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

by Geraldine DeRuiter

You cannot think about your future safety unless you are safe now.

I knew that bad stories got more mileage than good ones; I hadn’t considered that the same was true of people. That the jerks and the abusers, the assholes and the arrogant blowhards, tended to get bigger, better press than the ones who really deserved it.

Smooth pâté with cognac-soaked cherries, chunks of baguette that threw shrapnel of crust into the air when you tore it apart. Piles of golden frites, too hot to touch, Bibb lettuce salad with hazelnuts and sharp shallot vinaigrette, crunchy orbs of falafel, frilly slices of cured ham, a gooey croque madame that we’d order “for the table” and then feign amnesia when it arrived.

Goals.

collection of moments, of paying bills and going to work and trying not to stay up too late and walking into a room and forgetting why you went in there in the first place.