“I think she is somewhat ignorant about other cultures, but in a sincerely interested way.”
Tieghan Gerard at home in Silverthorne, Colo., Oct. 9, 2023. Gerardâs studio kitchen has a view of her parentsâ house, where she and her seven siblings grew up. SILVERTHORNE, Colo. — Tieghan Gerard was busy lighting pumpkin spice-scented candles when I arrived at her sunlit studio in October.
“I’ve always been about the visuals,” she said of her recipe-development process. “I work backward from how I want it to look.” But Gerard has also become an unwilling lightning rod for controversy, entangled in issues that have galvanized the food world in the last decade: cultural appropriation, intellectual property, body shaming, privilege and racism.
Eleven years later, much remains the same for Gerard, who turned 30 in September. She has lived here since she was 14, apart from a brief attempt at fashion school in Los Angeles that was cut short by homesickness. Her mother, Jen, 57, still runs the business side of Half Baked Harvest from her house a few hundred yards up the hill.
When it happened again last March, this time with a “banh mi rice bowl,” the pushback was so strong that it was covered by NBC News. Gerard apologized again. Five Weeknight Dishes: These pizza-flavored dinner ideas could make you a hero Detractors have also flooded her comment sections when fellow bloggers, like Gaby Dalkin of What’s Gaby Cooking and Adrianna Guevara Adarme of A Cozy Kitchen, publicly accused Gerard of copying their recipes. Her recipes and persona have generated so much online conflict that most of the sources I contacted refused to go on the record.
Few knew then just how much Instagram, YouTube and other visual media would determine what the world wanted to eat. From the start, Gerard’s dishes, photographed in warm, high-altitude light, looked bountiful and beautiful — and homemade. Her breakthrough moment came in 2017, when Anthropologie, the fashion and lifestyle retailer, began stocking her first cookbook. Her most recent book, “Half Baked Harvest Every Day,” published in 2022 during the pandemic, spent 33 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
On Reddit, where her staff cannot moderate conversations, anonymous commenters publish detailed theories about her motivations and inner demons to a weekly “snark” thread dedicated to her. In October, members of the FoodieSnark subreddit monitored geotags in Chicago to track how many fans showed up at a promotional appearance for her new pumpkin-spice candle.
Her mother, also a small and intense woman, said the constant online discussion of Gerard’s body feels sexist and judgmental. “It’s unfortunate that people feel entitled to comment on someone being underweight, when they would never do that if the person was overweight,” she said.
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