Beware of influencers normalising authoritarian regimes; and is Uber taking over?

Hi there legends, thanks again for reading the Food + Travel Edit. I’m back at home now after a week in Victoria, a week in which I visited some of my favourite restaurants on the planet, and discovered some new ones.

Being at home means I’m back to doing my travelling vicariously, often through influencers and content creators who are out there exploring the world. That’s why it caught my attention this week when I saw mega-influencer Mark Wiens posting from Afghanistan, which is the main topic of this week’s newsletter – and please, let me know your opinion on this in the comments section below.

I’ve also been thinking about Google reviews, and the power that travellers who may not have the massive reach of someone like Wiens still have. As ever, a huge thanks to those of you who are able to support this newsletter with a paid subscription – I couldn’t do this without you.

Beware of influencers normalising authoritarian regimes

Mark Wiens is more powerful than pretty much any traditional media outlet on Earth. There are some that have a larger reach than him, massive players like the New York Times and CNN, but for the most part, one single guy who says “wow” a lot when he samples food has a bigger following than almost any newspaper or TV station on the planet.

Wiens is an American content creator, a food specialist who has a phenomenal 17 million followers across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. I’ve been watching him for many years, enjoying his enthusiastic takes on the cuisines of the world, his wide-eyed joy at tasting delicious things.

It’s relatable happiness, and he’s a trustworthy source. You want to do the things he’s doing, eat the things he’s eating. You want to hang out with this guy.

So when Wiens goes somewhere, people take notice. A huge number of people. And recently, Wiens has been in Afghanistan. He’s posted three long videos on YouTube so far, and posted three shorter clips on Instagram.

These are glowing accounts, enthusiastic documentaries of Afghan food culture, presenting a side to the country that we who haven’t visited don’t often see. It’s amazing to see Wiens visit restaurants in Kabul that have been there for as long as 100 years, establishments that have survived Afghanistan’s well-documented troubles, to serve food that has a history far longer.

This is all great and lovely and even inspiring, though there’s something missing from Wiens’s accounts so far: women. Any women. Any mention of women. Any indication that they might exist in Afghanistan at all.

This is a country in which women are segregated and discriminated against on a phenomenal and institutional scale. The Taliban rulers have banned women from receiving secondary education – they must finish in year six. Laws have been passed recently that normalise child marriage.

The implementation since 2022 of Shariah law means women have fewer rights of movement, fewer rights of employment, they have to abide by strict dress rules and are subject to increased domestic abuse. But you won’t hear about any of those things in Wiens’s documentaries. It’s all “wow” at the beautiful food, and happy interactions with Afghan men.

Commenters have pointed this out on his posts, that we don’t see any women, that Wiens is travelling in a country where women are discriminated against at an institutional level. Wiens almost never responds. Though, he did answer one comment a few weeks ago.    

“My wife was with me for the entire trip,” Wiens writes, “and everywhere we went she was welcomed with genuine warmth and respect. We also saw plenty of women out on the streets, at markets, and at restaurants – many restaurants have a dedicated family section, where women and families dine. Out of respect for the privacy of women and children, we tried to avoid filming them … At the same time, I know our experience as visitors is far from the reality of daily life for Afghan women, and I would never claim to speak for them.”

Here’s a wild idea then Mark: try allowing them to speak for themselves. Try featuring maybe even just one woman in your three-hours-plus of documentary footage so far. Try allowing just a small dose of a reality you will never have to face to creep into your widely viewed, glowing footage.

(Though, if you’ve followed Wiens for a while you will probably realise that women rarely feature on his channel. It’s a man’s world out there in Wiensland.)

I don’t believe people like Wiens should boycott Afghanistan. I think there’s real value in telling people’s stories, in sharing a different side of a culture and a people that many of us in the West know very little about, and who have suffered unimaginably under the rulers we also despise. That’s what travel is all about, understanding others through your own experiences, and for content creators it’s about sharing that with the world.

I also don’t think a food doco needs to get bogged down entirely in politics, that it needs to devote its entire run-time to problems you can see on the regular news every day.

But let’s pretend Wiens was visiting a country in which black people were institutionally and obviously discriminated against, where they weren’t allowed to work or move around the country without a white guardian. Let’s pretend Wiens was dining in a country where Jewish people weren’t allowed to attend high school and could only leave their houses with their faces covered.

That would rate a mention. That would cause some discomfort. That would require some balance. And rightly so.

Wiens also exists in a world where influencers like him are routinely used by authoritarian regimes to normalise themselves in the eyes of the world. Saudi Arabia is a prime example, a country that, just a year after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, began paying social media content creators, including plenty of Australians, to visit their country and publish glowing accounts of the fun they had had there.

I have no doubt that in a year or two we will start seeing influencers pop up in Israel too, sharing the amazing time they’re having in a country that’s “so misunderstood”. This is reputation rehab 101 for murderous regimes. Influencers can be ethics-free guns for hire.

I don’t believe Mark Wiens was paid by any government authority to visit Afghanistan. I do, however, think that content creators with the sort of massive power and influence that Wiens wields should think very carefully about the message they’re sending to the world, and their responsibility to paint the full picture.

Talk to women. Allow them to tell their own story, even if it’s through food. Normalise the experience of women and their presence in the same way you’re normalising the society than oppresses them. Otherwise it begins to look like you don’t care.

JOIN ME IN PERU!

There are still a few spots left on my food tour of Peru, taking place in July next year. This is such an incredible itinerary, and I can’t wait to share a huge range of experiences with 14 lucky guests. We will be dining at some of the best restaurants in the country – Mil Centro by Virgilio Martinez, and Kjolle by Pia Leon – but we will also visit beachside ceviche joints, tour markets in Lima, learn about Japanese fusion cuisine in Cusco, stay in some gorgeous boutique hotels in the Sacred Valley, visit Machu Picchu, and of course drink a few pisco sours along the way. Places are filling up, so if you’re keen, head over to World Expeditions for more information. I would love to see you there, to experience one of the world’s most underrated food cultures, and one of my favourite countries on the planet.

WHAT I’M LOVING THIS WEEK

• With online reviews for almost everything these days, travellers have tremendous power. But with great power comes great responsibility (and sorry to my local pizza guy)
• Western Sydney International has a new international destination! Fiji Airways has signed on for three flights a week to Nadi
• Inside Travel, who I’ve worked with a few times in Japan and really like, has a new “Undertourism” strategy, taking tourists away from over-visited areas like Kyoto and Tokyo and into lesser-known prefectures, and it’s working
• In related news to my Peru food tour, Sydney is getting a new Nikkei restaurant! (That’s the fusion of Peruvian and Japanese cuisine created by migrants to Peru.) It’s called Ame and it throws its doors open in Darlinghurst next month

WHAT I'M NOT LOVING

• Uber is increasingly inserting itself into the travel space, expanding globally into hotels, travel planning and even cruises. This is surely not a good thing
• In more frightening news, in the US, users of TikTok Go – a platform that allows direct booking of holiday experiences through the social media app – have been found to be using generative AI to sell viewers holidays in places that don’t exist. Which is just great for the future of humanity