Jen Monroe

February 4, 2020

Jen Monroe is an artist whose medium is food. Technically, Jen “cooks” and often, literally, she “caters,” but those words don’t adequately describe her work. Jen is a mad scientist, a magician, an architect of impeccable, edible worlds. Through her project Bad Taste she creates installations: fantastical foodscapes that engage all of the senses. Jen’s work explores the connections and tensions between the politics of food, aesthetic values, and sensory pleasure. Her dishes — jelly molds filled with the contents of an aquarium; geodes tucked, glittering, inside plums; thirty square feet of crudité, jammed upright like tiny skyscrapers into an inch of technicolor dip — blur the line between appetizing and alienating. By confusing the two sensations, Jen asks: What do we expect, as consumers, from the substances that sustain us? What do those expectations reveal about us as social, emotional, and political creatures? What forces shape our cravings? How do we take for granted the food that surrounds us, which feels so abundant but is fundamentally scarce and ephemeral? 

Before I learned about Bad Taste, I knew Jen primarily as a DJ and a respected music writer with her own album review site Listen to This. Because I was intimidated by her professional credentials and embarrassed by my own musical taste, our relationship stalled in the friendly acquaintance zone for years. It was only when I belatedly discovered she was a “food person” that I dared to initiate meaningful conversation. Jen has observed over the years that the audience for her food work is overwhelmingly female, while it tends to be mostly men who respond to her musical output. My own behavior reflected this gendered dynamic. We wondered together later: Why does this pattern persist? Through her work, Jen explores our collective expectations, illuminating them in order to interrogate and subvert them. What do we think we like? Why? Why do we stake so much of our self-worth on our taste? What yokes it so closely to our sense of identity? Talking to Jen helped me to mistrust my instincts, to be skeptical of my own tendencies and appetites. Our conversation freed up some space in me to replace conventional (automatic) thinking with sticky, tricky curiosity. She made me want to be a little braver, a little weirder.

Jen studied English at Reed College in Portland. After moving to Brooklyn, she worked briefly in food media. She began hosting immersive monochromatic dinners called Color Meals in 2015, inspired by a scene in J. K. Huyman’s novel À Rebours in which the protagonist hosts an all-black meal honoring the death of his libido. The dinners garnered media attention and Jen began creating other interactive food experiences under the name Bad Taste for brands and cultural institutions. Her ongoing project Balling the Queen addresses colony collapse in honey bee populations through a series of events that combine art, food, and environmental activism. 

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Georgia Hilmer: What was your plan for your undergraduate degree?

Jen Monroe: When I graduated I thought I wanted to work in food media and figured out really quickly that that was not the thing. Or at least at that time, I felt really alienated by what the food media landscape looked like. I graduated in 2012 and there were one or two food publications that were doing anything edgy. There was Lucky Peach and Gastronomica, which was a small, academic food journal. I really wanted something that felt similar to my experience of food, which was weird and perverse and tactile and messed up and strange — not “Ten Ways to Make Chicken Tonight,” which was most of what I was being asked to produce when I worked in food media. 

What was the first iteration of Bad Taste? When did it get a name and how has it changed? 

The name I had when I was in college still and fantasizing about having a food publication. It felt like the identity that was interesting to me, trying to push back on all the weird classisms that happen in food culture. The idea of having good taste is so deeply strange to me when it is a built in sense, a part of your body. It’s so weird to say it’s good or bad when all of it is so deeply subjective. 

The first meaningful instance of me offering food work to the world was when [my sister] Caroline and I started doing the Color Dinners in our apartment. They weren’t really meant to be anything serious. We had both read this book that we liked a lot, A Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans, about this aging aristocrat. He has this dinner party for his lost libido, it’s like a funeral banquet and all the food is black.

Once you had done a few Color Dinners did offers for other food work come in?

Slowly, really really slowly. It took a long time for me to even get anyone to write about them. No one wants to write about you until someone else has written about you and then suddenly everyone else wants to write about you. That was a really slow-moving couple of years. I had no money, I was trying to fund everything by myself. People would be like, “I want to come write about your next dinner,” and I was like, “I’m still trying to scrape together enough cash for there to be a next dinner.” It was a difficult process. I still had a full-time job. I was in wine by that time. I had peaced out on food media. I had a very short attempt at trying to go to NYU and do the food studies masters program there. I made it like a week in before I realized that the finances of having a part-time job and taking classes was just not going to work. They didn’t give me as much funding as I thought they would and of course no one is going to pay you to get a master’s degree. There was a lot of, not rejection explicitly, but the feeling of “Nothing is working!,” which I guess is what being a young person in a really expensive city is all about. It’s funny now — I look back on that age from 22 to 27 and think, “What was I doing that whole time? Why didn’t I get more shit done?”

Do you feel like it was time wasted or time aimless?

A little bit time wasted. It just takes so long to figure out what you’re doing. It takes a long time to figure out what is working and isn’t working and get the muscles in place to repeat it and do it better and to learn. I look back now and I feel like — and I know it’s such a wasteful thought — but if I could rewind seven years and start from square one I would have done this so differently.

What would you have done differently?

I think, and this is so awful, I probably would have taken out a big business loan and quit my job a lot sooner. You say that in hindsight knowing that things were going to kind of work out financially so you might as well have gotten started sooner. I think I would’ve taken out a big pile of money and said screw it and committed sooner.

When did your aesthetic — and I don’t mean to imply that it’s just a superficial, visual thing because I understand your work to be asking a lot of questions about the politics of food and consumption — start to develop? 

The Color Dinners were definitely trying to do something with food that was different and strange. I think a lot of that aesthetic was informed by my childhood experience of food. As a kid, food was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. That experience of food being this overwhelming sensory exploration was a lot of what I was trying to channel, like when you look at something and you don’t know what it tastes like but you want it so much. I think a big part of what was exciting about the Color Dinners was playing with that sensory expectation. If you look at food that is entirely pink, you sort of expect it to be sweet and soft and playful. When you start eating a meal that is the opposite of that, what does that do to your sensory expectation of a color or the way you anticipate flavor? I think that was a big part of the aesthetic jumping-off point. 

I also was just really tired of how everything looked. Food culture in America is so weird. The way we relate to food specifically now on Instagram is so weird, the way we try to use it to express our identities, which restaurants we go to, which restaurant reviews we rely on, restaurants being a point of social identification. 

Was part of your early work about taking away a familiar frame of reference — or not familiar necessarily but culturally agreed upon — for our aesthetic hierarchies? The food of yours that I’ve seen on Instagram is so beyond relation to what I see somewhere like Bon Appétit. It stands alone and apart. It forces you to reckon with your assumptions about what food is and should be and what the relationship is between how food looks and what it’s supposed to do for you. Are you thinking about how you can make your food look like nothing else?

Those are all definitely goals for sure. For me, a big part of Bad Taste is resistance to fancy restaurant culture, which is complicated because the more I do it, the more it becomes food that is expensive for people to eat in a way that I feel kind of torn up about. A big part of figuring out what this project is is trying to reckon with capitalism and what place I have in it, especially as I get these jobs with brands like Nike. Part of the way I’m still trying to justify that to myself is that if I can get the money jobs from brands that I don’t particularly identify with, then that gives me the time to do the work that I do care about. Thus far, all of the projects that I have done that have been more explicitly political have not generated any money. 

If money were no object, what would these projects look like? 

Something I’ve been working on for the past year or so (that has not at all been a cash cow but has been a project I’ve really loved) is this ongoing series of food happenings about honey bees and the honey bee health crisis. In a dream world, I would probably want to spend all of my time thinking about that. It’s been really gratifying to be able to use food as a pretty explicit teaching tool. I was first introduced to the concept of colony collapse disorder and bee problems when I was in high school and have been keeping tabs on it ever since. It is always interesting to me when I mention it in casual conversation and someone is like, “What??” If I can use food as a vessel for making that conversation a little bit more accessible and changing the way someone relates to insects, that is a huge thing. That’s definitely a space where we could all use a little bit more empathy: in the ways that we relate to the natural world, since it’s been cut out from our everyday lives. 

A tension I’ve always grappled with in art is the one between a problem you feel urgently about and the medium you choose to express that urgency in — like using a painting or a movie to address a social injustice. Sometimes I struggle against my own cynicism about the ways art can pose questions or offer answers. What do you think it is about your food practice that lends itself to addressing something like colony collapse? Why this mode of expression to address that? Do you ever have doubts about raising these questions through food? 

Those are all the really tricky questions. To answer a part of your question, I definitely always have doubts about using food to communicate any idea just because of how privileged of a substance it is and how perverted it feels to say, “I have so much access to food I can make art out of it, haha!” That’s totally, in a way, awful. I am lucky that I can work in that capacity but, given the way the world works, that can feel really evil. In terms of using food to talk about this particular issue, it feels pertinent with the honey bees because the real reason that most people have to care about the issue at all is how the honey bee crisis can affect our food supplies. Food really makes sense as the means to draw attention to that part of the conversation and illustrate exactly what is at stake here. But then from a more pure pleasure point, food is a really useful way to get people through the door because it is approachable and fun and by necessity involves shared experiences. 

I did not mean for that question to sound accusatory at all. It is naive of me to feel or insist that an artist shouldn’t have to make difficult things somewhat palatable in order to get people to attend to those issues. Nevertheless, sometimes, when I’m frustrated about the state of the world, I think, “Why can’t we all step up to deal with this ugly thing without being enticed or seduced?” It’s an ungenerous way for me to think about the problem.

It’s ungenerous but it’s real. That’s an issue so many people are dealing with in so many different industries: How do you get people in the door? How do you get people to care?

Can you envision the locus of your work shifting from what I assume is majority income-making food / catering / install stuff to more “pure” art? Does that seem possible or even desirable?

I have a hard time imagining that. I think branding plays a huge part in it. Positing yourself as an artist first rather than a chef has something to do with it. Both of those words are so fraught for me. It has taken so long for me to feel comfortable calling myself a chef — but I feel more comfortable using that word than ‘artist’ because I’ve worked in kitchens, whereas I’ve never had any sort of art training. I feel like I have more permission to call myself a chef than an artist, although many people would bristle at me calling myself a chef because I’ve never commanded a restaurant kitchen. There is always something! People call me a food artist sometimes and I struggle with that but, you know, that’s what a chef is. Any chef is an artist, truly.

What does it look like when someone approaches you for a project? Are they coming to you with a budget and a product that the food will be next to that will have to sell? Are there specifics? Are you given carte blanche?

It’s always so different, it really depends. Rarely does a client say, “I want you to do this thing for this amount of money.” It’s like in a lot of freelancing arenas where you do the budget stare down and they say, “How much do you want?” and you say, “How much do you have?” My strategy is to stare at a person and guess how much money they have and then ask for that amount. Sometimes I have clients that want to haggle for weeks and I’ve had to become firmer about that. People will milk you for a thousand proposals and then decide to go in a different direction. I finally got a contract written out for myself by a lawyer friend that I think is going to make my life one thousand times simpler. It basically says, “If you want me to write a proposal and you don’t hire me, you can’t use my ideas with someone else.” That has been happening. People will say, “We love your concept but we found someone cheaper to do it on the ground!” 

I think a lot of us grow up hearing about the duality of cooking vs. baking. Baking is understood as precise and scientific and controlled and not as creative; it’s based on all of these formulas and is women’s work. At least most pastry chefs I know are women and it seems the majority of chef-chefs are male. Whereas cooking is this intuitive, fly by the seat of your pants, brave male thing. How do people end up self-selecting according to those ideas? What I can see of your work leads me to believe it is super creative, scientific, and intuitive all at once. It involves the totality of cooking and baking. 

It’s really interesting to recognize that a large majority of the people who are interested in my food work are women. Which, again, I’ve had so many feelings of internalized misogyny about, like: “How do I get more men to come to my dinners?” Why do I care? I love women! Women give many more shits about this work and I should be so lucky to have so many cool women at my dinners. 

My impulse thus far has just been to learn how to do everything poorly rather than picking a focus. I think a lot of that has to do with gender anxiety, thinking, “Men can do everything! Men are chefs and know how to do the fire cooking and can also make bread and cook dinner for two hundred people at the drop of a hat and have amazing knife skills.” 

A big part of the reason I lasted five minutes working in restaurant kitchens is because of just how rampantly, woefully misogynist it was. I was cooking in restaurant kitchens in 2011-ish in Portland and I was the only woman in the kitchen except for the pastry chef. It was just disgusting. It was terrible. A part of me really wanted to thrive on that energy, to prove how tough I was over and over again by throwing an insult back at that man who said something vulgar to me in the walk-in fridge, by being the cool chick. But part of growing up for me has been losing interest in withstanding misogyny by absorbing that misogyny and deciding to check out and do my own thing. If that thing gets branded as super effeminate, so be it. 

How we arrived at this conversation is a little bit funny: you were always a “music person” to me and we met in a musical capacity at dance parties in New York City. I didn’t feel like I could approach you because I don’t have any confidence in my musical taste … but as soon as I found out you cooked food I thought, “Now I can talk to Jen!” I have been thinking lately about how I came to my relationship to music, which is a stunted one, and how I came to feel I couldn’t really have an opinion about it. Did your household have a lot of music in it?

Our biological dad was a pretty serious at-home pianist but he stopped being part of the picture when we were younger. And our mom always loved music. She always had a diversity of it around when we were kids. You need a point in your life when you are given permission to care and allowed to not be embarrassed about your interests. 

Was it music first for you, in terms of hobby-that-becomes-obsession?

I thought that I was going to become an opera singer when I was in high school. I did a little bit of a stint at music school. That was one of many “Oh, that’s not going to work,” moments growing up. Caroline was definitely the older sister who said, “You can care about music in a meaningful way.” She’s four years older. She gave me my first Radiohead record, which in a lot of ways opened many doors. We had very different musical tastes as kids but her just presenting me with a few records in a meaningful way and saying, “Here is your gateway drug,” from there I felt like I had permission to explore where else it could go. Then, through things like music blogs and Napster and Live Journal and music downloading services, I turned into a computer rat at a pretty young age. I am still a pretty major musical hoarder these days. 

What was the origin of Listen to This?

I started the blog in 2015 because I had friends who would always ask what I was listening to and what they should listen to. I thought it would be fun to have this platform where you could say, “Listen to this!” It wasn’t complicated, there weren’t any whiny academic essays that went along with it, it was just easy little bites of ideas. When I was in high school, I got a lot of my records from the library. I would check out stacks of CDs. Music blog culture gave me access to stuff that they didn’t have at the library. That was the impetus for the blog: “I love this record, I wish more people could hear it!” 

Why do you think your readership for the blog and the hierarchies of the music world are overwhelmingly male? Your mentioned that your food work gets much more play from women. Do you have any theories about that split besides it being a product of how society has shaped audiences? 

I think at the end of the day that is part of the answer, that these are what we have decided are masculine and feminine interests. I do think music writing has been so explicitly geared towards men, which is why I don’t really like having conversations about music with most people. They turn into competitions about how much you know or how much you can prove or how much you can win a conversation. 

Do you feel pigeon-holed in all of these different areas because you present such a strong aesthetic and a particular interest in one way or another? Do you find yourself asserting that you are actually capable of X, Y, and Z also? 

A little bit, specifically with music. But I feel like people who have listened to more than one of my NTS shows know that I have taste that runs the gamut. If anything, I’ve had to stop pigeon-holing myself. In writing the album download blog, I find myself thinking, “Oh no, that’s too weird for readers, I can’t post that. That’s unlistenable.” I have to remind myself that if there is something about an album that I love, other people are going to love it too.