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

by Geraldine DeRuiter

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.

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.

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.

Maybe this is what we speak of when we talk about nostalgia. A longing not for a thing or a place but for a version of ourselves that is now gone, something that slipped through our fingers, piece by piece, day after day after day, without our realizing it.

I want to hold that moment still, as if it were stuck in a snow globe, protected and unchanged even as the world swirls around it.

As they write in “Powerlessness and Anger in African American Women: The Intersection of Race and Gender,” this dynamic results in “heightened levels of emotional distress that include frustration, anger, and resentment.” And has been associated with hypertension, coronary heart disease, and numerous other health issues. The stress of keeping all of this bottled up is literally killing marginalized women. And yet the prevailing advice from the CDC and the American Heart Association remains to diet and exercise in the face of heart disease, putting much of the onus of surviving racism and sexism on those experiencing it most acutely.

This was the other component of this dynamic that no one had told us: that in being robbed of our rage, we’ve also been robbed of our power.

In the face of so many voices telling us to do otherwise, it is a miraculous thing: to feel our feelings, to eat when we are hungry, to trust our bodies and ourselves.