You Don't Owe The Internet Your Evolution (Patreon)

A few weeks ago I reconnected with my old friend (and OG lifestyle blogger) Jordan Reid on Like Me, the podcast she created and hosts on her Substack about the strange, fascinating rise—and aftermath—of the early internet influencer era. Jordan first built a large following with her blog Ramshackle Glam, one of the defining lifestyle blogs of the late-2000s blogging boom, and has since written several books and spent years exploring what it means to live publicly online.Our conversation starts with the odd experience of rediscovering each other on the internet years after high school, then wanders into bigger territory: the weirdness of becoming an authority people argue about online, how “best” turns into a loaded word on the internet, and how you figure out where to draw boundaries around your personal life—especially around things like sobriety and divorce—when your career is built on sharing.It was one of my favorite interviews to date, as we got to talk about subjects that are often ignored, but that I think about every day.Here is the complete transcript:

Jordan Reid:It is so good to see you.

Kenji López-Alt:Yeah, you too. It’s been a long time.

Jordan:It has been a long time.

Kenji:Yeah, you look the same!

Kenji:Yeah, this whole podcast is sort of about that.

Jordan:Yeah, this whole podcast is sort of about that. We’ll discuss. We’ll get into it. Kenji López-Alt, welcome to Like Me.

Kenji:Thanks. Thanks for having me on.

Jordan:It’s been, I don’t know, many, many, many years. Yeah, we went to high school together, and then college at neighboring colleges. So, for context, I did in fact know you before you were this tremendously influential food personality and New York Times bestselling author of The Food Lab.

But I actually discovered your work around 2009 via those Serious Eats articles that went viral—like the In-N-Out burger one and the eggs one. And I remember looking at the author and thinking, there can’t be too many of those. That’s got to be the same guy.

Kenji:It’s a pretty unique name.

Jordan:Yeah. So when you started doing this—besides paying rent, I have to assume—what was your intention?

Kenji:Well, it didn’t pay rent. I think the first Food Lab article I wrote, I got paid $30 for it, which was $5 more than the going rate at the time for those early blogs. They had very little budget, and they relied on people who just wanted to practice writing and get their writing out there.

So no, really it was because I’d been working in the restaurant industry for a long time. I was cooking around Boston, and I thought, this is a pretty unsustainable lifestyle. Working on your feet every day, getting drunk every night, going to work hungover—it just wasn’t a very healthy environment, and it was something I kind of wanted to escape.

So I transitioned over to writing as the escape route from cooking all the time. But I managed to find a job cooking and writing at the same time. I was doing that at Cook’s Illustrated magazine for a few years. Then the reason I moved over to writing online was that with magazines—and you’ve written for magazines and print publications before—you know it’s very different from writing online, because you have to have this sort of specific voice that’s not necessarily your voice. It’s the voice of the publication.

You’re also kind of restricted by the size of the page, the physical constraints of the page. So if they say 600 words, it has to be 600 words. Writing online, I felt, gave me an avenue to write whatever I wanted and make it as long as I wanted, and get it to a much broader audience.

One of the nice things about writing online—or these days making videos or podcasts or whatever—is that whatever niche you find, you’re going to find some kind of audience for it. As long as you do a good-quality product, there are people who are interested in everything. So if you want to write 3,000 words about hard-boiling an egg, it turns out there are people who want to read that. Who knew?

.Jordan:You did.

Kenji:No, I had no idea!

Jordan:I mean, when you wrote that first article, did you have any idea it was going to become a popular thing or turn into a book?

Kenji:No, I had no idea. It was just like, this is a fun thing to do. I’m very lucky in that I got into the industry at the right time in the right place. It was sort of the dawn of food blogging in the online world, and people were transitioning away from traditional media to online media. So I got in there right at the right time.

And as far as the subject matter goes, I just wrote what I was interested in, and luckily it turns out there are other people who are interested in that as well.

Jordan:We look at articles like the ones you were writing, and from the perspective of today it’s like, “How to make the perfect boiled egg.” But the approach you took was so different at the time from what everyone else was doing.

I wonder how much of that was that you had this very non-elitist, very—it really wasn’t like the other food bloggers we were reading at the time. Do you think the personality that you put into it made a difference, or did that come later?

Kenji:No, it—you know, the type of subjects I was considering were things I’d been thinking about while working in restaurants. I had questions all the time. And generally, especially back then—it’s a little different now than it was then—but back then the answer was always, “Because that’s what the chef said.”

It was this very militaristic, regimented thing where you did what you were told and there wasn’t really time to ask questions. So over the course of my restaurant career, I had a big list of questions I wanted to answer. Serious Eats gave me that opportunity.

But really, the voice and the subject matter—I got lucky meeting Ed Levine, who was the founder. He was a New York Times writer, a food writer, and he had this very democratic, inclusive voice. He loved hot dogs and hamburgers, but he also loved fancy restaurants. The ethos of Serious Eats was that we take the food very seriously, no matter what it is—whether it’s a burger from In-N-Out or a tasting menu from Per Se—but we don’t take ourselves very seriously, because at the end of the day, it’s all just food.

I found that approach really appealing. So I would definitely say the voice that I landed on, and that I kind of use today, was very much shaped by what Ed was doing at Serious Eats. He was doing it in the context of restaurant reviews and chef news and food news, and he hired me to bring recipes to the site. So it was: how do we take that inclusive voice and bring it to recipe writing and technical food writing?

I was also very influenced by—I grew up watching Mr. Wizard’s World on Nickelodeon. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that show.

Jordan:I missed that one. I was watching Thundercats.

Kenji:I was watching Thundercats also! Mr. Wizard’s World at 6 a.m., Thundercats at 4 p.m. But it was a kid’s science show, and I really liked Mr. Wizard and MacGyver and Bob Ross—The Joy of Painting—those were my three guiding guideposts for what I wanted the voice to be.

So when I was writing Food Lab articles, my goal was always—I wanted it to feel like I’d just learned something really cool and wanted to share it with you, like you were in my kitchen and I was saying, “Hey, look at this cool thing.” So yeah: friendly and inclusive, and explained in ways that don’t require a science degree to understand.

Jordan:I think part of why I personally responded to those earliest iterations of your work—and what you still do—when I first started blogging, I was like, I want to put up recipes not because I’m a chef, but because it’s fun and I have this good marinara sauce recipe. But there was a culture at the time—and I’m sure it still exists—where there was so much rage if I would dare to be like, “Also, you can just kind of use a can of Prego and spoof it up with some spices.” And people were like, “How dare you?”

Kenji:Yeah. There’s always rage.

No, I mean, on that exact point, I think I had a pizza sauce recipe—or maybe it was even a marinara sauce recipe—but I wrote in it that if your canned tomatoes aren’t particularly sweet, you can add a teaspoon of sugar to this. And yeah, there were people who got real angry. They were like, “There is no sugar in marinara sauce. This is not marinara sauce.”

So no, people use the comment section as an outlet, and it is virtually always—I would even say 100% always—more a reflection of them and them needing to get something out, rather than on you and the writing. Which is a difficult thing to remember.

Jordan:It is. Sometimes funny. I had a user who would comment on all the hate sites about me, and their handle was “garlic powder,” and I thought that was so funny because I hate chopping garlic and I’m always like, “I guess you could use garlic powder—it’s right there.”

Kenji:Yeah. I mean, I use garlic powder. I don’t use it in place of fresh garlic, but I do use garlic powder.

Jordan:Well, hence your career versus mine.

But when you did The Food Lab, I feel like there’s that mass-media kind of stamp of credibility and legitimacy, where opinion starts turning into canon, right? Did you feel like it went from, “Hey, here are my opinions,” to “Now I have more pressure on me to get it right”? Or, “Can I still experiment?”

Kenji:I mean, you experiment—you know, I always try to show my work. Whether that’s citing sources I’ve read from or showing what tests I actually did to form these ideas. So when I do have opinions, I try to make sure it’s understood that they’re opinions.

I’ve also kind of backed off—I think in the early days of online food writing it was always “the best hamburger,” “the best meatloaf.” People love those superlative terms, and I try to completely avoid those now. I’ll just be like, “This is a really good meatloaf,” or “This is a meatloaf that I like for these reasons.”

Jordan:Lower the expectations, everybody.

Kenji:Well, it’s also that you can’t—you know, I found after my first book came out and did really well and became, for a lot of home cooks, their manual, where if they had a question or if they were having an argument with someone online—which people do a lot—they would say, “Well, Kenji said this, therefore you’re wrong.” And I kind of really hated that, that it became this weaponized thing.

My children’s book Every Night Is Pizza Night was actually sort of a response to that. The whole book is about the concept of “best.” What is best? Really, how it’s contextual. “Best” is based on how you’re feeling at the moment, or your family, or your history, or your culture, or things that you experience. There can be many bests for many different situations. It’s all contextual, and that’s sort of the message of the children’s book.

It’s about a girl who thinks pizza is the best food in the world, and then she goes and tries other foods and doesn’t understand how people can’t see that pizza is the best, and then kind of gets it at the end.

That was really in response to these people who were taking when I said, “This is the best way to cook a steak,” and saying, “Kenji said this, therefore every other method is wrong.” And that’s not really what I meant, and certainly not how I meant for that information to be used.

Because everything is contextual. Especially once you have kids and life gets faster and more complicated and you have a whole different set of priorities. Suddenly there’s a whole different idea of what makes “best,” because now you don’t have two hours to make a meal—you have half an hour. You might have a picky eater. You’re working within the constraints of what life throws at you. So you have to reconsider what all those words mean.

Jordan:Who are some chefs that you look to who embody that ethos? Because there are so many who are like, “You must follow these hardened, strict lines, and if you do this it’s the most horrifying thing in the world.” Anthony Bourdain would be the obvious “you like what you like” example, but are there people who shape that ethos for you?

Kenji:I love Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat. I think she has a really empowering voice—something that makes you feel like you can go and do it. Also a very gentle voice where it’s like, you don’t have to do it this way; you can do it this way. Here’s a delicious way to get to an end result, but you kind of work with what you’ve got.

I tend to gravitate toward people who have that mentality. I like it when cooks make home cooks feel like they can do something instead of—you look at a Thomas Keller book and it’s like, what am I supposed to do with this? I’m not going to blanch—

You look at the pictures. It’s aspirational. Maybe you’re going to make it, but even if you follow the instructions perfectly, you’re not going to get the same results because you don’t have years of Michelin-star restaurant experience or a sous-chef breathing down the back of your neck while you’re clarifying your stock. So yeah, I like a kinder, more empowering approach to cookbook writing and instruction.

Jordan:Well, what I like about—I mean, my daughter is an aspiring chef.

Kenji:How old is she now? Eleven?

Jordan:Eleven. And we have The Food Lab on our coffee table. It’s our coffee table book, and we go through it a lot. What I find really lovely about it is that you can get as dorky as you want to get with the how-to, but you can also just dip in and out. I find it very exciting that way. It feels to me like a book I’ll sit down with and read, and also use as reference.

Kenji:Yeah. Well, I’m glad to hear that. The goal of that book—you know, it has some pretty complicated recipes and things that seem very prescriptive, like you have to follow these instructions, and there’s maybe a chili with 37 or 40 ingredients or something.

But my hope with it was that if you read the longer-form articles and introductions to those recipes, you kind of understand what each step is for, and then you can pick and choose what’s important to you. The goal was really to help people not have to follow recipes as much.

That’s an approach I take now with my videos, where I’m generally just cooking at home and it’s usually something I’m going to feed my kids. I’m not following a recipe. I might say, this is roughly based on a recipe from The Food Lab or from Serious Eats or whatever, but these are the changes I’m making because I have this in my fridge right now, or I don’t have two hours, I only have half an hour.

So the goal with those videos is to show people how, once you internalize those techniques and those lessons, you can improvise more easily. It’s like if you’re a musician and you practice your scales and your jazz riffs or whatever and you get them in your fingers—once they’re in your fingers and second nature to you, then you can play any kind of music or improvise over anything.

That’s hopefully the goal, and that’s what my new book—the one I’m working on now—is really going to focus on more.

Jordan:I do remember the day that I looked in my refrigerator and it was a little Matrix-y, and I was like, “Oh, I see what I can do with these ingredients.” And it’s coming from what you said—that fundamental understanding of how things combine, which allows you to swap things out or use what you have. I remember that being a very significant moment for me, my personal-chef moment.

Did publishing the book change—it must have been a huge jump in visibility. So how did that affect you? Because that has got to be a profound experience.

Kenji:Well, I mean, it was a financial success, which was great because my ex-wife and I at the time were living in a one-bedroom dungeon in Brooklyn that literally had no windows. What were we paying for rent at the time? Eight hundred bucks a month, something like that.

Jordan:And you left your rent controlled apartment?!

Kenji:It certainly helped us out in that sense. And continues to be good in that sense. But reputationally, once you get a James Beard Award, then you have some amount of authority and people tend to trust you more.

Really, I would say the biggest thing it’s done for me is that it has allowed me to pursue the kind of writing I want to do and write the books I want to write, because now my publishers trust me. They’re like, okay, you wrote this book that’s been a really great success for us; you want to write a children’s book, go ahead. So it gives you a little bit of that freedom.

Really it’s allowed me to explore the kinds of things I want to explore, which has been great. It’s opened other doors here and there, but I’m not generally an empire-building type of person. I’m happy just writing good stuff and cooking good food and hanging out with my kids and playing music and whatever. I’m not a fancy person, and I don’t have aspirations of world domination.

Jordan:That is very refreshing to hear. I always say, you know what I want? I want to go to the grocery store and buy the good milk and not be like—I don’t need a yacht.

Kenji:That was my thing in college. I remember saying, I want to be able to go to the cheese shop and pick whatever cheese I want and not worry too much about what it costs. That’s enough money for me.

Jordan:Yes. I want to be able to get the good cheese.

Kenji:Exactly. I don’t need a yacht. I don’t need multiple apartments. I don’t need a big place. I just want to get the good cheese.

Jordan:There’s your memoir title: The Good Cheese.

Something that I find incredibly striking in your work, especially because it seemed to come in tandem with this rise in legitimate mass-media visibility, was your increasing willingness to share intensely personal experiences—by which I mean divorce, sobriety, things you’ve shared about online—in a way that I found so generous, because you don’t have to. That’s theoretically off-topic for you.

And as a consumer of your work, I have to tell you: those things, especially about sobriety and stuff—the willingness of someone who really doesn’t have to share about stuff like that, and to share so vulnerably, is so meaningful.

Kenji:Well, same with your work.

Jordan:Oh, thank you.

Kenji:You know, for me—my ex-wife, so I was divorced two years ago. I think a pretty similar timeline to you, in fact.

Jordan:Oh, no, no, no. I’m an old—

Kenji:Were you way before that?

Jordan:Yeah, like eight years.

Kenji:Oh, is it that long ago? Okay. Sorry, my bad.

Jordan:I know what I’m doing. I’m an old divorced lady.

Kenji:But my ex-wife was, and continues to be, a very, very private person. So in my videos, she never really appeared in them. My kids never appear in the videos. Finding that divide between what’s private and what’s shareable and what’s completely private has always been a line I’ve had to think about.

With the divorce, I don’t really hide it anymore. It was a little sensitive at the beginning because obviously my ex-wife doesn’t want people at work talking about it or stuff like that. But at this point people know, and I’m fine with talking about it.

The sobriety thing—for me, I’ve been sober now since October of 2023.

Jordan:Congrats.

Kenji:Thanks. I was doing AA, and I’d been trying to cut down or stop drinking for years. I tried various methods, both through therapy and pharmacological methods, and nothing really worked.

I was always very averse to going to AA because I had been to one meeting and was like, this is like a cult.

Jordan:I mean, I’ve been to AA and I love it, but I definitely feel you. I have very strong feelings in many directions.

Kenji:But finding the right sponsor and the right meeting and the right types of people, and getting to the point where it’s understood that you take what you need and you don’t have to buy into 100% of it—and it’s really just a support network of people who have gone through similar experiences—that helped.

You don’t have to believe in God. You don’t have to believe in all these things. Yes, the book was written in the ’30s and there’s misogynistic stuff and strange religious stuff in it, and you don’t really have to believe any of that.

I was also going to outpatient meetings a couple times a week as part of the divorce. My ex-wife wanted to know, okay, how am I going to know that you’re going to maintain sobriety? And to be clear, the kids were never at risk. That’s never really been an issue. But I said, well, I can go to this outpatient thing, and they do random testing and so you’ll have some kind of guarantee for the period of that program.

And it turned out to be a great program. Really supportive and thoughtful people. At some point toward the end of that program, we had to write what was essentially called a breakup letter with alcohol. Mine was very long. But my case manager said, “I’m not sure it’s 100% kosher with AA, but you’ve got this big platform, and it might help a lot of people to hear this. It’s up to you, but if you want to read this, you’ve got my blessing, and I think it’s a good idea.”

So I did. And it’s been great, because I’ve gotten many messages from people who said they were having their own struggles, and hearing someone speak about it helped them and got them on a better path. I feel great about that, and I’m glad I did it.

It certainly rubs some people the wrong way, and it also brings out trolls. Again, I think these are people who are really just projecting their own issues onto you, but there are people who are going to be like, “Oh yeah, Kenji was an abusive drunk,” or “No wonder his wife left,” blah blah. They’ll just make up whatever narrative they want.

Those are easy to ignore. The troll comments that are so far from the truth are just funny to read sometimes. The things that get you more are the ones you’re actually a little bit insecure about. The ones where you’re like, “Oh, that hit a little close to home. Why am I feeling this way?” Those are the ones you take to therapy instead of responding to.

Jordan:Yeah. Sobriety to me feels like one of those last frontiers. For me personally—I mean, I share about freaking everything online—but that’s something that, like mental health, postpartum depression, all of those things were scary to share about, and now they’re sort of normalized.

You’re allowed to say “I take medication” in a way that even seven years ago my agents were like, “Please don’t say that publicly.” So seeing you and some other influencers in various verticals talking about sobriety is so huge.

But at the same time, how available can you make yourself? Because people also do, like you said, weaponize anything you say. They go, “Ooh, that’s going to be a vulnerability. I’m going to take that and weaponize it.” So how do you keep that line of being transparent but not available 100%? Especially when people want to put their own divorce stories on you or their own sobriety stories on you?

Kenji:Yeah, that’s a difficult one. But I really think it’s just always remembering that you know what your truth is. And again, when people do that, it’s them. It’s 100% them wanting to project this onto you. So you just have to remember what you know to be true and stick with it.

The sobriety thing—the other element that really made me want to share was that the reason I finally went to AA was actually because of two other chefs.

Andrew Zimmern, who obviously is extremely famous, has been sober now for 40-some years and he’s very open about it.

Jordan:He is? He does all that stuff sober? Oh, yeah. Who knew?

Kenji:Yeah. He had a very difficult early life, but he’s been open about his sobriety. I was at Aspen Food & Wine—must have been three or four years ago now—and I was hanging out with him there. We were about to go fly-fishing, and it was 5 or 6 in the morning, and a man came down the street really drunk, asking for money.

Andrew asked him, “What do you need the money for?” And the guy said, “Because I need to go get drunk.” Andrew actually went and sat with this guy, listened to him, talked with him for like half an hour, talked a little bit about his own sobriety. It was such a wow moment—like, he actually gives a shit. He cares about other people. This is an important thing for him. AA worked for him; maybe it’ll work for me.

Seeing that side of the program—the reaching out, which I think is the most important work in the program, other people—that mattered.

The other was chef Devan Rajkumar, who is also sober. He put out a video about his own sobriety, and I saw that and thought, okay, maybe I should try reaching out to him. We didn’t know each other, but I messaged him on Instagram and he called me on the phone and talked to me about his sobriety, the issues he had, and what worked for him.

Seeing that these two people definitely don’t have to spend their time worrying about someone else’s problems, and still choosing to do it—that was really inspiring and set me on my own path of sobriety. It’s also made me feel like it’s my responsibility to share what’s going on in case it can help other people.

Jordan:I think the acts-of-service element of AA is, for me, just so powerful. I’ve done a whole bunch of different things—I went to the Hoffman Institute and explored that, and went to AA for a year and explored that, and I follow people who talk about sobriety online—and I’ve found that taking all these pieces and putting them in my little personal toolbox has been massively helpful.

But the one thing above all else is just: when things are feeling bad, do something for somebody else. Just do something for somebody else.

This is a sort of meta question, but when you share about things that are big topics for people—divorce, for me, when I go on a podcast I’m going to get asked about divorce, right? I’m going to get asked about the touchstones of a career of talking about yourself online.

Do you ever feel like parts of your audience are still sort of in a relationship with a version of you that doesn’t exist? Or do you ever feel like you’re not being allowed to evolve past these inflection points because of the willingness to share about them so publicly?

Kenji:I mean, I think everybody—whether they’re in a parasocial relationship, whether it’s an audience or even friends I see—is in some sort of relationship with a version of me that’s not the full me. There are very few people who know the full me. My partner maybe—I mean, my kids don’t really know the full me. I’d say maybe just my partner knows the full me. My partner and my therapist.

So everybody, I think, is in some sort of relationship with a subset of you, and has their own ideas about you. I do often find that people online will ascribe certain virtues to me, or certain faults, or certain personality traits that I don’t think really reflect me. But there must be something they’re seeing, whether it’s a current version of me or a past version of me.

I know I was a very different person in my 20s and my 30s than I am now, which I think is a good thing. That’s also another thing AA does—it makes you want to go back and mend relationships and take accountability for the person you were.

So for me, it’s been great to be able to reach out to people and reforge relationships, and also really grow as a person. The important people, the people I might have harmed in certain ways in the past—or not even necessarily harmed, but the people who saw me behaving a certain way 10 or 15 years ago—it’s been really great to reconnect with them.

But when you have a semi-public life, your motives for doing things have to really be personal, and they have to be about growth. Because I think it’s very easy to fall into—especially on social media—a trap of projecting a personality that you want people to believe you are.

That’s a thing that happened to me on Twitter. One of the reasons I quit Twitter is because it sucks you into doing that. There’s not much room for nuance. It causes you to take what you want people to see and put it in as few words as possible and get it out there, when in reality people are way more complex and people can change. People aren’t the 140 characters they wrote 15 years ago.

But those things stick with you, and it takes a lot of doing to convince people that you’re not that person anymore. And then also just a lot of “you know what, it doesn’t really matter what people think of me. I know who I am. I can prove that to myself and to the people who matter by acting that way every day and continuing to try to grow.”

And if people don’t want to see that, that’s fine.

Jordan:Yeah. I mean, ask Kevin Hart about things coming back to haunt you. Remember he got canceled from the—

Kenji:I thought you were going to say ask Kevin Hart about growing.

Jordan:God bless.

One of the great joys in my life is actually getting called on things that I had said previously, and I’m like, “Oh yeah. I think about it differently now. I don’t know what to tell you. I changed, and that is great.” So it’s not a gotcha. It’s an evolution.

People should be encouraged to change, right? Part of the reason I’m doing this project is because I felt like after so many years of vulnerability, vulnerability, vulnerability, I was like: this is unsustainable. I can’t do this. I just can’t share anymore, because it was keeping me stuck in this previous iteration.

As I was getting older and changing—and my kids don’t want to be talked about online, and I used to—do you feel your relationship with your visible self changing? It seems to me that it’s been more toward sharing. Is that something you think about, how you’re approaching that? Or are you just doing what feels natural?

Kenji:I generally do what feels natural and what I think is going to help other people. I certainly don’t share everything about my life. I still keep my relationship with my kids very private. They still don’t appear. I’ll mention, like, “Wombat doesn’t like spicy food,” but that’s about the extent of it.

I guess I do share quite a bit, but it is still very selective.

Jordan:It’s selective, but it’s authentic.

I think I know what you’re saying, because in this iteration where I’m coming back to sharing, when I’m sharing, I really mean it. I really mean what I’m saying. I’m not afraid to say almost anything because I know myself better now at this age, and I know that if I say something and then change my mind, I can say, “Well, I changed my mind.” It feels like formative—it used to be—

Kenji:Exactly. I think if you looked at stuff I was doing online 10 or 15 years ago, it was more insecure. It was more cocky. It was more performative. And cockiness is a response to insecurity, I think.

Certainly it was like, all right, I need people to respect my opinion on this. All those feelings—you deny that they’re there, but looking back it’s like, okay, that’s probably why I said that thing, why I said this thing, why I got into a fight with this random person I don’t know on Twitter, etc.

Jordan:And it’s also impostor syndrome. At the beginning of your career, you’ve got to fake it till you make it, but you don’t really know what you’re talking about.

Kenji:For sure. And then at a certain point hopefully you’re like, actually I do.

Jordan:Or actually it doesn’t matter.

Kenji:Exactly. It’s fine to not know things.

So yeah, what I share now is certainly a more level and authentic version of myself, just because I think I’m more true to myself now and I know myself better. I’m more confident with who I am.

And I keep going back to AA—this maybe comes from even before AA—but one of the great things about the program is realizing that you don’t get judged for your faults. Everybody messes up. Everybody has these mistakes. In fact, you get embraced for admitting your faults. It’s good. You know you’re not perfect. Nobody is.

To be able to say that and not feel judged about it—because people online are very ready to judge all the time—to be able to find a community of people who actually care and don’t want to judge you and just want to support you, that’s been a priority of mine, especially since getting divorced. I want to find my people.

I moved to Seattle during the pandemic, and Seattle is kind of known as a cold, difficult place to make friends anyway. In the middle of the pandemic, I moved here with my then-wife and both kids. So for a long time it was difficult to find who my people are here.

I made a very conscious decision as the separation was happening that I need to find a support group. I need to find people who are supportive, who I enjoy, who I like, and who I can trust. That was a conscious effort, and I’ve managed to find that. I’ve got a great group of friends here now, very kind people, and a wonderful partner.

When you have that in your life, all the stuff you get online—it doesn’t matter as much.

Jordan:It’s almost like a perfect dichotomy: online culture versus AA, in terms of what the goals are and what people prioritize. And it’s also lovely training wheels for getting out and being authentic with people without those filters that you put on, whether metaphorically or literally.

It’s a very transformative experience, and I can see why it would be so deeply appealing in particular to someone who is also reckoning with the influx of input from strangers on a daily basis.

Kenji:Yeah. I mean, for at least a decade, the vast majority of my interpersonal interactions were with strangers online. I read far more comments from people than people gave me in real life.

And the other thing you find is that people who act one way online—if you actually take a moment and reach out to them, or even meet them in real life—they are completely different. There’s something that happens when you’re in front of the keyboard where you lose a certain sense of humanity and you forget how to interact with people. You forget that even a celebrity, or a news anchor, or a popular cookbook author—whatever—they’re all just real people. They’re not really that different from you, and they’ve all got faults and insecurities.

When you actually reach out and try to make a real connection, I find the vast majority of the time that people are actually quite kind.

Jordan:Isn’t it remarkable? A couple of my close friends are former—truly—trolls. The co-author of several of my books, our relationship started because she was a troll, and I was like, “Hey, what’s up?” And then we became friends, and then we wrote books together.

Kenji:Same with me. I have a very dear friend in Seattle now whose first interaction with me was sending me an angry private message saying, “How come you’re not talking enough about Palestine?” And of course, I wasn’t being silent about Palestine, but anyway. I was like, “You know, I really do care. If you want to sit down and grab a cup of coffee and talk about it, let’s do that.” So we did, and now we’re very close friends.

Jordan:That was such an interesting inflection point—how to manage posting too much, posting not enough, what if that’s just not your wheelhouse. That moment in time was very—yes. The disappointment came from all sides in terms of what was being posted or not.

Kenji:Yeah. That is one of the weird things about having a platform for me. In some sense, it’s like, I’m just some dude who writes about food. Of course I have opinions on a lot of things, but do I really have to—first of all, does it do good to post about these things? Does it do good to give my opinion? There’s not really a right answer.

In general, if there’s something I’m really passionate about, I try to lead with action as opposed to just words on a page. I’ll organize a fundraiser, or I’ll promote an event that’s going to help, or I’ll try to incentivize people to write to their senator—things that actually might make a difference.

But the whole idea that every single person with a platform has to post an opinion on every single major issue, and if they don’t they’re somehow irresponsible—to me, I’m just not sure how I feel about all that.

Jordan:I kind of opt out of that one. There are just other platforms with people who are much better spoken than me on certain topics. Here they are. Please go listen to these people who know what they’re talking about, because some things—we just don’t need Jordan Reid’s opinion on. A lot of things, in fact.

Kenji, what are you up to these days? What’s coming up next for you? And where can people find you? I mean, you’re everywhere, but where do you want people to find you?

Kenji:Well, I’m working on a new cookbook, but it’s going to be a little while.

The best place to find me: kenjilopezalt.com, or I’m @kenjilopezalt on Instagram. If you go to kenjilopezalt.com, you’ll find links to my Patreon.

The thing I’m doing on Patreon—I started a new business this year, and so I actually have a few people working on a number of projects, mainly video and helping with books. We’re trying to build this community. So we have this thing on Patreon called the Frienjis of Kenji, and then there’s also the Cookbook Club.

The Cookbook Club is for people who want to help shape this new book. Part of the concept of the new book is that if you learn a specific core technique—a process for a recipe—once you’ve learned, for example, how to pan-sear a chicken breast, marinate a chicken breast, pan-sear it, and then use the fond in the pan as the base for some stock to cook grains in, you’ve got a whole meal there, right?

That’s not just a recipe. It’s actually a blueprint for a whole bunch of different recipes. So the broader audience—people on YouTube, people just visiting the site—will get that first recipe. People in the Cookbook Club will then get a bunch of sub-recipes that are based on that same process.

And what I’m really looking forward to is feedback, and people who take that concept and put their own spin on it and share it with the Cookbook Club community. Part of what I want to do in this new book—first of all, anybody in the Cookbook Club, there’s going to be a dedication page, so all the thousands of people in there are going to get their name printed in the book as a thank-you.

And then if people want to submit their ideas, I also want to share some of the more interesting ideas and successes that people come up with, both on the website and in the book.

I feel like it’s a new concept for a cookbook, and I’m really trying to lean into building this community and showing how learning to cook this way can empower you in the kitchen and bring real success to everyday cooks.

I’ve also got a few product collaborations I’ve been doing recently. I have a wok that just came out.

Jordan:Thank you—what wok do you use? I want to know what wok you use.

Kenji:Oh, it's my own wok from Our Place. I’ll send it to you.

Jordan:Good.

Kenji:Yeah, I’ll send you one. I’ve been working with Our Place, which is a company out of LA. They make really cool stuff and they’ve got really smart people on the team, so we’ve been working on some sort of new technology and building some cool tools.

I’ve also got a knife, a new knife out, and I’ve got some packaged goods that are coming out soon, hopefully. So yeah, a bunch of projects this year. But mainly just chilling with my kids and trying to take it easy—which is why hiring people and getting people to help you is good. It’s something I avoided for years and years, and finally this year I was like, I should hire some help. And it’s been wonderful to find people who complement your skill set and make life easier.

Jordan:It’s so hard, though, giving up your—when it’s all built on your voice and you and you and you.

Kenji:Yeah.

Jordan:Work smarter, not harder, right?

Kenji:Yeah. And learn to trust other people—that’s the big one for me.

Jordan:Well, I look forward to becoming a Frienji of Kenji. So look for my Patreon subscription coming at you soon. This has been such a pleasure. I’m going to have to get up to Seattle one of these days and take a little cooking lesson.

Kenji:Yeah, yeah, please do. It’s been really nice to reconnect.

Jordan:Well, I hope we talk soon.

Kenji:All right. Sounds good.

Jordan:Thank you.

You can follow Jordan Reid on her Substack, Ramshackle Glam, or on Instagram at @RamshackleGlam