If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

I cannot see myself clearly, the way none of us can when we are twenty-one and sad and think that maybe no one should love us at all. It is like looking at a painting too close up.

Like any good, emotionally stunted writer, I've found linguistic loopholes to express my emotions while still preserving the labyrinthine collection of walls around my heart.

It was the mid-1990s. We were told that “no means no,” but no one told us what happened after that. No one told me that “no” would just be perceived as a starting point in a negotiation.

Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Titties.

the backdrop was black with flames—redolent of an open-fire grill, a Harley-Davidson logo, or Guy Fieri’s formal wear.

It didn’t occur to us, as we were trying to survive the mundanity of the every day, that this is what life is. This is what we get. A collection of moments, of paying bills and going to work and trying not to stay up too late and walking into a room and forgetting why you went there in the first place.

It was Schrodinger’s dinner; I didn’t owe him anything, but this only seemed to hold true as long as we split the bill.

That’s the thing about voicing your needs: The world tells you how bad you’ll look if you do it. But no one tells you how great you’ll feel.

It’s a hard thing to learn: that we can ask things of other people, that we can order food how we want it.

His approach was alarmingly effective: I’d started to question my own response to everything. The story he told so, so well was that I was overreacting, overemotional, defensive, difficult, high maintenance. And there was no way I could respond without proving him right.

That if I want cheesy garlic biscuits, I can bake them. That if I wish to have a loving family, I can create one… I still somehow think that if someone treats you badly, even if you are a child, it is because you deserve it. This is, apparently, easier to wrap my head around than the alternative.

Savala Nolan, author and director of the Henderson Center for Social Justice at UC Berkeley School of Law, writes that the fat suit “perpetuates the categorically false and harmful myth that fat people are thin people for whom something went wrong, and that there is a thin person in every fat person who wants (‘deserves’) to get out.

It also gave me a wildly fucked-up impression of the relationships adult women had—not only with romantic partners, but with food, which became allegorical to their messy dating lives. At some point, I started to wonder if the writers of these movies and TV shows based their entire knowledge of women on other movies and TV shows and not on actual women.

In those unsettling early months, I’d like to think we were all logical, at least at first. We stripped the shelves of hand sanitizer and disinfecting wipes and bleach and toilet paper, as if we were all going to have either the world’s worst or the world’s best sex party.

I suppose every human, holding the belief, erroneous or not, that they are under some sort of strange elemental peril that threatens their very being, comes to that same conclusion. It’s why Costco exists. A five-gallon barrel of tartar sauce gives you the illusion that your own mortality is in your control.

Whoever said that time heals all wounds probably died of sepsis. It does not. But in the case of a broken heart, it does soften the edges of the pain a little bit.

I know that memories alter the more you revisit them, and I want mine to re main pristine. I want to hold that memory still, as if it were stuck in a snow globe, protected and unchanged even as the world swirls around it.

Go to bed early and say the Pledge of Allegiance and don’t ever smoke pot or you won’t amount to anything. Well, look who is extremely high and laughing now, Mrs. Schmidt.)

There is no Red Lobster close to us. We live in Seattle, and the nearest one to our home is either thirteen miles north or twenty-seven miles south of us. To encounter one is a rare thing, like finding a truffle in dirt. Red Lobster, it should be noted, offers a truffle lobster mac and cheese on its seasonal Lobsterfest menu. A dinner-sized portion contains 1,460 calories and proudly exceeds the recommended daily intake of sodium and cholesterol. With every bite you are laughing at mortality itself. To eat it is to believe, for a moment, that you will live forever. This is simply part of the excellent value proposition Red Lobster offers. My husband does not realize this. And so, as the restaurant and the strip mall it resides in grow smaller in our rearview mirror, I explain it to him again. “I need endless shrimp for $19.99.” “No you do not. No one needs endless shrimp.” “Orcas do,” I say. This is obviously a winning argument. “You are not an orca,” he replies, and keeps on driving. I accuse him of not loving me. This is a laughable charge, and we both know it.

I was given dozens of baby dolls as a kid, which I insisted were my younger sisters. I never played house or dressed up as a bride. My Barbies, it is apparent in hindsight, lived in a very happy child-free lesbian commune with the occasional dramatic visit from Ken and my brother’s Mr. Kotter doll.

Even now as the window closes (is it a window? I don’t know. There are many analogies about the end of fertility, none of them good. They involved clocks grinding to a halt, or flowers withering, or reaching for an egg carton and finding out they're all gone, or maybe there’s one egg left, but it’s a little weird looking, and the shell is all rippled and strange and it’s probably from some sort of lizard), I’m hesitant to say those words: that I don’t want to be a mother. It sounds like a cold and calculated thing, something a comic supervillain would say before she starts up her penis-shrinking laser

An old spy is a funny thing. Some of the secrets come out, but when they do, it doesn't really matter. No one can understand, anyway.

I’ve accepted the feminist notion that women can do anything, but the idea that we don’t have to do certain things is taking a bit longer to sink in.

My non-Catholic friends have often asked me what the Eucharist – the unleavened bread that is consecrated to become the body of Christ via the process of transubstantiation (phew) – tastes like. My answer, unfailingly, is that it’s a little like a dry ramen noodle except instead of salt it contains guilt.

The fat suit “perpetuates the categorically false and harmful myth that fat people are thin people for whom something went wrong, and that there is a thin person in every fat person who wants (‘deserves’) to get out.

Mountain Dew tastes as if the entire product development team were going through a rough divorce.

We can be a lot of things, but we can’t be angry (or president, apparently. Or have bodily autonomy in, like, thirty states).

A 2011 study found that 37 percent of all sexual harassment cases reported to the federal government involved restaurants.

For some, the only solution to making home cooking more palatable is to make it a dick-punch of masculinity. In 2010, Allrecipes, one of the Web’s largest recipe sites, launched a short-lived site called “ManTestedRecipes.” The premise, according to the initial press release, was that it would be “a virtual man-cave where men can talk about food.” Because what men really need is a cooking safe space away from women, where they don’t have to deal with us getting lip gloss and menses all over the counters.

When Thelma and Louise came out in 1991, there was a moral panic that feminists were going to go on murderous crime sprees. It was years before I would learn that feminists dimply wanted what everyone wanted: to be loved and respected, to spend some quality time with their best friends, and to maybe fuck Brad Pitt in his prime.