It was Monday and I was gently hungover from too many mimosas at brunch the day before. I’d been swept up into the World Cup game on a large screen TV in the restaurant for the occasion, but I wasn’t going to let a light headache stop me from preparing some baked tofu that I would warm later in the day with boiled wheat noodles and an already prepared peanut sauce for dinner, with steamed bok choy and frozen spring rolls on the side.

I noticed the salad dressing jar was nearly empty and there was half a lemon rolling around the fridge, so I refilled it, adding more olive oil, Dijon, garlic powder, and the juice of the half a lemon to the dregs of red wine vinaigrette to which I’d added oregano. Solera-style. All the while, I was making oatmeal for myself and my husband: His would be packed into a Tupperware to take to work; mine I’d eat standing up at the counter, ravenously. 

That’s a normal morning in the kitchen of thinking ahead and living in the moment. For lunch, I figured I’d mix up the aïoli I’d made over the weekend for patatas bravas with some lingering chickpeas I could smash. The mailman brought a Burlap & Barrel package that contained a gifted jar of their new Everything Bagel Crunch, which I thought would be a great addition to the chickpea salad. As I spent my morning on research, I kept thinking about how to eat this fantasy chickpea salad: toast some baguette? That would be nice.

On this Monday, none of these tasks felt difficult. It was one of those magical kitchen days when nothing is particularly onerous but you know it will all be delicious. The next day, I’d be preparing a bag of black beans and making homemade tortillas while getting the oatmeal ready. I can never anticipate the ease; I can only hope that it comes.

I don’t think about “care” while I’m in the kitchen, not always; it’s care work, sure. It’s reproductive labor. For me, most of the time, it’s just what has to be done. I’ve always been conscious of and hoping to antagonize this tension, because food media broadly is a space of constant joy and obliviousness to things like time, money, willpower, and the role of industrial food systems in what is a desirable dinner. To food media, we are all single, childless, urban 28- to 32-year-olds who want to run a café out of our apartments and have a good amount of disposable income. I’m being silly, but it often appears this way to me.

I can admit about myself (now) that while I obviously love to eat and drink, my work is about what appetites tell us about human behaviors and desires, and the ways in which media, culture, and politics shape these behaviors and desires. I come at food from an angle of love and interrogation, which can be confusing to people so accustomed to just the love, just the descriptions of how meat moves in its juices.

That’s why when I was doing an interview about “cooking as care” before On Eating came out, I bristled at the notion—the implied and gendered nurture of it: Clearly, I was agitated by it. (If it’s not obvious, I don’t have a nurturing nature, except when it comes to dogs, for whom I’ll do anything: I lavish them with love and attention immediately.) At the time, I was in the midst of figuring out the food flow for Benny, who’s getting expensive and stressful chemotherapy treatment, and doing the unpaid work of book promotion, which is a blessing but quickly becomes tedious. (More tedious, I found out, when you yourself are very present in the text; I think On Eating is a better book, but I preferred talking about No Meat Required.) Those days didn’t have the same ease as the Monday I’ve described, when we know what we want for dinner and lunch and breakfast and precisely how to get there. Those days were a fucking mess.

On my easy Monday, the freezer was stocked with enough food for Benny to get him through to the next week, but the addition of how many ounces we have for him to my “mental load” has put strain on my vision of “cooking as care,” just as it has become so much more clearly that. A neighbor told me that she had tried and stopped cooking for her own dog. “It made me feel like I had a family,” she told me, “and I don’t want a family.” I completely understood, the way this kind of care can chafe for those of us who didn’t want kids; I’ll also never feed a dog kibble again.

My agitated response to the question about “cooking as care” included something about not making my husband what he wants to eat all the time. He’ll often want tofu katsu, meaning I have to bread and fry it à la minute rather than bake it in the morning for a smoother evening, and I will say, “No.” Instead, I say I’ll make them on the weekend, and I do.

I think this is very reasonable, but people wince at the idea that first and foremost, I cook what I want to eat and what serves my schedule despite the fact that I’m married. The unchecked expectation is on their faces; maybe they think of their mother as a default cook and believe she fed their every craving with a smile or they think about how they’d feel about their partner being the primary cook and saying “no.” But there’s no love in a tofu katsu of obligation, no silkiness in an eggplant parm of duty.

I was thinking about “cooking as care” again because in my conversation with Eli Davies about her wonderful The Spinster Cookbook: Culture, politics and pleasure in the single woman’s kitchen—a book that, if pressed, I would describe as where the approachability of Laurie Colwin meets the theoretical acumen of Rebecca May Johnson—I noted that I don’t think anyone can truly cook for others out of care without first knowing how to do so for themselves. Her book is an ode to care for the self in the kitchen, and she brings in voices from literature and culture as a way to create a “collage” that is an homage to the spinster figure. A reclamation. 

Her ode and reclamation is made more forceful through its commitment to financial realities and the final chapter on “The Spinster Canteen,” in which she envisions a sharing of resources and burdens. 

This is a “cooking as care” idea I can get behind, a true futuristic vision that isn’t about the apartment cafés of TikTok or the aspirational dinner parties of influencers or non-tradwives who nonetheless put on the drag in the kitchen. We all have our perfect Mondays at the stove, and we all have our days when nothing is quite coming together. How amazing would it be if we could find a more organized and equitable way to share the load?