Last year, the Condé Nast owned Tasty meal finds himself hit with some kind of account, to numerous staff of color – including Priya Krishna, Sohla El-Waylly, Rick Martinez, Gaby Melian, Molly Baz and Carla Lalli Music – departure from his popular Test kitchen series of videos about lower accusations paid compared to white colleagues, tokenization, stolen credit, and more. The scandal revealed a lot about the inner workings and differences of power in a website that regularly tried to portray its staff members as a group of colleagues who respect each other and all just hang out in the kitchen together, emphasizing the differences in power and pay in the organization of the site.
Now another, but related, Test kitchen finds that he is undergoing similar investigation, as Vulture report that Sruthi Pinnamaneni and PJ Vogt, a senior reporter and host respectively for the Answer everything podcast, steps away from the series after their reporting on Tasty meal similar issues revealed in their own Spotify possession Gimlet Media. Specifically, Eric Eddings, a former Gimlet contributor and co-host of The Nod podcast, outlined in a Twitter thread earlier this week a number of ways Vogt and Pinnamaneni, who discussed Tasty meal by their The Test Kitchen Spotify miniseries, allegedly hindered efforts to diversify Gimlet’s staff, specifically during the period in which the company’s employees insisted on unions. Eddings wrote, among other things, that, “The stories of BA staff members deserve to be told, but to me it is detrimental that the reporting and storytelling comes from two people who worked actively and AGGRESSIVELY against various attempts to diversify Gimlet’s staff and content. He then set out a number of cases in which Vogt and Pinnamaneni pushed back the organizational and diversification efforts.
Both Vogt and Pinnamaneni apologies issued in light of Eddings’ statements; while Pinnamaneni was already planning to leave Answer everything after The Test Kitchen miniseries, she has now left the program medium production. Meanwhile, Vogt, who co-hosts Answer everything with Alex Goldman and Emmanuel Dzotsi, said he was going to “walk away” from the podcast with Vulture reports that his departure from the series will be ‘permanent’. Gimlet Media has not yet issued a statement on the departure.