Alison Roman joins the cancel brigade

Alison Roman is back on YouTube with a new video on making homemade smashburgers, including some very strong opinions on how to best dress the griddled patties: iceberg lettuce, thinly sliced onion, NO TOMATO, pickles and tons of mustard. Oh, and hold the fries: instead serve ’em up with a heaping side of cancel culture.

In the middle of Roman’s cheeky rant about her pickiness when it comes to burgers, the cookbook author and food vlogger declares that the bun has “got to be” a “potato roll.” However, Roman never actually says the “potato roll” part — it’s actually dubbed in via a text-to-speech robot. When Roman holds up the package of “perfect” potato rolls, the brand name is blurred.

Why?

“We made this video before I learned my favorite potato roll brand has horrible political opinions,” Roman explains in a pop-up caption on the video.

It doesn’t take a master internet sleuth to deduce that she’s talking about Martin’s brand potato rolls. The company is facing backlash and boycotts after left-wing consumers found out that its owners have a close relationship with Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for Pennsylvania governor. Jim Martin personally gave $100,000 to Mastriano’s gubernatorial campaign in 2021. Martin’s, the left claimed, was boosting an extremist, “far-right” candidate and thus must be driven out of business. Even worse, the Martin family is devoutly Christian. The horror!

Roman’s not-so-subtle edit to remove Martin’s from her smashburger video is beyond irksome. You’d think someone who has been through a cancellation attempt would be reluctant to unleash that same fury on others. Roman said she was “dragged to hell” when she was accused of racism in 2020 for criticizing product lines developed by Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo. The controversy led to Roman taking a hiatus and then eventually leaving her job at the New York Times. Now she’s egging on the same harassment of a brand whose product she admittedly loves. How sad.

Why single out Martin’s, anyway? Is Roman going to vet every single brand she uses to cook from now on to make sure they don’t donate to Republicans or otherwise do anything that she finds personally objectionable? Clearly not. A follower of Roman’s tells me that she recently posted photos and videos of herself eating at Prince Street Pizza in New York, a shop that was dragged last year because its owners were posting racist Yelp reviews. In an episode posted to her channel last summer, Roman chooses to grill up Hebrew National hot dogs at a cookout; Hebrew National is apparently the only major hot dog brand in 2020 to give a larger share of its political donations to Republicans over Democrats. Oops.

Hilariously, in the same episode, Roman shares that she only uses one type of hot dog bun … you guessed it, Martin’s potato buns. History, I guess, can be edited but not entirely re-written.