Thug Kitchen: Veganism You Can Swear By (Published 2015) (2024)

LOS ANGELES — At Thug Kitchen, a three-year-old vegan blog that seasons its recipes with profanities, readers are exhorted to eat their [expletive] vegetables and be badasses in the kitchen. It’s a mischievous manifesto for inexpensive, healthy eating, leavened with the sort of humor that fueled the bedtime parody “Go the [expletive] to Sleep.” “Eat a [expletive] salad. It’s like plant nachos,” is a typical entry.

The creators of “TK” (as they call it for short) are Matt Holloway and Michelle Davis, now both 30, and both vegans. They began it, when he was working as a production assistant in a film company and she was a team member at Whole Foods, as a semiserious project: some health tips wrapped up in some jokes and a lot of cursing.

Thug Kitchen didn’t get much attention until the spring of 2013, when Gwyneth Paltrow plugged it on her own blog, Goop, and then mentioned it on “The Rachael Ray Show.” “It’s like gangster vegan chef,” she said. “It’s amazing.”

The aftermath was profound: The Tumblr blog had so many hits, its Google Analytics crashed. Saveur magazine gave Thug Kitchen its award for the best new food blog. It accrued millions of loyal readers, and a book deal from Rodale.

Then things became complicated. When “Thug Kitchen: Eat Like You Give a [expletive]” was published last September, an article about its creators, with their photographs, appeared on Epicurious, Condé Nast’s food site. Until that moment, Ms. Davis and Mr. Holloway had been anonymous. Unlike other blogs, there was no “About Me” section. Interviews with The Washington Post and Saveur had been conducted by email.

This reveal, as it were, created another sort of Internet frenzy. Ms. Davis and Mr. Holloway, who are white, were accused of cultural blackface. To some, the expletive-laden vernacular of Thug Kitchen sounded like language that might be deployed, as one reader noted, by “some white dude and his girl who played Wu Tang Clan ad nauseam” — or maybe your average American college student, white or black, eager to use the F-word as a modifier as often as possible. But others thought the slang was pointedly urban and African-American, and its use a cynical appropriation.