Do we like Samin Nosrat?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A warm, decent public record and no harmful words found, held back by one contested boycott pledge and a silence on it.
Samin Nosrat started out as a busser at Chez Panisse in Berkeley and worked her way into the kitchen as a cook. That apprenticeship became the backbone of her 2017 book Salt Fat Acid Heat, built around four elements and (famously) containing no recipes. It won a James Beard Award in 2018 and spun into a four-episode Netflix show.
Fame came with a cost. She has said that after the success she felt like “an avatar of joy” for people and a pressure to keep performing it. Her answer was smaller and warmer: a Monday-night dinner group with friends, and a 2025 book, Good Things, about recipes and rituals for sharing food with people you love.
Now the messy bit. In 2023 she signed the Hospitality for Humanity pledge, which commits signatories to not buying, using or promoting Israeli agricultural or food products. J. reports the pledge targets products rather than people, that more than 1,100 industry people signed, and that the New York Times listed her among the most prominent supporters.
On 5 October she appeared at San Francisco's JCC with Israeli chefs Itamar Srulovich and Sarit Packer to discuss their cookbook, and urged the crowd to visit a local Jewish bakery. Israeli-born chef Mica Talmor said criticising a government is different from shutting out its people, its chefs and its farmers. Others, like food stylist Aliza Sokolow, backed her willingness to come and learn. Where you land depends on whether you read the pledge as a stand against a government or as a squeeze on Jewish and Israeli food businesses.
She did not respond to J.'s repeated requests for comment and has not publicly disavowed the boycott, so we only know what she signed and where she showed up, not what she thinks now. On the harm test, we found nothing from her on trans people, women, migrants or the planet that does damage; her public remarks centre on food, community and being a woman of colour in a hypercompetitive industry. That's why it's an asterisk and not a fail.
The good stuff is mostly her work: a book that taught a generation to cook by feel, a James Beard win, and a push for gatherings where everyone helps out rather than one person slaving away. We found no court cases and no credible allegations about how she treats people. That is a thin file rather than a glowing one, so we have scored her accordingly.