Australia’s food and wine scene has always been punctuated by lists, rating systems and reviews – people deciding who is given coverage, or what receives recognition. A mention in (yet another) iteration of a Melbourne’s Top 10 Wine Bars article provides visibility and credibility, both of which have immense power in shaping the success and popularity of a business. Across the board, the focus is on the value of the experience, including aspects like food, drinks, service, setting, ambience, and the venue’s ethos. In one guide’s own words, “to help people feel safe in knowing their money will be well spent”. Yet, what is concerning is what they don’t consider: the cultural sustainability of the work environments provided by an establishment.

Australia’s food media landscape is not monolithic. However, broadly speaking, mainstream food media – the subject of our concerns and that which is characterised by big ad sponsorships, budgets, commercial positioning – is overly positive and toxically so. Following in the footsteps of the UK, Australian food journalism focuses on overzealous accounts of eating out, reducing the field to polar narrations of superficial aspects of the dining out experience in repetitive, formulaic and redundant formats. Take Australia’s latest painfully unoriginal rating list, the Delicious Top 100 where each review’s structure follows a very specific outline that is regurgitated, proclaiming the head chef as the genius behind the venue, inserting a play by play of the meal as it is eaten and retaining the reader in the dining room. But, we suppose, what would be left of food media if not for yet another white male chef modernising/elevating/appropriating a traditional ethnic culinary technique in the form of small plates while serving natural wine?

Reviewers are often quick to intensely comment on the decor of a venue, or the purity of the broth, but turn a blind eye/are loudly quiet when it comes to the impurities of work environments that underpin said venues. At its core, seemingly small aspects of the venue receive strong praise whilst significant issues remain untouched. Ask anyone who has had a career in the hospitality industry and I guarantee you that they will have a backlog of stories of abuse in their workplace by head chefs and venue owners who perpetuate racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, sexist, and ethically unsustainable work environments. The cultural standards that food media upholds are quick to overlook the exploitation and cruelty faced by the workers who are equally responsible in making a venue what it is. Whether it’s the back-to-back-to-back doubles, working 14 hours a day for 14 days straight, or the emotional labour that is demanded of hospitality workers, their efforts are rendered invisible, and their experiences invalidated when writers fail to consider what happens back of house and continue to celebrate dysfunctional employers.

“The food media is complicit in the creation of kitchen tyrants, building their profiles, massaging their egos, exploiting their personalities for clicks — and chefs, in turn, help elevate the careers of food writers with access and exposure. In this sense the food world represents the marriage of two uniquely flawed industries: restaurants and the media.”

– Kate Telfeyan

Without considering the internal structures of a restaurant, rating systems and reviews uphold the mistreatment of hospitality workers who are notoriously abused, underpaid and overworked. Given the imbalance of power in these scenarios, victims of abusive behaviour are silenced when establishments are continually praised by journalists, critics, and reviewers. It reasserts an existing notion within hospitality that the victim is to blame – that they are the problem – whilst also feeding into an existing culture of silence. The great takedowns of hospitality monsters have been the result of the efforts of individual employees bravely going against big dog corporations and their arsenals of lawyers. It seems incredibly unfair that these individuals are the ones that have to jeopardise their careers and emotional wellbeing when food media enables the success of the venues in the first place and whose job is to inform culture. Reviews and praises should uphold people and business owners who do the right thing and facilitate the empowerment and diversification of the industry, not suck the asshole of those who already have power (and abuse it).

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The reality is that mainstream food media is a deeply financially precarious industry that also suffers from fundamental systemic issues.  How many individual journalists are stressed about losing their jobs and made to lean on content that is easier to generate? How many are made to assume multiple roles within a media company? How many are pressured into writing things they don’t want to, and how many have their words changed by their seniors for the sake of maintaining existing relationships and profit maximisation? After all, the two industries (food media and hospitality) coexist to serve each other.

This isn’t new discourse after all: it holds the same space as the whole ‘can you separate the artist from the art’ conversation. If anything, food and wine is perhaps the more important cultural medium because of its relevance and mainstream positioning. Everyone eats. However, the Venn diagram which sees mutual exclusivity between being an ethically run business, is environmentally sustainable, and serves yummo food is few and far between. The World’s 50 Best was nothing short of eMbArRaSsInG in its lack of inclusion of women but also in its celebration of chefs who are literally criminals. Delicious 100’s tokenistic inclusion of merely one Chinese restaurant (whose headspend is ~$150pp) on their Victorian list is cringe. The list claims to be “something you can use every day, not just for special occasions”, which is at best, out of touch, and at worst, classist. On the topic of inequity of access, Broadsheet recently introduced Tables, where being a paid member allows subscribers to make bookings at restaurants that are typically unbookable (and all owned by Melbourne’s Big Hospo Four). They manufactured incredibly high demands for tables by constantly promoting the venues, then monetised a solution to sell back to diners. Clever, really. But also helpful if you’d like a list of restaurants not to visit.

With greater emphasis on the inequities within the food world, isn’t it time that we meet this shift with a change in how we review, moving an already outdated system into this century? How is it that food media still celebrates the white Australian man for ‘championing’ Indigenous ingredients without commenting on the fact that same chef actively chooses for his venue to stay silent and open on Invasion Day because it is ‘too political’, or that he asks to employ Indigenous apprentices purely for free labour and the optics, instructing his team to ‘treat them like one of us’. At the most basic level, these chefs are praised even when they take no strides in Paying the Rent or ethically sourcing Indigenous ingredients, ‘foraging’ (see: stealing) them from already stolen land.

So what can be done? In short, it’s time that food journalism critically reflects on the food and beverage industry in its entirety. In practical words, it would be incredibly insightful for food writers to peek behind the curtain and ask workers about their experiences working in an establishment, to notice how diverse a workplace is, to determine a venue’s employee retention rate and to include these insights into their judgements. Next, diversity in food media matters. Why are those outside of an in-group the ones making judgements on authenticity? Studio ATAO created a very practical toolkit titled Toolkit for Implementing Systemic Changes Towards Equitable Representation in Media Companies. Use it. Further, the assumed typical consumer (white, affluent, willing and able to drop at least 65 clams on a Thursday night) is probably worth a revisit. American writer Theodore Gioia suggests food media should move away from speaking to the consumer, but rather the citizen. Rather than the central contention being about where privileged diners should eat next, it should instead ask why that particular dining experience matters and what this  means for our culture and people. Really, if mainstream food media were wielded correctly, it would not only be far more interesting, it could action some much needed change for the industry. And it really is time for that.