Cooking magazine features same-sex couple, gets flamed, responds [View All]

[gollygee]

I'm a big fan of Penzey's Spices (good blue company too) so I subscribed to their magazine ONE when it came out.

Their first issue talked about different families in Birmingham, Alabama, and their favorite recipes and included a same-sex couple adopting triplets. Here's the lovely email they got:


Mr. Penzey,

You have done in one issue what it took Better Homes & Gardens, Sunset, Country Home, Country Living, HGTV and Food Network many issues or episodes to accomplish. You have alienated me as a frequent consumer and potential reader of your new magazine by featuring a same-sex couple in your premier issue. Congratulations. Neither your products or magazine will be welcome in my home from this point forward.

via email from Cathy.

But I LOVE their response:

The Editor responds:

Yes, I am sure this is going to happen now and again. Our desire to include everyone who goes to the effort to make the lives of those around them better through cooking is not always going to please all of our readers. My experiences in life have led me to place a greater value on including everyone than pleasing everyone. I have met so many different people growing up in the spice business, traveling the far corners of the world meeting our suppliers as well as having a business that succeeds through the efforts of hundreds of employees from very different backgrounds. Time and again over the years I have been frustrated with the way the different people I have met have been portrayed in the media. I don't want to be a part of that. It is not what group you belong to that makes you good or bad, it is how you treat others. And this magazine is going to treat everyone who cooks for those around them, with the kindness and caring that they have earned.

I must admit the tone and content of some of the negative letters did get me down a bit, but the positive letters more than made up for it, not only in quantity (almost ten times the negative) but in content as well. The letters that were against the article were all about imagining what families like this must be like. There was not one tale of actual experience. No story of, "We have a family like this at our school and they never contribute anything to the bake sale." It was the positive letters (a few of which we share here) that spoke of experience. That spoke of hearts and minds won over, of friendship and of love. It might be incremental, and at times hard to see, but the world really is becoming a better place.

I think in the long run inclusiveness will make for a better magazine. As much as we might all subscribe to YOU magazine (recipes by you and people just like you) would we re-subscribe? Our goal is to have recipes with soul. To have soul you need people. Casting a wider net to draw in a more diverse group of people does not guarantee a greater variety of recipes, but it sure seems like a great place to start. And we don't go just one direction with this approach. At a time when Hollywood seems all to happy to make yet another Dukes of Hazzard movie, I was very happy that our twenty pages of Birmingham people and recipes were able to give a glimpse of the depth, complexity and coolness of the people who live in this part of the country. There really is something in reading about the feelings of the person behind the recipe, why it means something to them and the people they care for that not only leads you to want to cook the recipe, but does a number on stereotypes as well.

And I loved it SO much that I typed the whole thing out!

It only ends up being 4 paragraphs so hopefully it's ok to put here.

Their website is http://penzeysone.com/cgi-bin/one/index.html