Writing & Eating
Dinner while the world burns
One of my first real jobs was in a commercial kitchen in New Orleans in the months after Hurricane Katrina, in late 2005. I was 20 years old and not technically qualified for the job, but everywhere was hiring for everything and employers didn’t get to be picky. I knew, vaguely, how to cook, but I learned on the job from various bosses and co-workers, who led me through all the culinary school basics in between stories about whether they’d left the city before the storm or not, or how they’d gotten out, or whether their house was destroyed, or where they spent the months that the city was shut down. This remains, for many reasons, probably the best education I’ve ever had.
The next job was cooking privately, for a very kind family in New York for two years during grad school, then I went on to make a lot of breakfasts at the cooperative B&B I lived in and operated in Brooklyn from 2010-2014. I loved my food-centric jobs as much as you can love a job, and after internships at a magazine and a publishing house, and various other office gigs, I always thought cooking and domestic work was better suited for a young writer than any supposedly normal job.
For many years, I assumed I’d always cook for money and write for little to nothing, because for about eight years that is mostly what I did. My life now is the opposite— no one pays me to cook, but I make a living by writing. Inevitably, the unpaid creativity has some kind of purity and excitement that’s occasionally evasive in creative work you do for a paycheck.
I’m not one of those people who need to totally shut out the world’s chaos (and there’s entirely too much of it right now) in order to write or function. But given the new war my country of origin has just launched, and the old wars that are still ongoing, and the genocide that won’t stop, and the rapidly expanding fascism in the States and elsewhere, I feel acutely aware of how steadying it is to cook for yourself and others.
Writing fiction and all the assorted tasks that come with being a professional writer often feel absurd against a background of so many nationalistic death cults wreaking havoc on the earth. Cooking and eating have been sometimes difficult when I’m going through a real depression, but the need to cook and eat always returns; it’s always the right thing to do even when writing may not be the right thing to do. To feed yourself or to give your time and resources to your most immediate community is life affirming when too much around us is death affirming.
In fact, my feeling is that to be a person who does not or “cannot” cook is simply not a defensible stance as an adult human on the planet in 2025. Being a very basic cook is totally fine. You know how to make one good soup? A bean salad? A grilled cheese? Are you the guy, like my brother, who has gotten really good at making biscuits? Every skill level and interest level is welcome but I’m going to insist that everyone know how to not embarrass themselves if they need to cook for three other people by tonight.
Because the point of cooking, ultimately, is to feed other people and not always be a person being fed. You don’t have to be impressive, in fact I would argue there are a great many dishes that benefit from utter simplicity and just good ingredients. If you’re reading this and you’re a non-cook, I would say you need to fix this as soon as humanly possible.
I’m thinking about all this right now because I was recently asked to do a Grubstreet Diet, which is now online with a more insane looking illustration than I could have ever imagined. At first I thought I’d finally get have a reason for my writing and cooking to cohabitate, but they wanted me to do it while I was in New York for book tour stuff, so it's mostly a portrait of a woman totally outside her routine, drifting between restaurants and cafes, and occasionally cooking in a friend’s kitchen (fun, but not the same as cooking at home.)
Keeping track of everything I ate for five days on the road, I thought, was going to be a chore, but it was more enjoyable than anticipated, mainly because the story of what you eat is inevitably a story of a hundred other things— how you slept, where you are, who you’re sharing meals with, what you’re thinking or talking about lately, the weather, the place itself, the season, your mood, your health, your habits, your values. A food diary— I’d somehow failed to notice—is just a diary. And I really liked
’s meditation on the form of the food diary from a couple years back.I’ve never really done a typical book tour of going to city to city in quick succession, and I think this was the first time I ever did three events in a row while various interviews and book reviews—some great, some shitty— pinged in the background. Staying in this state of events and exposure, in my opinion, is a good way to have a totally out of body how-am-I-not-myself break from reality. Three in a row, I’ve discovered, is my limit before a total overdose of the self. After that, I need to go home and sleep a lot. (I’ve been sleeping 9-10 hours a night.)
But now I’m home again and doing things that do not revolve around myself— like spending time with my friend’s absolutely perfect baby, reading books, reading my mentee’s work, trying to do random favors for people, taking the dog for a long walk. But probably the most enjoyable and necessary thing you can do for other people is to cook for them.
So— I wanted to share what I’ve been cooking and eating in Mexico City and how, in general, I spend my time in the kitchen, but now this post has gotten too long so I’m going to break it into a second part in which I will: wax poetic about fruit, describe the best way you can make eggs that you probably don’t already know, and reveal the main secret I know about how to be a Very Impressive and Seemingly Spontaneous cook. I might even do a proper what-I-eat-in-a-day diary because I’ve suddenly warmed to the form.
After the paywall, the unedited diary I wrote for Grubstreet.