of] zero waste.

Don’t make it look like you’re doing it as, “Oh, we need this Indian chef just for the sake of the magazine, otherwise we’re going to get called out on it or bashed for it.” No, we wanted to feature [Priya Krishna] for the right reasons, since she’s talented. In a way, i feel as though Pass the Spatula really brings more to the people relating in their own personal experiences, and even just wanting to learn or get a method just right off of a magazine, but having an actual backstory to it and actually meeting chefs that are more like them and have similar ideas or beliefs.

Pass the Spatula hits somewhere close to home, in a way where you can just pick it up off your bookshelf, find a nice method to cook for dinner. Just have that thought that, “Oh, students made this, but they also had the idea of bringing people together with it.” Did you ever consider careers outside of the restaurant industry—like in the adjacent world of food media? Working on Pass the Spatula really threw open its doors my eyes to the different possibilities that there are for me and for my future in the world of food.

And it gave me a broader look and point of view about what you can do with food, even though you don’t have to be in the kitchen all the time. You can as well write about it and do food activism—as she in addition divests her cakes. Stuff that she makes for Black Lives Matter or other organizations that support people who don’t have enough, or who just don’t get a lot of attention that they deserve. And I’m like, “Oh my God, what if there’s a really good job that finds that intersectionality between everything that you’re interested in?” I can have my love for food, but it doesn’t have to be right in the kitchen using a knife.

What the vision of what people think that it is that you go to that school for. “Oh, you can’t cook? Something that really stuck with me from Judy Kim’s story was that not every chef was born. Thought to themselves, “Yes, I’m going to be a chef.” She first got into the fashion sector, and hearing that—it’s like, oh, that could be me, because I’m really into fashion. The way you start and what you take from what you used to do—like, if you’re an artist, or if you even do construction or something, you can really implement that in your food and what you want to do in the food trade.

Looking at the effects of COVID-19 and the pandemic on the restaurant trade—it’s a very unprecedented time for the sector, especially with the risk of a second wave coming in. Being people who are going into the food industry, we’re just at present looking back at the whole umbrella of what are the possibilities of food, ’cause, you know, the future of food is going to change.

Jade Atkins: I know there’s nothing set in stone for the second issue or anything, but I do have to say that Pass the Spatula especially has been an outlet for us, and it helped us get to meet new people and actually understand them, and as well talk to them on a different level. And she was so supportive, and I got to share with everyone what the main message was about Pass the Spatula : bring awareness of what’s happening in the world that nobody really wants to talk about.

Some people—or in magazines, in food media, and media in general—they just don’t talk about it a lot, or when they do, they don’t like to specify. Leonel Ramirez: We might not be as involved as we were last year, but we want it to be something that’s going to be remembered for kids coming to Food and Finance in the coming years. Anthony Trabasas: Tying in with the work of Pass the Spatula and the legacy that it built, it just serves as a foundation for some more interesting and unique topics that the next juniors from Food and Finance High School can tackle.

And that’s not to say I don’t still eat some of those foods, but trying to get that childhood feeling—it’s like, no matter how much you try to re-create it or replicate it, you’re never going to get that same feel.