This July will be my eight-year New York City anniversary. But I’m originally from San Diego. My parents are both academics—they teach at UCSD. My mom’s a visual artist, and my dad is a Chinese film historian. Growing up, I was really passionate about books, music, art, and film, and when I went to university, those were the topics I was interested in and studied. Cooking and food were far from my mind.

When I moved to Montreal in 2009, I had this fantasy of going to grad school for a PhD in Ethnomusicology. At the time, my parents were living in Singapore. I’d gone to visit them, and reached out to this amateur ethnomusicologist. He took me to flea markets and I learned about how he excavated all this really interesting ‘60s local girl group music. I was really fascinated by that, thinking about pop music coming out of East Asia in the last 60 years, so I applied to grad school, but I was rejected from every program.

![1](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/2zNLXKBmkPbunTDlMKC9GF/e7f3e9ec196175346276cacccb5a71e9/1.jpg)

I stayed in Montreal but I had to work under the table because I’m not a Canadian citizen, and restaurants and cafes definitely run on that kind of undocumented work. I was really lucky that they took a chance on me. I didn’t have any experience but I pretended I did. I just needed a job. I fell deeply in love with the craft. Not just learning the technical skills, but also the culture and community that existed in restaurants, discovering new food—I loved all of it.

But I was never going to become a chef in Montreal or be legitimately hired because I was undocumented. I was tired of working under the table and not having a bank account. Everything I did was out of cash I kept in an envelope literally under my mattress. I loved pastry so much I decided I wanted to keep getting better at it. So, I moved to New York to work at Marlow & Sons and Diner.

Eventually, I was hired as executive pastry chef for a restaurant group called Matter House. We opened Cafe Altro Paradiso in February of 2016, and then Flora Bar and Flora Coffee in the Met Breuer in October. Two openings in one year. It was really hectic, but it was also super beautiful and rewarding. 

![3](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/5L6QUa5RZ8KskID6Tn2Cxe/6249a658109bb991b357b54a3c2ddb7c/3.jpg)

As someone who was super demanding and really wanted the restaurants to be the best that they could be, to go through that process twice in one year, was just a giant amount of pressure. We’re definitely at the point today, in 2021, where we’re re-examining the efficiency and purpose of that kind of pressure. It almost feels quaint to think back on that and the pressure of those openings, because it just seems so unimportant now. 

I didn’t do any professional culinary training. I studied English Lit. A lot of people who are thinking about pastry or cooking in restaurants ask if they should go to culinary school, and while I’ve had great experiences with all the different ones in the city, it just wasn’t right for me. It’s hard to justify the cost of it, and some people simply can’t afford it. What I tried to do was seek out restaurants whose chefs I wanted to work for. Developing mentors in the restaurant industry is really challenging. I wish I had that one person, but I was just trying to work at restaurants where I was able to learn from somebody who knew a lot more than me.

COVID has been incredibly hard on everyone in hospitality. When restaurants in New York closed down and I lost my job, I was like, *Well, what now?* In that moment, when you’re living it, it can feel like you have no options, that the world is falling down around you, and you have no way of figuring out what a path forward looks like. But it’s like getting out of a bad relationship: eventually, enough time goes by that you see all the ways it opened you up to other opportunities or to do other things that were better for you anyway.

![4](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/2P6K80FP6Kt7CuTdigA5n0/bb92140df0caa4e1156717f205543ebe/4.jpg)

I’m so glad I didn’t go to grad school, too. I’m grateful that I feel like I ended up somewhere that is actually better suited to who I am as a person. But coming from an academic family, that’s what was what was marked as being successful, so of course I thought it was my destiny. I think there’s a lot of value in looking back on your past and seeing it from a little bit further away and feeling more grateful that everything worked out the way that it did.

The last year has definitely reframed the way that I think about what I do. When you’re working in a restaurant, you kind of put your head down and then you look up and five years have gone by and you’re like, *Wait, I’m in my 30s, is this really something that I can keep doing? Is this really sustainable?* Going back to over a year ago now, the last day that we were open I had worked two weeks straight. We had just wrapped Fashion Week, and all the events and shit that go with that. Plus, I was still not rested and recovered from the insane holiday season. It’s just months and months and months of anxiety and move, move, move. I’m so lucky to have been okay when everything shut down. It was scary and stressful and I didn’t know what was going on, but it also gave me the chance to just stop and rest. To be outside during the day and go on long walks and eat better and sleep for as long as I wanted.

[[1]]

A book agent and I had started working together on a proposal the November before, but because of how much I was working it was always the last thing on my list. I just could not get to it. After the shutdown, my agent called me and was like, “Totally take as much time as you need, but now could be a really good time for you to get some work done on your proposal.” And she was absolutely right. I finally had the gift of time. That said, I didn’t have a computer. I haven’t had a computer for many years, I don’t have TV, I don’t have Wi-Fi. I was always at work and I live alone in this little apartment so it just never made sense to me. Wow, it is so hard to write a book proposal on an iPhone. A friend loaned me an iPad so I kind of went back and forth between the two. But I did it. Like a 40 page proposal—it’s insane.

Finishing it felt like a huge accomplishment. It scratched this itch that goes back to before I’d ever thought about food as a career—the idea of writing, of being a writer, and publishing a book. It’s a dream I never thought would be a reality outside of academia. 

>It was scary and stressful and I didn’t know what was going on, but it also gave me the chance to just stop and rest.

The whole process was so overwhelming because, at the same time, the pandemic was unfolding in this absolutely sickening way. The way it was mishandled, all the question marks hanging over everything that everybody did all the time. And then, of course, George Floyd was murdered and with that came the wave of the BLM movement. Simultaneously, we started seeing these other reckonings within the food industry, at other restaurants and with *Bon Appétit* ... just all this garbage swirling together. 

I started to wonder, even *if* there was a job for me, would I ever want to go back to that? Is that really the work I want to be doing? Working for a man at a fine dining restaurant that none of my friends can afford to eat at? Like, is this my life purpose? I ultimately didn’t have to make that decision because I was terminated in June, but it helped me contextualize all these things I was already grappling with in my head about the systems of the restaurant industry and how healthy or toxic they were for different kinds of people.

I’ve spent the past year untangling those threads, and having really profound conversations both privately and publicly, like, “If I choose to work in restaurants again, what are my terms? What does that look like? What kind of role do I have? What kind of space is it going to be and who are they going to serve? What are the values at the heart of this business?” Now, I feel like I’m established enough in my career where I can, instead of being grateful for the scraps, for the $45,000 a year salary, have a little more agency over who I’m working for, who I’m working with, and the kind of things I say yes or no to. 

[[2]]

One thing that I’ve gotten really back into in the last year, that has also been incredible for my mind and my peace, is drawing and doodling. A big part of that is because I’ve been working and collaborating with my mom on my Never Ending Taste pop-up. One of the things I love about it is that it’s in such opposition to the polished perfection of a Manhattan restaurant, at least the kind that I was used to working at, where the cutlery’s perfect and the glasses are polished. The pop-up is a little rough around the edges—things aren’t quite perfect. I would draw the menu and my mom would do the poster that I would use to promote it.

It’s created this new relationship with her. My mom was in art school when I was little; I remember her getting her MFA at CalArts. Our house is full of her art. But it was never something we did together. It wasn’t until I started doing my pop-up and thinking about creating that digital language with her. I think it also helps her understand and be more interested in the pastry work that I’m doing, too. 

I think a lot of people were feeling like this but I’ll only speak for myself: how scary it is to think about your loved ones getting sick with COVID, how fragile life is, and how it’s ripped so many people from their families in a horrible way. I live that fear, too. Part of collaborating with her was being like, “We need to create some stuff together. I want to have this chapter with you.” That’s brought us closer because it’s not just the same mother-daughter stuff that happens when we talk on the phone. Like, “Do you have enough vitamins? Do you have enough socks? Are you seeing anybody?” That kind of laundry list where you feel like you’re just checking in, rather than maintaining a relationship with someone.

[[3]]
>Edibles have come so far—everything from aesthetics to the ingredients.

When I first asked my mom about using her illustrations for [this collaboration with Gossamer and Rose Los Angeles](https://shop.gossamer.co/products/cbd-rosin-edibles), I was actually expecting her to have something critical to say, but she was so excited. I was blown away. She was like, “This just looks so cool. The website’s amazing. The boxes are little works of art.” She already has this plan for how she wants to frame them in one of those shadow boxes, like a little installation. I think the attitude from our parent’s generation is changing a little bit around weed culture in general, and I really feel like it’s because of work that Gossamer and [Rose Los Angeles](https://roselosangeles.com/) are doing to bring weed into a more inclusive space. 

It’s been really fascinating to see it all unfold. It’s not a subculture anymore. For me, the best part of where weed culture and products are at right now is that there are so many alternatives to smoking. I didn’t smoke weed at all growing up. I was a competitive athlete. I rowed in high school and at Cornell. It’s a really demanding sport and we had to sign contracts that said that we wouldn’t drink and do drugs during the seasons. So it’s all new to me now! Edibles have come so far—everything from aesthetics to the ingredients. It feels cleaner, it feels healthier, it feels less stigmatized by society, and that’s really exciting.

I’d never really considered cannabis as a flavor. That was the most interesting part of developing this recipe: it’s not just about finding harmony between the grapefruit, kiwi, and celery, but also highlighting this fourth element. When you’re putting that much care into sourcing all of the ingredients, why wouldn’t that extend to the weed as well? It makes perfect sense to me.

[[4]]

I’m from San Diego, so winter in New York is always really hard for me. But California citrus was always this bright spot when there’s not much else to look forward to. I approached [this recipe](https://shop.gossamer.co/products/cbd-rosin-edibles) the same way I do dishes for desserts at a restaurant—what it means to build layers of flavor and how different things can create something bigger than themselves when you mix them together. Oro blanco is interesting—it’s not something that most people know by name. But I love how delicate and clean and restrained the flavor is—it’s not overwhelmingly bitter but there also isn’t a lot of sugar.

Kiwi is going to add that creamy, banana-like sweetness, and thicken the whole mixture. This is not a huge note in the recipe, but I love that there’s celery in there, too. I love using celery in desserts. It pairs really well with almost everything because it’s so refreshing. I like those more savory notes in sweeter dishes so that it’s not too cloying. There’s something a little more sophisticated about it. It’s not necessarily a pairing you might have thought of but if you try all those things together, like, cut up on a spoon, you’d be like, “Oh, it’s delicious.” You’d get it.

Sugar is not a flavor. It’s kind of like salt in that it can set off certain notes. It can make fruit taste more vivid or it can soften the bitter edges of something. But if you use too much of it, it dulls and mutes that flavor and sensation. The thing that you want to taste is the actual ingredients of the dish, not the sugar. So, I always try to play up some more of those savory notes, so that you’re getting something that’s a little sharper in focus.

In a way, this collaboration is like my homage to San Diego, because these California fruits really remind me of home. I’m homesick, and it just feels really cool to have something to work on with my mom that makes me think of home. But the story of the illustrations is actually really cool. I went home in September for a pop-up at Chino Farms. One day at home, I was sitting at a table and my mom just walks up next to me, drops this stack of notebooks, and says, “You can have these if you want,” and walked away. She didn’t say anything about what they were.

[[5]]

When I opened them, I realized they were her personal journals. They’re unbelievable. They’re her super skillful, detailed pen drawings of her observations or ideas, but with all of this dense text in Chinese characters embedded into the illustrations or with the text just wrapping around it. It was so intimate, so personal, and so beautiful. But also to get this gift, that peek into your parent’s lives and you suddenly see them as a whole person.

Adding another layer of mystery is the fact that I can’t read the Chinese. It was super enigmatic. I started seeing all these patterns, like six different drawings of an old man smoking. And then I started noticing every time she drew food, like a bowl of noodles, or fried chicken on a plate, or a fruit coming out of a school bus. The images had this magic to them because we don’t really know what she was thinking or how they relate to the text. 

But I treasure them. I probably sent 50 different photos of pages or passages of illustrations that stuck out to me during the design process for this collab. My mom loved the idea. She also liked that lack of context, that the drawings are a little bit mysterious. The ones we used are all from her journal from 1999. I would have been in ninth grade at the time. Was I thinking about this rich inner life of my mom illustrating these personal journals? No, I was probably thinking about something super vapid and self-involved. It’s so cool to now to know, “Wow, this is what my mom was doing in ‘99.” I feel so honored that she gave them to me, and that we were able to use them.

![0](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/59oPjel7Cc5nx1FbK0TQuM/8ad723a2a6997c18c80ebb323ca99870/0.jpg)

***

*This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. [Natasha Pickowicz](https://www.instagram.com/natashapickowicz/?hl=en) photographed by [Meghan Marin](https://www.instagram.com/meghanmarin/) at her home in Brooklyn. If you like this Conversation, please feel free to share it with friends or enemies. [Subscribe to our newsletter here](https://www.gossamer.co/subscribe).*

Natasha Pickowicz on surprise careers, a computer-free life, and working with her mom.

![9](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/3xPbIcWyGtj777AjfHjidE/ee98988da561e4640d07ad2688e7e0d7/9.jpg)

![5](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/4cixfbf3TWgDdfOajKfiO9/0dbe1e1dca856b01e340cda1f48583b1/5.jpg)

![Cat2](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/8qul8dUaZW5azNMnT14AK/4b72f142c836b2ccb7b2d699c2737093/Cat2.jpg)
>The thing that you want to taste is the actual ingredients of the dish, not the sugar. 

Cat1

The chef on balancing flavors, a computer-free life, and working with her mom.

Natasha Pickowicz

__What date does legalization actually take effect?__

It already happened. You missed it.

__What will go into effect immediately?__

Individuals are now allowed to possess up to 3 ounces of cannabis for recreational purposes or 24 grams of concentrated forms, such as oils.

New Yorkers are permitted to smoke cannabis in public wherever smoking tobacco is allowed, though localities and a new state agency could create regulations to more strictly control this in public. Smoking cannabis, however, is not permitted in schools, workplaces, or inside a car. In New York City, it will be banned in parks, beaches, boardwalks, pedestrian plazas and playgrounds, where tobacco smoking is also banned. Smoking is generally permitted on sidewalks in the city.

Other changes will go into effect in the coming months when officials create the regulatory framework that will govern every aspect of a brand-new, highly regulated market.

__Can we smoke on the streets? Can I smoke in public?__ 

Generally yes, but you cannot smoke weed in places where smoking tobacco is prohibited such as schools, public transportation, or, our favorite, “bingo facilities.” 

__So if I go out to a bar and security or police find cannabis in my purse, am I good?__

As long as you’re walking around with less than 3 ounces or 24 grams or less of concentrated forms such as oil, then you should be good in the eyes of the law. But since a bar is a private business, technically the owner could ban you from the premises for any reason. If that happens, we suggest finding a new bar.

__When will I be able to go to a dispensary in NYC?__

Anyone who tells you they know for sure is lying. No licenses have been given out yet, nor have any regulations on how to create a legal market been written, so this means there will certainly be a significant lag between legalization and actual sales. Some smart friends believe that the first legal sale could occur at some point in 2022, but knowing how long the process took other states, we think it could be a couple of years before you’re lining up to buy at a neighborhood dispensary. 

__Will establishments be able to sell cannabis before official “dispensaries” open?__

The new law in New York sets up a legal and regulatory program where the state will determine where cannabis retailers can set up shop and who gets to grow, process, distribute and sell cannabis products in the state. That process will take time and some commentators are estimating that we will not see legal sales until at least summer or fall of 2022. 

__Where will the tax money go? Has that been decided?__

All adult-use cannabis tax revenue will be deposited in the New York state cannabis revenue fund. Revenue covers reasonable costs to administer the program and implement the law (and this full budget has not been released). The remaining funding will be split three ways:

- 40% to Education (schools and public education)
- 40% to Community Grants Reinvestment Fund (reinvested in communities disproportionately impacted by the war on drugs)
- 20% to Drug Treatment and Public Education Fund

__Can I grow weed plants?__

It depends. If you’re a medical marijuana patient, you’re allowed to start growing six months from the bill signing (so, a little less than six months from now). For recreational growing, you must wait until 18 months after the first legal state sale, which as we mentioned, could be years.

__What’s going to happen to my dealer? __

The responsible answer is that your dealer will be faced with a decision to either somehow go legit or hang up their satchel and find a new career. In reality, and for a variety of reasons, the legacy market continues to thrive in most other legal states, so your dealer will probably continue dealing, they just might be more punctual.

__Will there be New York-specific weed brands now?__

You’re talking to one. However, to answer the spirit of your question, yes, there will be all sorts of brands popping up. And for what it’s worth, technically there already are New York-specific weed brands now for medical patients.

__If I buy from my plug right now is that illegal?__

Yes.

__Can cannabis purchased legally in a neighboring or other state be transported across state lines?__

In a word: no. Cannabis is still generally illegal on the federal level so you cannot transport it across state lines, even if you are bringing it from one legal state to another. 

__Can you buy THC products or gummies from another state and have them shipped to New York?__

Sending anything with more than 0.3% of THC across state lines is considered shipping a federally illegal substance and is not allowed. For that reason, no dispensary or licensed cannabis business can send edibles with more than 0.3% THC outside of a state where it’s legalized. So keep those gummies stateside (and enjoy!).

If you’re asking specifically about our Gossamer x Rose Los Angeles THC Delights, the answer above still stands, unfortunately. However, you could eat one of our CBD ones and then smoke some legal flower for a close approximation.

__What’s the legality of selling weed products, like edibles? On a small home biz-scale?__

In New York, under the new law, households with one adult can cultivate up to six plants, (three mature and three immature), and households with more than one adult can cultivate 12 plants (six mature and six immature) for non-medical use. However, New York is still ironing out the details. 

__Will cannabis lounges and clubs have a pathway to open?__

Yes! There will be licenses for “consumption sites” where people will be allowed to purchase cannabis to consume on site. As of now, there can be no alcohol served where cannabis is consumed.

__How are production licenses distributed?__

This is still in the works, but the state’s adult-use cannabis program will be run by two new government entities: the Cannabis Control Board, which will craft new regulations, and the Office of Cannabis Management, which will implement the regulations. These entities will be in charge of creating and allocating licenses for all parts of the supply chain, from cannabis cultivation to the processing of the plant into edibles, concentrates, and smokable products.

The number of licenses will be determined by regulators and an advisory board “to ensure a competitive market where no licensee is dominant in the statewide marketplace or in any individual category of licensing.” However, that info isn’t available yet. All we know is that the stated goal is to award 50% of all adult-use licenses to social and economic equity applicants.

__How can entrepreneurs start preparing financially for a retail license in NYC?__

At this point, we do not know what the application will look like or how much it will cost. The best way to prepare is to ensure that you have an understanding for potential real estate locations, how much that real estate might cost, what budget is needed to run a retail location for a year (you can look into data from other states), and, if you’ll need to fundraise, start those conversations early. 

When will licenses for cannabis retail become available in NYC?
The law does not appear to give a date when license applications will be available or awarded, or when legal cannabis sales can begin, but we do know that the process won’t start for a few months, at least. The governor and legislative leaders still have to appoint people to the Office of Cannabis Management and the accompanying board, and then they will have to approve regulations and go through the license-issuing process. Sit tight...

__How fast will medical patients see changes in offerings and prices?__

Although the MRTA (Marijuana Regulation & Taxation Act) includes provisions to expand and strengthen the New York Medical Marijuana Program (such as additional dispensaries, additional patient access, more products like flower, and up to 60-day supplies), at this time the current regulations and program operations remain the same. The new regulations will take effect in six months at the earliest, according to the law and state officials.

__Will cannabis be covered under health insurance?__

Health insurance does not cover medical cannabis. Until there is federal legalization and cannabis is rescheduled from being a Schedule 1 drug under the Controlled Substances Act, cannabis will not have a path to be covered by insurance.

__Got more questions? Let us know at hi@gossamer.co.__


IMG 9677

You asked, we did our best to answer (with the help of [Tahira Rehmatullah](https://www.instagram.com/tahirarehm/?hl=en) and [Agatha Kluk](https://www.klukfarber.com/agatha-kluk)).


New York Legalized. Now What?

The first time I smoked weed was in college. It was out of a giant bong and it put me on a whole other planet. I ended up totally freaked out, and then didn’t smoke for a while. I think a lot of people have a similar story. 

I wasn’t that experienced with drugs, and I didn’t have that much understanding of what it’s like to be put in an alternate universe. Whether it’s acid or any other drug, I think the first time that happens , it can put you in a scary place. That’s why I think microdosing is so amazing, but it’s weird to me that at that time, people never thought to do it. Instead of easing into it, it was like, “You’re going to take this giant tab of acid.”

Smoking put me into this place where I was just like, Oh, shit, weed is really scary. I would say it took me five or six years before I picked it up again. I had just moved to New York. I had a good friend who smoked all the time and eventually, I was just like, Ohhh. I was more ready for it. That’s when I realized, *Holy shit, weed’s amazing and so fucking deep and life changing.*

![2](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/1qtJxGi6FJ5wXCw4d3cDhz/59e13cf7d8fb192b3c292747f9b339cc/2.jpg)

I got super into it. There are people who like weed, and then there are people who really like weed. I quickly became the one that always had the weed. I liked it enough to order the delivery service and smoke by myself and be the one who always had it at the party. Ever since I made that second connection, it’s been an enduring love.

As I’ve gotten more comfortable with weed, I also know that wherever I end up, I can handle it. I feel like I’ve gotten so intimate with it that I understand every level of high. That’s why I like meeting other people who are stoners, because they understand that, too. You can speak that same language together, where any feeling or weirdness you’ve experienced while stoned, they completely understand. It’s like you’ve traveled to the same country or something.

I’m just very comfortable being like, “Hey, I’m pretty stoned right now. I might sound weird.” I always feel an immediate comfort with people who get really stoned. If I’m in an environment where there are people who don’t smoke a lot, I won’t get particularly stoned. But if it’s people who I know get really, really stoned—even if they’re not stoned in that moment—I’ll still feel more comfortable going to the place. It’s almost like stoners can tap into that feeling even when you’re not stoned, once you’ve been there.

![3](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/4JxOE6qFZ3i88xjHevnKuR/3859b892b3e3a58410d93fe7de5a2d19/3.jpg)

I grew up in San Diego, which is very conservative, very white. I always felt really alienated. Not just because I was one of the few minorities, and people were pretty racist, but because I think I’ve always had a countercultural perspective. This was pre-internet, though, and I didn’t really know that alternative realities existed. Then I went to Berkeley, which is a super political school, and I was like, *Oh, there’s an actual language around feeling oppressed*. 

I wasn’t poor. I understand how privileged I am, but being a minority is a different kind of adversity. Berkeley was very liberating. It gave me the language and completely transformed my perspective, both socially and politically. It gave me a framework to understand the world more holistically. 

I was very much a student of Berkeley—capitalism is the devil, the system has to be changed, and all that. I was super idealistic and wanted to dedicate my life to that work. I got really involved in social justice, and from there I went to Columbia for grad school and studied human rights. 

![9](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/sEKqeIvyqUccDiwrZUCV2/d94314971e7e9cefd1251be54a6fab52/9.jpg)
>I would rather starve and live in the tiniest little shack than have to exist in a super corporate, capitalist environment.

I fell in love with New York. I started doing training for science interventions for community-based organizations. A lot of my work was with post-incarcerated populations. I hadn’t really made the connection between my relationship to weed with the war on drugs, but being involved in that work and seeing its effects truly firsthand was super eye-opening. But I kept my smoking private. 

I eventually got too jaded by all the political stuff. It’s fucking hard and you’re like, *Oh, well, the system needs to change. I can’t do it all on my own*. So I started a catering business. But that’s a whole other five hours of conversation. 

I like having my own businesses because I don’t like being a slave to the man. I like the freedom, and this is part of the reason I work in weed now: to be able to do whatever I want.

[[1]]

I would rather starve and live in the tiniest little shack than have to exist in a super corporate, capitalist environment. But what was crazy to me was that even working in a nonprofit environment felt very corporate. The CEO of our division was this white guy who was just so dumb and so arrogant. This isn’t the inspirational story people want to hear, but I was just like, *Wait, if he can have that position and be so dumb, why am I not doing my own thing? Why am I not the CEO then?*

That’s our ethos at [Pure Beauty](https://purebeautypurebeauty.co/), too. I think the reason that we’ve been successful, if you want to call it that, is because my two partners, Irwin and Tracy, and I are all on the same page.

In some ways, we started Pure Beauty very naively, being like, “Let’s just do this, it sounds fun.” We had no idea how hard and painful it was going to be. We started the company because we wanted to do something that expressed our love and feeling for weed in a way that reflected our own ideals and ethos. I think the reason that it’s resonated with people is because—at least when it hasn’t been super painful dealing with all the regulations and all the hardships of everything—we’re working with people we love.

[[2]]

We’ve found people, really good partners in this industry. It feels like we’re getting away with something. Like, “Can we do this? Fuck it, let’s just do it.” It’s been so fun. And again, that’s because we’re partnering with people who are like-minded to us. I think that joy and energy really comes through in our work. 

The quality of our product is super important. Usually it’s like, “Oh, your stuff is beautiful and your product is good, but you have a billion layers of plastic and it’s clear you don’t actually care about people.” You know how you can go to a restaurant and it’s super beautiful and the surroundings are amazing and you’re just like, *Holy shit. They put $2 million into this, they got all the best architects and designers, and it’s incredible*, but then the food is bad. It’s so disappointing. 

But when you get both, that experience is mind-blowing. We want to give people that full sensory experience. We want you to look at our product and our imagery and feel something. And we want our product to actually live up to that feeling. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people talk about other brands with beautiful packaging but whose product is just trash. We wanted our weed to take you to the next level.

[[3]]

We have an indoor grow. I prefer indoor flower, but it’s been criticized for the energy usage. But in terms of sustainability, all of our electricity is generated on site using micro-turbines and a little bit of natural gas. It’s not from the grid. A typical plant takes anywhere between 250 and 650 gallons of water. That could be indoor, outdoor, mixed light, whatever. But all of our water is actually pulled from the air using HVACs and dehumidifiers and then it’s just recycled. So, we take nothing from California tap, which I haven’t heard of anyone else doing. It’s a big deal, because California is a drought state, and with more and more flower grows coming online, that’s a huge water suck.

It also means there’s no runoff, because even though we’re testing for pesticides and things like that, there are still nutrients and fertilizers that can get into the soil that then run off into the surrounding water supply that can be toxic for indigenous species. Our team is constantly iterating on how to improve. All of our soil is donated to public parks. We have a relationship with the city and they come and pick it up.

We’re just constantly thinking about those things. We did the first plant starch mylar in cannabis—mylars are the child-resistant bags—and that took us a year and a half to do. It’s industrially compostable. I hate talking about these things without qualifying it by saying, “We’re not on a high horse.” There are so many things we’re doing that I wish we could do that better. But our intention is there and we’re trying.

>Social justice is especially important to me and I think the issues . . . that catalyzed BLM, are so clear and straightforward they shouldn't even be considered political.

After George Floyd's murder, I think a lot of people in the space were not sure what to do. There was kind of a period of silence. A lot of the bigger companies didn't say or do anything, or if they did, it was after a long time had elapsed. Social justice is especially important to me and I think the issues underlying this case, that catalyzed BLM, are so clear and straightforward they shouldn't even be considered political, especially in an industry that is riddled by these same issues.  

We had the idea to do a strain called A.C.A.B., thinking that it was a little bit subversive but fine, everybody is on the same page, no big deal. We wanted to connect it to something we cared about, so we arranged to donate all of our proceeds to Michael Thompson and the Last Prisoner Project. We got everyone in the supply chain to donate their margin and we charged a little extra for it, which people were happy to pay. One dispensary, Serra, actually did a matching donation, doubling their total. All in all, we raised $15,000, which is pretty great for just a little thing like that, and it also garnered a bunch of attention for the cause.

Right before it launched, a number of our vendor-partners got cold feet and pulled out. I started to get really nervous about receiving a negative response because as much as I believe in the importance of speaking out on meaningful issues, I also really hate conflict and offending people. So I went pretty deep into the history of the police and prepared a thoughtful preemptive response to what I thought would be an inevitable backlash. But ultimately, we got so much love, appreciation, and positive feedback. We only got one negative person who came after us but that was far outweighed by people DMing us to thank us. Literal love letters and one of our most-re-shared posts ever. And after the initial launch, many of the same vendors came back to us asking if they could still participate but by that point we were completely sold out.   

![6X9A2986](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/5ZHi6hhgHcjDOVJUkLPzCq/c45fcb51a0081861d94f04a5853d7e00/8.jpg)

Given that my dad’s Indian and my mom’s Mexican, I think my parents are inherently risk-takers. They’re super innocent, conservative people, but they’re very open-minded. At the time they were married, interracial marriages were very uncommon—more so in the Indian community than the Mexican community. My dad’s family is super caste-sensitive. But they loved each other.

They’re also pretty practical. My dad loves seeing Indian people on TV, so when Dr. Sanjay Gupta started talking about cannabis on TV, he was like, “Oh, if he’s saying it’s okay.” My dad’s an engineer, so when we first started getting into the industry, he built a little indoor grow in my old bedroom. They don’t smoke, but they love edibles and they lowkey love getting really stoned. They’ll be like, “I don’t feel anything.” And then they’re at 50 milligrams, and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, I kind of feel it.” It’s super crazy.

With Pure Beauty, the reason I don’t want to be the face of the brand is that I think the value for us is the feeling you get from what we do—the visuals, the ideas, and the community of like-minded people. So I don’t want to make it about me or my partners, personally. It’s so important to us that the brand speaks for itself and that people experience it in a very unadulterated way.

![12](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/5t8G2gULtCVFZBUg1Qxui6/a5a762a00a2cc71fe54f3b4cc543d9c2/12.jpg)

One thing about being a female founder—and just a founder in general—is that you become almost part of the brand. In light of both #MeToo and the Black Lives Matter movement, it’s such a refreshing alternative to all the white men in suits. So, I appreciate people celebrating female founders and founders of color, but at the same time, the media attention doesn’t necessarily reflect what’s actually happening. 

I can only speak for the cannabis space and from what I’ve seen personally, but if you look at the top companies, the brands that are making shitloads of money, the multi-state operators, and the venture capitalists, I think we’ve only ever met with two female-led VCs. I don’t think there was a single Black or Latinx person at any of the VCs that we met with. 

The other thing is all these panels that are happening now around diversity and leadership and social equity—it’s all women and minorities on the panels and attending the panels. It’s just preaching to the choir. Why are we, the minorities in this space, the ones having this conversation when it should be the people that created the systems of oppression in the first place? Where’s the guy who has $200 million to deploy and is giving it to their huge companies? They’re the ones that should be on that panel. 

![10](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/6yLmZv7UDR2fraa2BgQLCV/ecfda856f4e2fe7ea43b61e6d96b3060/10.jpg)

***

*This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. [Imelda Walavalkar ](https://www.instagram.com/purebeautypurebeauty/?hl=en) photographed by [Maggie Shannon](https://www.instagram.com/maggiehshannon/?hl=en) in Los Angeles. If you like this Conversation, please feel free to share it with friends or enemies. [Subscribe to our newsletter here](https://www.gossamer.co/subscribe).*

Pure Beauty co-founder Imelda Walavalkar on injecting politics into weed, the comfort of stoners, and not being the face of the company.

![6](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/3dJxQN79P5kCWjgbatMDm6/81a40484873744eeadcd65cc112697c5/6.jpg)

The Pure Beauty CEO and co-founder on injecting politics into weed, the comfort of stoners, and not being the face of the company.

Imelda Walavalkar

*[This interview originally appeared in Volume Six of our magazine. Order your copy here.](https://shop.gossamer.co/products/volume-six-garbage)*

The advice a lot of young people get today is to spend a considerable amount of time, maybe all of your twenties and some of your thirties, trying lots of things. Not committing too early. I followed the opposite path. I knew I wanted to do exactly what I’m doing right now when I was 15 or 16 years old. 

I was a math- and science-prone kid in school, and I think part of that was almost a default of being the child of Indian immigrants to the United States. My dad came from a family of engineers and my mom’s father was a chartered accountant. Math and science were what I thought I was supposed to be good at, what I was good at, and where I thought my path lay.

But I remember very clearly, during my sophomore year of high school, I had an extraordinary history teacher and an extraordinary English teacher, both of whom were PhDs and just out of the league of teachers you might normally encounter as a 10th grader. I remember reading and writing with both of them and realizing that history and English were fundamentally about being able to think about life, yourself, the world, and your place in it, and other people all the time, for fun.

[[1]]

I don’t know why that had not been obvious to me before, but it was an epiphany. I switched from being a math and science guy to being a person who wanted to write. I wanted to have journalism be the professional training and undergirding of what I do some of the time, but also reach into other types of writing. And I was very lucky to get to that early enough that I was able to spend the next 24 years, as it’s now been, chasing that dream.

I worked on the paper in high school and had my first glimpse of the real world of journalism from a *New York Times* internship at the end of high school. I interned there again in college, covering a post-9/11 terrorism trial. But when I graduated, I discovered the thing that a lot of people discover in journalism, which is that it’s a total crapshoot-meets-catastrophe to actually get into this profession. It does not show up on campus; it does not recruit. I think it’s different now, but there weren’t even listings of jobs on websites. The vibe from news organizations was: if you have the skills to work here, you have the skills to find your way in here. 

>The vibe from news organizations was: if you have the skills to work here, you have the skills to find your way in here. 

I tried a lot of different ways to get a journalism job out of college but couldn’t. I got a very fateful piece of advice from my mentor, Jill Abramson, who would go on to be the editor of the *Times* some years later. She said to me, “Don’t be one of these young writers who spend 10 years hanging out outside the building, trying to freelance one piece here, freelance one piece there, getting frustrated, and begging for opportunities when there’s a thousand other people as good as you begging for those same few opportunities. Go out into the world and learn about places and things that other people don’t know about.” Essentially, find something to say.

I started thinking, *Where in the world do I go?* After a while, I settled on India, because it was the place my parents had come from, and a place with which I had a very complicated relationship. I decided that going there would be the creative fount of my writerly career. But I was, again, unable to get a job in journalism there.

So, in one of the great errors of my life, I applied for a job at McKinsey. I knew about McKinsey because my father had worked there in the ’70s and ’80s. It’s one of those organizations that does not care if you studied history, as I had, or if you’re an engineer, or a water expert. They will take people from any place and put them anywhere to do anything, and that turns out to actually be one of the problems. But I got the job. It was my way of getting to India, and I was miserable from the beginning.

[[2]]

I have since heard people say that I was cashing in, but I was paid $14,000 a year to work in the local office of McKinsey. I moved there and lived in a rat-infested room in someone else’s apartment because real estate prices are basically the same as New York, even though salaries are far lower.

I was plunged into client work in the typical McKinsey way where I, someone who majored in European and American History of Political Thought, was now deployed to a pharmaceutical company in Ahmedabad in India and told to develop its leadership development system. I was like, “What’s a leadership development system?” And they were like, “You should look it up and then design one for this company.” I didn’t know what that was and I didn’t have any experience at a pharmaceutical company, and no one cared.

So I set about researching how people rate leaders. I found some websites that were like, “Here are the four criteria of leaders.” Then I had to come up with what qualified as one on a scale from one to four on this particular trait of leadership. What’s a two, what’s a three, what’s a four? And so on and so forth. And then to my shock and horror, the entire leadership team of this company was publicly evaluated according to my chart at a meeting of top executives. They sat there, the CEO and others, like, “No, that guy’s more of a 2.5” and “I think he’s more of a 3.” I remember sitting there thinking, *Please do not evaluate these poor men’s lives*—and it was all men—*on the basis of something that you forced me to make up*.

>How do you end up with such profound inequity if all these people are supposedly so serious about doing all these activities to help?

That was when I realized the total fraudulence of a lot of what passes for business advice in the consulting world. It’s people who don’t know anything constructing this tremendously puffed-up authority to sell counsel for hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. I had never believed in it much to begin with, in the sense that I was using it as a way to get to India, but I soured on it very quickly and started looking again for journalism opportunities.

Very luckily, I reconnected with folks at the *New York Times* who had just acquired the other half of the *International Herald Tribune* and, for once in journalism, they were expanding. They were hiring more correspondents across Asia, in part to be able to cover Asia for Asians and for local audiences. I snuck in on a wave of new hires as a Bombay-based South Asia correspondent. That was in March of 2005, when I was 23 years old.

What’s interesting about being the age I am in journalism—although I guess everybody at every age thinks it’s interesting to be the age that they are—is that I was fully trained in the pre-internet world. I mean, the internet was there, but journalism had not been torn up and reassembled by it. And I’m very grateful for that. Because there was a rigor and a seriousness and a fussiness to that world that I carry with me and I find valuable. But I’m young enough to have lived through and benefited from a lot of the new world. 

![5](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/3wOQT5PMVY0chOzCuQQcK2/96d0c59f2a12485c9ff92038c6fe5e79/5.jpg)

I think there are some spaces and modes in which I speak in a very serious, sober, edited, cautious, and lawyered way. And then on the other end of the spectrum, I’ll post, like, clapback tweets and a 30-second video making fun of Jamie Dimon—and everything in between. It’s all part of something that I think about as public teaching. But my commitment to being a writer and focusing on writing is as clear as ever. That’s what I do. Everything else is just in service of that.

My most recent book, *[Winners Take All](https://bookshop.org/a/16015/9781101972670)*, began with a simple observation about the specific phenomenon of “elite do-gooding.” Give one, get one shoes. Donating through Walgreens to fight cancer. Uber fighting for Black Lives Matter, and so on and so forth. My observation was that this had become the dominant, world-changing rhetoric of our time in America, and yet we live in an age of staggering economic inequality, increasing power concentration, and callousness at the top to those below. I became curious about the nature of that relationship. 

How do you end up with such profound inequity if all these people are supposedly so serious about doing all these activities to help? And in particular cases, how is it that some of the very same people who are engaged in these activities of do-gooding are flying into Aspen to talk about “doing good” having departed cities where that very day they were doing harm? Building monopolies, compromising our democracy, defrauding consumers, selling health crises . . . and then flying to mountain towns to talk about fixing the problems. I gave a speech in Aspen that made a critique of that, which went viral, and that led to the book. 

>How is it that generosity has been allowed to stand in as a substitute for justice?

Writing a book after giving this very pointed speech was very backwards. Normally you want to be reporting first and then have your loud, strident speech. I realized I had to actually go back to the beginning and turn my speech into a set of questions and then pursue the answers. 

How is it that the people most at risk of being resented in this age of inequality have reinvented themselves as saviors? How is it that generosity has been allowed to stand in as a substitute for justice? How is it that people can successfully wipe away public discussion of their harm by doing marginal side hustles of good? 

I was really pushed by my editor and friends to always ground the book in the struggles of people within these systems, because that’s what made it interesting. And as I went deeper, the aperture widened, and it became about the ways in which manic, hyper-capitalism in America in the early 21st century perpetuates and upholds itself. Because it is so obscene—this division of opportunity, this corrosion of democracy, this official monopolization by the few of the fruits of progress. It is so sickening that your logical expectation would be that, at some point, it’s going to buckle. People are going to revolt. People aren’t going to stand for it. Maybe even the people on top will have some kind of moral awakening! If you look at it like an alien, you’d think, “This is a very precarious situation. This is a tinderbox.” And yet it was not. It was durable. It was strong, and getting stronger. 

![6](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/2WHP6avzboPFh8P06SwBWy/3f79d11ac04c25fc76bb6aa8b101e074/6.jpg)

History is full of examples of horrifying things, like slavery or segregation, that a lot of people once thought were true but later realized are absurd. I think drug policy is one of those haunting examples, where not only do a lot of white voters and white politicians vote for this, but also a lot of people in the Congressional Black Caucus at some point were pushing for these tough-on-crime approaches. You had a whole consensus around something that turned out to be truly disastrous. There’s something so terrifying about that. I think the other big issue that we’re going to see in the coming years is whether there’s any kind of reparative approach to the harm done to Black communities by criminalizing something that just didn’t need to be criminalized.

The war on drugs locked up a disproportionate number of Black people and Black men. Now that it’s being legalized and turned into a business, I’m pretty sure it’s going to be the kind of thing that the rich make more money on. There have been important calls for allowing communities that were disproportionately hurt by the wrong policies of criminalization to benefit from the bounties of decriminalization, but that’s not going to happen on its own. That’s going to require concerted government effort to make sure that in a way, the sin isn’t compounded by the way in which it is undone.

>History is full of examples of horrifying things, like slavery or segregation, that a lot of people once thought were true but later realized are absurd. I think drug policy is one of those haunting examples.

But I may be the most hopeful social critic you’ll read an interview with in a cannabis magazine today. I truly believe we are living in the dregs of an era. We are swimming in the backwash at the very bottom of this can of neoliberalism, capital supremacy, and the idolization of money and greed that has basically defined the period of my lifetime. 

If there’s any silver lining to this time—and you’ve got to really dig deep to find it—it’s that it is no longer possible to be under the illusion that we are living right in any shape, way, or form. It really feels to me like the end of something, like the last gasp of a regime. And on good days, when I look around me, I see on the horizon this glimmer of other ways of organizing our society. I see it in certain political leaders, I see it in certain ideas, and I see it in the growing clarity with which people talk about capitalism. I see it in the renewed interest that people have in politics. I think if we play our cards right—and that is a big if—this age of capital can be buried, and an age of reform can be built on top of it, much as what happened a hundred years ago. That’s not a foregone conclusion. An age of tribal nationalism could very well follow instead. But I truly believe that an age of reform is possible.

It’s funny, I almost feel like if I ever want to run for office, I would actually need a good drug story. It used to be that you had to not have one in order to have any kind of political success, but now I’m dooming myself by the fact that I don’t really have one. I’m a cocktail and wine guy. I’ve tried it once or twice and, I have to say, unsuccessfully. I kept waiting for the big reveal, and I’m still waiting. So I think I’m just back to cocktails and wine.

![7](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/5fex9wYFE86VQXXNG551QA/b6d3ff471b1e918c7a3b971d83f9642a/7.jpg)

***

*This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. [Anand Giridharadas](http://www.anand.ly/) photographed by [Meghan Marin](https://www.instagram.com/meghanmarin/) in Brooklyn. If you like this Conversation, please feel free to share it with friends or enemies. [Subscribe to our newsletter here](https://www.gossamer.co/subscribe).*


Anand Giridharadas on the rot of elite do-gooders, finding a rare silver lining, and why he needs a good drug story.   

New1

![2](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/3BJ1cSil7V9R1rQgxdTuYk/103cefc02ed9881a8c6ad09f22e14db6/2.jpg)

The writer on the rot of elite do-gooders, finding a rare silver lining, and why he needs a good drug story.

Anand Giridharadas

*This Conversation is featured in Gossamer Volume Six: the Garbage issue, which you can order [here](https://shop.gossamer.co/products/volume-six-garbage).*

I feel like my whole life has been on a trajectory toward La Réunion. I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but everything becomes clear in retrospect. 

Textile art and quilting and making clothes have always been side things for me. My grandmother immigrated to Oklahoma from Nigeria when I was eight or nine—she was the one who taught me to sew. She spoke broken English, so it wasn’t always easy for us to communicate. I had all these white friends who were really close with their grandmas. I didn’t really have that experience because she was from a totally different place, and that wasn’t normal. 

[[1]]

If you’re Nigerian, you’re supposed to respect and honor the elders in your life. So that’s how I was raised, and the things that she shared with me were a lot heavier than your typical American grandmother. I was very stubborn and impatient with her a lot of the time, just because I wanted to know what she was saying, and I wanted to relate more to her. 

But she taught me how to sew and I felt like that was super meaningful. She didn’t teach my siblings—she picked *me*. 

My grandmother was a seamstress in her village, which is a very revered position. I didn’t realize I would be revisiting this in my twenties, but here I am. I’ve always had the impulse to make things—I think that’s a very Nigerian thing, too: being creative with what you have. My mom, for example, was always eating the pulp of her smoothies and finding another use for scraps. I was raised with the mentality that if something can be reused, why would we throw it away? When I was younger, I used to get yelled at for throwing away paper towels. That’s been hammered into me. I thrive off of those constraints now. Going into a fabric store is so overwhelming, I’d prefer to be limited and industrious and find a way to make it work. 

![1SML Gossamer SarahNsikak-9609](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/38hHbHlhovF4qZiN335sxo/a6c02a34986331ca454f18ade78dc347/1SML_Gossamer_SarahNsikak-9609.jpg)

The name [La Réunion](https://www.lareunionstudio.com/) comes from a little island off the coast of Madagascar called Réunion. It’s a French territory, but it’s part of Africa. I just loved everything about how it is a kind of hidden gem. I was like, *this is an untold story, why don’t we know more about this place?* And then I was thinking about all the stories in Africa that we know so little about. This project has been a constant turning over of stones. 

I feel like I’m reuniting with everything about Africa that I either suppressed growing up—because it wasn’t the white narrative that everyone else was learning—or that I wasn’t given the opportunity to discover. My uncle contacted me when I first started this project and said, “This is exactly what your grandmother would have wanted you to be doing.” I had no idea because of our language barrier, and she passed away when I was 14. But I remember when I was really young, I tried to ask my dad who my ancestors were because I had this project due in the history class. And he said, “You don’t have any ancestors.” I didn’t understand it at the time, but now I feel like it was symbolic. I mean, colonization wiped away so much.

>I feel like I’m reuniting with everything about Africa that I either suppressed growing up . . . or that I wasn’t given the opportunity to discover.

I came to New York after studying art therapy in grad school. I didn’t have any fashion experience, but I wanted to work in fashion and focus on sustainability. My first internship was with a company that supported African artists and was Black-owned. But the way I was treated, it was probably the worst experience I’ve had in New York. I felt like I was constantly being gaslit. People would say, “Well, maybe this isn’t for you, maybe you’re not tough enough.” There were a lot of traditional fashion culture standards that they were trying to meet because they had won some awards, and I think they wanted to come off as like, *Oh, we’re big dogs*. They felt that they needed to appear a certain way.

So that was my first experience, and it taught me that no one has it all right, no one’s that cool. I had to take everyone off of the pedestals I had put them on and get back to the reason I was doing this in the first place. Afterwards, I worked at Caron Callahan and Mara Hoffman. I’m really grateful for those experiences, and I continued working in fashion up until the pandemic, really.

[[2]]

The official launch of La Réunion was in December of 2019, but before that, I was planning and sewing while working my desk job at Mara Hoffman. During that time, I volunteered with this organization called Wide Rainbow, where I taught girls how to quilt and sew patchwork pieces together. I felt like it was such a good transition into a more intentional practice because, before that, I hadn’t really nailed down a cadence or anything.

This project was always in the background; I was just making it for myself and whoever else cared. It was all very sporadic. But when the pandemic hit, I was able to think about it more seriously. I knew about the dresses of the Herero women—a tribe in Namibia—and the style of dress they adopted from their oppressors as a symbol of resilience and rebellion, but I had never made one myself. So I wanted to honor them with the style. And I actually made my first few dresses with scraps from Caron Callahan, so those dresses are really incredible because of her. 

Around that same time, when everything was really hitting the fan, I went to this vegan taco place with a club called Black Flamingo with my partner and two friends. Before we left, he made us firecrackers, which is basically peanut butter and weed that you microwave and then put between two crackers. It takes a minute for it to hit. So I ate one, and an hour later I didn’t feel anything, so we ate another. Then I remember it hitting me all at once. We were talking, it was super loud, I was feeling light-headed, and I was like, *Oh my god. I have to go outside. I feel crazy*. I have never been that high. Edibles are fun sometimes but … wow. It’s hard to gauge where you’re at. Normally I like smoking joints. They just make me really relaxed. It’s nice to have some relief at night and feel like I can fall right asleep.  

![1SML Gossamer SarahNsikak-8246](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/4wsRw15XsoTrKM6OOWANTY/910046ffe3dbb49ab83ac648e32eb188/1SML_Gossamer_SarahNsikak-8246.jpg)
>It probably seems like I’m still in fashion to some people because I’m making these dresses, but really they feel more like art pieces to me.

It probably seems like I’m still in fashion to some people because I’m making these dresses, but really they feel more like art pieces to me. At this point, I’ve already made over 100! Pretty insane. I’m just working all the time—I’ve never been busier. 

I design every single one of them, and it takes a long time to make each one. It’s just been a really great, humbling process for me to try to learn how to meet expectations in a way that’s ethical and sustainable. The messages I get feel really good. People are like, “Oh, this is exactly what I wanted,” or, “This feels like it was made for me.” I love the idea of someone feeling like they were heard and that their dress reflects them as a person. That’s special. 

I’m just hoping that it will be a timeless thing that people pull out for years and years to come. And at the same time, I’m also thinking about ways to share stories from Africa and how I can best do that without making it seem like I know everything. I mean, I’m definitely learning a lot as someone from Oklahoma who was raised in a very Western society that doesn’t teach about Africa. It’s been amazing talking about the Namibian women on my platform and sharing the random little stories that I hear. I think that’s one of the big reasons I started this project in the first place. 

![1SML Gossamer SarahNsikak-9571](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/3X91ik4cRmHuCu8Aw26EsG/ae73676a34059b63fedabf4b237d1578/1SML_Gossamer_SarahNsikak-9571.jpg)

I have a lot of different references for my work, all African. Right now, I’m really inspired by photographers and filmmakers. People like Malick Sidibé. He was a photographer in Mali who shot a lot in the 1960s when Mali first gained its independence. He was photographing Africans in this celebratory state—the same kind of energy I felt in New York when we found out that Trump wasn’t going to be president for another four years. His work is very carefree, very unapologetically African. It’s very tangible. He captured a lot of streetwear and fashion, which actually inspired some of the styles I’m making now.

Another example is Ousmane Sembène. He created a lot of films that I can very much relate to, even though they’re decades old. He made the film *Black Girl*, about a Senegalese woman who is sent to France to be a nanny but ends up being treated like garbage. When I first watched it, it was one of those full circle moments, because I was able to fully connect with my African heritage in a different way. Even though I grew up here, we have these experiences of sameness, of Black experience in the diaspora. I could relate to how she was treated in France in the film because of how I’m treated as a Black American woman in this predominantly white space. So there’s a lot of parallels there with my work—trying to reunite with my African heritage, what was always there, while still keeping and honoring where I currently am. We can fully acknowledge these parts of ourselves, and celebrate and pay tribute to all of them.

There are also things about myself that are new to me because of La Réunion but, at the same time, I think I have always known. Like how I love warmth; that’s such an African thing, you know, wearing a blanket when it’s hot outside and loving the sun. Small things. Reconnecting with this project has been like a bridge to my Nigerian heritage. It has shown me that this is kind of what I was meant to be doing all along. 

[[3]]
>If you’re a Black artist, you don’t really have an option about whether or not your art is political.

It also makes me feel like I finally have a foot to stand on when it comes to talking about what’s happening in Lagos, what’s happening with SARS and police brutality in Nigeria—and in the U.S. So I have these two different perspectives of police brutality and violence against Black people. It is exhausting, but it’s also really important to see these parallels happening and to know that my Blackness in America can be so connected to my Blackness in Nigeria, and that my experience here can be so directly correlated to their experiences there. It’s been really eye-opening. 

If you’re a Black artist, you don’t really have an option about whether or not your art is political. It’s a privilege to be like, *Oh yeah, this is not about anything; it’s just art for the sake of art*. I wish I could do that. But if you’re any kind of minority, I feel like your work or your art is expected to have some kind of connection or attachment to what you’ve gone through and your experiences as a human. I just don’t know how I could not have some political side of my work. Even just saying that this is a sustainable art practice is a political statement. Some people don’t get that. I believe it’s really irresponsible to make stuff that’s brand new, but I also know it’s such a privilege to invest in something like this. I don’t expect everyone to spend $435 on a dress. It’s not a necessity, and I never want to come off as an elitist who says you have to shop sustainably when that’s not always an option. 

At the end of the day, La Réunion is really for anyone who wants to participate in revisiting themselves in the most authentic way possible. I hope that people can look at these themes and feel inspired to try to do that for themselves outside of this project. 

![1SML Gossamer SarahNsikak-8275 K](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/7v3BVGXOFMKeWBBHSpVcvQ/0beb69ab86c0f49b4cf3a8385f9eaf7f/1SML_Gossamer_SarahNsikak-8275_K.jpg)

***

*This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. [Sarah Nsikak](https://www.instagram.com/a.la.reunion/?hl=en) photographed by [Stephanie Mei-Ling](https://www.instagram.com/stephaniemeiling/?hl=en) in Brooklyn. If you like this Conversation, please feel free to share it with friends or enemies. [Subscribe to our newsletter here](https://www.gossamer.co/subscribe).*


Sarah Nsikak on patchwork, politics, and the unpredictability of edibles.

1SML Gossamer SarahNsikak-9563 copy

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The textile artist on patchwork, politics, and the unpredictability of edibles.

Sarah Nsikak

Gossamer looks at the world—travel, design, art, culture, and food—through a green lens.

Open plan offices for new media companies, beautiful as they are, contain few physical pleasures.

There are no opaque phone rooms for naps or crying, just glass boxes with doors that don’t lock. No coffee pots, just a cumbersome robot that spits out diesel-scented “espresso,” and milk substitute. No room for a plant on your desk, which is more like designated space at a table.
 
The office I worked at in the summer of 2017, which was situated on two floors of the graveyard of Goldman Sachs, offered a few things worth having: narrow windows with views of the East River and the Stone Street meat restaurants, proximity to a neighbor’s helicopter pad, and an array of Fresh Direct-supplied snacks. La Croix in 10 flavors, single-serving discs of hummus and guacamole, pita chips of every stripe, slimey packages of hard-boiled eggs that came in pairs, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, hundreds of dollars worth of cashews and almonds, apples and oranges and one or two rock-hard green pears, and, most importantly, Babybel cheese. I ate it every day.

I spent that summer thinking about a crush, and complaining about my job, which was to pay attention to Tumblr and *Game of Thrones*. I thank god that we are not all bloggers, and that we have not all spent time in Manhattan’s Financial District, but I imagine you still know what I am talking about: each day is the same. An iced coffee drips condensation next to your laptop, an idle conversation about going to the beach this weekend ends with no one making a plan, and a music video or two breaks up the hours by giving you something to tweet about. Mercifully, the day will end when the sun is still out, the way it doesn’t for three-fourths of the year. It’s not all bad.
 
Plus, Babybel cheese. After breakfast, but before lunch, the same little red wax guy. Originated in France, manufactured at a factory in South Dakota, one of an estimated 1.5 million wheels per day. Driven to a 30-story office building in lower Manhattan at five in the morning. You can pop them like pieces of gum while you stew in the the languid but fizzy energy of waiting for a day to end.

It’s the perfect snack. For staring into space and dreaming of never returning another email. For doing something, anything, with your hands, while you recite a fraught iMessage conversation from memory to whomever sits next to you. For swallowing a low-calorie placeholder in two bites and, synched with the crouch to the trash can, subtly dipping your chin to find out if you remembered to put on deodorant.

 
The red cellophane wrapper makes the whole package look like a Valentine. The Valentine weighs exactly 20 grams every time, which according to some reliable-enough internet resources, is the same as a mouse and twice as much as a human eye. The wax shell looks like something that’s been hatched out of and discarded in a weird place, as chilling as a cicada husk dropping into an open pitcher of sangria. You can warm it in your hand and make a tight, shiny ball. But it’ll leave a pink film on your skin, so why would you?

The experience is sensual, like the slow drag of a zipper that you’re opening mostly for effect. The wax resists. It’s basically alive. Then there’s a two-centimeter gasp of bright white, appearing like a not-yet-tan belly peeking out from the narrow, moving gap between jean shorts and crop top. It is pretty much as close as you will get to a strip tease in a work environment.

The experience is also a little bit gross. Like peeling anything is a little bit gross. Like the word “peeling,” which is gross. Depending on your mood: a little bit like in *Black Swan*, when Natalie Portman peels back a frayed strip of the skin around her cuticle until there’s a bright red bloody line all the way down her finger.

And then there’s the cheese itself, which, bitten into, looks like an orthodontist’s upper jaw mold, and tastes like nothing.

***

*Kaitlyn Tiffany is a writer living in Brooklyn. She co-authors a [weekly newsletter](https://famouspeople.substack.com/) about terrible parties.  *

GreenBabybel

Babybel

The first time I fell in love, we bonded in the early stages through phone Scrabble. “Scrabble back,” he’d text me, if a few hours passed without my next move. This was pre-Tinder, and our matches got heated. We eventually spent enough years together to re-download the app for a burst of nostalgia in our long-distance monogamy.

As our relationship wore on, Newtoy’s then-wildly popular Words with Friends became available on my Android, like the Snapchat app we’d use to sext. Then came Scramble with Friends (renamed Word Streak), which really spiced things up.

To me, word games will always be kind of romantic: a throwback to simpler times. They’re nerdy, but nobody really cares that much if you underperform. There’s space to slack, to try too hard, or to embarrass yourself only in front of a bot.

On Wikipedia, a website predicated on people volunteering to write and edit words, “word games” [are categorized by type](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_game). There’s letter arrangement (Scrabble), puzzle (crossword), structured (Mad Libs), or linguistic recreations (spelling bees).

These games predate artificial intelligence by eons, well before Siri had all the answers and Merriam-Webster Dictionary started dragging people [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/MerriamWebster).

Words, one of the most basic forms of communication, can be primal. Like puzzles—or a budding relationship—they can leave us vulnerable or confused. Choosing the right word could win you millions of dollars, grant you acceptance to a prestigious school, or earn you 10 whole seconds of glory on a dimly lit stage before a crowd of boozing spectators.

We may be post-truth, but a word well-played still brings people together. On a recent Galentine’s Day, I watched a group of grown adults in a Manhattan speakeasy compete in a spelling bee. “French from Latin,” the moderator read. I sipped my beer. “Can you please define the word?” Plot twist! In line for the restroom, I learned one very good contestant spoke only English and Portuguese, the latter not much help here. More were eliminated. No mercy was spared. Only one speller—who asked to hear a word in a sentence—behaved as a “douche,” at least according to the moderators.

For the same reason I go to estate sales, word games have retro appeal. They’re a haven from the noise, and from a president who does not open books. They’re a cerebral flex in a society that keeps telling me how to fix my face, company for a “lonely generation.”

If we match in a Scrabble game, thanks to some algorithm that connects people all around the globe, your choices tell me something about you. Maybe you learned a word from reading The Hobbit as a kid, which totally changed your life. Maybe you’re really into Shakespeare, or you’re a jackass who keeps making two-letter combinations until one finally sticks.

People separated by time or distance or language can play word games. True to form, most Americans are unwittingly more limited: notorious for only speaking English, and often afraid to look silly. It’s a humbling thing to admit that you can’t make a halfway decent play in a word game.  

Maybe you’re like my younger brother, who at age 10 won a round of Scattergories, the 30-year-old board game that includes pencils and paper in a box. For the category of “medicine” and the letter of “M,” he chose Midol, much to our mom’s and aunts’ delight. Obvious victor.

Maybe work is boring and unchallenging and you’ve been entertaining fantasies of quitting, but there’s some temporary spontaneity in the daily crossword—or whatever the frequency, depending your source.

In a culture that thrives on superficial connections, when your next lay can be only a few swipes away, word games can be intimate. An opponent’s assemblage of letters is suggestive, tells me something different than the 280-character tweet you spent an hour crafting and retooling.

On a recent early-morning bus ride to Manhattan from Philadelphia, I passed time by redownloading the word game apps I deleted forever ago. Delirious from little sleep, I felt slightly self-conscious and rusty playing against random players or bots. I remembered that I preferred Scrabble, because the virtual instructor would tell me if I chose the best possible word based on the tiles given. Uncertainty can be thrilling, until it’s not.

I drag the tiles: “F-I-R-E.”  Best word! “R-I-D-S.” Best word! An analog-looking, starry popup appears on my screen, a form of congratulations.

Is this as hard as it gets? Maybe I’m taking the easy way out. Or maybe, I still got it.

***

*[Natalie Daher](http://www.nataliedaher.com/) is a writer and journalist based in New York. She co-authors a newsletter, [Clipped](https://us16.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=469667a58e33374cf748297f7&id=4e1050af80), about women's media.*

Finding common ground one letter at a time.

scrabble

Word Games

In 2016, I moved into an apartment outfitted with a panini press, a clunky appliance I used exactly once and which then served as an ersatz modern art installation for the remaining 364 days of my lease. Its worthlessness was solidified when, on a camping trip with nary a press in sight, my roommates and I placed hunks of cheese-stuffed baguette on a grill and flattened them with large rocks. Me, dependent on a single-use appliance? I scoffed as I bit into my panini. Please. I was practically Bear Grylls.


My ambitions — at least when it came to eating sandwiches — may not have been lofty enough to capitalize on a panini press, but its existence served as a gateway gadget, paving the way for what I now consider to be the holy grail of single-use appliances. It sits in my kitchen. It is small. It is sharp. It cuts without hurting and slices without contrition. Friends: meet the egg slicer.

 
Invented in the early 1900s by a German man named Willy, the egg slicer was created for the sole purpose of — this isn’t hard, folks — cutting eggs. The device itself is composed of two parts: a slotted base and a hinged frame strung with taut metal wires. To wield this contraption, all one has to do is place a peeled, hard boiled egg on the base and lower the top, allowing the wires to cut through the membrane and separate the orb into equal segments. As Willy was clearly aware, no one wants to accidentally coat their egg with fingerprints or deal with buckled whites, two common hazards of holding an egg and cleaving it with a knife. Best yet, these slicers transform the yolk (which I’ve always found slightly repellant) into manageable, aesthetically appealing ribbons of chalky yellow fat.

 
There is something pleasingly democratic about an apparatus that elevates an egg from an inexpensive, ubiquitous form of protein to a delicacy with one quick sever. The devices are also widely accessible, with myriad brands, styles, and price points from which to choose. While I prefer the bare bones, 100% aluminum version that sells for [$2.81 online](https://www.tigerchef.com/tigerchef-round-aluminum-egg-slicer.html), egg-eaters with upscale taste can purchase fancier instruments. Williams Sonoma offers a [$14.95 BPA-free "Egg Slicer and Wedger](https://www.williams-sonoma.com/products/williams-sonoma-egg-slicer/),” which one online reviewer bought "on a lark" and then loved so much that she ordered another for the kitchen in her lake house.

 
The egg slicer may be my favorite, but a brief tour of my pint-sized Brooklyn apartment reveals that I now own a small army of single-use appliances, all honed to execute one task perfectly: there is a [milk frother](https://www.amazon.com/Bellemain-Stainless-Steel-Frother-capacity/dp/B010E1ZQVC/ref=sr_1_20?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1529576025&sr=1-20&keywords=milk+frother), which I use every morning and a [rice cooker](https://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-SR-G06FGL-1-Step-Automatic-Cooker/dp/B01DGQVX46/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1529575340&sr=8-3&keywords=panasonic+rice+cookers), whose services I employ on occasion; on the table sits a [small wedge](https://www.amazon.com/Bobino-LATOFTQ-Laptop-Foot-Turquoise/dp/B0758161RQ/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?ie=UTF8&qid=1529575443&sr=8-1-spons&keywords=bobino+laptop+foot&psc=1) that serves no purpose other than propping up my roommate’s laptop and which she claims stands between her and a lifetime of carpal tunnel; and in the back of my closet is a [sweater razor](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B015RN9JN8/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1), which I drunk-ordered last winter after reading that it would slice the fuzz off all my sweaters and, thus, “change my life.” I still believe this although I have yet to prove it true — in my aforementioned state I forgot that I own only one sweater and zero of the batteries the device requires.

 
The beauty of single-use appliances is that, unlike Pokémon or sexual harassers, it doesn’t behoove anyone to catch ‘em all. Unless you happen to inhabit a mansion of Versailles-style proportions, collecting these contraptions forces one to prioritize. Would you rather be greeted every day with the dead-eyed stare of a [hot dog steamer](https://www.amazon.com/Nostalgia-HDS248RD-Extra-Large-Steamer/dp/B01LVWIIVR/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1529576752&sr=1-1-spons&keywords=hot+dog+cooker&psc=1) or a [strawberry huller](https://www.amazon.com/Chefn-27466-StemGem-Strawberry-Huller/dp/B002XOHZWC/ref=sr_1_4?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1529575061&sr=1-4&keywords=strawberry+huller)? Are you the sort of person who values flawlessly [spiralized zucchini](https://www.amazon.com/OXO-Grips-Handheld-Spiralizer-Green/dp/B013KAW5IQ/ref=sr_1_8?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1529682126&sr=1-8&keywords=zuchinni+spiral+noodle+maker) over a properly [scraped coconut](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07D59NVXH/ref=sspa_dk_detail_0?psc=1&pd_rd_i=B07D59NVXH&pd_rd_wg=iz3Tv&pd_rd_r=SGF4GQ8K4JYKWNKRHBV0&pd_rd_w=PPENA)? At some point, the questions become nearly existential: in the vast scheme of things, do the rewards of a [banana bunker](https://www.vat19.com/item/banana-bunker-protects-bananas?adid=gshopping&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&adpos=1o2&scid=scplpbanana-bunker&sc_intid=banana-bunker&gclid=CjwKCAjwma3ZBRBwEiwA-CsblIot5ie4bOdhlrGp7z1XY6XwEvJyHjmvyPgJiWZMXMWQXpNZe5JBShoCsrcQAvD_BwE) trump the spoils of a [hamburger press](https://www.amazon.com/Weston-Express-Hamburger-Ejector-07-0310-W/dp/B000XB45DO/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1529576579&sr=8-3&keywords=hamburger+press)?

 
I was speaking with a friend recently who admitted that she has a rule against owning single-use kitchen appliances, her reasoning being that in most instances you could probably use a knife to accomplish the same task. Does she have a point? Sure.


But sometimes “good enough” just isn’t good enough. And if anyone needs me, I'll be in my own (slightly more crowded) kitchen, with my slicer, basking in that rare flavor of joy that accompanies placing a perfectly mathematically bisected egg atop an otherwise mundane salad.


***


*[Luna Adler](http://www.lunaadler.com/) likes to think of herself as an agreeable Scorpio. She lives in Brooklyn.*

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