A conversation with Provecho editor Kyle Yoshioka. Interview by Arjun Basu

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That meal your grandmother always cooked. Or your mother. Or your father, for that matter. The odors that permeated a kitchen or the entire house. The first taste. The idea of comfort food.

So much of who we are and what we remember are about food, sure, but also about place, and most definitely about the person doing the cooking.

While many food magazines go beyond food to create the context about the recipes they print, writer and editor Kyle Yoshioka felt they lacked the backstories that make food about more than taste or trends or wine accompaniments. And with no experience in the form, he was part of a team in Portland, Oregon that decided to launch Provecho, a magazine all about the backstories, and especially the culture and communities, behind each and every ingredient that goes into each and every lovingly created dish. And without a single recipe.

Provecho, then, is not really a food magazine at all, but a cultural review that uses food as a focal point. It’s anthropology that tastes good. One that is, in its own way, creating a community all its own.

Arjun Basu: So how does your story begin? A lot of your story, a lot of interviews in Provecho start with that question, but how does your story begin?

Kyle Yoshioka: I would say my story begins with my grandmother and it begins with her because she is my primary link to my heritage. I’m half Japanese on my dad’s side and I grew up with her. My grandparents raised me halftime and I learned a lot from her. From her I learned kinda how to comport myself and then, crucial for me, how to cook. And cooking became my primary link to my heritage. It’s how I feel connected to the Japanese part of my identity. And it’s how I care for people. It’s how I was cared for in turn.

And it’s just been part of my life for as long as I can remember. And so she was just like a looming, large figure in my life. And I think a lot of people can relate to the power that a grandmother has over your life. If you’re lucky enough to have them be present with you. So I think that’s where it starts for me.

Arjun Basu: We’re going to come back to the whole idea of memory and family and grandmothers. But how does that origin story then translate into founding a magazine?

Kyle Yoshioka: Yeah, so I’m a writer by trade. And I think a primary way that I began to find my voice as a writer was realizing that origin story is something that was a rich thing for me to mine.

I don’t have a background in publishing by any means. This magazine, Provecho, is like my first foray into any kind of publishing. It began as a really organic product of the collaboration that I had with my design director, Heldáy de la Cruz. We came together one summer in 2022, I believe, and we wanted to work together.

We’ve collaborated before. He has a similar kind of connection to his heritage through food. It made sense to do that given my skills in editing and writing and his skills in design. But we wanted to do something that allowed us to really remember and commemorate our upbringing and give other people an opportunity to do the same. And food was the medium that felt universal enough to reach a really broad audience.

And our team and our contributors are all people of color, and that feels like such a salient touchpoint for people of color to really access those memories and that heritage especially when other avenues aren’t afforded to us or aren’t available. So it feels like a really nice culmination of my background. And it kinda just happens to be that an indie publication is the way that we wanted to do it. I think we could have done it any number of ways, but this makes sense for a lot of reasons.

It’s something that allows us to have a concrete thing that becomes a beautiful memorial to all the stories that we’re telling. And it’s visual, it’s storytelling. It’s so many different things that results in this object.

Arjun Basu: So no one on the team really has a background in food per se, like professionally in food. You all eat, obviously, and you have these shared memories, but you don’t really necessarily have a background in food.

Kyle Yoshioka: I worked in food service for a number of years, but I would not consider myself a chef. I wouldn’t say that I’m a professional food person at all.

Arjun Basu: So I guess it was just a conversation or one of you invited the other one for dinner and saying, “What’s this?” “Oh, it’s something my grandmother used to make.” That sounds oversimplified, but is that how it started?

Kyle Yoshioka: It’s certainly not a lot more complicated than that. I think we were inspired in part by this event series that happened in Portland, Maine. I’m in Portland, Oregon. But it’s called Tender Table. And it’s a storytelling event that invites people to tell a narrative from their life and connect it to a dish, like a specific dish, that they make for the event, and then serve to the audience.

And we were inspired by that concept. So we had that in mind as we were going into this. We just gravitate towards feeding one another as people I think. So it was just like every time we hang out, we cook or we share some kind of meal together. And so that is the ethos that, like, originated this. It is that simple.

Arjun Basu: You speak lovingly about the experience of growing up with your grandmother, about the meals you remember, about joy and comfort and connection to loved ones, with food being really a symbol almost of it. Or a vehicle for it, and then that infuses it. Food magazines are never really about food: websites can be about food and recipes and make this and impress people, but most food magazines are about something else.

Kyle Yoshioka: Absolutely. Yeah. I’m pretty adamant that we remain an unconventional food magazine in the sense that we’re not publishing recipes. Like we have one kind of conceptual recipe in our first issue, but food is the medium. Food is a prism. It’s a means through which we can talk about a lot of different things and it’s also a beautiful thing visually and sensorially. It’s a nice thing to commune over. It’s a nice thing to photograph. But yeah, it’s very much a publication about personal stories and food is just the glue, the entry point.

Arjun Basu: There’s both issues. On the front the tagline is “stories of food and identity,” and I think it’s really about identity and food. The order of the words matters but, food and identity sounds better than identity and food. That makes sense. It’s probably also easier to sell, but it really is about the voices that are missing, I think. Or the stories that are missing in a lot of food writing.

Kyle Yoshioka: Yeah. Agreed. I think you could take that interpretation in a lot of different ways, but I think we’re certainly filling a niche in the food media landscape for people of color. There’s a lot of appreciation for non-white food, right? But there’s not often a commensurate amount of appreciation for the cultures that bring us that food, or the people that bring us that food.

So I think we’re certainly meeting a need there. And I think there’s also a way you can interpret that as it’s the memory aspect of that too, right? You bring people into the room with you, or in invoking someone who maybe you can only access through food, through something that they loved, for example. There is a lot of, maybe, absence that it’s speaking to as well. And, it’s also at the same time, celebratory. It holds both of those.

Arjun Basu: Yeah, because I think there’s an inherent criticism of a lot of food writing in the magazine without saying it because the magazine is a happy place. But so many food magazines are about the photo and not about the meaning or, the gorgeous shot and to make you hungry but not the backstory, and or recipes and no backstories. But this is like all a backstory and no recipe.

Kyle Yoshioka: Yeah, absolutely. It reminds me of—I think it was a thing that’s been memed to death at this point—but the, like, online recipe that you find and then there’s five pages of backstory about like your long lost whatever, and then you finally get to the recipe.

I think that the story that precedes the recipe is the interesting stuff. It gives writers an opportunity, I think, to really inhabit the space that they’re given. I think that’s my editorial intent, to really make writers feel like they’re welcome to tell the story. Only they can tell to an audience of one, which is themselves. I don’t want them to cleave to an institutional voice.

I don’t really set, like, a strict theme. When we were putting out calls for pitches, it’s like we were looking for stories about food and identity and that’s kinda the end of it. And then I do other things, like, for example, not italicizing non-English words, things like that, that are more subtle, but that can start to other non-English speakers in various ways. So that’s a really intentional part of what we do. And we don’t, for example, we have content in other languages that aren’t English. We don’t translate them in the text. And that is meant to challenge the idea that publications have to be in English because we’re in America.

There’s still a linguistic hegemony favoring English in this country, despite America being a melting pot, despite there being so many languages spoken. And so it’s our little attempt to challenge that, like poke at that. And I think that it helps to welcome in people who might not otherwise feel represented in that way.

I think that there is universality in the hyper-specific. I think the more we can drill down to those specifics, the more opportunities actually present themselves. I think it’s maybe counterintuitive, but I have found in my experience, I’ll speak for myself, that the more that I can encourage and create the space for writers to feel safe in the vulnerability of getting just so particular and like really putting themselves back into that memory that they’re trying to evoke or embody that experience that they’re having, that they’re trying to convey. The more they can be specific, the more relatable it becomes, and the writing becomes better, which is important for me as well.

That directive that I’m giving, I think at the beginning maybe I would’ve thought that we’ll start to alienate people or something like that, but I found the opposite to be true, and now, in retrospect, feels very resonant with the kind of publication that we are. We’re not too concerned with what other standards are and we aren’t beholden to major stakeholders or whatever.

So it’s, we have the leeway to be able to publish something that maybe wouldn’t have a home elsewhere. And I’m honored to be a lot of people’s first publishing opportunity too, and maybe it is a bit esoteric and maybe there are people that do feel “other”ed by it, and that’s okay with me.

I think it’s okay that not everything is for everyone, but I really think that you enter into relatability and universality again, the more you winnow down it it’s like there’s a certain shape that it has of widening, like narrowing, and then widening again.

Arjun Basu: Yeah, you just graphed it out. As a writer, I actually graph everything, and so thanks for that. So we talked about food as a conduit to really other types of meaning, so in that sense, this is anthropology.

Kyle Yoshioka: I think so. Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s one way in which we get at that human story. I have an undergraduate degree in art history and I feel the same about that. A lot of things are anthropological.

There’s so many artifacts, and food is one of many, and it’s one that’s ancient as, like probably as humanity itself. So there’s been a lot of time to accrue a lot of meaning for it, and it’s become something, I don’t know, there’s a lot of capacity for it to be something esoteric now, even as it’s also elemental.

Arjun Basu: Yeah. Whenever I go somewhere, I always do two things. The first thing I do is when I’m in my hotel room or wherever I am, I turn on the TV and just let it run. I don’t even change the channel as long as it’s a local TV station. If it’s foreign, then I’ll change it to a local one and chances are I don’t understand what I’m watching. I’m always very fascinated by the commercials that run. Cultural sort of immersion. And the second thing I do is I just go out away from whatever street I’m on, usually a side street and I will just go into anything that looks like they might be serving food or coffee or something. And I just go in and I sit down and sometimes I end up pointing at the menu because I don’t know what I’m asking for and I spend like a half hour in there just to get my bearings and just to absorb the sounds and the smells and the tastes, even if I’m having just a coffee of the place I’m at and and then, the thing I remember about a place usually is not a site. It’s a smell or food. It’s food. And so when I was doing magazines, food became the central core subject of most of the stories we would run. Because that’s how you discover the world.

Kyle Yoshioka: Absolutely. It’s so visceral, right? Sense is such a powerful memory forming vehicle like, and we all have to eat. It’s almost not even worth saying that, but that is a fundamental way in which we interact with the world every day. It’s still something that you have to think about. It’s always around no matter where you are, even if it’s not physically present, it’s with you in your desires or your thoughts.

And there’s so much distinctive food, characteristic of cultures, and there’s also so much overlap. So it’s like the universal and the specific thing again, like there’s that beautiful overlap interculturally, and there’s that very specific kind of permutation that happens, and you get to experience it when you travel. It’s so beautiful. But that kind of food being a memory formation powerhouse is, like, universal.

Arjun Basu: Yeah. And I mean it really did strike me—and we’re back to your grandmother—but the first half of the first editorial and the first issue is about that memory about you and your grandmother. And I love the thing about the grape. Peeling the grape and she did it, and how that stayed with you. And like my mother is in town right now. She’s staying with us. And my son, when he comes over, a lot of their interaction is around food and they start cooking something. It goes back to what you said also about representation and about that not showing up in a lot of food writing or magazines. Like that intimacy. In your discussions with your creative director, your design director, who is your friend, I’m assuming before all this started?

Kyle Yoshioka: Yeah.

Arjun Basu: How was it about the food necessarily or was it about that representation that got you guys going?

Kyle Yoshioka: I think it’s both as it often is, but…

Arjun Basu: Can you even separate them?

Kyle Yoshioka: I think, yeah, I know, right? Yeah, it’s hard to, certainly, I think we, being that we’re both from Portland, which is a foodie city, it’s easy to notice that lack of representation. Certainly. And it’s so normalized, I guess for me anyway, to encounter stories, media, which at first seems to foreground another culture through their food, but doesn’t create any sort of infrastructure for sustained support of the people who are giving you that food.

Like we’re a pop-up town, which I really like, and it can create this feast or famine kind of effect of you get a lot of attention because your pop-up’s really buzzy and then when it’s not buzzy anymore, then you don’t have any business. And that happens a lot, I think, or so I hear. And so it’s very present for me, living where I live. It’s present for me, having the identities that I hold.

And it’s, I don’t know, I guess I personally just think about food a lot, so it’s always present to me. I’m always noticing where and how that’s showing up and who is telling the story, and there’s just abundant examples of storytelling, which I would say doesn’t do as good a job of that representation. And representation obviously isn’t everything, but it’s something and it’s a piece of the puzzle.

And really the followthrough of making that representation happen is then creating connection, community, that supports the people that you’re representing. It’s a non-extractive kind of ethos that I try to cultivate and that I don’t think enters a lot of editorial rooms and maybe it doesn’t have the capacity to, or they don’t have the capacity to do that, but it’s something that I notice just talking to people who do work in food here and who maybe have similar experiences or leanings that I have.

Arjun Basu: Any food culture, any culture that is trend driven, and you talked about popups coming and going, when the food culture becomes trend driven, then it’s never going to be deep. And I’ve always said that, cities that are where the food culture is really an outcome of trends aren’t, they’re not really food cities. Those people are just experiencing stuff. It’s like bucket list stuff, it’s not really about the food, it’s about the experience of being in the place where the food is being consumed. And magazines for commercial reasons will, of course, pick up on that and then promote the trend and call a thing and then say “Hey, Korean’s the next big thing.” And I said that 20 years ago in a magazine, and it was 10 years too early. And I regret saying it for many reasons, my thinking has obviously evolved. So when you go out and make your appeal for writing if someone knows the magazine, it’s obvious that you guys aren’t trend driven by trends or anything. But do you see yourself receiving a lot of submissions that may? How do you avoid it?

Kyle Yoshioka: How do we avoid overly trendiness?

Arjun Basu: Particularly, yeah. Or even mild trendiness.

Kyle Yoshioka: Oh, it’s a good question. I think we are so earnest that I think that the people that tend to be drawn to us maybe are a little bit trend proof in their taste.

Arjun Basu: Are you saying you’re too nerdy to follow trends?

Kyle Yoshioka: Oh, you could say that. Yeah. I certainly don’t think I’m cool enough to, so maybe the opposite of that is that I’m just too nerdy.

No. I feel very lucky to know a lot of people in Portland doing really cool things. S I don’t know if I can exactly pull that off. Maybe it’s how we’re projecting ourselves. And I think it’s also partly the groundwork that I try to lay. I have conversations, pretty extensive conversations, with everyone who contributes for us, and it’s a lot of that stage setting for welcoming vulnerability and doing some deprogramming around, say, having to write to an institutional voice or maybe also writing to trend. I think I implicitly discourage that in those conversations, and I find that I don’t have to mitigate overly trendy things. I haven’t yet anyway.

Arjun Basu: Yeah. The more magazines you produce, the more people are going to understand what you’re doing and the easier that might get. So what magazines inspired you growing up? What formed your thoughts here besides your grandmother?

Kyle Yoshioka: Yeah, that’s the number one. And then beyond that, I, yeah, I didn’t grow up consuming a lot of magazines. I was an avid reader and so certainly the written word has been with me a lot. But I think the most influential things that have gone into Provecho from where I sit, leading it, co-founding it, are not other publications so much as other writing that foregrounds identity and talks about creation of community, talks about memory, talks about pleasure, things like that. I’m recently reading this book called Dear Elia by Mimi Khúc, and it’s about Asian identity, Asian American identity formation, and it’s also about ableism.

It’s also about white supremacy culture, and perfectionism, and productivity, all these things, and I have found that work that I have done internally, examining my own identity and then reading other writers works about how identity plays out for them, whether that writing is academic or less formal, those things have really shaped how I approach writing about identity myself and how we frame perpetually for other people interested in writing about it. So things that have helped me to understand how belonging can function, how it’s built, how trust is cultivated, how identity can be such a fraught thing, can be contingent and not fixed for a lot of people.

Arjun Basu: You’re one of the first people I’ve spoken to that has absolutely no background in this at all. What have you learned the most in terms of the making of this thing? Not conceptually, but the actual physical task of making a magazine. What have you learned the most?

Kyle Yoshioka: That’s a good question.

On a meta level, I think I’ve learned that you can do whatever you want to do. There’s a permission that I’ve gratefully accepted that I didn’t wait for someone to tell me that I should do this. It’s, maybe, it’s a lesson of adulthood. I’m in my mid-thirties. It’s like a dawning realization of oh, that’s just like the order of the universe is like you can just exert your will when you want to.

So that’s a big kind of larger theme. More granular, I would say. There is such a value in having. a project manager’s kind of expertise as you’re going into this. There’s a lot of work that goes into the magazine, I assume, all magazines, that is so, like, heart-centered and tender and very artistically fulfilling and creative.

And there’s also this nuts and bolts element of can you return email in a timely fashion? Can you track all of these dependencies and do all of that nitty gritty stuff? And it’s made me appreciate the interlocking relationship that those two things have. It’s probably the same for a lot of creative industries, but it’s something that I didn’t really think about too much before jumping into this. Like just the amount of I’m going to be on my email, infinitely, and I need like systems to track everything and I need to build it in a way that feels responsive to my needs.

Its that building the architecture that supports all of this beautiful creative work. But I have been humbled and I’m very grateful to now have a better understanding of just the amount of work. It’s staggering and we’re not by any means a huge operation. So I have a major appreciation for the amount of labor and the number of people that have to go into these projects.

Arjun Basu: Yeah. I love what you said that you get to a certain point where you realize you can’t do anything you want. So what is, what would you like to do better? You’ve done a few issues, now you’re just finishing up the third, am I correct?

Kyle Yoshioka: Correct.

Arjun Basu: And that’s going to come out soon. Are there areas that you haven’t explored that you’d like to in the magazine, or that you want to eventually maybe look into again because you didn’t do it the first time? What would you like to do better or like to do?

Kyle Yoshioka: Yeah. I really have been drawn to getting weirder, so doing some unconventional stuff. We have the leeway for it. And I think I have enough experience now, at least with our individual publication, to begin to feel a little antsy. And I want to do some weird novel experimental stuff.

And our third issue, which is coming out November 15th, has a little bit of that more experimental writing, some different formatting, some content that’s just like a little bit out of our comfort zone, and that feels so good. So I think I would need to get better ultimately in my role at setting aside space and time for that ideation, because I think we could, in theory, pump out things that are fairly similar from issue to issue.

We have the structure, we have the bones, and it would be easy to get comfortable in that. And maybe that would be fine, but my temperament is such that I now feel this, like, what are we doing differently now? What’s the next horizon for us to begin to explore?

So I’m really curious about switching things up in a way that’s interesting. In boundary pushing. I’m also really interested in the temporality of our publication because at the moment we only have capacity to publish yearly, but I’m very interested in exploring other mediums, maybe doing things that are able to be a bit more responsive and can keep us in people’s minds in between issues, doing things that are in person and community-based and trying to build connection around the publication.

So I’m simultaneously committed to that physical object that we’re creating every year and I’m super interested in the things that surround and orbit it. And that’s where my next ambition lies, I think.

Arjun Basu: Yeah, because I think I was going to say that, no magazine is an island. It exists in a universe or an ecosystem that is larger. And those different parts of the ecosystem usually feed on each other. And that’s where you eventually go. And that’s where it gets very interesting beyond the magazine itself. That’s where, in a way it becomes a business. But a business that is founded on, I guess in this case, a community. So what has the reaction been in terms of the readers? Where are they? Who are they?

Kyle Yoshioka: Yeah, I think the heart of our readership is in Portland where we’re based, but we are now partnering with a distributor. So we’re on both coasts of the United States now, which is really exciting and all along the West Coast. That readership is growing, which is really exciting.

And the reception. I’m still shocked, surprised, and pleased, when people I don’t know approach me or recognize me somewhere, recognize my name and talk to me about the magazine. That’s still mind blowing to me. So from what I can tell, the reception has been really nice and really kind.

And I do think that thing I said earlier about us filling a gap in the food media landscape. I think that is being met with a lot of appreciation in our readers. And to your point, the kind of anti-trendiness of it all. I think it feels like it’s engendering a lot of really genuine, sweet points of connection. People will tell me about their grandmothers or their, like, favorite food and it’s just generating a lot of similar kinds of stories, which is kinda the point.

Arjun Basu: Yeah. I see a thing with grandmothers, becoming a theme or—

Kyle Yoshioka: —they’re so powerful—

Arjun Basu: —food my grandmother fed me or something.

Kyle Yoshioka: Yes, absolutely.

Arjun Basu: Okay. I always end these with one question. Three magazines that you are recommending to people right now.

Kyle Yoshioka: I can actually show them to you. So, I have for you The Slow Press. This is their sixth volume, and they do some really fun formatting. They’re also a food centric publication, but it has such a point of view and a really beautiful aesthetic and really strong writing. So that’s my first recommendation.

My second. Another food focused one: Cake Zine. This is their “Candy Land” issue. More very beautiful writing.

And my third is Buckman Journal. This is their most recent thing that they put out called Choice Cuts. And it’s about Portland house parties and has a lot of documentary photography about Portland house parties. But Buckman Journal, also based in Portland, is doing some really incredible work with, like, stories that are sourced from here. And their journalism is really rigorous and their attitude is just really in keeping with the Portland that I know from, like, the early aughts and it’s really cool, punky, but rigorous publishing house.

I also take a lot of inspiration from the Paris Review and how they do their interviews. It’s not a QA kind of format. I find myself moving away from that in my own writing. It’s this beautiful amalgamated intentionally and deeply edited thing where there’s a conversation and it’s structured really, I think, with the reader in mind, and it reads just so unlike an interview.

It reads like you’re a fly on the wall in this conversation. And it’s more cogent maybe than a raw interview could ever be. But I aspire to that level of coherence and elegance when I am doing an interview. They have an interview with Tony Morrison from many years ago that remains really influential for me.