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If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury
From the James Beard Award–winning blogger behind The Everywhereist come hilarious, searing essays on how food and cooking stoke the flames of her feminism.
When celebrity chef Mario Batali sent out an apology letter for the sexual harassment allegations made against him, he had the gall to include a recipe—for cinnamon rolls, of all things. Geraldine DeRuiter decided to make the recipe, making food journalism history along with it. Her subsequent essay, with its scathing commentary about the pervasiveness of misogyny in the food world, would be read millions of times, lauded by industry luminaries from Martha Stewart to The New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells—and it would land DeRuiter in the middle of a media firestorm. She found herself on the receiving end of dozens of threats when all she wanted to do was make something to eat (and okay, maybe also take down the patriarchy).
In If You Can’t Take the Heat, DeRuiter shares stories about her shockingly true, painfully funny (and sometimes just painful) adventures in gastronomy. We’ll learn how she finally got a grip on her debilitating anxiety by emergency meal–planning for the apocalypse. (“You are probably deeply worried that in times of desperation I would eat your pets. And yes, I absolutely would.”) Or how she learned to embrace her hanger. (“Because women can be a lot of things, but we can’t be angry. Or president, apparently.”) And how she inadvertently caused another international incident with a negative restaurant review. (She made it on to the homepage of The New York Times’s website! And got more death threats!)
Deliciously insightful and bitingly clever, If You Can’t Take the Heat is a fresh look at food and feminism from one of the culinary world’s sharpest voices.
When celebrity chef Mario Batali sent out an apology letter for the sexual harassment allegations made against him, he had the gall to include a recipe—for cinnamon rolls, of all things. Geraldine DeRuiter decided to make the recipe, making food journalism history along with it. Her subsequent essay, with its scathing commentary about the pervasiveness of misogyny in the food world, would be read millions of times, lauded by industry luminaries from Martha Stewart to The New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells—and it would land DeRuiter in the middle of a media firestorm. She found herself on the receiving end of dozens of threats when all she wanted to do was make something to eat (and okay, maybe also take down the patriarchy).
In If You Can’t Take the Heat, DeRuiter shares stories about her shockingly true, painfully funny (and sometimes just painful) adventures in gastronomy. We’ll learn how she finally got a grip on her debilitating anxiety by emergency meal–planning for the apocalypse. (“You are probably deeply worried that in times of desperation I would eat your pets. And yes, I absolutely would.”) Or how she learned to embrace her hanger. (“Because women can be a lot of things, but we can’t be angry. Or president, apparently.”) And how she inadvertently caused another international incident with a negative restaurant review. (She made it on to the homepage of The New York Times’s website! And got more death threats!)
Deliciously insightful and bitingly clever, If You Can’t Take the Heat is a fresh look at food and feminism from one of the culinary world’s sharpest voices.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published March 12, 2024
About the author
Geraldine DeRuiter
5 books248 followersGeraldine DeRuiter is founder of The Everywhereist blog, which TIME magazine described as "consistently clever" (note: Geraldine brings this up a lot. Even when it's not pertinent to the conversation). While ostensibly a travel writer, she also writes extensively about desserts she's enjoyed as well as Jeff Goldblum's entire filmography. Rather miraculously, her work has also garnered the attention of FORBES Magazine, which listed her blog as one of its Top 10 Lifestyle Websites for Women for 3 consecutive years, and THE INDEPENDENT, who included her on their list of 50 Best Travel Websites. (So, you know, that TIME thing was not just a fluke or a result of the editorial team getting drunk.)
When not on the road with her long-suffering and infinitely patient husband, Rand, Geraldine can be found in Seattle, usually fighting with people on the internet.
When not on the road with her long-suffering and infinitely patient husband, Rand, Geraldine can be found in Seattle, usually fighting with people on the internet.
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May 22, 2024This book is part of what I like to call the cozy feminism genre. It's not a bracing call to the barricades that asks you to completely reconsider the world we live in but it's a validation of (some of) our experiences and an honest look at the absurdity of diet culture (and how it morphed into the more pervasive wellness culture) and how we fall for it.
DeRuiter shares her experience of being a woman with an online presence in a way that I found quite refreshing and very validating.
My reading experience was akin to sitting with a friend, it's not necessarily going to change your life but it's going to make you feel seen and somewhat sane for a moment.
There are a lot of eminently quotable lines in there and great quips about Florida (who doesn't love dunking on Florida these days?).
There's a bit about how in Quebec people eat the sacred host wafers that didn't quite meet the standard as a snack and I would like to add that we don't just eat retailles d'hosties we also eat the wafers that would have made it, it's like a whole thing here, we like our guilt that much (I can say that I'm technically still a Catholic with all the guilt that comes with it).
No rating because I do not rate memoirs but I really enjoyed my time with this book.
DeRuiter shares her experience of being a woman with an online presence in a way that I found quite refreshing and very validating.
My reading experience was akin to sitting with a friend, it's not necessarily going to change your life but it's going to make you feel seen and somewhat sane for a moment.
There are a lot of eminently quotable lines in there and great quips about Florida (who doesn't love dunking on Florida these days?).
There's a bit about how in Quebec people eat the sacred host wafers that didn't quite meet the standard as a snack and I would like to add that we don't just eat retailles d'hosties we also eat the wafers that would have made it, it's like a whole thing here, we like our guilt that much (I can say that I'm technically still a Catholic with all the guilt that comes with it).
No rating because I do not rate memoirs but I really enjoyed my time with this book.
December 7, 2023
ARC courtesy of Crown Publishing.
Before reading this book I had no idea who Geraldine DeRuiter was. I now know she is a liberal feminist who unapologetically tells the truth about being a woman in the 21st century and I am here for it through every page. I don’t believe I have ever laughed out loud this much while reading a book. Her candor is refreshing and an absolute riot. It felt wonderful to have so many of my thoughts validated through Geraldine’s voice.
Before reading this book I had no idea who Geraldine DeRuiter was. I now know she is a liberal feminist who unapologetically tells the truth about being a woman in the 21st century and I am here for it through every page. I don’t believe I have ever laughed out loud this much while reading a book. Her candor is refreshing and an absolute riot. It felt wonderful to have so many of my thoughts validated through Geraldine’s voice.
March 24, 2024
This book made me laugh really hard, cry really hard, get really angry, get really hungry . . . sometimes within the same paragraph. DeRuiter's writing is intimate, making you feel as though you're listening to your best friend rant, so you laugh with her, and then you get angry on her behalf. And when she talks about her husband, or her family, or foods that she loves, you smile and nod and want to hug them (or eat them, depending on if it's family or food), and you feel like you know them, and her, so well. Finishing the book was like realizing that you're not going to see your funny friend for a while, and it made me more than a little sad.
December 29, 2023
This book is *chef’s kiss* perfection. Geraldine is generous and insightful. And she’s so brave to exist as a woman with—gasp—opinions on the internet.
I loved reading her personal stories, some I’d heard before in some form and others completely new to me. While learning about Geraldine’s life in food, I was flooded with my own long forgotten food memories. This book helped me to appreciate all the ways in which our most meaningful relationships—with our families, our friends, our communities, and ourselves—are wrapped up in food.
I’m so glad to have gotten my hands on an advance reader’s copy. My only teeny tiny quibble with this book is that it doesn’t come with a box of homemade baked goods. But maybe the hard copy does, which is only one of the reasons I look forward to reading this again when it hits the shelves in a few months.
I loved reading her personal stories, some I’d heard before in some form and others completely new to me. While learning about Geraldine’s life in food, I was flooded with my own long forgotten food memories. This book helped me to appreciate all the ways in which our most meaningful relationships—with our families, our friends, our communities, and ourselves—are wrapped up in food.
I’m so glad to have gotten my hands on an advance reader’s copy. My only teeny tiny quibble with this book is that it doesn’t come with a box of homemade baked goods. But maybe the hard copy does, which is only one of the reasons I look forward to reading this again when it hits the shelves in a few months.
July 4, 2024
I liked that it made me think about my first food memories. I liked the analysis of when/how women eat on TV.
But a lot of it felt kinda RGB-tote-bag cringe. I'm guessing many of these essays were written in 2014. Back then, I would've loved them! But that style of BuzzFeed-smash-the-patriarchy humor aged pretty poorly. Now, popular feminist writing seems to have a more serious tone and be more nuanced/intersectional. So it's jarring to time travel back to the "pizza rolls not gender roles" era.
But a lot of it felt kinda RGB-tote-bag cringe. I'm guessing many of these essays were written in 2014. Back then, I would've loved them! But that style of BuzzFeed-smash-the-patriarchy humor aged pretty poorly. Now, popular feminist writing seems to have a more serious tone and be more nuanced/intersectional. So it's jarring to time travel back to the "pizza rolls not gender roles" era.
July 10, 2024
I hadn't realized that I'd actually read some of DeRuiter's work before, until I got to chapter 12 (Bros'). The story of that meal is awful/hilarious and it was nice to revisit it (and I enjoyed how the author expanded on it). I also really enjoyed The Comments Section, In Case of Emergency: Break Fast, and most especially Gender Roles and Cinnamon Rolls. One frustration I had was that every essay felt a bit too long.
March 13, 2024
This book was an unexpected joy to read. I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed a book so much, I took photos of favorite sections. So many essays reminded me of my own memories around cooking, misogyny, and anger. The chapters “Secret Agents and Secret Recipes”, “The Only Thing In My Oven”, and “Old Haunts” were a few of my favorite chapters.
March 14, 2024
the perfect mix of feminine rage, humor, and food—chef’s kiss.
April 2, 2024
I want to thank the New York Times for their review of this book, which I did not read. It came accompanied by an illustration that upset the author, made the rounds on social media, and piqued my curiosity—that’s how the book landed in my hands.
This is a phenomenal collection of essays. I didn’t know DeRuiter was the genius behind the famous blog entry on the worst Michelin-starred restaurant experience ever. I also didn’t know anything about the chaos that ensued after it was published. The chapter on Julie & Julia holds a special place in my heart (I’ve been trying to power through Julie Powell’s Cleaving for a while now). I could go on and on pointing at the things I loved about each and every chapter, but I’ll just say that this was a great read all around, insightful and hilarious, and I’m glad I found it.
This is a phenomenal collection of essays. I didn’t know DeRuiter was the genius behind the famous blog entry on the worst Michelin-starred restaurant experience ever. I also didn’t know anything about the chaos that ensued after it was published. The chapter on Julie & Julia holds a special place in my heart (I’ve been trying to power through Julie Powell’s Cleaving for a while now). I could go on and on pointing at the things I loved about each and every chapter, but I’ll just say that this was a great read all around, insightful and hilarious, and I’m glad I found it.
April 11, 2024
This book was fine. I found several of the chapters to be very relatable and funny, and I am glad I read the book to have experienced my favorite parts of it, but every chapter felt too long. It was also at about the 70% mark that I decided that I don’t find the author very likable and started rolling my eyes.
My last note is maybe the most egregious one: there’s reference to an iconic argument in Sex and the City where Carrie explains that while she’s not allergic to parsley, she has to say that she is so that restaurants take her request for no parsley seriously. DeRuiter says that this fight happens with Big, but it actually happens with Berger, and that’s when I lost faith in the editor.
My last note is maybe the most egregious one: there’s reference to an iconic argument in Sex and the City where Carrie explains that while she’s not allergic to parsley, she has to say that she is so that restaurants take her request for no parsley seriously. DeRuiter says that this fight happens with Big, but it actually happens with Berger, and that’s when I lost faith in the editor.
April 9, 2024
This is sometimes funny, sometimes sweet, and often times poorly edited. Overall it was fine.
April 19, 2024
3.5 star
RTC
Happy Reading!!
RTC
Happy Reading!!
April 25, 2024
4.75 ⭐️
September 4, 2024
The subtitle says it all. It was often funny, sometimes poignant, sometimes maddening, sometimes sweet.
I found her when the NYT book review focused on her personal traits, not her writing, including that her reasons for not having children weren’t good enough for them. Little did we know the judgments of choosing not to have children that were to come...
I found her when the NYT book review focused on her personal traits, not her writing, including that her reasons for not having children weren’t good enough for them. Little did we know the judgments of choosing not to have children that were to come...
March 18, 2024
I don’t often literally mean that I laughed and cried, but I mean it this time: I cackled, I seethed, and at one point needed to put it down so I could go sob. Geraldine weaves her life and work into stories that are funny and deeply affecting. If she is “loud and irrational,” as the NYT review would have one believe, she is the kind of loud and irrational that so many of us are. Her work to make and keep a place for herself in the world is relatable and brave.
March 26, 2024
I love feeling like I'm the target audience for a book. Under discussion here: Red Lobster, Florida being terrible (agreed!), depictions of women in pop culture, the treatment of women in restaurants (as both patrons and employees/chefs), her takedown of Mario Batali, baking an almost-lost-to-history pie for her grandfather-in-law, her horrible meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant (and the backlash to her review of it), etc. The Comments Section was particularly funny. This is girl power in food essay form.
May 19, 2024
Hackneyed. Not worth finishing.
March 30, 2024
This was an excellent book about food writing, travel, feminism and how women are treated on social media. Each essay has a different topic but all talk about one or all of these themes.
My favorite essays were the ones about how she became famous on social media and in the food writing community. I remember learning about her when she wrote about Mario batalli’s sexual harassment “apology,” which, oddly, included a bad recipe for cinnamon rolls. The other one was her essay about the aftermath of the review she wrote for a Michelin starred restaurant in Italy which was painfully pretentious and literally named “Bros.”
The author has a very strong sense of humor, which means there are lots of jokes and self-deprecating humor in the book. This book is a quick and engaging read.
My favorite essays were the ones about how she became famous on social media and in the food writing community. I remember learning about her when she wrote about Mario batalli’s sexual harassment “apology,” which, oddly, included a bad recipe for cinnamon rolls. The other one was her essay about the aftermath of the review she wrote for a Michelin starred restaurant in Italy which was painfully pretentious and literally named “Bros.”
The author has a very strong sense of humor, which means there are lots of jokes and self-deprecating humor in the book. This book is a quick and engaging read.
June 8, 2024
I took so many photos of paragraphs while reading this and so glad I saw DeRuiter talk about her book in person a few months ago (thanks Laura Levy!). Highly recommend this book of food writing/memoir/essays filled with moments that made me laugh out loud. And I also appreciated how frequently DeRuiter acknowledged her privilege as a cis white woman, and that she uses her voice to call out the racism, misogyny and homophobia in the world of food writing and in the restaurant industry.
April 15, 2024
A great blend of feminine rage and humor. Plus fun stories about food. I think my favorite part was when she referred to Bobby Flay as "an arrogant bowl of potato salad."
May 28, 2024
i'd let this lady narrate my internal monolog
July 8, 2024
I just finished and want to go back immediately and reread several of the essays. I can’t seem to properly express how I found a similarity of understanding in some of the pieces (the heartbreaking essays about losing her father and a friendship ending) and just pure joy in several of her descriptions. Funny, spot-on observations, and emotional. This book made me feel a range of emotions in the best way. One of my favorite sentences, which I keep coming back to:
“You don’t get to ridicule someone’s body and demand that they hide it because you don’t like how looking at it makes you feel.”
Thiiiiiissssss!
“You don’t get to ridicule someone’s body and demand that they hide it because you don’t like how looking at it makes you feel.”
Thiiiiiissssss!
April 4, 2024
Actual Rating: 4.5 stars
Listened to audiobook
Witty, sarcastic, a little dark, this collection that mixes memoir and feminist essay is smart and funny. Always revolving around food, usually the memory of it, much in the vein of Stanley Tucci’s Taste: My Life Through Food, it recalls a certain nostalgia while also distinctly challenging many conservative perspectives.
Always appreciative of punny title chapters, my particular favourites were (based on content):
*My favourite chapter in the whole book and worth reading on its own if you’re not inclined to pick up the book as a whole.
Listened to audiobook
Witty, sarcastic, a little dark, this collection that mixes memoir and feminist essay is smart and funny. Always revolving around food, usually the memory of it, much in the vein of Stanley Tucci’s Taste: My Life Through Food, it recalls a certain nostalgia while also distinctly challenging many conservative perspectives.
Always appreciative of punny title chapters, my particular favourites were (based on content):
The Seafood Lover in Me
I’ll Have What I’m Having
What’s Cooking, and Who’s Cooking It
The Only Thing in My Oven
Paying the Price*
Gender Roles and Cinnamon Rolls
Hanger Management
A Moment in Pie
*My favourite chapter in the whole book and worth reading on its own if you’re not inclined to pick up the book as a whole.
August 10, 2024
Loved loved loved this book. Perfect balance of wit, culinary hot takes, and feminism.
March 15, 2024
Food and sense-memory are both so deeply intertwined with our closest relationships. I love cooking but don’t often read books on food, so I wasn’t sure how much I’d resonate with the themes before picking this up. But I’d read the author’s blog and social media, and loved her sense of humor.
The humor is here, in spades. I lol’d at least once a page, so at 336 pages… I definitely got my money’s worth in that department.
Imagine my surprise when so many of the food-related anecdotes landed hard for me as well. Her mother’s terrible baking (check). Learning to bake through trial and error (check). Beloved restaurants as an anchor for important life events (check check check).
The final chapter had me both laughing and crying, and also hungry. I think I might bake a pie this weekend.
The humor is here, in spades. I lol’d at least once a page, so at 336 pages… I definitely got my money’s worth in that department.
Imagine my surprise when so many of the food-related anecdotes landed hard for me as well. Her mother’s terrible baking (check). Learning to bake through trial and error (check). Beloved restaurants as an anchor for important life events (check check check).
The final chapter had me both laughing and crying, and also hungry. I think I might bake a pie this weekend.
April 6, 2024
The kind of book that makes me want to get back into writing!
“And there were some kids-extremely maladjusted kids, I might add, who probably grew up to tuck in their shirts with shorts and vote libertarian-who were not allowed to watch any television at all.
1. She doesn't eat. I'y not that she's starving herself, at least not canonically. It was just that she's bever seen consuming food, ever. It's as though she were the human equivalent of an air plant, sucking nutrients straight from the atmosphere, even as her male counterparts are allowed to go to restaurants and order food and consume calories. I've watched nearly every single episode of Friends at least once (il was the 1980s, I was young, mistakes were made, including a haircut that imalved *chunky layers." Let'» just move on). And without fail, all of the men eat. (There's an entire episode where Ross gets justifiably angry when someone eats his Thanksgiving leftaver sandwich) order food and consume calories. I've watched nearly every single episode of Friends at least once (it was the 1990s, I was young, mistakes were made, including a haircut that involved "chunky layers." Let's just move on). And without fail, all of the men eat. (There's an entire episode where Ross gets justifiably angry when someone eats his Thanksgiving leftover sandwich.)But the women don't. Hell, Monica is a chef, and while she's allowed to talk about food, the only time it's ever close to her mouth is when she puts a turkey on her head (she is shown eating, but it's when she's “Fat Monica" -Courteney Cox in a fat suit that appears in flashbacks and alternate realities. A specific brand of bullshit that I will address in #4.)
2. She eats garbage. She's basically a raccoon with breasts. She doesn't cook for herself, because-I don't know, she doesn't have time, she never learned, her parents died in a nutritionally well-balanced accident backstory, and we don't care about that. What we care about is a grown woman who eats candy for dinner, which is a signal that she's just a hilarious mess. This is the domain of Lorelai Gilmore, whose diet can be found on the shelves of a gas station, and Liz Lemon, angrily tucking into her plate of night cheese. Even Leslie Knope and Olivia Pope, who are stunningly competent in their careers and know exactly what they want, eat waffles or popcorn for dinner (Leslie refuses to eat salad because she “doesn't hate" herself). The Sexy Garbage Eater's tendency to eat Runts candy instead of fruit is a window into her disorganized soul, a signifier that despite her intelligence and her accomplishments, she's approachable, she doesn't have it all together, that she just might need someone (read: a rakishly handsome guy with floppy hair) to feed her. But, hey, all of these characters are thin, so it's okay to eat trash.
3. She's extremely picky about food and will therefore die alone. I've seen this scene in countless romantic comedies-a male character on an endless string of dates, wherein his female companion proves herself to be high maintenance based on the specificity of her ordering.
4. She's fat. She eats. For some reason, this is hilarious.
This is the low-hanging fruit on the comedy tree.
Look! A woman who is fat and eating food! Let us ridicule her for having a round body that consumes calories. I don't know when this narrative shift happened-it was way before I was born, and I think that the makers of aspartame are somehow to blame in all of this-but fat became something to be ashamed of, rather than just something that was, a part of our bodies that everyone had. And women who are hungry for food are often portrayed as hungry for love as well. Half of the time, these women aren't even fat. (NOTE: THIS DOES NOT MEAN IT IS OKAY TO TREAT PEOPLE WHO
5. She's the "She Doesn't Eat Like Other Girls" Girl. She eats like Joey Chestnut about to win his championship competitive eating title-entire hot dogs swallowed whole in a matter of seconds. She does it to illustrate that she's low maintenance, and "one of the guys," and has no gag reflex. She won't bother her spouse with the particularities of her appetites (be they carnal or emotional or epicurean), won't get upset when he fails to show up at her grandmother's funeral because he was too hungover from hanging out with his fraternity brothers. She is, to put it bluntly, not that particular about what she puts inside her body, and she is free from being food- or
There were life lessons that I started to glean from all of and there was no one around to tell me not to believe .. You can't be the high-maintenance crazy girl who s dressing on the side because she goes home alone and ved. You need to be the sort of girl who can devour a er while simultaneously looking as if you've never eaten a burger
Theres an expectation that women need to be up for anything, lest we be labeled frigid or a prude (the same high-maintenance and difficult argument but translated to sexual willingness). But the second you are up for anything, you're a slut. So you need to be completely willing and competently able to suck a dick. You need to have the enthusiasm of someone who has been walking across the desert for three days and believes that the penis that sits before them will, if stoked properly, spurt cool crystal spring water. But also?
You better not have sucked too many dicks. You need to be a dick-sucking prodigy, if you will. A natural at it, despite zero real-life experience. You need to coyly blush and say, "A pee-nis? I have never laid mine virgin eyes on one before. For, you see, Father forbids me to speak to menfolk!" And then you loosen your corset (I forgot to mention: You are wearing a corset) and proceed to go to town on that sucker like a milkmaid whose hands are tied behind her back. The Virgin-Whore Complex isn't new, but no one told us we had to be both at once.
The narrative has been baked in—so early and so deep-that you can't ask for too much, or be too much, or want too much, or make too much of a fuss. Even when someone treats you like garbage. Even long after you've learned that you deserve better. And so I said nothing.
I've accepted the feminist notion that women can do ything, but the idea that we don't have to do certain things taking a bit longer to sink in.
And sometimes, a glimmer of it would hit me. The idea of holding a small person who was mine. I was curious about it. But I didn't need it, the way I needed air, or water, or lemon pound cake with icing. I was happy with the life I had. had. When I thought about what it truly meant to have a child, I was indifferent. And I don't know if parents should be that. I think a prerequisite to being a parent is that you should want to be one. And there's a long diatribe here that I could go on about, but simply: Parenthood should always be a choice.
You'll change your mind.
It's a deeply condescending thing, to be told that you don't know yourself. To assume that I haven't gone over this question a thousand times, and nonstop for the week surrounding Mother's Day every year. That I haven't pulled my hair out and questioned whether I'm cold and dead inside (and maybe I am, but that's because I refused to cry during E.T., and not because of this). Sometimes I clench my teeth until they hurt, because my husband doesn't get lectured about needing to give me children, but I've been pulled aside and told I'm depriving him of something. I was once having a discussion with a man I knew who snapped at me that I needed to shut up because I didn't have kids. (Some-one hand me my penis-shrinking laser.) Somehow, I am blamed for a decision my husband and I both came to. One that he's always been more certain of than I've been.
It turns out that I'd received something called a ladies' menu-one in which the prices aren't listed, because it's presumed that the person reading it isn't going to pay for the meal. If you've ever gone to a fancy-pants wedding or a catered lunch, you've probably encountered one-just a list of dishes that are about to be served to you. But receiving one at a restaurant is an extremely rare occurrence. And in. the United States, it's unheard of, thanks to legendary lawyer Gloria Allred (who was personal lawyer to Norma McCorvey-the "Jane Roe" in Roe v. Wade, years after the landmark case). By the late twentieth century, ladies' menus were already largely obsolete in America-a relic of a bygone era.
As people of color and white women fought for more. rights within a white patriarchal system, restaurants played a pivotal role. These places, intimate and integral to every day life, had for so long been the domain of white people, and specifically of white men. (While white women had fewer rights than their white male counterparts, many were-and are-invested in preserving the existing racist hi-erarchy. Doing so kept them on a higher rung than most everyone else and meant that their spouses remained in unchecked positions of power. Even those who embraced feminism often failed to do so intersectionally, and were unwilling to acknowledge their inherent white privilege)
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 a recurring theme I've found:
The entire notion of fine dining service, and the proper behaviors expected from such an environment, rest on these antiquated gender roles. And to challenge these concepts-which are supposedly indications of polite, genteel society-is to risk coming across as unfeminine, difficult, and rude.
He is not the most high profile, and he is ostensibly not even the worst offender. But he is the only one who included a recipe.
And of course, the glaring question is why? Was his PR team drunk? Is life suddenly a really long, depressing SNZ sketch? Do these cinnamon rolls somehow destroy the patriarchy? Does the icing advocate for equal pay?
Batali's another drop in the bucket. He's not the first, he certainly won't be the last (he already isn't).
The misogyny runs so deep that the calls now come from inside our heads. We blame ourselves. We hate ourselves. We wonder if our skirts are too short, if our bodies are too noticeable. If we're asking for too much, or not enough. We don't trust ourselves, even when we should.
We try to follow a half-written recipe and think it's our fault when it doesn't work.
We need to undo an entire humanity's history worth of hate against women. Apologies are a good start.
Just skip the goddamn recipe.
In a particular lonely and deranged moment, I started regrowing my green onions in water. After many long days I trimmed them and showed Rand. He stared at my bounty, enough to conservatively garnish a single baked potato.
"You realize that green onions are like sixty-nine cents a bunch, right?" he said.
"I AM PROVIDING FOR OUR FAMILY," I yelled.
I thought when disaster struck, I knew exactly what I'd do I expected something to happen to subtly indicate we'd moved from "Before Times" to Cormac McCarthy's The Road, like a push alert on my phone or a handful of spectral horsemen riding across a flaming sky.
The magic and misery of living in one place for a long time is that it is filled with ghosts of the past: of relationships that have run their course, of now shuttered restaurants, of the person who you once were, spiky banged and insecure. Some days they are bittersweet reminders of the life you've lived. Some days you just feel haunted.
Wade through enough of them and the appeal of the comments section on a cooking site becomes staggeringly clear. Food is a perfect outlet for our anger, the one thing we can be frothingly opinionated about in a way that is safe, because it is both deeply personal and somehow doesn't make us feel vulnerable. People having different opinions from ours on this topic don't negate our humanity or value or make our safety feel threatened. They are just charlatans with no taste, but they can't hurt us. We can be as passionate as we like, and if we disagree, at the end of the day it's fine.
No one is going to outlaw pineapples on pizza or insist we eat turkey bacon or that we stir walnuts into our brownies. This is one place where our bodily autonomy remains se-cure, where we are still people in the eyes of those who disagree with us, where the crimes committed are against not us but the culinary world.
as far as anger goes, I'm on the highest rung of the privlege ladder for women who could express this emotion. I'm a white cis American woman in my forties; you better believe that if I ask to speak to the manager, I will get a refund or someone will honor a coupon that's so old it's actually a daguerreotype. I can complain without risk of death or arrest or even lifetime banishment. But even I've been socially trained to believe that I need to be nice to the guy from AAA who told me I got my flat tire because I was a bad driver even though the car was parked in my driveway at the time. And so while I wanted to shout "FUCK YOU, MIKE FROM MIKE'S FRIENDLY TOWING, I HOPE YOUR DICK IS CHEWED OFF BY SQUIRRELS," I tipped him.
Because I didn't want him to think I was a bad driver and a bitch.
This isn't new. There are literally ancient Greek myths about how an angry woman is an affront to nature. It's the whole story of Medea! She gets completely jilted by Jason (after Medea saves his life and helps him get the Golden Fleece and flat out gets exiled so he can be a hero, he runs off with a young princess-the fourth-century BC equivalent of a midlife crisis). And the allegory here is that if a woman gets pissed off at her husband, she will straight up become unhinged and murder her own children. Because we can be a lot of things, but we can't be angry (or president, apparently. Or have bodily autonomy in, like, thirty states).
But men are entitled to their anger. It is entertaining, and masculine, and somehow heroic and a sign that they are good fathers even if (and maybe because!) they kill a few people. It's the root of every superhero or action film ever. A man, up against the odds, and deeply pissed off.
«Powerlessness and Anger in African American Women: The Intersection of Race and Gender," this dynamic results in "heightened levels of emotional distress that include frus-tration, 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.
The phenomenon of hanger (a portmanteau of "hun-ger" and "anger") wasn't unique to me. According to Sophie Medlin, chair of the British Dietetic Association in London, a drop in blood sugar causes cortisol and adrenaline-the fight or flight hormones-to rise up. Our bodies feel as if they were under attack when we're hungry, which isn't entirely off base. (Evolutionarily speaking, it makes sense, too.
A hungry person who is angry will fight for the food they need to survive.) Biochemically, Medlin says, men have more receptors for neuropeptides-the chemicals that affect the brain and can trigger hanger. So they're theoretically more susceptible to it. Yet in one survey, women-and primarily young women under the age of fifty-were much more likely to report feeling hangry than their male coun terparts. Part of that may go back to how women are social-ized. If we're taught from a young age that our rage is unladylike and unseemly, we'd be more acutely aware of when that feeling came up.
Even the societal messages around hanger are deeply confusing and sexist, aiming to diminish any legitimate claim women might have to feeling pissed off. (Snickers commercials) The lesson: Being hangry makes you whiny and demanding and is a distinctly female trait. It's as though the only time a woman can be angry is under the guise of hanger. Moreover, men can't feel a version of anger that doesn't involve live hand grenades without literally turning into a woman.
The philosophy is outlined in Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturtevant's book Reclaiming Body Trust, in which they note that most people are born with body trust (this is why babies are so confident) and that a ousand things can happen which may rupture that rela-onship as we move through our lives. Negative comments om peers and family, depictions in the media, fatphobia, xism, racism, transphobia, homophobia, and the entire stitution of junior high gym class all erode the comfort at we have in our own bodies. Sometimes we don't even alize this is happening! we're a less sexy version of the Skeksis from The Dark Crystal and this is a reasonable reflection of reality, and it's all our fault and we deserve to die alone under a pile of mismatched socks.
The stealth of this self-hate is by design. The narrative around dieting has changed drastically in the last forty years, become obfuscated, harder to even identify as that.
But the morality of diets was even harder to argue gainst now; to do so meant you were arguing against the otion of being healthy. The shifting narrative around diet-ng from weight loss to wellness is just another way to dis-uise society's total disgust with our bodies, no matter the ize. We are told to embrace and love ourselves just as we re and at the same time told to change and improve our-elves through food restriction and extreme exercise.
Anger, when left unattended, isn't that different from hun-ger. It doesn't go away. It just grows, until it becomes un-wieldly and you find yourself in a parking lot, watching two pigeons fight over an everything bagel and wondering if you should join in. Like hunger, anger requires you to trust your-self. To know that what you are feeling isn't crazy, or silly, or irrational. I'd suppressed my negative feelings so much they only came out when I hadn't eaten, and by then it was an uncontrollable thing, something I didn't know how to calm down except by throwing bread at it.
Angry, hungry, fat-these are things women aren't sup-posed to be. We need, in every single way possible, to take up as little space as we can. Violate this, and you will be made to feel as though you'll wake up and find that undefin-able, nebulous thing that makes us all women has broken free from your body and is lying on the bed, like the tail of a startled lizard, still twitching, no longer a part of you.”
August 9, 2024
I’ve been in med school for a week but I feel as if I have the expertise to say that this baddie is exhibiting textbook signs of OCD
March 15, 2024
What a wonderful book!
It’s not food writing exactly, nor is it memoir or feminist commentary or modern history, but it’s all of those and also ferociously funny. And very good writing.
It’s not food writing exactly, nor is it memoir or feminist commentary or modern history, but it’s all of those and also ferociously funny. And very good writing.
March 28, 2024
I really enjoyed this series of essays from food writer, Geraldine DeRuiter.
She tells personal stories with heart and humor, all while connecting it to food and her (our?) relationship with it.
I listened to it on Audible, and DeRuiter was the narrator - so the stories felt extra personal. Every now and then she would deliver a line so perfectly - I would break out laughing. I do wish she had loosened up for all of her narration - because the book is best when she treats it as story telling.
She tells personal stories with heart and humor, all while connecting it to food and her (our?) relationship with it.
I listened to it on Audible, and DeRuiter was the narrator - so the stories felt extra personal. Every now and then she would deliver a line so perfectly - I would break out laughing. I do wish she had loosened up for all of her narration - because the book is best when she treats it as story telling.
June 7, 2024
Shocked this has >4 stars … when I started this book I had no idea that this was written by a food blogger and not a female chef. I continued listening but kept waiting for a discussion of her career or frankly any salient/interesting topics but instead what I got was: a hyperbolic, frankly obnoxious sense of humor; a lot of stories of minor inconveniences that the author/blogger turns into huge ordeals; a decided lack of plot, and so on.
Thoughts I had while listening to this book on tape:
If I hear one more attempted comedic line that makes an analogy to something I will scream. (Example ‘I devoured it like I hadn’t eaten in months’) etc. She has a particular proclivity for making an analogy and then coming back to it in the next sentence and it is so tired and cringe.
This author is trying soooo hard to be relatable (comments like ‘I shove food into my mouth constantly’ and ‘I hate myself!’ or something like this) and it’s painful to listen to.
The version of “feminism” and discussion of “oppression” that she is marketing is really just White feminism… I will credit the author with admitting to her own privilege as a White woman, but this felt like an admission made with no real weight behind it… why not tell more stories about the experiences of women of color working in the food industry? Why not use your platform to elevate other voices? She is a cis White female who is a travel blogger and works from home … she is not an authority on oppression.
The author is complaining about a few menus without prices being given to women at fine dining restaurants. Yes, that’s annoying. Yes, women should be able to pay for a meal. But guess what hon, not all of us can even fucking afford to eat at these establishments. This book over all just felt like a rant at whatever bots are commenting on her essays or blog posts.
Thoughts I had while listening to this book on tape:
If I hear one more attempted comedic line that makes an analogy to something I will scream. (Example ‘I devoured it like I hadn’t eaten in months’) etc. She has a particular proclivity for making an analogy and then coming back to it in the next sentence and it is so tired and cringe.
This author is trying soooo hard to be relatable (comments like ‘I shove food into my mouth constantly’ and ‘I hate myself!’ or something like this) and it’s painful to listen to.
The version of “feminism” and discussion of “oppression” that she is marketing is really just White feminism… I will credit the author with admitting to her own privilege as a White woman, but this felt like an admission made with no real weight behind it… why not tell more stories about the experiences of women of color working in the food industry? Why not use your platform to elevate other voices? She is a cis White female who is a travel blogger and works from home … she is not an authority on oppression.
The author is complaining about a few menus without prices being given to women at fine dining restaurants. Yes, that’s annoying. Yes, women should be able to pay for a meal. But guess what hon, not all of us can even fucking afford to eat at these establishments. This book over all just felt like a rant at whatever bots are commenting on her essays or blog posts.
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