Cover Your Bases 23

1/31/2021 How COVID-19 made me a cook

Paintings by Floris van Schooten, Dutch painter, c. 1585-1656

This week: A reflection on something personal and reflective. Like how COVID-19 made me a cook.

I truly became a cook during this year of pandemic lockdown.  Yes, I cooked before, and I cared about it, but it wasn’t till COVID-19 lockdown when I began cooking 2 or 3 meals every day,  for what’s now almost a year, that I transformed into someone for whom the act of cooking is now at the core of her being. 

Taking a break from work at 5 PM to prep a dinner salad, then cooking the rest of the meal at 7, have become activities I relish repeating. They comprise a culinary Tai Chi, a form that is centering, rewarding, and calming. In the past, cooking felt more performative, done for praise, or the experience. Now, I’m invested in just making food everyone enjoys.  When they dig deep into a dish, my race is won.

Making something new every day has also become important to how I cook.  Bye-bye, stockpiling a week’s worth of dishes. These days, I plan for the day, not the week. Savory, salty, crispy, or crunchy;  sweet, spicy, hot, cold, or room temp, I’m about immediate reward and something to look forward to each night.

For me, the daily act of cooking has become a salve. Preparing and eating meals together is a respite from the pain of friends we can’t see, jobs and classrooms we can’t go to,  relatives we cannot hug, people who are in COVID-19 quarantines while we are not.  A salad is a salad, but the dazzling bowls of Caesar kale, little gems lettuce with ranch, smashed cucumber with soy sauce and garlic, roasted butternut squash with red onion, tahini, and arugula are places we can find joy.

During COVID, I‘ve come to cook patiently, deliberately, intentionally moving through the kitchen like people who set out bread to knead and then rise.  I prepare the mise en place, chop, mix, cook, then serve and eat.  Part of the joy is doing it again, and again.

It’s all about providing, right?  Like every hunter-gatherer, I’ve made a nest out of food, ensuring that my partner’s mandarin oranges and bananas, her teen’s bagels, Greek yogurt, and frozen acai, are available. And like my mother before me, I take pleasure in providing incidentals: home-made salad dressings, jars of fruit butter and jam, pickled red onions, cucumbers or beets, plus occasional tea loaves, cookies, and snacking cakes. 

But this deepening love of cooking and food and service is also about fear; there is no way I cannot name that. In so many ways, outside our house, very little feels safe. An invisible virus, unhoused people suffering, friends’ parents and siblings ]sick or dying, separation from my son and his wife for most of this year--I have so much anger and so much grief.

In this pandemic, who wouldn’t want to be a cook?  It’s my walking meditation, my ritual, one aspect of life I can control absolutely. 315 days in, with no solid vaccine distribution plans in sight, I’ve learned that cooking is a way to hold on for dear life.

Norma Listman & Saqib Keval, Photo Credit Jorge Davalos

Quick takes: The work of sharing food is sharing culture: 

So much good writing about food as culture--and fighting erasure--is happening, with these pieces that I read this week standing out:

Food & Wine: Saqib Keval, of Masala y Maiz, made a comment in a recent Food and Wine editors’ apology for a non-contextual recipe presentation, that struck me as profoundly true.  Saqib said, “The work of food media is inherently political because you're making culture easily consumed, and you're trying to present it in a way that's culturally conscious and thoughtful. A lot of times it works and sometimes it doesn't, and there's a lot of media that doesn't hit that mark. I would love for readers, your readers, and food media at large, to think about is how recipes and food are inherently political. The work of sharing food is sharing culture.”

The Plate Online, If You Want to Celebrate Black Food, You Have to Include All of It, by Amythest Ganaway, An essay on celebrating authentic foodways, versus what the white-centered mainstream names as good:  “For too long, the food world has been filtered through a white lens. The only acceptable Black food came from the narrow filter of soul food; anything else was deemed too exotic or just not appetizing.”

Peeled, New Year New Grain, by Lisa Elaine Held. This interview with Anuradha Mittal, the executive director of The Oakland Institute looks at the ethics of the globalization of fonio, an African grain. Key point: “the growth of the “local food movement” over more than a decade has done nothing to slow the machinery that runs the exploitative, industrial system. There are now alternatives available to those who can afford them, but the big guys don’t miss the farm-to-table foodies—and everyone else is screwed.”

Erin Alderson, The Future of Naturalyella, I found Erin Alderson in December 2020, after she made the choice to move on from her popular food blog Naturalyella, so I am making my way backward in her oeuvre. I was impressed and moved by her essay about her decision, as a white-presenting person with privilege, to move into a more conscious way of working. Her words resonated, including these:

“Food writing and recipes need to be told by the people who have the connection. Yes, food is always adapting and changing based on migration, but when we work within an industry heavily dominated by white voices, we lose a lot. I’m not a voice that should be telling you how to make jollof rice or ramen, but I know there are many voices out there that should; they just haven’t had the opportunity or platform.”

Parting bits (where my inner nerd comes out)

Reaktor.com, Why I’ve tracked every single piece of clothing I’ve worn for three years, by Olaf Hoverfalt.  An article about tracking all your clothes to determine the intersection of most worn and cost per wear speaks to my data-driven heart. With its own extensive GitHub repository, what could be bad? I loved this and scanned every single fricking chart. (Via kottke.org)

Art Forum, Guston, Whiteness, and the Unfinished Business of the Vile World, by Steve Locke. Steve Locke’s essay does a great job of going deeper and naming a discomfort that many white people want to escape when thinking about whiteness and race.  This essay reflecting on Guston’s work is a valuable read if you care about anti-racism reflection and learning. 

 “Guston is the first artist I ever saw make paintings about white complicity and silence in the face of white supremacy, putting on a Klan hood to examine his white selfhood.”

Art News, Kara Walker’s Tate Modern Fountain Stars in New FKA twigs Video, by Alex Greenberger.  I am a follower of Kara Walker, so this piece about a  new music video by FKA twigs that recently premiered and is performed before a giant fountain sculpture by her that is on view at Tate Modern in London totally got my attention. Titled Fons Americanus, the sculpture appears throughout the video, called “Don’t Judge Me.”

How are you doing? What’s keeping you inspired right now? How are you coping with stress?

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Best, Susan