The Culture Journalist is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience — including bonus episodes and our eternal parasocial friendship — we recommend signing up for a paid subscription.
Paid subscribers also get access to CUJOPLEX, a private Discord server and online hangout zone where folks who like talking about the evolving state of independent music, culture, and media can congregate, share links, and talk about the news of the day. We’ve rounded up a selection of cool stuff members have shared lately at the bottom of this post.
Like most people on the internet, we here at the CuJo love a good food-centric social media account. But our arguable favorite at the moment is Snaxshot, a Substack, Instagram, and online community run by journalist and snack oracle Andrea Hernández.
Through analyzing products like Graza olive oil and adaptogenic cookie dough and the bold colors and chunky fonts that make every new food brand look vaguely the same, Andrea probes the vast culinary zeitgeist in search of what it tells us about both our generation and this moment in culture.
This week, she joins us to crack open the fascinating and often disorienting cultural politics of what she calls “gentrification food.” We get into the culinary and aesthetic hallmarks of this genre of food and beverage, what we millennials are broadcasting about ourselves when we consume it, and how our consumption choices became a form of status signaling in the first place.
We also talk about the differences between how Millennials and Gen-Z relate to food (and how it’s marketed to them accordingly); how artisanality became a mass-market concept; and why chain restaurants like Olive Garden and Cheesecake Factory are having a moment among young people.
Subscribe to Snaxshot on Substack
Follow Snaxshot on IG
Recommended reads by Andrea
CUJOPLEX VIBES
Here’s some of the articles, books, and films we’ve shared and discussed in over the past couple of months in CUJOPLEX, our members-only Discord:
The YouTube Apparatus by Kevin Munger
“How brainrot humour infected the internet with surreal gibberish” by Kieran Press-Reynolds
Meghan Garvey’s Brat review (and Nersey’s interview with her about it)
Cute Accelerationism by Amy Ireland & Maya B. KronicAmy Ireland
“A devil’s bargain with OpenAI” by Damon Beres
“The Millennial Left as a moment in internet history” by Benjamin Studebaker
American cosmic: UFOs, religion, technology by D. W. Pasulka
“How the NDA became the defining legal document of our time” by Reeves Wiedeman
The Criterion Channel’s 1999 collection
How groceries got gentrified, with Snaxshot's Andrea Hernández