On February 4, Simon & Schuster published Rage Baking: The Transformative Power of Flour, Fury, and Women’s Voices. Edited by Katherine Alford, a former vice president at Food Network, and Kathy Gunst of NPR’s Here and Now, the book features essays and recipes from women to explore how “baking can be an outlet for expressing our feelings about the current state of our society,” specifically in relation to the 2016 election. Contributors include food industry professionals like Ruth Reichl, Dorie Greenspan, and Preeti Mistry, and other well-known writers and artists like Rebecca Traister and Ani Difranco. The book “encourages women to use sugar and sass as a way to defend, resist, and protest.” It is already a No. 1 best-seller on Amazon.

Then, on February 14, blogger and baker Tangerine Jones published an essay on Medium titled “The Privilege of Rage,” outlining how she coined the phrase “rage baking” back in 2015, and watched as Alford and Gunst’s book was published to great acclaim as her work went unacknowledged. Jones, a black woman, wrote that “Being black in America means you’re solid in the knowledge that folks don’t give a true flying fuck about you or anyone who looks like you,” and that she turned to baking as a form of self care. In 2015, she started posting online with the hashtag #ragebaking, and started the @ragebaking Instagram account in the summer of 2016. “Rage Baking is about expressing anger, but also healing in real ways,” Jones told Eater over email.

Jones says she was never contacted about the book, but after fans of hers responded to Gunst’s use of #ragebaking on Instagram, she received a DM from Gunst and Alford attempting to explain themselves. In Jones’s screenshots, Gunst and Alford (who are both white) say they saw the phrase “rage baking” used independently for years, and that the book is meant to be a “celebration of this movement.” But Jones writes that this “celebration” erases her use of the phrase as specifically related to racial injustice, and asks “if all of this research around Rage Baking had been done prior to the book’s publication and the intention was to be a celebration of feminist women’s voices, why wasn’t I acknowledged for my efforts or contacted?”

https://www.eater.com/cookbooks/2020/2/19/21142732/rage-baking-tangerine-jones-racial-injustice-controversy-explained

The reading audience (at least at Amazon) noted the slight.

Still, sometimes, there are rare moments of vindication. Despite being “one of the most hyped cookbooks/essay collections of the year,” according to Eater, in the three months since its publication, Rage Baking’s Amazon rating (2.5 stars) remains in shambles as reviewers ask why Jones is in no way credited or included. And while Paula Deen has found a new job among “her kind of people,” somewhere in Brooklyn, The Root’s Managing Editor Genetta Adams is pulling several loaves of freshly baked bread out of her oven. It’s just one of many constructive ways we move forward...maybe it’s all the rage.

https://theglowup.theroot.com/reclaiming-our-sourdough-starter-rage-baking-began-wit-1843201092