'Queer Eye' and Sweet Potato Pie

My great-aunt Christine’s sweet potato pie recipe is a family secret. She was in her 80s when my mother asked her for the recipe, to make sure the recipe would survive after Aunt Christine died. She agreed to pass it down on one condition: My mother had to swear that she’d never share it with anyone who isn’t a family member. My mother recognized the recipe as a treasure of great value, and has kept Aunt Christine's memory alive through food. She’s taught me the importance of family traditions like this one. One day, I’ll ask her to teach me the recipe, too.

That’s why “Jones Bar-B-Q,” the third episode of the Season 3 of Netflix’s Queer Eye, had me wrestling with questions about legacy and family. This episode brings up, and doesn’t neatly answer, questions about the commodification and commercialization of family recipes and legacies.

In the episode, the Fab Five, as the group is known, bring their weeklong whirlwind of clothing, grooming, food, design, and culture to the Jones sisters, Deborah and Mary, who go by “Little” and “Shorty.” The Jones sisters are Kansas City pit masters and barbecue restaurant owners, and the Fab Five show up at the restaurant, meet customers, and help take and ring up orders. Little and Shorty are charming and funny, and they firmly refuse to give Antoni (the Queer Eye food guru) the recipe for their delicious barbecue sauce—a family recipe that their father created and sold at his barbecue restaurant, and that he passed down to his daughters. The Fab Five pledge to help the Jones sisters take their no-frills business “to the next level.”

For the Fab Five, a “next level” business means that the restaurant gets a makeover courtesy of Bobby, who builds an outdoor seating space with hipster-chic potted plant and picnic table aesthetics; Tan finds clothing that helps both women feel sexy and confident, and includes his signature “French tuck”; Jonathan cuts hair with aplomb and emphasizes self-care; and they all professionalize the branding via a logo on the space and employee T-shirts.

But what struck me most about this episode was when Antoni and Karamo (Queer Eye’s culture specialist) take Little and Shorty to Original Juan, a specialty food production company. (Original Juan has since been sold and is now called Spicin’ Foods). They’re met by food scientist Josh and chef Tommy, who, Antoni explains, are going to recreate the Jones sisters’ barbecue sauce for bottling and mass production, so they can sell it at their restaurant and potentially in grocery stores.

All the Jones sisters have to do is share the recipe.

There’s a moment during this outing when Little and Shorty seem to pause. They’ve already refused to tell Antoni the secret ingredient in their sauce, and there’s a look on both sisters’ faces that’s hard to watch without thinking that something might be wrong. Deborah’s expression looks like a mix of discomfort, fear, and proprietary-ness, and persists for a while before she eventually starts getting into the process of making the sauce. Food scientist Josh tells the sisters, “You don't have to make [the sauce] in your restaurant.”

Here, what stood out is the question of ownership. Shorty and Little had to tell someone who’s not their family the secret ingredient in their father’s sauce recipe. They also gave up control of production to an outside entity.

To be clear, the Jones sisters seem both pleased and proud that they now have a production system for their sauce. Deborah says, tearfully, “I just never got this far.” And at the end of the episode, they both proudly show their professionally produced and bottled sauce to family and friends. But there are interesting implications in the Jones sisters’ story and in the idea that taking a food business “to the next level,” on some level, requires giving up control of a family legacy to commercial actors to reach a certain scale.

One food show that takes a very different approach to the business of food and legacy is Netflix’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. Based on her book of the same name, the show features chef and food writer Samin Nosrat, who travels the world and explores each of what she calls the “four elements of good cooking” by meeting farmers, chefs, and artisans and learning about the foods they make that exhibit these elements.

What other writers have noted about the food producers whom Nosrat visits—from the miso maker in Japan to the butcher in Italy to the honey farmers in Mexico—is that they’re all masters of slow food produced in traditional ways and in smaller quantities. Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat—with its slow-motion shots of soy sauce dripping in a traditional press, its emphasis on long time-scales as essential to the production of parmesan cheese, and its underscoring of the history behind the harvest of honey—elevates small production and family techniques to an art form. The show seems to argue that these foods are so delicious and valuable precisely because they’re steeped in legacy and tradition, and they couldn’t possibly be mass-produced or put into outsiders’ hands.

I can imagine a version of the Jones sisters’ Queer Eye episode where, to take Jones BBQ “to the next level,” the Jones sisters’ sauce is given the Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat treatment.

In this alternate reality, the sisters keep ownership of the recipe and means of production. Instead of taking them to Original Juan, where they hand over the literal secret to their success so that other people can make and bottle their sauce, the Fab Five either fit the restaurant with better kitchen equipment and more storage space where they can make and bottle the sauce themselves, or help Little and Shorty rent commercial kitchen space where they can make larger quantities of their sauce for outsourced bottling. In this version, the Fab Five works with the Jones sisters to plan for an expansion that involves hiring trusted people to scale up, giving them choices about whom to share the recipe with, and when to do so.

These are two drastically different approaches to the commercialization of a family legacy in the food business, and there’s no single correct choice to make. Certainly, in the case of Queer Eye, Shorty and Little Jones seem thrilled with the path that the Fab Five showed them—and thanks at least partly to the show’s popularity, their business has been booming. But in these kinds of scenarios, it’s also important to think critically about who really owns a family recipe, and what sharing that recipe means for the ownership of a family legacy.

Businesses like Jones BBQ demonstrate the complexities of these questions, but different approaches to commercialization and owners matter to all kinds of people: the producers of sauces and spreads across the world who might want to use facilities like Original Juan; family restaurant owners; and, of course, anyone who holds a family legacy in the food they make.

My mother tends the secrets of Aunt Christine’s sweet potato pie recipe. While her brother and sister both bake, and both know that she has the recipe, they’ve never asked for it. That means one day, it’ll be my turn. And I know that if anyone outside the family asks me what’s in it, I’ll give the only acceptable answer as cryptically as I can: “It’s a family secret.”