Tamar Adler is the author of An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, The Everlasting Meal Cookbook, and most recently Feast on Your Life.

Alicia: Hi, Tamar. Thank you so much for taking the time out to chat.

Tamar: Hi, it's wonderful to talk to you. 

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Tamar:I grew up in Westchester, New York, which is about an hour and a half south of where I live now. And because you were so generous in sending some of the questions that you wanted to ask me along beforehand, I thought about this one a lot. Because I realized that there are these like—there's a tendency to try to narrativize one's own life in a coherent way, and that every time I answer a question like this, I tell one version of the narrative, and that it's actually not super coherent. 

And like I was remembering that I ate chocolate Pop Tarts for breakfast, which I've never put into any story of what I ate because I also had this kind of unbelievable, gastronomical upbringing because my mom is an incredible cook. And it was—my mom was a developmental psychologist, but she worked in a really, really hard area. She worked at Albert Einstein in the Bronx, and specifically with foster children with developmental disabilities, and their foster parents. And it was just like, it was just hard, and grueling, and she had terrible stories. And she was really beaten down and she took refuge in the kitchen. And so she cooked incredible food. Like, I used to take smoked mozzarella and eggplant and pesto sandwiches on focaccia to school and just like, it was not, you know, it wasn't standard. She loved it.

That was a big part of it, but I hated food. And she was a super young mother; she had me when she was 24, she got married at 19. The fact that I hated food meant that if ever I wasn't eating, she would like flip out and try to find a way to compensate for that. So it was like this funny mix of—my father was 11 years older than her and Middle Eastern. So we had this like, really amazing Mediterranean, homemade diet, where like, there was hummus every meal, and Israeli pickles and olives, and like, this sort of very, you know, like, rooted and real culinary existence. And then also, I was a picky skinny kid. And so I had, like, every kind of sugary cereal you could possibly want. I had, I mean, maybe not Lucky Charms, but only because they weren't kosher. But I had like, Cinnamon Toast Crunch. And chocolate Pop Tarts, that was like a several year long thing. And then sometimes a chocolate Pop Tart and Carnation instant breakfast in the hope of like, you know, just like getting me to wear, you know, pants that wouldn't fall down and stuff like that. Yeah, so it was like a mix of hyper-processed, just anything that a kid would eat. And, you know, like, the Mediterranean diet before that was even—I mean, I'm sure it was a thing, but certainly wasn't going on in a lot of my friends’ houses.

Alicia: And I mean, that's so interesting, because obviously the next question is that you were an editor at Harper's before you turn to food and now that I know you didn't like to eat as a kid, it's especially interesting, I guess, to understand how you made this move in your in your career. So how did that switch happen?

Tamar: Well, that was another—it's another thing where I think I've tended to narrativize it one way and it is other ways, too. Because when I was, I was an editor at Harper's for I guess, three years, during that time, I developed a just a real, like a full, full passion for cooking. I was just totally, I was in love. I loved reading food magazines. And I loved, you know, going to the Chelsea Market and buying Italian olive oil and I loved the farmers’ market and I loved learning about food sourcing and about organic and biodynamic farming. 

But I had kind of a false start with food because I got—I was really, really in love with it like, like the way you fall in love with a human. And then I thought, well, you know, I was so young, I was like 22, I think, when I got to Harper's and I just got really lucky and ended up kind of like, rising there. So I was a, you know, a full editor, but I was like, you know, 23, 24, 25, really, very kind of early in my grown-up life, and I decided that I wanted to go to see if I—I like decided to give myself this test where in order to test my love of cooking, I would get Gabrielle Hamilton to let me work at Prune on the weekends, but not quit my job as an editor. And that that was just gonna like—that was going to answer the question. Which is a super like, it's a naive and charming and bold thing to do now thatI think about it. 

But she had said, like, ‘No, I'm not gonna let you do that. And I don't think you're gonna really learn anything this way.’ And then I was super persistent, and there's this wonderful story that I've told a billion times where finally she kept on, like, saying no, or no, it was I hadn't actually talked to her yet. I would go to Prune at lunchtime, and talk to people who were working in there, and they were like, she's not here. She's not here. And then her pastry chef, like the third time I went, her pastry chef was like, ‘Well, if you're an editor, why don't you write her a letter? Because she's a writer.’ It was a long time before Gabrielle started, really started her writing career. So I wrote her a letter. And she actually called me and when I got back to my office at Harper's, there was a voicemail for me saying, like, you can come in, and so I ended up somehow convincing her and I would work. I worked brunch there. Which was terrifying, right? On Saturdays for three months. And I never told anybody at Harper's, but it went okay. I mean, it sometimes didn't go okay; she pulled me off the line once, I was like burning hundreds of dollars’ worth of food. And, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't really smooth or effortless, but it was happening. But then I quit. After three months, I was like, I can't. 

At that point, I really wanted to—I was feeling quite ambitious. And I felt like I needed to work weekends at Harper's, too, because I wanted to, like rise and excel. And I just felt like I was like between two worlds. And she was like, great, you should definitely not be a cook, like go back to Harper's. And then I quit Harper's not that long after that, like maybe six months or a year. But I didn't quit to cook, I actually quit, when I did quit, I quit because I thought I wanted to go to law school. I felt like I was—it was like part of wanting to cook was that I wanted to not be sitting in this chair so far away from life. Like, you know, it was just so removed. And Harper's especially was so removed on so many levels. I just felt like my heart was turning black. And so somehow, like the fact that I wanted to cook and the fact that I wanted to go to law school seemed very connected. 

So I studied for—I quit Harper's, studied for the LSAT, and while I was studying for the LSAT, I worked as a personal chef and a research assistant for Dan Barber. And then when I ended up becoming a real full-time cook. I was supposed to be going to law school; I deferred for a year. And I was going for immigration law. So I was sort of on the fence about Georgetown versus Michigan versus Chicago and I ended up deferring from Georgetown.

And then during that year of deferral, I just became—I had to choose, and cooking sort of had me in its grips. So that's the super-long and but totally fragmented story.

Alicia: And I mean, that's so fascinating. And so when did you decide to start writing about food?

Tamar: I tried to write about food while I was an editor at Harper's, but I was too scared to do it. And I wrote one piece and I showed it to the deputy editor and he said, ‘Well, what I've learned from this is that you can write but you would have to rewrite this entire thing. It's not—it has to be rewritten.’ It took me years to just get it together to do that, and the idea of rewriting it was too overwhelming. And so then I guess it just got, I was just scared. I think I always wanted probably to do it, but it was—it was like beyond, it was beyond terrifying. Nothing else was as scary as the idea of writing or writing about food. And in particular, writing about food because it felt so frivolous. Like the main reason that I didn't just write about food from the beginning was because it seemed frivolous beyond anything else I was doing like Harper's, although it was obviously kind of removed and intellectual. And not like service-oriented. The observations in it were valuable. And cooking has always seemed useful to me, because you're literally feeding people and giving them joy. And obviously, immigration law is important if you're on the right side of it. But the idea of like, I was—I was just really like, I was scared and ashamed of the frivolity of it. And so it just, I think I always wanted to do it, it took me decades, really, to let myself do it from a combination of paralysis andmoral paralysis. And I don't know what the other kind would be personal paralysis, self-confidence.

Alicia: Well, how did you? How did you figure out a way to write about food in a way that made it not frivolous for you?

Tamar: It was because of the thing that I started writing about it. I started writing a few like free pieces for this, San Francisco—I was living in San Francisco because I was cooking at Chez Panisse. And my friend Sasha had zine called Meatpaper. I was involved in the meat world, because I actually started the first meat CSA in the country. Back then, because it was San Francisco, like you could do anything, it was kind of like that. You literally could just decide you wanted to do something, it started happening. 

So I was spending all of my time buying whole animals and having them broken up and then distributing them according to this crazy, sort of non-mathematical butchery algorithm that I had worked out. And so because of that, I was like in the meat world, and I started writing pieces for Meatpaper, and they're really like turgid and like so overwrought, but it was a beginning. And then I wrote one or two pieces for civil eats, which were also pretty bad. But it was like just writing for these local, these local places, mostly, from my perspective as a, you know, meat activist. 

And then I was having drinks with a friend of Alice Waters, Chris, who—wait, what's her name? Katrina, who was like one of the founders of Wired Magazine, or maybe one of the first editors, I don't know, she's like a brilliant sort of polymath. And we were having martinis. And she was like, I've always wanted to write How to Cook a Wolf for today. And I, like almost fell off my chair,

because I was like, but that's my life's work. Like, that's what I am put on this earth to do. I'm like, I was born to do that. And then I said, Why don't we do it together? And she said, Great.

And we were gonna do it by sending stuff back and forth. And then it was like, I got tricked into it. I mean, she didn't mean to, but I just kept on sending her things. And she wasn't sending anything back. But she was sending me really good edits. Like I remember one of them. She said, This seems digressive throughout. And I was like, wow, wow. Wow. But then because it was so offline and just not part of anything, I was able to write because I was just writing her emails, right? And then after like a month of that, she said, You know, I'm not doing any work on this, but you basically just wrote a book proposal, so why don't you just go with it? So that was my 20-year-long way of backing into the thing that I had wanted to do forever. 

Alicia: And so that book, which I'm assuming became An Everlasting Meal, you know, was about making cooking seem, you know, simple rather than complex. And you told The New Yorker when it came out, “One way we get back to the stove is to treat food less fetishistic.” And, you know, do you think that that has happened, it's been ten years since the book came out, is food being treated less fetishistically? In the right way, from your perspective?

Tamar: No, no. Nothing. I mean, like, yeah, so I mean, also that I didn't even answer your question. But so I thought that An Everlasting Meal didn't feel frivolous to me. It felt like, it felt like good work, you know. So that was why—that's how I was able to do it, was that I was like, this is good work on this planet. And that's what I want to do. It's gotten more and more fetishistic. I can't, I have had so many times of like, real. I don't know, beyond depression, about it, like, sense, like, real senses that I haven't done anything. And that, in general, this, the whole field is like, at a point where I can't even reach it and shouldn't try and to just find other things to do with myself to make money because I like—that was before Instagram. I mean, you know, with with obviously a little bit of a parenthesis around pandemic, thinking about food and pandemic experiences of food and a parenthesis around, you know, growing awareness of the longtime erasure of traditional and indigenous and black food pathways. 

But for the most part, over the last ten years, food has gone on being fetishized and become more and more and more fetishized, and entire personalities have been built on, you know, co-opting food personalities co-opting traditional dishes and, no, I found it. I thought, like, I was so naive, I thought I could write a book. And obviously, not that many people read it. So like, maybe you could write a book and like every single person could read it and that could be all you had to say on it. But I was just, I really thought I was so innocent. I was like, I'll just write this book. And then everyone will have it. And then everyone can just do the stuff in it. And they'll be totally untethered from all of these awful systems, and we can, like, live better lives and be kinder to each other. But that was not true.