BITTMAN, BITTERNESS

The famed food writer finds a fight over the name Salty,

When cookbook author and former New York Times columnist Mark Bittman announced this week that he was launching a new online food publication with Medium, people were intrigued by the name: Salty. It’s a food name, sure, but it’s also slang for feisty or irritated. It fits the publication’s scope, which Bittman outlined in an introductory post: to cover the world of food with an eye for politics and inequality, in addition to recipes and personal essays.

Food writers and fans praised the clever name, with its retro font and pink logo.

It’s such a good name, another publication had already come up with it.

Salty, a “sex, dating and relationships newsletter for women, trans and non-binary people,” launched in March 2018. It, too, has a pink logo with a retro font. And its editors see Bittman’s initial adoption of the name as another way the “deck is stacked against” women, trans and non-binary people, they tweeted.

The founder of Salty is Claire F., who asked to go by her last initial because she said she and other Salty writers have been subject to online harassment. She and her collaborators chose the name Salty for what it conveyed: “It’s visceral. Sex is salty, sweat is salty, tears are salty,” she said. “It’s used to put down women who stand up for themselves. We wanted to take the power back.”

“We’ve been around for a year,” she added. “We’re not nobodies. It takes literally a Google search to find us. Either they haven’t done their due diligence, which is shocking, or they’ve seen us and have decided that what we do i s of little consequence.”

The new Salty got the message. Later in the week, Bittman tweeted that he was changing the name:

“Hi — we’re really sorry. This was a mistake (stupid, but honest), and we’re working on changing our name and logo right now. It might take a day or two, but we’re on it.”