This book might be helpful when you cba to cook and feel bad about it but know you have to eat

I’ve just read this essay by Jaya Saxena in Eater in which she interviews Margaret Eby, about You Gotta Eat: Real-Life Strategies for Feeding Yourself When Cooking Sounds Impossible which will be published in November 2024.

Here’s the book’s blurb:

“A trained chef teaches you how to keep yourself fed in the face of stress, burnout, and exhaustion—and have fun doing it. Delivery is expensive. Eating a spoonful of peanut butter is depressing. You can’t imagine having the energy to chop an onion. But somehow, you gotta eat. How does anyone feed themselves under these conditions? Enter You Gotta Eat, a friendly, accessible resource for getting something on your plate when you have too much on your plate. Part cookbook, part pep talk, and part action plan, You Gotta Eat offers tips and tactics—plus ten “do exactly this” recipes—for making effortless food that’s nourishing, tasty, and even a little fun.”

I’m intrigued.

One of the things Eby tells Saxena struck a chord: “There’s this fallacy in food media, where you and I are both participants, that every meal should be the best meal you’ve ever had. No, some meals are frozen burritos, and that is fine. And I know also from experience, many of the people putting together the beautiful and aspirational food and making the photos look gorgeous are like, Well, I have 20 minutes for lunch, so I’m going to eat a cheese rind and an orange.”

Hard relate.

No matter how socially aware we food writers are, it’s almost impossible to free ourselves from the insidious message that our every meal should look like something you’d want to eat too. Eby is deputy food editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer and a former senior editor at Food & Wine so she’s spent a great part of her working life surrounded (and perhaps drowning) in aspirational food presented as if it were the norm. She talks about the two days it took the F&W team to make a lasagne for the cover of the magazine. I long for homemade lasagne but I can’t face making one anymore. One day I will but right now just reading the instructions is enough to make me want to collapse on the sofa in a fit of the vapours. Some of this is a result of having cooked and shopped and planned for years so that our children didn’t starve, develop rickets or complain endlessly: “Not this again!” -and we had five to feed. At the moment, when it comes to complex batch cooking, endless assembling of ingredients and meal planning I am (temporarily) done with that particular tyranny. This doesn’t mean I don’t cook most days, it’s just that the meals aren’t anything you’d be dazzled by. I love to eat but I don’t live to cook and I’m aware how odd this sounds coming from someone with a monthly recipe column.

I particularly dislike one particular trope held dear in the food and hospitality world that we are all ‘feeders’ who live to stuff delicious food down the gullets of anyone who approaches our front door. It feels like a qualification I failed to acquire. I will take you to my favourite restaurant or bring food to your home or event, but I do not want to entertain you at my kitchen table outside of very specific parameters. I find it intimidating, stressful and not relaxing at all. My home is where I can escape performative cooking because the problem with having people over is that despite exhortations to keep it simple, it’s almost impossible to escape the pressure to serve something exceptional in its own right, no matter how humble it sounds: The Best Cheese Toastie. The Best Tomato Soup. A Perfect Peach. Someone once told me they imagined we had spectacular and unusual Christmas meals and was surprised when I said I cook a standard Christmas lunch every year, sans ‘twists’. What can I say? I like its familiarity.

I have yet to read You Gotta Eat but I have followed Eby’s career for quite a few years now. Eby combines service journalism with in-depth profiles, interviews, reportage, and recipe writing, much of it food-related but not all. Eby seems particularly invested in the love lives of zoo-dwelling capybaras. South Towards Home where she travels in search of an answer to the question: what is it about the South that has inspired so much of America's greatest literature, is one of my favourite books. I have high hopes for her latest.

You Gotta Eat is published by Quirk Books on 19th November 2024.