Compost (Abridged)

For over a year I’ve been tensely reflecting on and avoiding reflecting on my relationship to a) food and b) cooking. The former is easy: I want it and need it; I have impulsive desires when I think of certain forms of it, usually the kind that are never sated, so I often stick to the immediate and attainable (fries and bad white wine). The latter makes me emotional, gives rise to difficult, automatic thoughts: Everything I make is slop. I’ve lost my touch. I wish I could cook someone dinner. I wish someone would cook me dinner. Even a can of soup! Desire is the root of all suffering. Why did I buy so much kale?

I wrote a letter to a friend and put it in a zine in the summer of 2020:

Dear Emma,

It’s July 27th, which means it’s been 134 days since lockdown started, 133 days since _____ came to stay, and 68 days since he left.

Like you, I cooked for two almost every day. I don’t know if you or I would consider it fun under the circumstances, but it was a kind of entertainment. You’ve seen the photos. I made tamales, tagliatelle bolognese, pork belly steamed buns, sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves, milk bread, kimchi hotpot, potato curry and roti from an aunt’s recipe. I kneaded dough and let it rise while I worked on my design projects. I cut carrot coins into cherry blossoms. Cooking offered the sense of control I couldn’t find in almost every other aspect of Living in 2020. And in almost every instance, the food was good.

Now solitary, my meals are basically compost. I eat bread heels and shriveled halves of zucchini. I scramble a single egg and chase it with apple slices. I shouldn’t say I’m alone — I eat while watching YouTube videos of beautiful Chinese women cooking multiple courses for their friends or cats.

I want to say that I prepare dinner for myself as lovingly as I would a partner or friend or pet. But habits are mirror images. And the truth is that I don’t treat myself well in a multitude of ways, in rooms outside the kitchen, in moments when I’m not compelled by biological instinct.

I think in time I could bring myself to use the nice plates, eat more protein, more good fats, make a jar of marmalade just for me. There is work involved. But I do have a lot of time.

I’ll send pics.

But the habit of eating what I called compost would stick. The primary way a long-distance relationship functions is through hope, and if not hope, then rigorous planning. I was running on hope for five years, at times just wisps of it, sustaining myself in the most rudimentary ways in order to get through to the next month, the next visit, the next year when everything would come together, when we would come together, and it didn’t matter where, just that it was permanent. A time when he would make me coffee in the morning and I would think about what to make for dinner in the afternoon and by night we would have it all, and be content. Ad infinitum.

It turns out planning counts for a lot. And it can be difficult to think yourself worthy of good things, nourishment and fripperies both, when decay begins to feel like a continuous state instead of an inherent part of a cycle. The swing between what I cooked for us and what I cooked when we were apart was so extreme, I began to see myself—in the kitchen and outside of it—as a fragmented, half-feral creature, carrying my groceries up the hill to my apartment with a howl lodged in my throat.

Here versus there. Now versus then. Waking up with an arm tucked under my ribs versus the morning after saying goodbye at the train station. The dissonance between orange trees and evergreens. How could I produce such gratifying things for us both and then cook nothing of note, sometimes bleak embarrassments, for myself? Was I not the one doing the work in both kitchens, both countries?

By the end, it felt so obvious, inevitable, that neither of us could sustain the other when we could barely sustain ourselves. One of the last emails he sent me ended with the line, “God, I’ll miss your cooking.”

I don’t deny that food, its preparation as much as its consumption, is about sharing, about connectedness. But that’s not all that it’s about. There seems to me to be something robustly affirmative about taking trouble to feed yourself; enjoying life on purpose, rather than by default.

Even in culinary terms alone there are grounds for satisfaction. Real cooking, if it is to have any authenticity, any integrity, has to be part of how you are, a function of your personality, your temperament.

—Nigella Lawson (Eating, 1998)

Compost (Then)

• Rotisserie chicken, thighs eaten first out of the package with bare hands

• Shredded cabbage omelets with or without chili crisp

• Mixing bowls of salad greens with half a cup of microwaved rice and Korean seaweed cut with scissors mixed in

• Canned (canned!!) dolmades, but only eaten three at a time

• Lacinato kale cooked with garlic and water, maybe a scrap of pancetta from the freezer, baguette ends thrown in like the worst ribollita you’ve ever seen

• Sky Flakes and a square of dark chocolate, the kind of snack I imagine existed in a Hong Kong prison in the 1980s

• Late night Indomie after the bar which gave me a stomachache and a bad sleep 100% of the time

Sustenance (Now)

• Solo hot pot with laptop TV

• A jar of preserved quince, garnet red

• Pozole verde from rotisserie chicken bones, with all the garnishes

• Walnut miso with mixed grain rice

• Zucchini cooked the Rachel Roddy way

• A medium rare square of flatiron steak eaten after my period

• Chinese herbal soup, with dried lily flowers to forget my sorrows

• A kale soup with butter beans and guanciale, made with some encouragement and much more care

• My aunt’s Fijian-style roti, to replicate memories

• Everything with herbs from my garden
  

I suppose the update is that I’m “living with intention” or whatever. It mostly feels like having hope in the present, which historically has been an uncomfortable, prickly place. There’s regular hope, too, like looking forward to summer, and cooking and eating with friends. I’m remembering that compost serves a purpose.

On another note:

So I’ve been reflecting. I had the idea to re-activate my recipe Patreon in March. I baked a cake, wrote some words about the cake. It didn’t sit right with me, so I let it sit longer in drafts. And then I bonked my head on my kitchen cupboard and I’ve been finding my way back and/or forwards since.

But I do know: For now, I like reading recipes more than I like writing them. I like cooking more than measuring and taking process photos, too. I want the things that I show you—give you—to have material and emotional weight, like a gigantic flower, or a big bowl of chocolate pudding. I’m still trying to figure out what it is I want to show you. It’s all in pieces currently, but as a lover of trinkets, I’m starting to think that pieces might be the medium. And if not pieces: parts, breadcrumbs, a path, a trail.