Kitchen

Cooking—the bursting, splattering, briny, salt-mouthed, greasy, fragrant sensuality of it, the demands of heat and spice and sweetness under your roaming, scrambling hands—welcomed me home to my own body. This uncouth, uncooperative animal, a vessel and one unending open wound, this nightmare I’ve tried to negotiate and shrink my way out of, my body, revealed itself to me as I ate, not only with my mouth but with my whole ravenous form.

In every encounter with true, glaring tenderness, the kind that could render you wide-open and raw if you let it, I remember food. Age thirteen, a jar brimming with dried apricots, offered to me after a thankless day of middle school, by a girl with whom I wanted to spend my life sitting beside; those apricots are little inklings of queerness right as it blossomed and fluttered in my chest, how we reached into the jar at the same time and ate so many our stomachs twisted hours later. The same challah French toast her father made us one Sunday morning, glistening with cinnamon-sugar glaze on her sunlit deck. Or the cheesy, bacon-loaded, heavenly breakfast burrito a different friend went and got for me while I shivered one morning in the waiting room of a hospital, waiting for a rape kit. I don’t speak to her anymore, but even now, even under the sediment of a dissolved and once-volatile friendship, I can’t dislodge this kindness from her, can’t unknow how she once showed me this flickering gesture of such undemanding love, how because of that gooey, bulging burrito I can think of this morning with something other than utter paralyzing loneliness. An under-spiced, doughy dining-hall samosa bought for me by an inscrutable, lovely boy after he’d asked me if I’d eaten anything that day and I’d said no. Or the water bottle of peppermint sun-tea my favorite high school English teacher once concocted or me on a school writing-arting-camping trip to the desert, noticing how blurry-eyed and lethargic I’d gone in the scathing heat.

What is love but a person putting a plate of food in front of you and saying eat up? What is love but the cheap apple-caramel crepes and glasses of sweet, steaming mulled wine bought for you by a new friend in a new country; you, so sickeningly lonely, knowing no one, jagged at the edges, and her, offering this, this, and this, to me, a stranger devouring it all in between tentative fragments of laughter. What is love but the matzah ball soup from the local deli that my mother and grandma went out to buy me nearly everyday while I thinned and waned in a hospital bed for weeks, struggling to keep food down and still being a little shit about eating hospital food?

I mean that I have often believed there was/is no tenderness available for me, that some unidentifiable element in me rendered me incurably unlovable, that love only existed if it was spoken and touched into being. I mean that I was, am, have always been, wrong. I mean that even the most pungent, blood-thick loneliness is a love story somewhere if you know where to look, or rather, where to taste.

I mean that my body is a secret I forgot how to keep.

That whatever ghost tortured me with such precision and ferocity, whatever ghost I became in order to inhabit a body socialized and perceived and made in the image of ‘girl’ and all its blasphemy, its daily violences and its propensity to teach itself to self-anestheticize, to blur the shape of yourself out of view until you shrink into a figure so slight and unnoticeable you become forgivable, whatever such mindfuckery had turned me inside-out and obsessed with the pursuit of smallness in every possible meaning—whatever, whoever, that ghost was, has slipped from the room, has begun to cease her haunting. As I’ve learned to cook, I’ve learned to feed myself. I’ve learned to know that I actually, really, truly deserve to not only feed myself but to nourish myself, to create pleasure and delight and curiosity for myself in the food I consume. To devote whole heaping, steaming portions of life to honoring my own appetite. To learn to cook, to learn the composition of my own appetite in all its depths and cliffs, is above all a rescue mission. I am picking up the shards of a hunger I have spent years trying to deny, disavow, disown.

It is not a painless thing, to live in a composite of lines from Adrienne Rich’s widely-beloved poem “Diving Into the Wreck:”

I came to explore the wreck.

The thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck.

As your hands learn the textures of different vegetables, meats, knives, the world shifts just a little to accommodate this new sense. You grow a new set of teeth, eyes, hands. You, if you are someone raised under the language and binary of ‘woman’ or ‘girl,’ even if you aren’t really any of those words at all, might feel almost monstrous, almost unbearable, when these growths start to appear. If there is anything terrifying it is the revelation that you exist first and foremost as an animal as hungry and needy and taste-searching as anything else with a heartbeat. If there is anything to implode your very foundations, to shake this heavy house of your storyline about your own hunger, it is finally listening to the noises growling and growing underneath the floorboards.

Perhaps the misogynists have it right: women do belong in the kitchen, after all. They belong in a space voided of guilt and self-punishment, a space to expand and widen and subvert; a space to invent and give form to their own complicated hungers, bleeding hard and thick like red smoke.

Women do not have one essential relationship to the kitchen, obviously; even the word and notion of "women" is more of an open-ended, write-in question than anything cohesive or monolithic. And thank fucking god for the elasticity of gender identity, of shattering every trapdoor. Women of color, especially Black women, live now in the bruising reverberations of a historical, and continued, forced domestic work. Most women of color and most low-income women in the US never had a choice in entering the kitchen; they raised white women's children and kept white families alive meal-by-meal, all to keep their own selves and children and loved ones alive. When do women of color, especially, get to stop focusing on keeping everyone else alive, on feeding sacrifice after sacrifice and myth after myth and burn after burn to keep the ground settled under everyone else's feet? When do their own hungers come into full view, as not secondary but revolutionary, pleasure-oriented and complex?

(There is no kitchen that exists separated from history. There is no way to cook apolitically, even if you think there is. These wounds are too messy and too ancient to brush away.)

Over the past year, I’ve gained thirty pounds. For most of my life I was severely underweight; simply because of genetics, fast metabolism, but also at times perpetuated by disordered eating, by the hellscape of the ballet world, mental illness, and, more generally, the routine bludgeonings of American girlhood. Until something shifted, maybe around age seventeen, and I grew into myself a little more.

The months I spent in France: cheap crepes bought from stands above Metro entrances and in parks, warm papery layers of melted butter, sugar, caramelized apples, so hot I burned my mouth while I walked, still eating anyways because how could you not cram such heaven down your throat, how could you muster patience while walking through Montmartre on a rainy, mulchy day? The cheese and prosciutto bought from the local supermarket, the cheap rosé on tap that you could fill your own bottle with for five euros. Even the fucking McDonald’s felt strangely cocooned and special, less a fast-food place than a quasi-restaurant thick with laughter and families speaking an unhurried French between chicken nuggets and greasy, hot fries.

But: if food is a love language, it can also be an alphabet of all the ways our love goes miscommunicated, misheard, distressed. Food can become a smoke signal—we try to reach whoever can see our raised signs, but sometimes we miss, sometimes we stay lost or losing. The ways food can reveal how clumsy or inattentive our love can be; if someone I loved bought me a salad as an entire meal, for example, I'd feel irrationally estranged from them, because if they knew-knew me, they'd never choose the salad. What is loneliness but the wrong food handed to you by someone who’s supposed to know you best?

If food is a love language, then:

learning the textures, swerves, histories, and hinges of another person's appetite is a lesson in devotion if there ever was one.

Food as expression of unsolicited and exquisite care. Salty, starchy, sticky, braised, sauteed, tannic, earthy, glazed, bittersweet, tender, rich, sour, sugary, subtle, floral, woodsy, grainy, coarse, briny, thickened, saucy, translucent, charred, smeared, suckled, yeasty, metallic, fluffy, porous, crunchy, crusty, rough, knotty, smooth, cloying, burnt, oily, smoky, stringent, ashy, gooey, oozy, mulchy, salted, creamed, severed, chopped, roasted, cracked, shelled, fishy, cold, citric, intricate, fine, grated, minced, peeled, all of it.

In the thick of the pandemic, my best friend drove to my house solely to deliver a single delicious red velvet cupcake. We couldn't touch, or take off our masks, because he'd just returned from college out of state and had to quarantine. But, still. That outstretched hand, that gesture of such quiet love.

The only thing about dying that really devastates me, I say to a friend, is not being able to eat anymore.