ATLANTA — Emily Nunn won’t drive on the freeways here, so it can take 45 minutes to get from her apartment to the cavernous indoor Your Dekalb Farmers Market, whose inexpensive and bountiful produce selection she prefers.
We hadn’t even reached the lettuce bins before she started in.
“Everybody in the food business hates me,” she said, taking a moment to defend both her vigorous use of mint and her penchant for social-media agitation, particularly when it comes to ageism. “It’s because I have so much fun. And I don’t care anymore.”
The word “everybody” is hyperbole, of course. Ms. Nunn spent years working as a food journalist at prominent publications like The New Yorker. She now writes a twice-weekly newsletter on salad.
Ms. Nunn (61), is as shocked as anyone that the sixth-most popular paid food newsletter on Substack is The Department of Salad. Substack is home to hundreds of food and cooking newsletters. Hers was a career pass for the pandemic’s first year, when she was eating a lot salad. She would post photos of them on her Twitter feed with a comment like “Here is another damn salad.”
She often mentioned Galax, Va. as her small hometown. Aunt Mariah’s antics, suggested that Republicans perform certain sex acts, crowdsourced tuna salad recipes.
She also tweeted about how life looked from the vantage point of an older single woman: “I once went to a dinner party with all couples and one of the wives asked me: But what do you do at night? I told her I freebased.”
She said that The Department of Salad could also have been The Department of Dips because she was eating lots of them.
“Look, I’m not the world’s biggest salad fan,” she said as we arrived back at Department of Salad headquarters — a small, tasteful shotgun apartment with a balcony and a counter full of vinegars in a slightly fancy suburban building.
“I love salad and I’ve gotten better at salad, but it’s this kind of food writing that I’ve missed,” she said. “I don’t want to be going to the parties in Brooklyn and writing about amping up the flavor of everything. I love it, but I can’t do that. I had to make something of my own.”
The thrill of reinventing yourself can make life exciting, and there are many opportunities in the world of food. (See: James Beard, Julia Child, Anthony Bourdain, Carla Hall, etc.)
After a long writing career that included co-creating The New Yorker’s Tables for Two column, reporting for the Chicago Tribune, blogging, contributing to the website Food52 and publishing a book, Ms. Nunn found herself living a quiet country life in a leaky converted horse barn in North Carolina that she found on Craigslist. She said it was a good spot to recover from a rare, but treatable, form of blood cancer she had in 2018.
The pandemic struck. The money from her well-reviewed 2017 memoir “The Comfort Food Diaries,” which chronicled life after a drinking career and the suicide of her closeted gay brother, was almost gone. She couldn’t get hired by a mainstream publication. She was willing to work in rolling quarters.
Southern summers have a month where the tomatoes pile up next the cucumbers, and the peaches are sweetened with juice. Ms. Nunn kept her sanity by tossing them in salad. Her Twitter account, a funny and cranky corner of social-media, had only 18,300 followers. This kept her connected.
A food writer suggested on TwitterShe suggested that she create a newsletter about salads. The actor J. Smith-Cameron, who plays Gerri Kellman on “Succession,” tweeted that she would read something like that. Ms. Nunn already had one by October 2020..
The next February, she started charging $50 per annum or $5.50 per a month. She made $20,000 in her first year. Her followers include the British food writer Diana Henry, media personalities like Soledad O’Brien, pediatric surgeons, Vanity Fair writers, people from Cleveland and doulas.
Ms. Nunn wouldn’t disclose how many of her more than 17,000 subscribers pay, or what she earns now. She did however say that she makes more now than she did in 2009, when she was laid off as a roaming feature reporter for the Chicago Tribune.
Her newsletters are a mix of humor and information. She might feature an interview with someone who has a different view on salad, or use a recipe taken from an old cookbook or menu as a writing prompt. Some recipes, such as orange and radish salads or herby rice salad with peas, prosciutto and tomatoes, do not include lettuce.
“Salad is a lot of fun because it’s not like lasagna,” Ms. Nunn said. “If I was doing a lasagna newsletter it would be like, ‘This time put Italian sausage in it, or make a béchamel.’ But there are a million different kinds of salads.”
Bill Smith, a celebrated North Carolina chef, was interviewed by Sheila to find out if the South has a signature dish. “We’re both resigned to the fact that most non-Southerners are always going to try to pin molded gelatin salads on us,” she said.
He gave her his recipe for garlicky carrot slaw and celery root rémoulade.
For her first newsletter, she had a long chat with Mollie Katzen, who wrote “The Moosewood Cookbook,” and they went deep into the preparation of lettuce.
Lettuce care is a particular skill of Ms. Nunn’s. “What’s worse than sand in salad?” she asked. Each variety is then swung in a large stainless steel bowl. She then dries them in the spinner she bought at a yard sale. She’s also adept at preserving lettuce and arugula by wrapping them in slightly damp paper towels and tucking them into a zip-top bag.
Another way to make avocados unripe is to use a mandoline to slice them, adding a nutty texture and flavor to a salad.
Ms. Nunn believes in adding lots of citrus and soft herb to salads and that red onion can save the day. “I have this theory that whenever there’s anything wrong with anything, add a tablespoon of very finely chopped raw red onion and everything will be fine.”
Yukari Sakamoto, the author of “Food Sake Tokyo” is building a collection of favorite Department of Salad recipes, including spicy cherry salad from Mitchell Davis, a former executive of the James Beard Foundation, and one of Ms. Nunn’s latest, a vintage green olive dressing made with a hard-boiled egg yolk and basil.
Ms. Sakamoto trusts Ms. Nunn’s palate, and is a fan of her voice. “It’s a bit sassy, which sometimes has me laughing out loud on a busy Tokyo train.”
The editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, who was brought up to regard salad as a close relative of castor oil, says he has been a fan of Ms. Nunn’s humor since they both joined the magazine in 1992.
“Getting something that’s authentically funny and not the latest gag of the day, but something that has an innately funny voice and real wit — that’s really rare,” he said. “To see her now bringing the funny as a food writer, I wish I had thought of it long ago.”
Like others who have worked alongside her, he says that Ms. Nunn is not one to be intimidated. This is why she uses Twitter to relentlessly oppose ageism in hiring. She often targets The Washington Post and Jeff Bezos (who she has also blamed) for her persistent campaign. lack of friséeVisit his Whole Foods Markets.
Her crusade began when she applied for a job in the paper in 2018. An editor incorrectly sent her an impersonal rejection letter, explaining that the job required someone who had more experience and has worked for a respected publication. It ended with a cheery “Keep writing! Good luck with your career.”
Ms. Nunn was furious and posted the sentiment on Twitter along with her age. “I mean, if it wasn’t ageism, why was I on auto-reject?” she said. “I had three times the experience they needed.”
The tweet quickly became a discussion about age discrimination and went mainstream. Other members of her generation shared stories about never getting a call back for interviews, despite being more qualified for jobs. The cause was born.
“It’s just soul-annihilating,” she said of ageism. “I’m not anti-younger people. I’m pro-older people in the mix.”
Ms. Nunn also posted an apology from the editor who had sent her letter. Her subsequent applications for jobs at Post, including one within the Food section, were not successful. She has targeted the paper ever since, contacting various editors to no avail and even filing a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which she knew wouldn’t really go anywhere.
This month, when the Post published a collection of crossword puzzles to honor Women’s History Month, she tweeted: “Thanks for the fun crosswords. Older women can do them while standing in line for food stamps.”
Joe Yonan, the paper’s Food editor, who has taken much of her heat, declined to comment. Some of Ms. Nunn’s friends are suggesting that what once seemed a worthy fight against ageism in the media is dangerously close to taking a right turn into the land of unhealthy obsession.
“It’s frustrating to be super-talented and have all that experience and you can’t get arrested, but her vendettas sometimes are a little hard,” said Steve Sando, whose coveted Rancho Gordo Beans mail-order club has a waiting list of 40,000 people. (He once hired Ms. Nunn as a writer about beans. “We asked for four or five recipes. Amazingly, she gave us ‘War and Peace’ on beans.”)
He understands her anger. He said that Ms. Nunn belongs to a new generation of food writers, who are uncompromising in their opinions and strongly political on social networks.
Dan Stone, a writer and bar owner who works on writer partnerships for Substack, has been a fan since Ms. Nunn’s time at The New Yorker. He reached out to her to support her platform work after he saw her thread on ageism in March 2021. It led to a yearlong contract with Substack for a minimum financial guarantee. This contract ended this month. Substack and Ms. Nunn are currently discussing the next year.
On Substack, Ms. Nunn is competing with some big names like Alison Roman, a former New York Times columnist whose newsletter (simply called “a newsletter”) holds the top spot on the platform’s paid food list, and the pastry chef David Lebovitz, who has been writing a letter from France since 2005.
Ruth Reichl, Andrew Zimmern, and others are also big hitters. Substack newsletters aim to offer a successful combination of video, recipes as well as reader participation, storytelling, at a time when subscription burnout is likely to be a distant possibility.
Ms. Nunn’s own burnout may not be all that far off, either. Despite her running joke about getting help from “the boys in the lab,” she does everything herself, with only a light read from a copy editor paid for by Substack.
“I’m exhausted all the time,” she said. “I always have salad dressing in my hair.”
But she’s happy. “I like making a living just being myself.”
Recipes: Herby Rice Salad with Peas & Prosciutto | Orange and Radish Salad
Source: NY Times
