Daniel Humm’s Warholian Riff

This week, the food scene engaged in a monocultural debate over why Daniel Humm slapped his name onto Riff, a CPG product of boxed dried pasta and powdered sauces sold as a “meal kit,” which encourage buyers to “riff” on the ingredients therein with whatever is hanging around their kitchens. Everyone and their brother seems to have an opinion about the product, and about the highly decorated chef’s decision to move forward with it. If you ask Humm, “Everyone should know how to cook, even just a little bit,” he said in a promotional video. “That was one of the main motivations to create Riff.” But that seems unlikely. The most popular answer, and likely the most correct one, is money, honey. And the Hamburger Helper-esque look of the product inspired so much ire, that one writer I know wrote to their Instagram page, “Wow, you guys haven’t hated something this much since Marcel!”