Happy New Year! In the past few years, the circumstances of my life have required an exceptional amount of reflection on the past and projection onto the future, so I’m taking this year (and maybe forever) off from looking at the year in review and setting goals for the next one. It’s just time after all!
However, since I spent much of this lockdown holiday revisiting old seasons of The Great British Bake Off, and very much enjoying the heartwarming passion of these home bakers from all walks of life, I can’t help but contemplate that I am in the depths of a culinary drought. I’m starting to wonder: is this a phase or have I given cookery the final kiss off?
As someone whose art practice is based around food memories and simple stories told in what and how we eat, I’m a little thrown off. Food these days, although still a great pleasure to consume, feels more like a chore than a delight. Where I used to find a meditative breath in the moments made to prepare a meal or a snack, I now feel a tiredness, burden and ambivalence to the rituals I once loved. On any given day I’d be happier with an easy take out burger than making something nourishing and tasty at home. It’s not just the cooking that has me feeling worn out; but the shopping and carrying of groceries, the cleaning, the time, and most of all: all the mental work that goes into the whole thing.
Growing up, my mom had some stand by dishes she cooked, such as: porridge with brown sugar and raisins, scrambled eggs and bacon, leftover rotisserie chicken soup, “bangers and mash” (which was just jumbo boiled wieners and mashed potatoes), and a pretty weird soup made with a can of Heinz tomato juice, sour cream and macaroni. We ate a lot of canned soups, baked beans on toast, cereal, frozen perogies, cold cut and cheese sandwiches, and pasta with canned sauce and sprinkle cheese. When we felt fancy or had no food in the house, we sometimes ordered pizza, or KFC, or picked up a $12 rotisserie chicken, potato wedges, and dinner rolls combo from the local IGA. Us kids would help ourselves to instant ramen, Kraft Dinner, pizza pops, and bready grocery store poppy seed bagels with Philadelphia cream cheese. If ever given my own lunch money or allowance I’d go straight for a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli. But to be honest, I don’t remember many meals we had. We almost never all sat down to a meal together (our table didn’t even fit our whole family). I vaguely remember over-cooked broccoli, buttery baked sweet potatoes, and maybe fish sticks or chicken fingers with plum sauce from a giant no name squirt bottle.
In my teen years I more or less lived at my best friend’s house. She came from a fairly affluent family, which meant that they had a giant stainless steel fridge stocked full of premium groceries, and a full pantry off to the side of the kitchen. There was a big dining room table where they would have dinner together every night. Sunday was pizza night where the whole family would make pizza from scratch and eat together. It was through this surrogate family that I witnessed the act of eating and making food as a ritual of love and togetherness. We teens were even allowed to sip on gin and tonics on their front porch in the after dinner golden hour, which was my first introduction to drinking alcohol to simply enjoy the company of people sharing in something delicious, rather than using it to get fucked up. My friend and I would get out her parent’s peak 90’s era Martha Stewart cookbooks and use the abundance of ingredients in her large, well equipped kitchen to make pies together on their marble island. I’d never made a pie or even conceived that it was possible that someone like me could make a pie. I felt like I was stepping into another world, waking up to the possibility of being someone beyond who I thought I had to be.
When I left home and started living with roommates I’d pick up on their culinary tendencies. I worked at a popular vegetarian restaurant for many years, and had enough punk vegan activist friends that I learned how to cook things like vegetables, brown rice, beans and tofu. I got into soup and stew making: amazed at how easy it was to cook up a bunch of random veggies and blend them into a deceptively fancy purée (this era of blended soup experiments has almost permanently turned me off of most puréed soups for life). I would fancy-up cheap student food in subtle yet decadent ways. I started most days eating an instant porridge out of a mug with a juicy chopped peach drizzled with honey. I ate this way for years, along with cheap all day breakfasts in sketchy diners, take out $1 veggie banh mi and $2 veggie patties in coco bread smothered in curry gravy from the Island Foods in the food court by my art school.
At some point around my mid twenties, we stopped having potlucks and started having dinner parties. The food wasn’t necessarily that different but we lit candles, and decorated our dining tables with artful centrepieces and cheap floral bouquets. We drank shitty wine for enjoyment over drunkenness, usually had a humble dessert course and seasoned the whole thing with (what felt like) adult conversation. I started being more thoughtful about food, realizing that I was as capable as anyone of learning cooking technique and following recipes. Once I moved into my own tiny apartment with a hot plate and tiny convection oven, I started the process of learning to love feeding myself. Living alone compelled me to show myself simple acts of self love through food. I wasn’t conscious of it then, but I was essentially learning to mother myself out of the necessity of being on my own.
Around my early thirties was when I accidentally fell into still life painting. I was using gouache to make paintings for a larger concept installation (my major at OCAD was Integrated Media FYI) when I remembered how much I liked painting pictures. I naturally gravitated towards painting pictures of food. It felt like within each snack, meal, or ingredient I painted there was a story to tell. When I started to want more out of this unexpected creative activity, I asked myself “why do I only seem to want to paint food?” Something clicked for me when I realized it was to tell a story of growing up on welfare and the bittersweetness of how those instant and budget foods were a part of my personal history. It was also during this time of unearthing meaning in my food based art that I began to care deeply about the food I ate. I would try to make beautiful, nourishing meals that weren’t costly. I think I was proving to myself that even without a lot of money you could have food made with love and share that wealth with those around you.
I began collecting cookbooks, which I would read like novels in bed. I spent some time buying fancy and long ingredient lists for the Ottolenghi recipes I wanted to try. I started to feel comfortable enough experimenting and inventing my own recipes. My shopping behaviours at thrift stores became less about fashions and more about pretty platters, glassware and old cookbooks. Rather than containing fancy recipes to impress, these cookbooks told stories through words and images that I ate up with just as much delight. My favourites are church cookbooks with recipes submitted by community members. I love this format so much in that in 2013 I even compiled my own version called Food Blog, where I asked people in my own community of artists and friends to submit their recipes (and of which I have very poor documentation and can’t remember where I stored my archive copies - but there are a few fuzzy old photos on IG). It was one of my first Riso projects I did with Colour Code. Revisiting this book makes me feel a little embarrassed. It reminds me of how I was fumbling to find something to say as an artist. At the time, I was aspiring to make relational and community art and I see in this book a bit of a struggle to find that voice. But it’s also a nice little time capsule of people’s recipes from those years, which I’m glad to have!
I found myself adopting principles about food and eating. I became one of those people who would say “why order take out when I could make something better at home for a pennies?!” I was a person who would arrange my afternoon snack in a pleasing manner on a plate and take a photo of it. I’ve never stopped liking junk food, but I became much less interested in it. The dark side of this new adult gourmand Anna is that I could see that at times I was desperately trying to reverse something difficult from my childhood. I thought that if I cooked with enough love, that I could consume a sense of family or belonging. Maybe if I cooked something refined enough, I could erase the shame and inadequacy I felt about growing up poor. While I do think you can find healing though the act of cooking and eating, it can also be a fuck load of importance to put onto lunch.
And even before I had begun thinking consciously about starting my own family, I think somewhere deep down I was using food to create my own sense of history and tradition to pass on to my imagined future children, so that they could grow up feeling loved through good home cooked food: something that I felt a lack of in my own childhood. I needed to know that I was able to communicate love through my cooking. Maybe that would make me worthy enough one day.
And then came the infertile years, which drained my energy for nearly everything. I would let good food go bad in the fridge on days when I could barely function. I started feeling such uncertainty about my future that my desire to pass on recipes to future generations and share in lovingly prepared meal times didn’t matter so much. And let me tell you, there is a phenomenon of people telling those struggling with infertility that their lifestyle/diet may be to blame for their medical condition. As a result I experimented with a restrictive diet for thyroid health, a gluten free diet, and using an app on my phone and a scale to make sure I met daily protein requirements (you would not believe how hard it is to eat an adequate amount of protein everyday). I started off inspired to find creative ways to work with my healthy restrictions, but that optimism dwindled as I found myself stuck in the endless repetitive cycle of infertility, making basic and unappetizing meals to meet my nutritional needs. If I ever slipped up, I’d spiral into believing that the donut I ate for comfort on a particularly bad day was what was making me barren. Because I’m a reasonable person, I know that can’t be true, but I was desperate and spread thin. Food and eating became fraught with neurosis. I would lay awake at night obsessing over how I could eat healthily for the next hour, day or week, while somehow juggling the rest of my out of control life. During a time when I felt like I was a biological failure, my personal metric for preparing beautiful, delicious, medicinal food became just another potential way to fail.
I’ve mostly made peace with where I’m at in my cookery journey. Me and gluten are cool again. I keep a box of chicken fingers in the freezer. I think a sandwich is a perfect meal. Smoothie’s get ‘er done. I probably don’t eat “enough” protein, but I’m only human. If lunch is a beef patty and cookies some days I don’t sweat it. The freezer has become a good place to store prepped veggies. I don’t shop for more groceries than I need, which means I’m limited in what I can cook, but at least I never have to throw away rotting food (when I can sense I’m dropping the ball with what I do have, I now do my best to drop it at a local community fridge before it turns). As someone who used to be principled about making delicious food on a thrifty budget, I now feel like I would rather hand over my wallet to anyone who can help me feed myself. Mostly, it’s because I want to take back that fraught space that cookery was taking up in my brain. I need that space for making art and money, for resting, for taking extra long walks, for doing absolutely nothing sometimes, for starting this new little family on the way. There are some things I’m not super proud of in my newfound disinterest in cooking, but I’ll tell you this: I am proud of knowing my limits, and recognizing that I just need a break and a bit of help right now to get back on my feet.
Yesterday I finally made a big pot of my old standby slow cooker black beans. Here’s the recipe: dump about 4 cups of dried black beans in the slow cooker with a little over twice as much boiled water, a chopped onion, some chopped garlic, olive oil (although I had leftover bacon fat in the freezer I threw in), and some cumin and oregano. Leave it to cook for a few hours and then season liberally with salt. For something that starts off looking like pebbles in a bucket of water it magically transforms into a rich, dark and creamy stew that scents the whole apartment with an aroma so comforting, I suddenly feel even more at home. I love these beans and I love remembering that this perfect recipe exists within my being. At this moment, maybe that’s enough for me to know that I still love to cook.
As a soundtrack to accompany you on your own Tale of Cookery, her’s a nice vibe playlist I made of all food themed tunes. It’s an ever growing mix that I recommend playing on shuffle.
Blessings to you all for 2022! Maybe this Lucky Elephant Popcorn Box reprint is the perfect mood for right now? People have been asking for me to bring this one back for years, and I’m also happy to see it again. It’s an evergreen message of absolute truth, in my opinion. It’ll be available in the shop on Tuesday January 11th at 1:00 EST :)