IN CONVERSATION WITH A FRIEND ...
the other day, I found myself asking her how and when she learned to cook. This got me thinking about my own connection to the kitchen. When and how did the act of cooking and feeding myself and my family become a foundational value?
I suppose it seeped in through the daily observations I made of my own mother cooking, gardening, gathering ingredients, and singing the praises of the power in plants to smell good, to taste wonderful, and to impact your body’s inner and outer health – and I don’t mean ‘health’ as co-opted by capitalism, the kind that ties directly into diet culture and what is now being called ‘wellness’ - but the idea of health as a strengthening of one’s inner self, and how we interact with the outer world. For example, building immunity by eating lots of garlic in the Fall and Winter.
My mother’s connection to food and cooking came from a deeply instinctual place. I believe that when my mother cooked, she was expressing herself as a feminist, counterintuitive as that would seem to her mother’s (my grandmother’s) generation, who experienced ‘freedom’ by way of microwaves and processed food. (I would be remiss not to point out here that any woman’s definition of feminism is her/their own – there is no ‘correct’ definition that comes from outside of yourself, as long as it doesn’t exclude or harm other womxn.)
In my mother’s case, feeding herself was an act of agency, a way to connect to herself and others by connecting with the Earth. When she made food from scratch, she was embodying self-reliance, and this was an act of feminism. As the owner of her table, she was also the author of her own story, and the guardian of her own body. In other words, the kitchen was a source of empowerment.
For some, the pandemic has brought a closeness to the kitchen and to food that wasn’t there before. For others, it has been a stark reminder of how close one can be to going hungry. Although we're privileged to have continued access to fresh, locally grown food, the pandemic has made my daily life feel more like I am operating in ‘survival mode’, constantly striving to catch my breath. Being in the kitchen has felt less like a source of connection this past year, and more burdensome – something else to keep up with, to rattle around in my already noisy brain, feeling more like a feminine obligation than a feminist choice.
The very same act, through a different lens, can hold an entirely different meaning. The same thing can be both the handcuffs and the keys, based on the circumstances.
So what does it take to own your power then? As Monique Melton’s work reminds us, it requires continually checking in with your motivations. And when we do that, we find that the natural course of action is to return to our values and ask them to lead us forward.
The impact of gendered social conditioning not only affects us in the kitchen, but the office as well. At times, when we lose our way, we inadvertently uphold a status quo in a futile attempt to fulfill an unwritten duty to ‘please everyone’. As we have stepped into our power to affect broader systemic change through incremental policy changes, those pressures to remain in the comfort zone are consistent. It’s remarkable how the insistence on someone else’s comfort can trick you into thinking you’re on the wrong path, when in fact discomfort – in the form of vulnerability, addressing your relationship to power, and living by your own deep, inner truth regardless of outer judgments – is a sign of growth.
Today we invite you to think about your own relationship to power - both your own power and the power of others around you, the individual and the collective - and how that shifts as you consider motivations and values. Some resources that have helped our thinking on this topic in the past months include Be Nourished, whose Body Trust newsletter is a regular check-in and re-centering, Monique Melton’s Shine Brighter Together podcast and classes (among many other offerings), and The Adaway Group (in particular, the Sister Summer writing exercise, which will give you something to look forward to next summer if you sign up to receive their newsletter).
In food, justice, and food justice,
Dor + Tay
photo of by Christine Han
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