About Recipes for Trouble

Food connects us to the world.

Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin writes about eating: “the body here transgresses its own limits: it swallows, devours, rends the world apart…”

I wrote those words when I started an earlier version of this blog, over a decade ago.

I ended the blog when my mother died, in 2013. She had been my muse, and she was gone. So was the writing, for a time. Since then, I wrote a food memoir about my culinary relationship with her, called Food Was Her Country: The Memoir of a Queer Daughter, published by Caitlin Press. Much of the writing of that book grew out of this blog.

Since then, there’s been a global pandemic, still raging as I write. I’ve been mostly stuck at home for months on end. So have millions. Restaurants are closed, radically changing our foodways. Covid has revealed the gaps in our civil society, especially around elder care, food security, and housing Those of us with the privilege to have a home, a kitchen, and the resources to buy groceries, have been cooking differently. There is a slow food movement happening in our homes, our gardens, transforming the ways that we think about food. 

There is also a global revolution against police violence and governments’ murderous neglect of BIPOC people. There are challenges to systemic racism in policing, but also in many institutions, from universities to theatre companies.

How do I write about food in relation to global crisis and uprising? How can food connect us to the larger, bloody, gasping world? How can we rend these worlds apart?

I hope you will join me as I try to write my way through.