“Resources for simple cooking often do more harm than good.” (Tamar Adlar)
It’s the stress that kills you, slowly, they say. It seeps into every pore, every relationship, every bite. It makes you bitter.
This makes sense to me: I’ve always been told that animals raised on factory farms or in other terrible conditions don’t taste as good. You want to eat happy chickens, not stressed out ones. Though, you’re still eating them so not everything is all daisies and sunshine for them, I have to imagine (at the risk of anthropomorphizing the chickens).
Most days, no matter how successful or joyful the moments are that fill them, it usually still feels like I am also going to be eaten. The cynicism doesn’t help with the stress.
The stress also makes sense to me: in the middle of an ongoing pandemic, ongoing Russian war, ongoing global fascism and white supremacy, and relentless, daily violence at the micro and macro levels, we are also staring down a recession. To combat my rising grocery bills, rising gas bills, and rising heating bills, the government’s plan is to raise my housing bill as well. Really, I should be grateful to have a roof over my family’s head, and I am. But, the stress seeps in there too, through the roof that the building inspector tells me might need to be replaced sooner rather than later, seeping in the cracked window frames from god knows where…
All of this has led to writers and platforms lining up their essays on how to survive the recession, how to keep eating, how to reduce the bills on our own, how to… So many recipes for beans, so many recipes for self reliance.
When I read those articles about eating in a recession, cooking in a recession, buying groceries in a recession: it also feels like we’re collectively lacking the imagination necessary to reimagine life more broadly. To reimagine the systems that reduce our choices to what we buy. We’re trapped, really. An Instagram post from a local farm irks me in its insensitivity and its plea for people to buy their “what-is-still-a-luxury-for-most-product,” in its disregard for the edge that a recession will take many people to and over. But I remind myself that small farmers are pitted against consumers in a system that disadvantages each of them, scrabbling for pennies from each other while billions in profits are normalized elsewhere. We need better ways to live and to love, futures outside of capitalist social relations that pit us against each other, that sacrifice our collective survivance so a few might benefit. This requires more radical imagination than I feel I have in me most days, though.
We need more imagination and we have to grow that imagination together. Sometimes bringing the argument back to the collective, to the systemic level, feels like a bit of a cop-out, a lack of accountability for an individual’s actions. I feel that in my own arguments sometimes, but when I check my gut I get this: I wish we had that same level of desire for accountability for the systems, the governments, the corporations as we seem to do for ourselves and our neighbours. Our actions can start with ourselves but they can’t end there.
I understand why we focus on the minutiae, though. Why we sweat the small things. It’s the stress: it gets us, gets us looking around ourselves for a sense of control, and it’s those small things that we can control. So we nitpick on those, focus on our individual choices while the planet burns.
Dried beans are cheap protein. Shop the sales. Eat less meat. Buy in bulk. Cook at home more. Reduce waste.
So many tips for people trying to survive, trying to sustain themselves, so few tips for the robber barons that run our grocery chains, or for the government officials who refuse to make sure their citizens are fed (I wonder who would publish a column of tips like these?).
But each day that rises, each time my tummy rumbles and reminds me to eat, each time my kids sit down at the table expecting to be fed, I’m reminded: food is indeed about sustenance. It is a matter of survival. But, it is also a matter of love and imagination. What does it mean to survive in a world devoid of these things?
I need to eat, to cook, to share, to build, and to dream to sustain myself, my family, and a movement for better futures. I need to find a way to sustain the love necessary to reconfigure the world and myself.
This is what brings me back to my kitchen day in and day out: sustenance, love, and imagination.
I cook every day: trading my time and transforming raw ingredients into sustenance is still the cheapest way to eat, and the most effective way of taking care of myself in body and mind.
I do religiously shop the sales and plan my weekly meals based on what is cheapest that week. Being religious about something is something I never really wanted for myself but I am learning to be gentler with myself: just because this isn’t the life I wanted doesn’t mean there’s not something beautiful about it. New worlds are often made through small moments, and I think being gentle with myself and with others can be one of those moments.
Along with being gentle with myself (as a way of managing that stress and ensuring I still taste good no matter what), I am practising adaptability and flexibility.
My youngest has been constantly asking for hamburgers, and another child has developed a new ravenous hunger for spaghetti meat sauce. I bought the cheaper ground pork last time and he never knew the difference, though. Added a little less, too. Compromises. But I’m also still doing my best to make food that is love, food that they will eat and will sustain them. I want these little people to know food as love, as pleasure, as joy. I work to not let the stress seep too much into those bites I put on their plates and in their bowls.
I hope this isn’t read as a screed or a manifesto, as much as a conversation with myself and with you, a reminder for those times that I need it, and a provocation for those times that I need the kick in the pants to do better. Maybe it’s also partly a love letter to the ways we can create wonder and joy and delight in our kitchens, no matter how cheap or thrifty the ingredients are.
I believe that the best way to cook through a recession is to do it together. So many of us are in the same situations, learning the same lessons, managing the same stress. I want to find more ways to sit down collectively to eat, to gather in kitchens to cook, to share leftovers and cakes and tea and moments and conversations. It’s not something I’m very good at, really. But I want to be better: I see its importance.
For some reason in the past months, I’ve been remembering and sharing with my kids the folk tale of ‘stone soup’. I’ve been keeping the veggie scraps again, adding them to the chicken bones for stock, deglazing the roasting pan too and ensuring each last dripping gets used. Each time is a little different, depending on what is in the house and needs to be used up. There’s power in a little bit of this and a little bit of that coming together to make something much greater. There’s a little magic in being able to transform any old scraps and bones (or even stones!) into sustenance and something that is delicious. There’s something needed about being able to gather around a simmering pot, in community, and sharing what there is. There’s joy in everyone contributing what they can.
I want joy and love to sustain us even in the midst of a recession, to not let the daily stress seep into the moments of joy and comfort. It’s important to name it, to articulate what we want, and then create the conditions to make it possible.
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