In the Gender, Sexuality, Feminist, and Social Justice Studies (GSFS) 401 Winter 2022 semester class on Food, Gender, and Environment taught by Dr. Alex Ketchum, students are analyzing the ways that food accessibility and environmental threats are gendered, raced, and classed within the global context. As part of the course, students visited McGill’s archives and special collections to have a hands on experience with historical cookbooks (more on that here: http://www.historicalcookingproject.com/2022/02/class-visit-2022.html). The Special Series of Student Posts is a collection of student reflections on what information we can glean from cookbooks.
Cooking Without Spoons: Reflections on Sonali Menezes’ Depression Cooking
by Rebecca Parry
Content Warning: discussion of depression and mental illness, disordered eating, ableism.
There’s a scene in Mexican novelist Laura Esquivel’s magic realist classic Like Water for Chocolate that has stuck with me since I first read the book in high school English class. The protagonist Tita is making a cake for the wedding of her lover, Pedro, to her sister, Rosaura. Overwhelmed with thoughts of Pedro, Tita begins to cry and her tears season the batter (Esquivel, 44). Later at the wedding, her guests become violently ill while eating the cake, overcome with the sorrow of its maker (58-59). Whatever Tita is feeling while cooking, the people who eat her food will feel while eating. So what would happen if Tita was cooking while feeling nothing at all? Although I’m no Tita, I swear that when I’m feeling bad, my food tastes worse. For me, this has been one of the most consistent and disorienting side effects of mental illness: no matter how fresh the coriander or how spicy the balsamic, everything tastes like soap.
I learned to cook in my mother’s kitchen when I was ten, and I carry with me her worn-down cooking spoon and her food values: fresh, local, and reflective eating. Although some of my favourite food memories are gathered around a table with good friends and chosen family, cooking has been an important part of my solo pandemic routine. I come home at the end of the day, pull out the oldest veggies in my fridge, and add sauces, oils, grains, proteins, and assorted pickled things to make a meal. Chopping onions into tiny pieces or reducing butter until it’s bubbling and brown feels a little bit like therapy. How can cooking, an activity that brings me so much joy, sometimes be completely impossible? Here’s where depression cooking comes in.
As a mentally ill person, I think I’ve always known about depression cooking. It shows up as a line item in my grocery budget: “sad food,” “bad day food,” or just “Annie’s Mac and Cheese.” These are foods that I know I will want to eat and will have the energy to prepare when I feel like garbage. In Depression Cooking: Easy Recipes for When You’re Depressed as Fuck, Sonali Menezes distills years of collected wisdom from friends, social media, and her own experiences into a cookbook, zine, and “a love letter to my depressed kin” (1). Each recipe has a “More Spoons” and a “Less Spoons” option based on Christine Miserandino’s Spoon Theory, where spoons represent the amount of mental and physical energy a person has in any given day. Are you running low on spoons? Make microwaved oatmeal. Spoon stores are high? Try the overnight oats. Instead of measuring out portions, Menezes tells you how many dishes you’ll have to wash after making the meal, which from personal experience, can make or break a depressed person’s decision to cook and eat. And of course in the depression cooking model there are no “bad foods.” As Menezes says in her Depression Cooking Manifesto, if it’s edible, put it in your mouth. Cooking while mentally ill is enough of a victory (Menezes, 15-16).
The Depression Cooking Manifesto from Sonali Menezes’ Depression Cooking zine (Menezes, 2022)
Growing up in a household where snack food meant kale chips, depression cooking has not always come easily to me. Like so many of her generation, my mother’s world was taken by storm by alternative food. Out of the 1960s and 70s counterculture movement came calls to bring food back to its pre-industrial roots for the health of the body and of the planet (Kauffman, 361-362). After reading John Robbins’ Diet for a New America and learning about the horrors behind the doors of the factory farm, my mom and many others adopted a plant-based lifestyle. I grew up cooking from Mollie Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook which made global vegetarian food traditions accessible to a white North American audience. In a recent conversation with my mom, she spoke fondly of food’s latest crusader, Michael Pollan and his seven word food rule: “eat food, not too much, mostly plants” (27). These are the ideas that transformed my mom from a fries and gravy-loving teen into a vegetarian, a fair trade and organic consumer, and a food co-op member. These are my food roots. They’ve shaped my political consciousness and my connection to food, and I have no desire to cast them off. However, in the process of developing my own relationship with food, I am also developing my criticisms of the alternative food movement. In this, I am certainly not alone.
The alternative food movement labels the fast, processed, and mass-manufactured food that many disabled people rely on as impure or in the worst case scenario, not even food. Philosopher Kim Q Hall calls this “alimentary ableism” in which health and healthy eating means the eradication of disability and by extension, disabled people (178). The “good food-bad food” binary presents fatness in a similar light, encouraging disordered eating and fatphobia. Further, in the alternative food world, the responsibility to change food systems often falls on the individual. Menezes pushes back against this: “individualist consumer choices are not going to save the planet. Industries are our largest polluters, not you—you are one depressed human trying to survive under the crushing weight of capitalism” (15-16).
These critiques help me make sense of my discomfort with depression cooking. I’ve been trying to fight against this notion that the only healthy and responsible choices are organic, locally-grown, unprocessed foods. Sometimes, I tell myself, it’s okay to order UberEats. Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, I have seen attitudes around take-out and processed foods begin to shift. There’s an increasing understanding of the fact that cooking and eating is labour and that other people are going through it, not always in ways that you can see. At the same time as these big social changes are happening, I’ve been trying to be more compassionate with myself. Over the past two years, I’ve become more comfortable with the role that depression food plays in my diet even when I’m not actively mentally ill. I hope that this is one of those pandemic era changes that’s here to stay.
Annie’s Mac and Cheese with a few add-ons, one of my classic depression meals (Parry, 2022).
Writing this post, I wanted to cook one of Menezes’ recipes but on the day I planned to cook, I woke up with very few spoons. I made a 2pm lunch of Annie’s Mac and Cheese mixed with leftover roasted broccoli (incidentally, mac and cheese is in Menezes’ Holy Trinity of depression foods). I dirtied one pot, one strainer, and my mom’s old cooking spoon. As I stirred in the butter and sprinkled some nutritional yeast on top, I realized that this was more in the spirit of depression cooking than any planned out meal could have ever been; I was cooking and eating with what I had and what energy I had. Most importantly, I was surviving. This, as Menezes says, is “the biggest fuck you to depression, which is trying to snuff us out. Not today, depression!” (1). Not today, indeed.
References
Esquivel, Laura. Like Water for Chocolate : A Novel in Monthly Installments, with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies. Translated by Carol Christensen and Thomas Christensen, Overdrive eBook, 1st ed., Doubleday, 1992.
Hall, Kim Q. "Toward a Queer Crip Feminist Politics of Food." philoSOPHIA vol. 4, no. 2, 2014, pp. 177-196.
Kauffman, Jonathan. Hippie Food : How Back-To-The-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat. 1st ed., William Morrow, an Imprint of HarperCollins, 2018.
Menezes, Sonali. Depression Cooking : Easy Recipes for When You’re Depressed as Fuck. 2022.
Pollan, Michael. Food Rules : An Eater's Manual. Overdrive eBook, Penguin Books, 2009.