How Do You Eat? No. 1

Introducing a semi-regular series in which I ask food writers around the world how they stock their kitchens.

I’m always nosy about the particulars of the mundane. I think most of us are, or else there wouldn’t be such massive industries built around watching people get ready for their days or make a sandwich.

But what I personally really want to know about is how people stock their kitchens and pantries. Not just what’s in their kitchen, but how does the infrastructure of the city where they live and who they live with affect what they eat and how they go about getting it?

Welcome to the first installment of “How Do You Eat?” featuring Lesley Enston, Gillian Longworth McGuire, and Apoorva Sripathi.

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Lesley Enston, author of the forthcoming cookbook Belly Full: Exploring Caribbean Cuisine Through 11 Fundamental Ingredients and Over 100 Recipes

Location: Brooklyn, New York, USA
Household: 2 adults, 1 child

On how she shops for food:
Once upon a time, I was one of those New Yorkers who went and got their food from so many different places. I feel like you just spend half your time commuting to food. I don't know if everyone does that. But I know most of the people I know do that. Like, I'm gonna get this from the farmers’ market. I get this at Trader Joe's. I get this from Sahadi’s. 

And now, I do the bulk of my shopping online through Amazon. Whole Foods. I hate it. And every day when I get the order, I get all the bags and I’m like I hate this. I started looking at other options and—this is what it is. I’m in Bed-Stuy, which has better food options than it used to, but they're still not great. When I go to the grocery store, if you want to get anything that's organic, it's so much money: a bunch of kale at my local grocery store that's organic is I think $6 now. At Whole Foods, it’s $3. That says it all. Everything that I look at is like that. The difference makes me kind of sad because I would certainly rather give local people business.

I still do go to the farmers’ market when I can in the summers, summer through early fall. I do a CSA so that makes me feel good—the Central Brooklyn CSA, which is Windflower Farm. Obviously there's also the Caribbean element that I cannot get at Whole Foods. That is still a local endeavor. Luckily for me, I am in the southernmost part of Bed-Stuy, so I'm close to the Crown Heights grocery stores. Some of our grocery stores, like Foodtwon, have plantains and sour oranges and coconuts. All that stuff that I have to get on the ground.

On feeding her family while recipe testing:
I fed them my recipe tests. I'm really grateful because, at that time, my daughter was 3 and then 4—a notoriously picky age. I know plenty of people who have to make separate meals for their kids. And I was like, I'm not. First of all, I didn't grow up like that, and she's always had sort of a good palate. I think that actually that helped solidify it, because she wasn't young enough to know that she could ask for anything else and I certainly was not offering anything else, because I just cooked so many recipes today. And sometimes the whole family would be like, We've eaten this. It's been ten times. I'm like, I haven't gotten it right. 

I think I did a good job because we were eating all the food; it was little food waste. I think that was helpful because in the beginning, I was still sort of shopping like I would normally shop and then realized very quickly that this was not a thing. I felt like more than usual, I would have to be shopping constantly: Okay, now today we're making this and I have to go get that. So that was kind of not fun, but that's okay.

On how she cooks after writing a cookbook:
After I was finished with the book, there was a time when I was like, I just have to freestyle. I don't want to know. I'm just gonna throw things in the pan and I don't care and leave me alone. It felt really nice not to measure anything. 

Then I went through a period of, I want to cook other people's food that doesn’t have anything to do with the Caribbean. Like, I want Thai food. I want Korean food. So it really depends on the week. There are weeks where I'm all about the latest cookbook that I got and sort of planning out of that, and then there's other weeks where it's just a mess here and I kind of wing it. 

No matter what, the pantry is very important. I have a very, very, very stocked pantry—perhaps more stocked than other people. A recipe will call for tamarind paste and I’ve got it, because it’s normal for me.

On eating out:
I cook 98% of our meals. I was thinking about this because it's only just recently that I started to order food, like takeout. I was like, Wait, I can do that. Oh, that's a thing that I could do. Like when she's in school late, and I'm working late, other people can make my food for me. And I think it's partly because I just grew up with home-cooked meals. When we got food out, it was a thing on Fridays. We would go to the mall and, you know, get KFC. Or it was somebody's birthday or something. But otherwise, it was home-cooked food all the way. I think I just grew up with that being the norm and I never really questioned that until very recently.

Gillian Longworth McGuire, author of the newsletter Gillian Knows Best

Location: Venice, Italy
Household: 2 adults

On how she ended up living in Venice:
We lived in Rome for a long time. My husband worked for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, so that was the reason we were there. It’s always all about the food. And he retired. We were moving to California, where our son is, and then in a very rash decision, we decided to move to Venice instead.

On adjusting to her new city:
I was walking around today. I'm still kind of struggling with food in Venice. I don't love the cuisine. I don't. I haven't kind of found my feet here in terms of where do I like making myself a regular customer, consumer, shopper. So I was looking for bread and I went to this kind of organic place trying to get around San Marco because of course, it's crowded. And I didn't. I wasn't very successful. And then on my way home, I was like, Oh, I'm starving. I'm gonna go get a sandwich at this local chain. And it was literally double what it would have cost in Rome. Yes, Rome is a capital city. It is full of tourists. It is not nearly as expensive. Venice is kind of eye-wateringly expensive.

On the price of food compared to the U.S.:
My son lives in Los Angeles. When he and his girlfriend come to visit, they feel like millionaires. They're like, Oh, no, we'll pay for dinner. I'm like, That's really expensive. It's all about gradations, right? Compared to America, for sure, food is less expensive.

On seasonal eating:
I tend to go to a local market. Eating seasonally is enforced here. There is not a choice. You know, I can't get a watermelon right now. I think I just saw the first cherries.

It's completely different. If you've traveled in Italy before, you know: You go an hour away and you're not going to recognize the food you're gonna eat. So up here it's a lot of seafood. Completely different vegetables. Completely different climate. We're hundreds of miles away.

On what she misses from Rome:
Amatriciana. Okay. So not a vegan dish. But one of the stories I tell, when I went to the butcher here and I saw this big beautiful piece of guanciale, and I was like, “Oh, amazing. You have guanciale.” And he said, “Yes, it comes from Parma,” and I said, “I'm Roman.” And he says, “Oh, no, don't buy this. You won't like it.”

On how food has changed in Italy:
I've lived overseas since I was 23. I'm quite adaptable now. With every trip back to America, there's less that I bring back. There are fewer things I miss in Italy; particularly post-pandemic, things are much more global. There are Americans in Rome making bagels that a New Yorker would eat; they're not just bagel-shaped bread, which is what was available for 25 years. There are taco places that are as good as taco places on the East Coast 15 years ago. 

Apoorva Sripathi, author of the newsletter shelf offering

Location: Chennai, India
Household: 3 adults

On how often she shops:
It depends: rice, millets, and lentils, spices, oils, salt, sugar are items we buy every 15 days. Again, that isn't fixed and changes from time to time. All the above essentials, we buy from our local grocery store, what in Tamil is known as a 'palasarakku kadai' or a 'many items shop'—it is as literal as that. Our grocery store has been in the area for 50-plus years now and the person who runs it procures his goods from wholesale dealers, sometimes straight from farmers he's known (or his father has known all his life). They also used to own an oil mill where they'd make their own cold-pressed sesame, coconut, and groundnut oils, but they had to shut it down since Covid. 

Flours we buy from the same grocery store. Until a few years back, we used to buy grains of wheat and mill our own flour, but it's been difficult to procure really good wheat in the last few years, so we stopped the practice. My mother used to grind her own spice blends until a few years back, but now we buy our spice blends at the local grocery store.

Rice, we alternate between a local rice seller and our grocery store, depending on who has stock. There's always at least four different types of rice at home: parboiled, raw rice, seeraga samba, karuppu kavuni, and red rice that we use depending on what we're eating.

Fruits, we buy weekly from our fruit seller. Bananas are a staple and perhaps the only fruit we have on our tables throughout the year. Currently, I have strawberries and blueberries that he gets from Ooty, and mangoes from around the state. We also go to Pazhamudhir Cholai for fruits, which is a local grocery chain because they have a greater variety of mangoes. Sometimes, when my father goes back to his village, he brings lemons and citrons, banana flowers and stems from there. We also sometimes exchange fruits and vegetables with the neighbors depending on who has what and who needs what! One of our neighbors has a banana tree, so they give us bananas, leaves, stems, flowers, etc., whenever they have an abundance of it.

On how she gets to the shops:
By walk, because really most items are available within a radius of maximum 2 kilometers. For cheese and bread (that are made locally), I either take the bus or an autorickshaw to their store. Very occasionally I use their delivery service, only if I'm indisposed. Some sauces and coffee (which I buy as beans) I order online. My parents get their coffee ground locally (with chicory) from the shop they've been buying for the last 30 years.

On the difference between London and Chennai:
In London, where I lived and studied for a year and a half, I shopped mostly at supermarkets, which was an endless fascination for someone who's used to shopping at stand-alone or independent shops, sometimes from the people who grow the produce or acquire it from someone else. It was (almost always) a traceable chain in Chennai and then in London it wasn't. But the sheer variety of, say, chips (a.k.a. crisps) and alcohol and snacks and breads were staggering, which was fun, I must admit. I don't remember much about the change in cost, but availability was completely different between the two cities. I could get berries and juicy stone fruits in the summer in London, pointed sweet peppers, so many herbs that I hadn't seen in person till I was in my late twenties, frozen dumplings, some 200,000 ice cream flavors, a wide variety of vegan milks, for example, at any point in time. 

In Chennai, I've spotted berries only recently (Pazhamudhir Cholai introduced peaches in 2021 and then it was promptly never to be seen again!) since the last two summers that passed. Frozen dumplings have become a reality, too, since the pandemic. Mangoes in London are available, but you need to know where to look. Mangoes in Chennai during summer—they are everywhere. So are bananas, and NOT Cavendish, which is a constant source of joy. 

After coming home, I've had to readjust the way I shop. Back in London, if I was missing an ingredient for dinner, I could pop into the corner shop or a supermarket and be sure of acquiring it, like cheese or bread or even some kind of dip. In Chennai, I have to either plan in advance or think of substitutions, which made me so frustrated at first, but now it's like little challenges in the gameplay until I meet the end-of-level boss, which I think is just life.

On how she cooks:
I make sure to have bread and rice at hand. Because so much of my life has been defined by carbs, having any one of these carbs helps my decisions to cook. But also, I cook to help myself think and procrastinate, and on those days I honor my cravings, which are usually unnecessarily specific and complex. I tend to use recipes the least, because they call for particular ingredients that are most probably unavailable where I live. I only use recipes when I make a cake; even then, I mostly wing it and it comes out nicely anyway! I love reading recipes for fun, though, and sometimes they imprint on my brain and I will be thinking about a recipe more often than not only when I realize I may have the ingredients for it, or when I'm thinking of how to substitute one ingredient with what I have. I'm almost always thinking about two things: what to cook and what to write, usually the former wins and helps nudge along the latter.

On her dream scenario:
I'm quite happy with the way I live now, because I only buy things when necessary. But because this is a dream scenario and I'm insatiable when it comes to food, it has to be a mix of London and Chennai. Food that is accessible via a supermarket (only in case I need something last minute) and perhaps more access to stone fruits (I love a good peach and have consumed it like four times in my life?) like in London, but honestly, for everything else, Chennai! I will find it difficult to live without a regular supply of good bananas, Indian vegetables, and mangoes!

This Friday, paid subscribers receive From the Desk Recommends… my monthly roundup of links—written, audio, video, etc.—with a playlist, as well as a book giveaway.

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The next Desk Book Club discussion of Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds by Yemisi Aribisala will be on June 28. Buy it from Archestratus for 20 percent off!

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If you’re looking for cooking inspiration, remember to scroll through The Desk Cookbook.

Recently, from the farmers’ market.

News

My book No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating will be out in paperback on June 25. Please consider a preorder!

Reading

Playboy by Constance Debré