In an interview with Rolling Stone Philippines, celebrity food content creator Erwan Heussaff talked about how he navigates online criticism, explaining that the contexts of his controversies were never fully understood.
He recalls his buttery carbonara recipe from 2018 and its poor reception online, which eventually reached the Italian YouTube channel Italia Squisita. The channel uploaded a video in which Italian chefs reacted to and critiqued the recipe, to which Erwan responded with a video in which he stressed that he wasn’t making a traditional carbonara.
After recalling the controversy during the interview, Erwan said, “I understood that it was all sensational.”
“The taho one kind of hit a little deeper,” he admitted.
“I got a call from Santa Monica in California. People at Tastemade are like, 'Hey, we'll fly you in four times a year to shoot – and I'll still remember this – to shoot pan-Asian content.' So I was the face for Vietnamese, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Thai, Malaysian, whatever Asian they needed me to be, I was okay,” Erwan recalled.
He then detailed how the recipes he made while working in the United States were prepared to be filmed within an hour, and he was asked to shoot six to eight recipes a day.
“I would give notes where I could in terms of how things should be prepped. And I show up, and the sago wasn't soaked, right? And it wasn't pre-boiled, and obviously I'm not dumb – I could tell it was hilaw inside. But I couldn’t say no, I don’t wanna do this video.”
Erwan mentions that the video initially didn’t gain traction when it was first uploaded in 2016. Instead, someone resurfaced it online two years later and the content creator faced heavy backlash for the undercooked sago. He said that this controversy hurt as “people assume that you're an idiot” without the benefit of the doubt.
Insert Media: https://www.instagram.com/p/Dae5wk1jfbi/?hl=en&img_index=5
Despite the backlash, Erwan mentioned that it helped him develop a "very strong cancel radar" when it came to approving stories at the office. “I was very careful in terms of how I approached food, cultural dishes, and everything like that,” he said.
“And just understanding every aspect of, if the viewers aren't in the room with us, will they kind of understand everything we're trying to say, through this limited time that we have them?”