Vice TV’s own food renegade battles Foodie Pretentiousness
Personally, I think she’s the perfect woman.
She has a crazy, almost-visually-disturbing and unassuming sense of humor, a fondness for food (and a healthy distaste for pretentious “foodies”), colorfully-tattooed arms, and most importantly, a British accent.
She is very thoughtful about race and what it means to be of multiple cultures, speaking against those who look down upon multi-racial people with bigotry, malice and ineptitude. A snarky writer with wit and bravado, she’s also charming as hell.
She is Joanne Fuertes-Knight, star of Vice Magazine’s Girl Eats Food.
As I browsed through the earlier versions of the show, her second episode was actually for a recipe on how to make “Dinuguan,” a Filipino blood stew of pork chunks and offal. It was almost a funny way of her trying to eradicate her fear with having to make a gross-looking dish, albeit it being one of the best Filipino dishes, ever.
[See: AstigVegan’s Dinuguan Recipe]It’s a real treat to watch her in action, especially since she seems like the most ordinary home cook with a really dry and dark funny bone. As Pinay columnist Larissa Urcia of Renegade Chicks describes Fuertes-Knight, “Watching her off-beat techniques and tips, the unthinkable now seems pretty possible.”
Traditional Pinoy dishes aren’t easy to pull off, and I imagine that for Filipinos who grew up away from the motherland, it is that much more challenging. But food is also the quickest way to absorb culture and create understanding, and Joanne does her show with wit and originality that I don’t think anyone has ever shown. I also think this is her Brit-hipster-modernist way of battling the evil snooty foodies out there.
Check out JFK’s Dinuguan episode below. (She also has a recipe for Longganisa, which you can check out here.)
[Photo Credits]
