Secret Ingredients: You'll never guess
Let's talk about what you like to eat, and whether you can take the heat
Everybody thinks they want a meal plan.
I understand the seduction of it – the enchanting notion that there’s a way to have the perfect plan simply handed to you from on high, with exactly what you should eat to be beautiful, healthy, and morally unassailable. It sounds fantastic.
The whole thing is wrong, alas. A meal plan I write as a registered dietitian could be nutritionally balanced and tailored for your medical or wellness needs, of course, but the rest of it would be pulled from thin air, the deep and abiding mystery of what food is reduced to crumbs. A meal plan has an antiseptic, cookie-cutter brutality, with nothing in particular to do with you. Your preferences, worries, traditions, and aspirations are a delicate web. It’s the sensory imprint of ice cream on your tongue in the backyard, the smell of the kitchen in your childhood home. There’s one brand of cereal that makes you sick for no apparent reason. You don’t like leftovers if there’s chicken in it. When you order a certain meal from a certain restaurant, you hear that toxic ex’s voice in your head.
You won’t eat things that are purple.
What I need to do, then, is to help you find a way to put together your own meals in the way that makes sense for your actual life. It will not be perfect overnight, or indeed ever. The first attempts may not work for you at all, or they may not work for long. That’s okay. We just keep trying things out.
For some people, that means finding prepared meal options that fit their health needs, and they just pick what they want that week so it shows up at their house. For others, it means we gradually learn how to shop, cook, and plan meals that work for the whole family, on a really tight budget, when two people in the house have different food allergies. The different aspects and needs and preferences and pressures compete for space, until we figure out how they all fit in the same container.
I spend a lot of time talking about what goes on my plates just by way of conversation, and about what should go on your plate in medical nutrition terms, sure, but I spend a lot more time on what goes on in your heart and mind. What I want for you is that you feel well – rested in the morning, fewer aches and pains, happy belly – but also that your mind be freed from framing your meal choices and the shape of your body as being reflective of your virtue or worth. What you had for lunch has no moral underpinning, for good or ill; it’s merely a product of which needs you are prioritizing in that moment. Whether that is work, others’ needs, mental rest, physical rest, finances, health, a sense of belonging, or pleasure, it’s completely understandable, a natural consequence of the structure of your life, which is only barely under your influence. By bringing that structure to your conscious awareness, we can find ways for you to have more influence, but we humans have this tendency to hide things we are ashamed of, even from ourselves.
Often, uncomfortably often, I will realize at a certain point that your secret plan for loving yourself boils down to fundamentally altering your body.
And that’s why I want you to read Geraldine DeRuiter’s new book.
It’s called If You Can’t Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury, but you might know her better as The Everywhereist, author of an almost accidental travel blog that has made the news and won awards many times over. But, even though it originated when she was laid off and started accompanying her husband Rand in his work-related travels, calling it a travel blog doesn’t come close to encompassing its profundity. She is adept at depicting places, yes, but more to the point, the feeling of being in a place. Over time, she has become more and more fearless in describing her thinking, and in taking up space wherever she is, even if it’s at home replying to spammers with photo essays, or preparing for surgery to remove a brain tumor.
More recently, her writing is moving more towards being about the food part of life both home and away, and that’s partly because of the response to her visceral piece about Mario Batali’s newsletter apology for workplace harassment, with which he inexplicably included his recipe for Pizza Dough Cinnamon Rolls. In recounting making them, she expressed what a lot of people were living with at the height of Me Too: anger that so many are discounted, flattened into decorative or pejorative objects, hurt, and violated by people in power over us, and anger that we so often internalize those messages even when we know how wrong they are.
In return, she got both death threats and a James Beard Award, and that’s when her thinking around how food intersects with power started to gel. Last year, after again going viral and again being threatened with bodily harm, for a hilariously scathing review of Michelin-starred Bros restaurant in Lecce, Italy (you must read it, I’m absolutely pleading with you to read it), the need for a book became crystal clear. As Geraldine recounts in the book, the chef responded by releasing a bizarre and incomprehensible manifesto so inadvertently funny that I actually purchased a t-shirt commemorating it. She also recounts how the restaurant posted an explicit video intercut with interview footage of her, and yet, he has faced no consequences, except maybe good ones, even after she passed on-the-record allegations of workplace abuse along to the New York Times.
“As I was writing this book, I realized that so much of how we talk about food is just so unkind to us,” Geraldine told me. “People will talk about dieting and how they want to lose weight, and the way that they regard food is this adversarial relationship. How did we get here?” She started to look at the food industry critically, with its worship of abusive celebrity chefs screaming at the staff for entertainment, and (something I worry about a lot in my line of work) the elevation of “healthy” restrictive eating practices that are merely disordered eating in disguise. “Looking broadly at our societal relationships with food and looking at it through the lens of feminism, I started seeing that we never question it. We never stop to say this is sexist or unhealthy or unkind. I wanted to break that down, but I wanted to do it through personal, hopefully funny stories as well.”
I love that this is one of those books you’ll annoy other people with by insisting on reading paragraphs aloud, because laughing makes it easier to look at those things we hide from ourselves. Chapter by chapter, she recounts stories from the whole span of her life, from childhood to marriage to her current writing career, all of it framed by food. Some of it is imminently relatable: her perverse obsession with Red Lobster’s Cheddar Bay Biscuits; the bliss of good relationships and crushing pain of bad ones; the angst over who pays for dinner and what it means. Her relationship with her husband provides a beautiful and uplifting background, and although it’s ostensibly framed by a feminist mindset, it’s really more bookended by that along with healthy masculinity. Some of it is, like Geraldine herself, larger than life: her mom tells a little white lie about how exactly the house got burned down; she connects with her often absent, probably-a-spy father with his beef and V8 Stroganoff; she spends two days making a Nesselrode Pie, the “culinary equivalent of the dodo bird”, to open a door to memory for her husband’s grandfather.
The intimacy with the reader is purposeful. She couldn’t make the papers cover abuse and misogyny in the culinary world, but she could let us in on her own life. “I decided to talk about what happened behind the scenes of some of my viral food pieces, what the hate looks like for a woman writing about food. Because at some point, my body, what I look like, became part of the discussion.” She has experienced the vitriol publicly, at a level most of us thankfully haven’t, and still she has managed to come out of it in one piece.
No matter who you are, you can learn from reading about that process. The book models for you her arc of becoming aware of her thoughts around food and eating, questioning them, and finding a path forward in which she learns to stop apologizing for what she wants to eat, for how she feels, for what her body looks like. She demonstrates learning not to make herself smaller, literally or figuratively, not for anyone. Her narratives are fresh, raw, and meaty, like a good meal, and I hope you partake. These messages that the food, wellness, and entertainment industries serve us get chewed up and spit out as a mindset of limitation, internalized self-hatred, and disordered eating, but there is a way to do your own chewing.
You can learn to stop apologizing, too.
I don’t know your life, so I’m not telling you to stop scrolling. I’m just suggesting that you curate it a little bit, and diversify your media, to see whether you can loosen your deathgrip on diet culture, or rather the grip it has on you. Read more long-form books and articles from people whose lives you find interesting; they don’t even have to be about food to feed into this approach. Mute some of the accounts, at least for now, that are telling you how you should be, and follow a few that are just expressing how they are. If food is fraught for you, after decades of judgment and restriction and bingeing, try to gravitate to some* that look at food not for shocky, fear-mongering clicks, but to express their own curiosity and enjoyment. Observe people who are showing you the fruits of practice in body neutrality and body positivity. (I’ve started keeping a list of such media if you’d like to check them out here.)
If you look at those approaches and either feel ready to work with them or hopelessly at a loss about how to implement them for yourself, you could try talking to a registered dietitian with an approach that sounds right to you. If your first guess doesn’t work, try a different tactic. I humbly suggest starting with intuitive eating or mindfulness approaches like my own, and like the other RDs Geraldine interviewed for her book, but I’m not right for everyone. Someone else will be, and I know that because -- that meal plan you think you want?
The secret ingredient is you.
Unrelated but timely note: I have a video review up for this crazy thing called a Pepper Cannon, which I am almost totally enamored with. (I get so many pitches from marketers, and I almost never accept things other than new foods for review on Today.com, but this offer, I just couldn’t refuse — they sent me one to try out with no guarantee of coverage. But, this is not an ad, and I have no promo deal with them.) It has 75 grind settings, which I coughed and sneezed my way through trying as pictured below, and it was an absolute deluge of pepper with less than half a turn near the end there. It is amazing. At the same time, you can grind finer than fine for French sauces. You do not need it, but you definitely want it, and they tell me they are having a 20% off sale sitewide on Monday, March 25, 2024. You need the 20% off, too, because this beast is $199. If you have a little money to burn, and you take your pepper as seriously as I do, this is the place to burn it.
