canned corn in June
The New York Times and Instacart are working together, and as much as I'm in favor of creative ways to sell people journalism, I can't get behind auto-populating grocery lists.
Hello from St. Louis, where I’ve been gleefully wilting in the humidity since Saturday. Also, I apologize for going dark last week; I had some (non-scary) health stuff going on, and suddenly it was Friday night and I’d only written three paragraphs. Here are those paragraphs, plus several more I got around to writing yesterday.
These days, the business of journalism — and the people in journalism whose bad bets have gotten us all to this point of near-implosion — makes headlines regularly. Maybe you’re lucky enough to be offline enough that you don’t sweat about the bad news your favorite news outlets are making. I’m not.
To be a journalist is to know the way things work now isn’t working — and it hasn’t for some time. According to Pew, the newspaper industry in 2022 brought in roughly one-fifth the ad dollars it did in 2006, and between 2008 and 2021, newsroom employment fell 26 percent. In my 13-year career, I’ve survived at least 10 rounds of layoffs at the publications where I’ve worked, and I got axed in one massive staff reduction. Jobs I’ve left have later been eliminated, as have entire departments I’ve worked in.
I share all of that to say: I spend a lot of time thinking about strategy. How to convince people that news is something worth paying for? How to convince management that reporters and editors are people worth paying a fair wage? How to win the battle for Gen Z eyes against TikTok and Instagram?
Are you wondering what any of this has to do with food? I’m getting to the point, I swear.
Very few, if any, media companies have navigated this string of news natural disasters as well as the New York Times has. The Times realized before almost anyone else that it needed to offer readers alternatives to hard news, that stuff like games and consumer reviews and — most relevant to this newsletter — recipes might convince people to buy subscriptions. Do I love that well-reported, impactful journalism has become the equivalent of a chocolate-covered spider? I certainly do not! But, for now at least, the Times’s approach has helped it grow and remain profitable, and so I say: By any means necessary, convince them to eat the insect. Drown the vegetables in fat. I love creamed spinach.
A few days ago, the Times put out a press release announcing the launch of an “innovative shoppable recipes integration” with the grocery-shopping app Instacart. In plain English: The Times — with its phenomenal recipe database — is partnering with Instacart to give people who subscribe to the delivery app’s membership program limited access to NYT Cooking. And people who cook using the paper’s recipes will get deals on Instacart+, along with some new tech that will auto-populate recipe ingredients into Instacart shopping carts.
There are two ways to react to this news: as a journalist, and as someone who loves to cook and bake. In my (less stressful) role as the latter, I was dismayed. You all know my stance on grocery delivery apps: Above all else, I’m an advocate for physically selecting your groceries whenever it’s possible. I also understand that some days, for some people, that’s impossible. (I have been that person, many times.) So to me, the apps’ existence is enough, and the last thing we need is a mechanism that nudges us to rely on them even more and digitizes another link in the chain between farm and plate.
On Monday morning, the featured recipe on NYT Cooking was a spicy corn and shishito salad — exactly the kind of thing I might want to make as a side dish this week. I clicked, and there, below the ingredients list, was the Instacart widget. It announced: Shop ingredients on Instacart [carrot emoji]! So I clicked again, and sure enough, there was a list of ingredients from my local Wegmans, ready to be added to first a virtual cart and then a physical one pushed by someone who is not me.
It was too easy. So easy that I’d be tempted to skip the simple step of standing up and opening my fridge to see what I already had — or what I had that might be a close enough substitute. The ease of the transaction felt like a guarantee I’d end up with 18 half-used heads of garlic and so, so many wilted herbs over time.
Also: The recipe called for fresh corn — three cups of kernels, from four to six ears. The app freestyled. Here, it offered, was a can of corn, which would certainly make it easier to quantify three cups. But think of your taste buds! In the winter, canned or frozen corn might not be such a grave sin, but right now? In mid-June? The app’s liberties raised a valid question: Will the technology evolve to account for variables like seasonality, freshness and price fluctuations? (In the spirit of fairness, I will concede one pleasant surprise: The platform does offer a section for ingredients you may already have — in this case, olive oil and spices. So, should you choose to dabble with this feature, you wouldn’t accidentally end up with multiple jugs of olive oil or an overpriced plastic salt grinder.)
So that’s half my brain, screaming: Don’t click the button! Look at all the corn at the farmers’ market, just begging to be shucked and shelled into a salad with shishitos! But the other half — the part that remembers I am in favor of creative ways to monetize journalism — is shrugging. I don’t see obvious ethical downsides to Instacart getting mixed up in the New York Times, and if the big-wigs in charge of revenue and partnerships at other news outlets start to see food and cooking journalism as a place for innovation and investment, all the better for me and my career.
So think twice before using the one-click method to buy your groceries, but tell all your enemies they should. More non-canned corn for the rest of us, and more money for news outlets. That’s all I can ask for — and I’m curious to see how this “convergence of content and commerce” (I weep for our language) turns out.
Very fun to read!