An editor from the Times reached out to me in the spring of 2024 to write an essay about “belief”—something that wove food and Catholicism together. I didn’t have much faith that it would run, because I’ve been around the block a few times, but I wrote it anyway because a person with a forthcoming book can’t be too choosy. I filed, got one round of edits, and eventually—over a year later—was told it wouldn’t run after getting intermittent updates that it was still in some kind of limbo. There wouldn’t be a kill fee, despite the fact that I’d been commissioned. I say all of this without bitterness or malice: I just think it’s good to be transparent about how this business works at times.

I only remembered that I wrote this a couple of weeks ago, so I looked up my original draft and found out I liked it. Indeed, I think some of my best work is stuff that’s commissioned and ultimately killed! It was written while I was working on On Eating, so I think of it as a companion piece. If you’ve read the book, you’ll recognize themes. And though I’m reticent to discuss “craft” before you read the piece, I will say that there was a conscious decision here to discuss doubt while also adhering to traditional capitalization and gender re: pronouns in order to emphasize the tension. This wasn’t for me a question of piety but of writing. I also, in revisiting, realized it never would’ve worked out because it’s about quiet things, and the tension I wanted to emphasize only existed in my experience of Catholic school, not in my home. I was able to leave it behind, though obviously it lingered and lingers.

Join Tomato Tomato x the Desk to support my work and the writers I’m publishing—they’ll always get a kill fee!—plus get access to the community, global recommendation maps, salons, workshops, and more. A new issue will be out on Friday, May 29. Catch up on issue 01.

I would slice open a kiwi as a child in search of a snack and think: God has to exist. Who else could make something like this, furry and brown, and give us humans the desire and instinct to slice it open? Who else would reward us with such a vibrant green, where a ring of white strobed from the center, studded with black seeds? It looks like a halo, the kind of halo that medieval painters would put around the head of a resurrected Christ. It has always been in the seemingly trivial that I saw God; it was always in a church that I doubted His existence. 

To me, there is nothing more beautiful than humble devotion: a tiny shrine of found shells and feathers, lit by tea candle; a statue of the Virgin Mary in the gated garden of a nondescript Queens home; the rosary prayed by someone on the subway home from work. All religion, any religion, looks appealing when drilled down to those little things that anyone could partake in rather than the imposing echo of a cathedral mass, where often the priest’s homilies would focus on what we were doing to upset God rather than how we could find Him.  

Finding Him in the kiwi would be considered blasphemy, according to the lessons in Catholic schools I attended. I wasn’t supposed to find God in a piece of fruit; He was in church, in communion, in the Bible. But I couldn’t find Him there, and I couldn’t find Him in theology class, where my fellow students would ask our teacher if their parents were really going to hell for getting divorced, and he would say yes. 

My family always treated food as religion, but Catholicism was the official word. There was a plastic Virgin Mary filled with holy water sourced in Lourdes on my grandmother’s nightstand, next to us when we watched Julia Child and The Frugal Gourmet on PBS. The twin memories in competition for my first are my asking for lamb chops, and the sight of a golden crucifix being placed into my chubby toddler hands. [Editor’s note: Lamb won.] Selling chocolate bars at the parish doors to raise money for my small parochial school meant waking up for 7 a.m. Sunday mass. Food and God were always right there next to each other for me, but never did I dare suggest they were intertwined. Jesus turned water into wine to prove his miraculous abilities, I figured they’d tell me, not because celebration is holy. When we abstained from meat on Fridays during Lent, it was to mirror Jesus’ sacrifice, not because overconsumption of meat was having a detrimental ecological impact on the world and certainly not because animal life was to be respected.

This push-and-pull between my appetite and my spirituality hit a fever pitch in my mid-twenties, when I decided to go vegan. I was reading The Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda as part of my research—part of my search, period, for a container for the spirituality I felt drawn to but unable to reconcile with a punishing Catholic church overly concerned with personal sexual and medical decisions rather than what I considered the real issues facing the world—and was shocked when he mentioned Saint Francis of Assisi as a “yogi.” I’d long seen in Saint Francis the only expression of Catholic spirituality I could comprehend: giving up material possessions, speaking to animals, caring for the planet. These were religious devotional acts I could understand, tethered to the earth rather than seeking separation from it. 

Once I saw Saint Francis in this new light, as being influential beyond the Church, I kept finding new examples that reframed the religious tradition of my family. I caught wind of a woman named Mother Noella Marcellino who had been dubbed “the cheese nun” for her fermented wheels of raw milk in Connecticut, where she also earned a PhD in microbiology. In writing about cocktails, I found out that Chartreuse had been made by monks since 1737; indeed, their refusal to overproduce owing to environmental concerns has led to a shortage. In Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, in which he writes of the need to “care for our common home” and recognizes explicitly the significance of biodiversity and small-scale food production. 

One of the most clear signs that God and food were perhaps not so distant after all was when, during one of my regular visits to the used cookbook store Bonnie Slotnick’s, I found Brother Victor-Antoine d’Avila-Latourrette’s 1989 From a Monastery Kitchen: The Classic Natural Foods Cookbook. “Each of us today must consider whether we want more than the least of us on the planet can have,” he writes in the introduction. “Most of our brothers and sisters do not have meat.” Was there room for me after all in the church in which I was baptized?

I wouldn’t be so quick to say so, considering I still disagree vehemently with church positions on many matters around gender and sexuality, as well as how it has historically wielded its vast wealth and power—how it has abused these, abused children. But I realized that I didn’t need a container for my spirituality and its connection to how I eat, to the ways in which I find God in food. It’s ok to simply use food, to use my care for the planet and its nonhuman animals, as a way of expressing that relationship and that attention, no matter how ill-defined and diffuse. There is precedent for it, even in the Catholicism with which I’ve had such a tense relationship throughout my life. 

I still find God, whoever that might be, in fruit—in the abundance of guava or starfruit that I turn into jam, in new varieties of banana, and indeed in the slicing open of a kiwi to find the gleaming white halo surrounding its seeds. But I also find Him in the bubbles of a pizza dough that rises because of reactions to yeast in the air, the wine and cider made from found grapes and apples on my home of Long Island, and the sobremesa moments when a meal is over but we’re lingering in conversation over candlelight. Sometimes I think about going back to Mass, and then I put on my apron instead.