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Alison Roman says she was 'dragged to hell' after criticizing Marie Kondo and Chrissy Teigen

Alison Roman
Alison Roman spoke with The New Yorker about her attempt to come back from being "dragged." Clint Spaulding/Stringer/Getty Images

  • Alison Roman talked to The New Yorker about being "canceled" after being accused of racism. 
  • She compared her experience "to that of a lobster" being boiled in a pot.
  • The cook also talked about grappling with the controversy around her recipes.
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Over a year and a half since Alison Roman was accused of racism after criticizing Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo in a May 2020 interview with The New Consumer, the cookbook author told The New Yorker's Lauren Collins that it's been hard to recover from the backlash she faced.

Roman, at the time, said Kondo decided to "capitalize on her fame" by coming out with a product line and described Teigen's Cravings brand evolution from cookbooks to products as "so crazy" to her. Because she only called out two Asian women, and because Roman herself was accused of hypocrisy for having brand deals of her own, the backlash was swift. As Collins writes in The New Yorker, after Roman's remarks about Teigen and Kondo, "two themes emerged: the sense that Roman was both a product and a perpetuator of structural racism in food media, and a wish that her sense of social responsibility was commensurate with the size of her platform."

Roman issued a public apology to Teigen and Kondo in the wake of the interview, but the damage was done. Roman took a temporary hiatus from her post as a columnist at The New York Times before officially parting ways with the publication in December 2020.

"I still have not seen a successful story of a woman getting dragged to hell in the way that I was and then coming back publicly and being able to talk," Roman told Collins in the article published Monday.

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Roman said there are only two ways someone can move forward: "slink away into oblivion," or act like nothing ever happened. 

Since the writer's controversial comments were published, Roman launched A Newsletter, which began as a not-for-profit subscription service and has since turned for-profit, according to The New Yorker, with Roman donating at least $2,000 each month to charity. She also started selling apparel with photos of some of her more popular recipes on them — all of which were sold out at the time of writing — and is working on a new cookbook centered around desserts, according to The New Yorker.

alison roman
Roman bartending on "Watch What Happens Live!" Bravo/Getty Images

Roman's newsletter initially featured recipes for what Collins called "American-style classics" (shrimp cocktail, cinnamon rolls, and a pseudo-recipe for a hot dog party). Then, in September, Roman shared a recipe with lentils. The newsletter that went along with it included a note about its ties to the South Asian dish, daal. She told Collins that she expected to receive backlash and thought that working with lentils might mean she would be accused of cultural appropriation. Roman told Collins she chose to publish her "Gentle Lentils" recipe because "I don't want to operate out of fear."

"In my heart of hearts, I was, like, 'You fucking idiot. Don't cook with lentils,'" she told Collins. The YouTube personality said she knew on some level that there was a good chance she'd receive backlash again for publishing a stewed lentils recipe but decided to go ahead, saying in the piece, "Can we all just lighten up? Can I make a pot of lentils? Call it whatever the fuck you want, I don't care."

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She published the recipe and, in an editorial note, called attention to the fact that the lentils she chose to use (in addition to any split pulses or legumes) are also called daal.

Roman sent the newsletter on September 30 and shared her photo and notes on Instagram on October 1. She then edited the post a month later on November 3 with a statement regarding her use of the words "lentils" and "daal."

A post shared by Alison Roman (@alisoneroman)

"THANK YOU TO ALL WHO LEFT NOTES! THIS IS DAAL," she wrote in the caption. "'GENTLE LENTILS' WAS A CHEEKY NAME MEANT TO DESCRIBE THE CONTENTS / STORY GIVEN IN THE NEWSLETTER, NOT MEANT TO REBRAND THE CENTURIES OLD FOOD SOME OF YOU KNOW AS DAAL, [...] I TAKE NO OWNERSHIP OF THIS FOOD."

Earlier in the New Yorker piece, Roman described being "canceled" as a surprise. "She compared the experience to that of a lobster in a pot of cold water," Collins wrote. "'You bring it up to a boil, they never know,' she said. 'And then they're dead.'"

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Representatives for Roman didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment. 

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