If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

by Geraldine DeRuiter

They lived in Italy, and I expected them to leave that behind in favor of a state where toddlers were legally allowed to own firearms.

I cannot see myself clearly, the way none of us can when we are twenty-one and sad and think that maybe no one should love us at all.

I often ask him why he loves me. “Because you are great,” he says. “WHY?? WHAT IS BROKEN ABOUT YOU THAT MAKES YOU THINK THAT?” I often scream back. He usually just shrugs and kisses me, and tells me I am his favorite person. It is still deeply confusing, but twenty years later I no longer think that it is a mistake or that he has me mixed up with someone else.

It’s a bittersweet thing, to look back at your childhood dreams and know that you’ve exceeded them, that you were so desperately longing for not that much.

it always felt as if he were looking down on me. After we’d broken up, I’d point out this tendency of his, and he would usually tell me something like “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent,” which is a quotation that’s often attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt and repeated by shitty people who want you to feel responsible when they hurt your feelings.

He was an asshole, but also: I never walked away. Because that was never part of the narrative. The narrative was how to be appealing to guys. Not how to leave them. So I tried to be what he wanted, which required being less of myself.

we can ask this of the world and of ourselves. To be fed, and to be loved, and not made to feel unhinged or overly emotional. This request is not too grand.

I was still technically alive, but I had ceased to function in any sort of meaningful way. I became the human equivalent of a hermit crab. Which I guess is just a hermit.

feeding someone and protecting them are not different. To separate the two is to ignore how safe I feel when eating a giant bowl of cacio e pepe. I don’t need a bodyguard defending me from nonexistent threats. I need to be fed. Often, and before I start getting so hungry that I get angry about a haircut I had in sixth grade.

I’ve accepted the feminist notion that women can do anything, but the idea that we don’t have to do certain things is taking a bit longer to sink in.

My father was rigid and organized, a legacy of joining the armed forces when you are barely sixteen. My mom’s personal filing system involves the occasional bucket on which she has written IMPORTANT in black marker.

Some people are unknowable, and what is left is the bits and pieces you try to assemble throughout their life and with a renewed sort of desperation after they are gone.

I am occasionally asked if I have children—usually in bad faith, by men on the internet with whom I argue about issues that have nothing to do with whether I have children. It is a means of undercutting my credibility, a sucker punch I don’t see coming, even though I should expect it by now. No children, no opinion. Which would make sense if we thought the world actually listened to women who do have children.

Sometimes I get called a cool wine aunt, which is supposed to be an insult. While I don’t drink wine, I am an aunt, and a pretty damn cool one. I teach the niblings to swear in multiple languages, I play with Lego, and their college tuition is covered. Do you want to insult me for that, faceless internet dude whose wages are garnished because you owe child support to three women in Idaho? Go for

My aunt once made a pie that can best be described as cursed, pulling out a piecrust from the freezer that was old enough to remember where it was when JFK died.

I met my husband a few months after I turned twenty-one, and he was twenty-two, at a time when you are too young to meet the love of your life, and if you do, you are too clueless and busy dyeing your hair and listening to Green Day to realize it.

To be a woman who wants children means you are racing against a countdown timer. This is especially true if you want biological children. Mothers who are too young get judged. Mothers who are too old get judged. You need to be roughly thirty-three, but you have to look twenty-seven. Anything older and you are geriatric, you are infirm, you are past your expiration date. Anything younger and you’ve wasted your best years.

Maybe it’s more that people don’t want women thinking about money, because if we do, we might start burning shit to the ground, and nothing kills the fine dining atmosphere like a gallon of gasoline, a match, and a feminist agenda.

When I looked, I had somewhere in the vicinity of twenty-seven missed calls, which is never a good thing. Even if someone wins the lottery or has a baby, they are not going to call you twenty-seven times to let you know.

This, for the record, is not an ideal situation: when first responders see your mom and are like, “Oh, hey, you again!”

I wasn’t going to win a food Oscar. I grew up in Florida. I’ve eaten fried gator meat in the back of a moving pickup truck.

By the summer we thought that the world might return to normal, a sort of naïveté that I look back on now with painful tenderness, the way you do when children talk about growing up to marry the neighbor’s hamster.

I vacillate between thinking I’m an absolute genius and a worthless pile of trash; between being hell-bent on making it and knowing that I will fail, utterly. It is self-indulgent and torturous. In the years to come, it will hit me: This is just what it means to be an artist.

The hardest part of reckoning with the people who hurt you is that there was a reason you loved them in the first place.

One day we were friends, and the next we were not. Or maybe I’m kidding myself. Maybe our friendship had been running away from me for a long time. Maybe it was already gone, and I just didn’t want to let go, so I just let myself be dragged for a while.

In my mind, things fell apart in a matter of months. The truth was that it was slow, stretching out over years. There was always something simmering just below the surface, a sense of unease, a discomfort that I figured couldn’t possibly have been from anything she’d done, right? Things I chose to ignore for a long time because they were my feelings, and I didn’t want to inconvenience her with them. Our friendship felt impenetrable but fragile all at once, like the underwater glass tunnels at aquariums.

She had an unwavering sense of what she believed to be right and just. She didn’t back down from a fight. She was fearless and unapologetic and never questioned herself. I didn’t realize the corollary of this. Someone who was staunchly unapologetic would, ultimately, never apologize. If someone always saw themselves as just and right, they would struggle to see where other people were coming from. If they never second-guessed themselves, they would never acknowledge that they’d made a single mistake. It seems obvious now, an old cliché playing out: that the best things about her were also the worst things.

To have someone not want to date me made sense! Lots of people didn’t want to date me! (I’m horrible!) But to not want to be friends? Where did we even go from here? There was no “let’s just be friends” alternative to this. She knew me, and she decided that she didn’t want to anymore.

Losing a person—or even a place—so tied to your past feels as if you were losing the last vestiges of the person you once were. You get disoriented. You go through a bit of an existential crisis.

I’m very bad at being an adult. And I don’t mean in a “Wheee! I’m so fun and carefree” eating-Popsicles-in-the-snow kind of way that men find extremely attractive in characters played by Kirsten Dunst. I have adult energy (translation: vaguely constipated), but just not any of the authority or competence. I’m like a very draconian accountant who has never seen the number five before.

When the world is turning into a smoldering uninhabitable rock, and it feels as if you were powerless to stop it, our anger has to go somewhere. Why not unleash it on the people who really deserve it? Those who have committed the unforgivable crime of sharing food recipes for free on the internet.

It isn’t just that men (and almost always, specifically white men) are the only ones allowed to get angry; it’s that anger is one of the only socially acceptable emotions we allow men to demonstrably feel.

The American dream is to do what you love and get paid for it, which in my case is, obliquely, “consume curly fries.”

I spent my waking hours angry at everyone and thinking about pasta, which is terrifying, because I’m pretty sure that’s how fascism started in Italy.