Stephen Satterfield: I think that my work ultimately is about providence or origin. By that I mean I have always felt that food has been underestimated as a means of organizing people, radicalizing people, and conveying information around identity and migration. Stories that tell us more about who we are than pretty much anything else can.

And the way that food media was being presented to us, in prior years, was through a lens that was incredibly myopic, unimaginative, and formulaic. And the formula basically went like: Recipes, restaurants, and restaurants limited to those European-trained, white-owned, almost entirely male chefs. A very redundant kind of cuisine and ideology and aesthetic. Really a lot of the same exclusive power dynamics that permeate in a lot of places. And so, as someone who grew up being deeply interested in food, getting into food as a young person, becoming a sommelier, starting wine as a teenager, going to culinary school … I just got sick of how underutilized food was being presented to us as a medium for dialogue or investigation.

Satterfield: There are many examples. I’m always reluctant to try to start listing people cause I always forget. And then I honestly just hate feeling bad about myself when I forget people.

What I can definitely say is Dr. Jessica B. Harris, who obviously I appeared with on-screen and is the source material for High on the Hog, the docuseries, was always a north star for me in terms of rigor. Had cookbooks, but cookbooks, not just with recipes that work, but deep analysis. Work that really showed an exhaustive, comprehensive understanding of the subject matter and intermittently with: “Here’s recipes.” I think that rigor, not just in food media, but across media, is needed.

Honestly, I just try to mind my own business. The first time I was really thinking about all of this was probably like 2015. We really started in 2017. And so it took us a couple of years to get going. And that has required me to pay a lot more attention to what’s happening in our camp than looking outward. I hope I’m not somehow exposing myself in saying that, but it does take a huge amount of concentration, communication, and planning to make content at the scale and quality that we all are. So I’m really just trying to focus on building what we’re building and not really think about it in terms of how it fits in.

Satterfield: Yeah, that’s a big part of it. I think my life — many people’s lives, I’m sure — are much more complicated. 2017 somehow just seems quaint, even though the house was on fire back then, too. I wasn’t positive what the reception of the magazine would be.

We had a couple of less-than-stellar crowdfunding campaigns trying to get Whetstone off the ground. It wasn’t like lines were wrapped around the door anticipating the arrival of Whetstone, but we did find an audience gradually and I was instantly motivated to try and grow it.

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do a second one, I just wanted to do a first issue, but then when the first was out, I almost immediately wanted to do another one and then I wanted to build a business around it. And so I think, as time has gone on, that commitment for me has deepened and a lot of the stuff that we hope for has been realized, but what’s required to keep the lights on … that’s kind of where my head is.

Satterfield: Lately I’ve been thinking a lot more about who is the narrator. And I think that the narrator really says so much about who the material’s for and, obviously to a large degree, how stories are edited and produced and packaged and presented. Really, working in so many different countries, the intimacy comes from the person and that’s what it comes down to. And so, there are other ways that we can build, I don’t want to say engagement, but … investment in the story, by making it beautiful, by giving it a package, by having a thoughtful editorial process and team, that’s critical. But also, who’s telling the story is what is going to say so much about who it is actually for.

Satterfield: Until very recently, I don’t even think people were taking it seriously enough to where objectivity could be seriously questioned. It was laughably institutional, hierarchical, “buddy-buddy,” and insider, very poorly kept secrets in the industry about how the food writers were connected to chefs. I personally worked at restaurants where the operators were friends with food writers that had been in the same position for three decades.

I think things have, in the last couple of years, begun to change again because of this breadth of voices that we see and read. We’ve tried to very intentionally come at this from, what we call (somewhat problematically) an anthropological point of view, into our analysis of food, because it gets us to a way of talking about human beings and talking about the relationship that we all have as humans. And there’s a lot in there that is messy. There’s some in there that’s emotional, there’s some that’s historical and factual. It’s the full range … that’s all the stuff that I am interested in capturing. But I tend to have a cynical view when I hear the word objectivity in the context of food media. Those two things, at least historically, just don’t even belong in the same sentence.

Satterfield: I always try to not articulate things [on] a hot microphone for the first time. So let me be extra careful. I think one of the things that I’m struggling with is the inevitability of this new digital and technological future and the ways in which that advancement is really going to be harmful: ecologically, environmentally. I mean, again, talking about this splintering, I feel like that’s really what just happened. You know, I feel like we all went through this really violent tunnel of loss and illness and chaos and have not even come out, but are emerging in our relationships and our friendships, our interpersonal connections, it just feels so sad. And I think, you know, the internet reflects and amplifies that.

When I think about blockchain technology, in particular, the implications for artists, for farmers, for Black wealth … I’m not so sure that I have well-formed ideas around this new future. So I think that’s just like something that I personally feel conflicted by right now.

Satterfield: Even though right now we have two other Black-owned publications, we are the only company of our kind in terms of output, scale, and scope. At this stage, for the first time and for the majority of the year, I started to look for outside capital. And that has been a very enlightening process. The bottom line is always the same, which is that it is very hard for people of color to find adequate capital to finance your dreams and your ambitions. And that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t pursue them, but it does mean that you need to be sober in your assessment of how you’re gonna show up to the work, because the work that we’re making costs a lot of money to make.

It’s hard to find well-paying jobs in journalism, but it’s also an incredible time, especially for journalists of color, because we don’t just have the sauce, we are the sauce. It’s important to just understand your own unique individual value.

I think these next five to 10 years are going to be a wave, but I think when you’re thinking about publications or institutional media or the industry at large, it’s expensive and it’s hard to find jobs that pay. It’s hard to find jobs that are funded. And I think it’s good to be clear on that as young professionals.