gifted
This is the one year (ish) book birthday of Extra Helping, the book I wrote! So let’s have a little party.
Like many parties, this one has a tiny meltdown, some cake, and a pile of presents.
The book’s first year of life has been complicated by several of the kinds of events it seeks to help address, the type of life circumstances that we run the risk of encountering when we make the foolish choice to be born human. Like any card-carrying mortal, I am always prepared to systematically wreck myself for things I haven’t done enough of. It’s so easy! Truly the work of a moment! Think you are immune to these thoughts? For just a second ponder EITHER (you can choose between these seasonal offerings) some element of holiday preparedness that got away from you, or some other person whom you perceive to have handled it more expertly than you (nicer cookies? better gift wrapping? a themed tree?), and you too can be a harsh self-talk transformer action figure. Then take one of these to calm down. And remember that young people are watching you! Model the self-kindness we hope they will employ.
As an exercise, I’m going to focus on the joyful fact that the book exists—I wrote it! I wrote a book!—and on one of my favorite reasons that the book took shape, which is my old pal reading.
My nerdy fascination with how to feed people just the right thing owes so much to my early exposure to books and the love of reading them, to the expansive time I was given as a sprout to read things like Heidi (raclette!) and the Little House books (all that pie!) and endless British novels full of clotted cream and treacle. My mother’s devotion to the writing of Lilly Reich and Florence Lin and Marcella Hazan and Elizabeth David and Diana Kennedy and Laurie Colwin and on and on. Reading, the least tiring and most cost-effective form of travel, served up permission to think deeply and nerdily about words and about the ways that food is essential both to human connection and to the general strengthening of what goodness persists in the world.
Here at the close of 2019 so much feels broken, in so many places, on such a massive scale, that niceties of garnish and novel flavor combinations often feel ridiculously meaningless. I think about the scale of the ruptured world every time I take pains to snap a good picture of my lunch or get actually irritated when something topples off the plate on my way to the one corner with the best light.
Everyone eats, though. And taking a moment’s pleasure in it, even if it’s a plain bowl of rice or oatmeal, is part of what makes food more than simple fuel. There is the blessing that you have it, thoughts of the farmer that grew it, the soil it sprang from, the feeling of warmth from the bowl in your hand or the steam on your face, or the memories it evokes, or who made it for you—there’s all of that. Those things are part of being born human as well, and hold true no matter where we call home. When everything is polarized and we seem to have lost all sense of common humanity, having something so universal to consider, and to offer, is one kind of pathway. (Do you like falling down a rabbit hole? Fall into this exploration of how we transform beliefs we think are set in stone.)
On my Instagram account, I have been posting links to the various teachers and agents of change I am learning from and supporting as I try to unpack for myself just how we got to this precarious-seeming place, and try to delve into what those of us with abundant privilege can and must do to create a different future.
In celebration of the efforts of these good people to change the story, I’ll list some of them here, also, in hopes you feel moved to support them. I’d love to hear from you if you know of others.
In celebration of the book birthday, and in celebration of the unifying principle that everyone eats and we can find common ground at the table, I’ll be giving away a stack of beautiful books right after the holidays. If you’d like to enter here, just leave comment below telling me about who you are supporting this season as we collectively try to set course for someplace better than this, or telling me what you read as a child that made you hungry, or just saying hello. You can also throw your hat in to win over on Instagram.
I’ll draw the winners next month, after the dust of the holidays has settled and been swept up, and we are all craving a little spark of light to start the new year.
The books in the stack are Extra Helping, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen by Sean Sherman, Zaitoun, by Yasmin Khan, Black Girl Baking by Jerelle Guy , Eating from the Ground Up by Alana Chernila, Now & Again by Julia Turshen, and Sourdough by Sarah Owens.
A few places you might consider sliding some of that sweet end-of-year lettuce to include:
Prison Doula Projects (MN, MI and NY)