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

by Geraldine DeRuiter

When I was halfway through second grade, my mother moved us to the central east coast of the state, in what is called the Space Coast. Presumably the name comes from the nearby Kennedy Space Center. Also, because the more apt “Little Congealed Balls of Petroleum Tar That Wash Up on the Beaches Thanks to Off-Shore Drilling Coast” was too wordy for the Florida board of tourism.

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.

Also worth noting: That night, I accidentally ordered $54 worth of bottled water because MY MENU DID NOT HAVE PRICES. And while spending an obscene amount of money on something that literally fell from the sky was new and horrifying to me, menus without prices weren’t.

Women don’t want to think about money? In America, women make on average eighty-two cents for every dollar a white man makes. And those numbers only get worse when you specifically look at populations of women of color. Black women make sixty cents per dollar, and Hispanic women make fifty-five cents per dollar. 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.

It’s why Costco exists. A five-gallon barrel of tartar sauce gives you the illusion that your own mortality is in your control.

Her name is Jessie Liu. I first met Jessie months earlier; she was the chef who had worked under Floriano and contacted me via Instagram (she has given me permission to use her name and discuss her experiences in this book, for which I’m grateful). She now worked at an Italian pizza restaurant in Copenhagen called Bæst, which continually ranks as one of the top pizza restaurants in all of Europe. She told me that we should stop by if we were ever in town.

I am convinced that if you were to make a topographical map of the internet, it would just be an infinite collection of tiny hills upon which people are willing to die.

Do you struggle with keeping up motivation and pushing past obstacles? Are you repeatedly setting goals only to find them unrealistic and overwhelming? Does holding yourself accountable seem like an impossible task? YES, OBVIOUSLY, ALL OF THESE THINGS, I AM A WRITER. These are my main personality traits.