Faith in the Web

Be a preacher’s kid, the oldest of eight, homeschooled by a mom who cooked from the world food cookbook More-with-Less. Graduate from The Ohio State University with an English degree, then move to Orlando. Immediately begin blogging. Join a house church and show your love by cooking dinners for 30 in your tiny apartment. Land a freelance writing gig with the blog Apartment Therapy, whose warm, hospitable vibe you love. Move back to Columbus to be near family.

Above all, love the web and be alive to its possibilities.

Do that, and one day the editor of Apartment Therapy will fly you to New York to offer you the job of editor of its brand-new sister blog, theKitchn, a job you will still hold (with upgrades) 13 years later because you, after all, are the one who grew it into one of the most popular food websites on the internet.

At least, this is what will happen if you are Faith Durand.

Faith, 41, grew up in Pataskala and lives in Clintonville with husband Mike, an earth sciences professor at OSU, and their two young daughters. As editor-in-chief, it is her outlook—at once global and Midwestern—that fuels the creative fires of theKitchn.com, which Faith calls simply Kitchn.

Here, the food and cooking website’s 30 million monthly visitors can find not only recipes but all things kitchen-related: cooking techniques and how-tos; meal planning and prepping; a popular Cooking School; what’s new in groceries; in-depth reviews of kitchen tools; kitchen design and organization; and what Faith describes as “personal essays and features about how people eat today.”

WALKING THE WALK

Faith is warm, engaging, and hospitable (before we even meet, masked, on her front porch, she texts me a choice of beverages), so it is no surprise to hear that “a lot of her pure hope” for Kitchn is that it be “the most empathetic food source on the web.”

Faith gets it: Sometimes you have time to cook for pleasure and sometimes you have to hustle. “We don’t talk down to those situations—‘Oh, well, tonight it’s just mac and cheese.’ No, it’s mac and cheese you can be proud of.”

Although Faith says “most people that I know in food” have compassion and empathy, she also feels “very strongly that food media often just speaks to the insiders” and not to “the vast millions of people who just need to put food on the table. They don’t take their concerns seriously, or they talk about it like it’s dumbed-down food or food for the masses.”

Faith wants to change this narrative. “You can talk the talk that our social systems don’t support people and people are suffering, then if you write recipes and food content that communicates contempt for the needs they have, then you’re not walking the walk.”

She shrugs off the notion that recipes for good, easy food are easy to write. “I think it takes skill and discipline and focus and a real self-investigation to write recipes that really consider the person. It also takes diversity—it takes a multiplicity of voices.”

This is not to say that all Kitchn recipes are quick and easy. “But I think we’re always after the gold standard of the right recipe for the right moment. We try to think very broadly and empathetically about the challenges people face and how do we offer solutions from a recipe or a cooking standpoint.”

Working from her kitchen in Columbus helps Faith keep the Midwestern outlook so important to serving the site’s many readers.

A MULTIPLICITY OF VOICES

Faith works remotely, as do the half of her team members who live on the West Coast and in the Midwest. The remaining staff works from New York City, home base of parent company AT Media, which owns Apartment Therapy and Kitchn. This intentional regional mix of writers keeps Kitchn relevant to its readers across the U.S.

Kitchn’s NYC studio kitchen is purely for food shoots. Faith emphasizes that recipe testing happens not in “big, shiny test kitchens” but in her team’s home kitchens, with all their faults and quirks, so that home cooks can confidently replicate the recipes.

This empathy extends to other conversations that are current in the food world. Faith’s own interest in cooking was sparked by the desire to cook South Indian and Thai food for immigrant church members to make them feel at home. (Remember those dinner parties for 30?)

But, Faith asks, “Who gets to tell the story and write the recipes that are rooted and owned by certain cultures? Is it correct for me as a white woman to write a recipe for something that I enjoy and have maybe made a couple of times but I don’t really have this grounding in—is that appropriate?”

At Kitchn, the answer is no, Faith says. “I want to have people telling stories that feel very authentic to them, that feel very appropriate to the expertise that they have.”

The blog recently featured cookbook author and entrepreneur Chitra Agrawal’s South Indian cooking, and Faith says that “the story was really owned and run by an editor on my staff who is also Indian. We also had a South Indian photographer shoot it. They brought whatever ineffable and hard-to-define quality of understanding and insight they would have about that food. It wasn’t just outsourced. We work really hard to do this.”

If you sign up for Faith free newsletters at thekitchen.com, you’ll see this illustration of her and her daughters. Faith credits illustrator Bijou Karman for the drawing.

PANDEMIC COOKING

With a staff already accustomed to working remotely (Faith describes herself as a “power user” of web apps Zoom and Slack), Kitchn was in many ways prepared to continue working through the pandemic. There was some tweaking of content to reflect the times, but Faith’s main concern was for her staff.

“It’s hard for the team—the childcare gaps, sick family members. I’ve tried to take care of everybody. I don’t believe you can make work that rises above the level of your team’s happiness and feeling of creative satisfaction. Ultimately the team is the first priority of things for me. It’s really important that people feel valued, that they feel they have a voice.”

Faith notes that “especially during the height of stay-at-home, America was cooking in a way it never had—it was like Thanksgiving every day. I think that was exciting, that people are having to learn skills they maybe haven’t before. We’ll see how that affects how they cook as the year goes on. I do expect to see that wave come again this fall as things close down for the winter.”

In addition to her online work, Faith has written three cookbooks.

FUN ON THE WEB

Although Faith sets serious goals for Kitchn, she clearly revels in her job.

“What’s fun about Kitchn is that it’s a place where you can do almost anything where you see an audience appetite for it. Meal planning? We can say ‘Let’s try it’—and if the audience wasn’t as into it as we thought, we can just move on to something else.”

She has written three cookbooks (including one for Kitchn with Sara Kate Gillingham), but Faith prefers the ever-evolving environment of the internet and social media.

“I love the web so much,” she says. “With the web, I think, you can do things that are so engaging and interactive. You can flex your creativity.”

Case in point: Kitchn’s Thanksgiving Food Fest, which Faith describes as “a virtual food festival and learning event held on social media the second weekend of November.”

Faith never expected to stay with a single company for 13 years, but Kitchn has her heart. “I feel very lucky to get to work on it every single day. It just feels like the best.”

• Visit Kitchn at theKitchn.com.