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

by Geraldine DeRuiter

First kisses can be absolute disasters, too clammy or taste of Cheez-Its, affronts to the senses, but the first food memories, my God. Ask anyone in the food world—the answer is always poetry.

No one, I’d decided, would tell me what I would eat. Not even those stiff-collared jerks at Poison Control.

It had not yet occurred to me that the awful things said to us by our parents were awful things that were once said to them.

Perhaps living creatures should not be harvested from the sea in infinite quantities so that we may ingest them with all the restraint of a hungry, hungry Bacchus.

One of the ways of getting through a childhood that wasn’t perfect and was maybe, I don’t know, sort of shitty (sorry, Mom, but also, Jesus Christ) is by telling yourself there are small, tangible things that will put you on equal footing with your peers.

At this time in my life, it does not yet occur to me that the things I have always longed for are things I can make myself. That if I want cheesy garlic biscuits, I can bake them. That if I wish to have a loving family, I can create one. I still believe that these things are preordained and inaccessible to me, destined to happen only to the girls with shiny hair and perfect blue tags at the backs of their shoes. I still somehow think that if someone treats you badly, even if you are a child, it is because you deserve it. This is, apparently, easier to wrap my head around than the alternative.

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.

Women on television, I’d found, were portrayed in only a few ways when it came to food:

It’s not the first time a woman has been portrayed as too picky and too demanding about her food, and therefore too picky and demanding about life in general. The message isn’t subtle: If you want to be loved, you must have zero special requests.

Because if you start to express too much emotion or demand too much of a partner or of life in general, you could get labeled as “high maintenance” or “difficult” or—worst of all—“crazy.” Once you are branded with it, it will follow you everywhere.

It was the mid-1990s. We were told that “no means no,” but no one told us what happened after that. No one told me that “no” would just be perceived as a starting point in a negotiation.

I didn’t yet know that being alone is far better than being with someone who relegates you to being their dirty secret, their sidepiece for uncomfortable, sweaty teenage hookups.

It’s a hard thing to learn: that we can ask things of other people, that we can order food how we want it. That our bodies deserve to be nourished and loved and fed the way we want them to be.

Kim. I reminded myself that 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.

That’s the thing about voicing your needs: The world tells you how bad you’ll look if you do it. But no one tells you how great you’ll feel.

And also, if you did convert, you were no less entitled to your identity than someone who was born into it. On the contrary, she told me. People who converted had worked very hard for it.

Culinary and religious tradition became intertwined, and the former always held more sway simply because, well, it was food.

This is what it means to love someone. You cook for them. You help them carry the weight of their own memories.

I once naïvely thought feminism would be a cheat code to make the right decisions. But sometimes it’s just there to make me feel like a hypocrite for not being able to escape my old patterns of thinking, my ingrained habits, the memory of all the shitty, misogynistic things I’ve done.

According to a study published by the Pew Research Center in 2019, among heterosexual couples who cohabitate, women are much more likely to prepare meals than their male partners, and much more likely to grocery shop.

While home cooking remained the domain—and the burden—of women, in the professional culinary world men continued to dominate.

The reasoning, Druckman notes, is not that there is a dearth of great female chefs, but rather that women are not allowed to succeed in the existing framework. The parameters for success are set up so that, for the most part, men are allowed to be great chefs. A woman can, at most, succeed at being a great cook. But when that cooking extends beyond the realm of the home, we are hesitant to acknowledge her genius.

Did they honestly think that men who cooked at home were less masculine?

Did they think the second they learned to prepare anything more complex than cereal, their testicles would start shriveling up like the Nazi who drank from the wrong chalice in the third Indiana Jones movie?

That women cannot be professional chefs, that men cannot be home cooks. Gender roles have played out on the culinary landscape. Food has been a battleground, cooking has been an obligation, a game of keep-away, and a burden.

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.

There are many analogies about the end of fertility, none of them good. They involve clocks grinding to a halt, or flowers withering, or reaching for an egg carton and finding out they’re all gone, or maybe there’s one egg left, but it’s a little weird looking, and the shell is all rippled and strange and it’s probably from some sort of lizard), I am hesitant to say those words: that I don’t want to be a mother.

I think a prerequisite to being a parent is that you should want to be one. And there’s a long diatribe here that I could go on about, but simply: Parenthood should always be a choice.

Why do you think so many people want me to have children? Part of it is certainly schadenfreude, because I have laughed at too many diaper blowouts. And part of it is because they want to be assured that they haven’t made the wrong choice.

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.

“The rule about who pays on a first date is comparatively easy,” Petrow writes. “You invite; you pay.”

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.

Nero played the fiddle while Rome burned. My mother was discussing trees.

But the further and faster you run from your parents, the greater the likelihood you end up right in front of them again. Being a reaction to someone doesn’t mean that you are free from them.

Online harassment is extremely subjective.

According to the Women’s Media Center, a nonprofit dedicated to how women are represented in media, when women experience abuse online, it is more likely to be “gendered, sustained, sexualized and linked to off-line violence.” Women are more likely to be targeted with “rape videos, extortion, doxing with the intent to harm,” and are more likely to become victims of nonconsensual pornography and stalking.

I’d experienced it enough firsthand to know now there was absolutely no difference between how we are harassed, whether it was online or off. The narrative is always the same. It is about how fuckable or unfuckable we are.

I didn’t have comfort foods; I had an entire comfort pantry.

But no matter how many times you try to prepare for the unexpected, you’re never quite ready for the real thing. That’s one of the main features of emergencies, I guess. You don’t see them coming.