The Hate for Meghan Markle’s Netflix Show Is as Unfair as It Is Predictable

“We’re not in the pursuit of perfection,” says Meghan Markle in the trailer for her forthcoming Netflix series, With Love, Meghan, “we’re in the pursuit of joy.” The show, which airs on 15 January, promises “cooking, gardening and hosting tips,” but the preview overwhelmingly features food, as she prepares focaccia, ceviche, and tiered sponge cake to share with high-profile friends in a California kitchen. The pursuit of joy might be a cutesy platitude, but it’s a common one across food media, a simple notion that resonates with our need to be nourished and find comfort around a table.

As a food editor of nearly 15 years, I know that eliciting joy is a guiding principle for almost anyone who cooks, professionally or otherwise. It is a sentiment so valid as to render it anodyne— inarguable in its feel-good vibes. But any words uttered by the Duchess of Sussex, the woman who splits opinion more than a jar of Marmite, instantly become weaponized. I should have known better than to be shocked. Meghan sensibly turned off the comments on her Instagram post about it, but a quick scroll through the Netflix feed reveals wide-ranging vitriol including “anyone who streams this should be deported”, and “she doesn’t know the meaning of love”. This is a technicolor, sound-on, flashing lights Trolls World Tour of trolling.

Meghan with Mindy Kaling in the trailer for her forthcoming Netflix show.

Photo: Courtesy of Netflix

I’ve always been able to get on board with Meghan. She stands for things, and the fact that she likes to cook just endears her to me more. I’m interested, though, in people’s sense of her “inauthenticity”, which one comment goes so far as to call “her brand.” Her interest in food and drink is well-documented, and was a major feature of her one-time lifestyle blog, The Tig (itself named after her favorite wine), where she shared recipes and chef interviews. And it was food that helped her put her stamp on royal life; she enlisted, for example, the London-based Californian pastry chef Claire Ptak to make the cake for her wedding to Prince Harry, pairing lemon with seasonal elderflower from Sandringham, a step change from the fruitcakes of royal weddings past. In 2018, her first project as an official member of the royal family was the foreword to a recipe book with west London’s Hubb Community Kitchen, a group of women displaced by the Grenfell fire, enabling them to continue cooking together for survivors twice a week in the aftermath of the tragedy. Irrespective of her cooking credentials, Meghan has a track record with food.

“Not her house, not her garden, not her recipe”, says one comment, exposing not only that familiar resentment of Meghan’s insistence on a right to privacy, but also the idea that she is somehow cheating. I wonder if audiences realize the extent to which much food television is staged. Do they think celebrity chefs film in their real home kitchens? Natural light, space, and configuration are all major considerations for shooting food content, and it is rare to see a star cooking in their natural habitat. Moreover, the people you see cooking on screen will usually have a team of recipe developers as well as food and prop stylists. None of this detracts from their talent or authenticity, but it’s important to recognize that even if the setting is ostensibly domestic, these are still productions.

From baked fish with roast vine tomatoes to crostini and what look like little iced doughnuts, it’s unlikely that the recipes in this series will show us anything new. But it is notoriously difficult to do anything truly innovative in cooking; I’ve commissioned and edited enough recipes to know that they are seldom without precedent elsewhere. That doesn’t make them unoriginal. In fact, I think that’s the beauty of cooking; a dish can be adapted and respun indefinitely, and is as much about the person who makes it as the recipe, literally and figuratively shaped by their hands. With Love, Meghan might be a saccharine series title, but it embraces the romance of cookery.

What’s more, audiences want simplicity. In all the years I worked on The Guardian’s food supplements, readers were consistent in their appetite for simple, quick, healthy meals. When talent gets this right—witness Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals, or the frankly insane market for air-fryer books—people are propelled into the kitchen. Food media exists not to make a chef out of you, but to entertain and perhaps inspire you to cook. Meghan is adding to that oeuvre.

With Chez Panisse founder Alice Waters.

Photo: Courtesy of Netflix

Is anyone really going to watch With Love, Meghan expecting culinary innovation, though? She doesn’t purport to be a chef who will dazzle you, but someone who enjoys cooking for friends at home. Okay, so those friends might include actor Mindy Kaling and her Suits co-star Abigail Spencer, and okay, it might not be her real home, but a well-lit spacious Montecito studio kitchen with exemplary produce and glossy cookware. But this is Meghan Markle, Hollywood actor, entrepreneur, and duchess. Glossy is why we’re watching it. “No average person wears million-dollar jewelry while squeezing lemons,” wrote someone. No babes, but it’s precisely because she’s not an average person that she’s squeezing those lemons on Netflix.

There are also some suggestions that this show peddles the tradwife image. Does Meghan in the kitchen amount to domestic servitude? This is a dangerous conflation and an insult to women who choose to cook. And speaking of dangerous conflations, I should mention the many comments accusing Meghan of stealing the IP of Emma Thynn, Marchioness of Bath. Because the world doesn’t have space for more than one Black woman married to an English aristocrat who happens to cook on television.

Food is by definition universal. But it should also be unifying—and it often is. I was struck by a piece by the war photographer Giles Duley in last weekend’s Financial Times, who said, “Food is the opposite of war… [it] is how we bring people together and how we show love. In food I find my peace.” The fact that it has become her trolls’ latest battleground marks a sad and tedious continuation of the misogyny and racism surrounding Meghan Markle.