May 24th, 2025

I watched a documentary on Alice Waters - Netflix's CHEF'S TABLE: LEGENDS - last night and identified so strongly with her beliefs and statements and attitude on food that it realigned my philosophy on everything. I had associated her name with 'farm-to-table' before, but that's such a humble way to describe what she stands for. She wants everything to taste the best that it possibly can, and she finds people who want the same, and they build a network of better flavour for all of us. And it seems so simple to write down - everything should taste good - but the more I thought about it, the more cataclysmic the gulf between what I have and what I want, what I and everyone I care about deserve, felt. There is so much better to be had, and it's within our reach, and all it needs is time and love – which is all cooking needs, too.

So I decided, immediately, that I would go to the local regenerative organic farmer's market, Sunset Ridge, in the morning. I set my alarm for several hours before opening, messaged my husband, Ken, that I was doing so, and laid in bed til the small hours, mind alight with thoughts of food. Flavor. Possibility. Not an iota of doubt, not a second of compromise, only the singular acceptance of I want to eat only what tastes best. 

Now, anyone who knows me well knows one absolute truth about me: I am, in my way, a selfish person. I simply won't do what I don't want to do. I won't eat what I don't want to eat. I will cut ties with anything that no longer serves me, and move on to what is next best for me without a backwards glance. 

The flip side of this is, of course, that 'what is next best' will never be handed to me. It'll only be fought for, earned, wanted and pursued. Love is something like selfishness for me, an irresistible urge, a need to have one person I please; it comes on hard and hungry and all-consuming. I told Ken I'd marry him before anyone less devoured by the need to love and be loved would have even thought about forever. He's the person I want to look at over as many of the meals remaining in my life as possible. Love recognizes and cherishes everything human about someone, sees character instead of flaws, and it means neither of us would give the other anything less than our best. 

How do I put that emotion on a plate? 

How do I display that every person I cook for matters to me? I want only a beautiful life; I want only to know, and to feed, people whose hearts hold kindness and empathy as valuable as mine. So I'll only ever serve them the most beautiful food I have access to in that moment.

What a shift of perspective. What a realization. 

In my adult relationship with food, I’ve understood it as an act of necessity, an act of love, and an act of passive aggression; in my teenage relationship with food, I saw it as an act of identity and appreciation; as a child, I remember food being something I tolerated, interspersed with moments where it became the source of my strongest memories:

The taste of honeysuckle nectar accompanied by cool morning dew and my father’s smiling blue eyes. The floral, tangy heart of a clover flower and the delightful lemony pucker of wood sorrel stem, which I could have eaten by the handful if the other kids didn’t think it was weird. Massive pots of spaghetti sauce rich with sausage and bell pepper and onion, before the divorce. After, morning coffee, a sunshine memory turned stress trigger. My first taste of baklava, when I did a report on Greece from my home encyclopedias, so old I remember to this day that they said Greece had a king, although my mom has argued this is impossible as Greece last had a king in 1974 and there’s no reason we’d have an encyclopedia set 9 years older than me. Regardless, some encyclopedia somewhere said Greece had a king, and I was disinclined towards using more than the two sources I already had: this encyclopedia, and my imagination.

All of that, from merely recalling the taste of phyllo and honey and walnut, a massive flat of which my mom dutifully picked up from a restaurant and sent along with me to school the day of my presentation on Greece and its king. I didn’t know what baklava was, only that it was a very Greek food and the other thing, olives, wasn’t sugary. I’ll never forget, and honestly still only halfway forgive myself for, the distress in her voice when she picked me up from school and saw that sticky, empty baklava container, not a single piece saved for her. I can’t try to imagine how she felt, because I can only imagine the most dramatic ways I would feel. I don’t even think of Chris Kiss-a-Cabbage anymore, the centre of my obsessions at that time despite (because of?) his name, who was personally gifted the best looking piece. 

The other part of childhood was food as something to be tolerated. My mom wasn’t an adventurous cook, although that comes with an important caveat I’ll write about soon, and I really don’t remember what she even prepared for us when she and my dad were still married. My kitchen memories from then are sparse, but they’re him, in the wood-paneled space on Turf Drive with the big windows that let in the morning glow. Once I know the marriage is over, most of my memories of food are lukewarm. The temperature of the cheap chain burgers, plain and dry, shoved into bags by the dozens as my now estranged father and casually evil stepmother tried to feed the six kids – “three are mine, three are his, but together, they’re ours,” she loved to say to strangers who admired how she handled us in public – shoved into the cab and bed of his truck or squeezed two between them in the front seats and four beside each other in the back of her car. With mom, it’s Shake n Bake porkchops, tougher than any meat I’ve eaten since, and frozen vegetables from bags boiled until they fell apart on themselves. Instant mashed potatoes, margarine, boring meals made from the perspective that they were a chore by myself and/or my mom, all served with frustration at having to do it, all tasting terrible. 

And still I knew that she made it with love. One of the times in my life I recall feeling the most guilty, the most oh no I fucked up, has to do with feeling like I hurt my mom. I was young enough to care what people thought about me, and upon opening my lunchbox, saw she had packed me peanut butter and jelly – acceptable – on whole wheat bread – not acceptable. Horrifying, in fact. I didn’t even open the Ziploc bag. I just mushed it up with my aggressive little fingers until the sandwich looked as disgusting as I thought it would be to eat, and then I threw it in the trash rather than leave the bag in my lunchbox for my mom to recycle, a thing I cared about, like I did most days.

Then I started crying. Because I knew she’d packed it with love. Even if she gave me the worst bread in the world, it was really rude of me to treat something she made like garbage. I think I apologised to her, literally that night, for throwing the sandwich away even though she loved me, and in my memory she’s gently laughing it off. I was probably a melodramatic kid. It’d check out with the way I’m a melodramatic adult.

Honestly, this entire piece began as a text message to my mom, that I then realized was going to be a little longer than I wanted to type on my phone so I should get on my computer, that became a draft in Discord except I hit a character limit and realized I had more to say, so I moved to a word processor. I owe her a lot.  So I’ll stop thinking about ways I’ve hurt her, real and not, for a little while, to write a little more about the important caveat mentioned earlier.

My mom was and is an adventurous eater. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen her say no to trying something new. She’s the source of so many thrilling food memories. Sometime after the divorce, she started seeing a Navy engineer named Gerry, and he had money and good taste in food and took enough joy in it to treat his new girlfriend and her three shitty kids to meals at restaurants we’d otherwise never experience. My favourite was a Mexican place – I loved the way that walking in felt like another world entirely, the door shutting out the traffic and concrete of Virginia Beach and the interior somehow both so dark and contained and so colourful and intriguing. It felt like a secret. We’d tuck into a heavy wooden booth and as far as I remember, Gerry would order for us. This seems important because I suddenly recall the first time I ordered for myself.

Gerry and my mom took me to their favourite Japanese restaurant (their favourite! Did they try multiple? Was my mom secretly a foodie in the 1990s Chesapeake Bay area? I’ll have to ask), I assume now for a birthday. Maybe it was the same birthday I received a gift from ​my teacher, Ms Gaida, and her fiancé, whose name I’ve since forgotten but who was a college professor. Hers, a thing I regard as titillating, now, imagining him visiting her in the Catholic school she taught at, the connection they must have shared, the both of them certainly romantics as they gifted a 5th grader with a writer’s soul half a dozen books of classic poetry – I hope they’re still happy.

There we are, at the Japanese restaurant, and I remember looking over the menu extremely carefully. My mom and Gerry were going to order sushi, raw fish, a nauseating thought, so I had to figure out by myself what I wanted. It’s funny to me now to realise that I opted for the closest thing to that rubbery, too crisp porkchop my mother kept forcing me to eat at home: tonkatsu.

The tonkatsu was so delectable that I decided to trust my mom, and try sushi. Maybe those things happened in quick succession; maybe they didn’t. I only remember the direct line between them.

So. Gerry. Mexican. Japanese. An adult world where my mom, who had gone out dancing on Fridays before him, might have been visiting a new restaurant every week, and a new spin on a despised old familiar, breaded pork cutlet. 

Eventually, we all moved in together, to a beautiful house on Shoshone Court. Our neighbour’s front yard was entirely bamboo, and it spilled into the creek behind us, and I stood in the stalks thrilled by the dark and quiet density of their dramatic, foreign heights. I still expect Chinese restaurants to deliver at ungodly hours, due to Gerry and mom ordering it well after myself and my siblings had said our goodnights. I’m still desperately sad when I realize most restaurants close at 10pm and are not, in fact, preparing fresh crab rangoon and General Tso’s chicken and eggrolls at half past bedtime. 

Some time after that, we moved out. To Connecticut, where mom and dad’s family both lived, where they’d met. Gerry wouldn’t marry her, and mom made a choice to bring her kids home. I don’t want to guess at her motivations. I could ask her. I can imagine. What else could a single mom of three, moving back to family, want? 

Support. Community. Love.

Connecticut was heaven, I thought. I was an audacious kid, punch drunk on stories about man and dog facing the wilderness, convinced fairies and magic existed and I just had to be open to being guided by them. What could be better than to finally get away from mom’s stinky boyfriend and my increasingly confusing, stressful, restrictive relationship with my dad, and be welcomed by the forest? I felt like our property was magical.

It is. It’s classic New England. Our houses are a little shabby, a little aged. They’ve been painted dozens of times over the years, because our men are contractors, but usually just the same functional shade of white. There’s a hockey goal visible from the road, although it’s seen significantly better days. Back when the intersection didn’t have a stoplight and before the antique shop on the corner, for some ancient small town reason not bordered by the same guardrail that protected us, got hit by cars so many times that no one would insure it anymore. 

My mom’s appreciation for food expressed itself even when her ability to prepare it fell short. Every single autumn, I crave a hot apple cider from Buell’s Orchard, served directly to me steaming in the crisp air. Nothing I can make at home or find in Texas will ever compare to that flavor, and she’s the one who introduced me to it. I know what strawberries taste like fresh off the vine when you’re supposed to be putting them into your little pick-your-own pint instead, because of her. I tried fresh river trout because she brought us back home, where our grandpa fished at dawn and cooked his catch on the massive grill set outside the cavernous garage where all the adults congregated on summer nights. I have strong opinions on fried dough’s superiority to funnel cakes because she brought us to the Woodstock Fair and said she loved them, and the first taste of dough fresh and hot from the oil and delightfully sticky with the strange, sweet meltiness of powdered sugar remains with me. It’s a mystery to me that my mom isn’t confident in the kitchen, because she loves food and she knows what tastes good. I love summer squash because she fed us zucchini our neighbour Wendell “I Said, Wendell” shared with us every day, usually just lightly sauteed with margarine and salt or baked into a zucchini bread. I was probably an absolute bitch about it all at the time, because my audacious child grew into a monstrous teenager, but I appreciate it now. 

My mom made a huge, brave change recently and, for the first time in her life, has chosen to put herself first, to shape her life into what she wants it to be. I’m so immensely proud of her for this, and talking to her now, seeing the way some of the jagged edges have softened and hearing about the things she’s enjoying, how she’s still trying day by day to feel more like herself, brings me immense peace. I don’t think there’s a moment of our childhood when she put herself ahead of us. She could try to argue this with me now and I wouldn’t accept it. When my relationship with my dad felt completely shattered and ephemeral, a thing leaving my life, my relationship with my mom felt completely solid. It always has. Because she exists, I exist, and there’s nothing impermanent about that bond. 

Why would I ever feed her anything less than the absolute best I can? Did she ever feed us anything else? If I know the best lettuce is at a farmer’s market on Saturday, why wouldn’t I make anyone I care about a salad on that day, with that lettuce? Something else is better somewhere else on Friday, and I’ll find that to cook it for my husband. He deserves it, and so do I. So does anyone.

It’s fitting that on the day I have an epiphany about food as flavor, I also have one about food as community. At the farmer’s market, as I stood at SEEK Sourdough Artisan Bread’s booth and listened to the baker talk about his gorgeous product, another customer walked over. He grabbed one of the olive focaccia from the selection before me and paid for it with the sort of confidence that suggested he’d done this many times before. “Is that your favourite?” I asked him.

“I’ve never tried it before,” he said, and then: “Do you want to try it together?”

Do you want to try it together? Glorious. It gives me goosebumps. We’re strangers, but we’re in the same place for the same exact thing: the experience of flavor, the culmination of ingredients and skill and love and effort, in every single step of the supply chain. I’ve been daydreaming about someone asking me a question I can answer that way.

I’ve been tasting food today in a manner I never have before. It’s different. Everything is different, now. I’ve tasted the dark green of a mature spring onion. The transitional green. The white. The root. I’ve bitten them through with my teeth, and I’ve tasted them cut with my knife. I ate a tiny one I found hiding among its siblings, trying to consume it small bite by small bite and finally, gluttonously, popping the last third into my mouth to crunch down on with gusto. My favourite bite of the day was a pickled jalapeno, sized generously and rich with seeds that I expected to challenge me. It felt so rewarding, spicy and salty and vegetal and acidic, the texture giving but still firm as the best pickles are, an explosion of flavour so satisfying that I immediately stuck my fingers into the jar to fish another one out for Ken. I had to go downstairs and get a fork and come back up, and it was worth the time and the physical effort just to pluck it out and pass it to him and say, here, try this, it’s delicious.

What else is love?

That stranger showed me love today because we both want the same thing for ourselves, our loved ones, anyone’s loved ones: good food. Real food. Grown by real people whose voices strengthen, quicken, with every question I ask, until the excitement is nearly physical in the air between us: we both love food. We both made a pact, conscious or not, to eat only the best thing available to us at any given moment.

It’s impossible to express how ravenous this has made me. Why aren’t I eating the sun-dried tomato focaccia downstairs? I know it’s fresh. I know it’s delicious, and crafted with care, and it’s just sitting on the counter. The sungolds that were the most gorgeous pops of sweet acidic umami before the sun peaked had already lost a touch of that glorious heat-kissed freshness when I ate another handful three hours later. There is a point at which everything tastes its absolute best, and it feels irresponsible to either let that moment pass or to serve food that is at anything less than its peak.

Overnight, the latent environmentalist, the hippie everyone joked I’d grow up to be, has reawoken. She’s stretched from her long slumber and said, ah, you’ve finally connected the dots. There is no future in which regenerative organic food practices should be anything less than the standard in my kitchen. I can’t enjoy the best possible flavor at every meal without communal agriculture and hyperlocal eating. And I’m selfish, so why would I expect anything less than that? Why would I settle for anything less on every plate? I see the idealism and the naivete of this, but I see the sustainability and the history of it, too. Am I willing, every day, to live and behave in a way that centres flavor? 

As long as I try to be a little bit better about this tomorrow than I was today, I am living like that. I am living the way I want. 

Shouldn’t we all?