faux food insecurity

An interesting thing about the whole self-quarantine experience is how much of my anxiety and horror about what's happening in the world get poured into the grocery shopping, an activity I used to really enjoy. Except for maybe a two- to three-day respite following a given shop, I work on the grocery list constantly, with weird intense pathological desperation. That list is by far the most cursed thing in my home (or on my phone, I guess). Hundreds of years from now, if an anthropologist finds one of my pandemic-era grocery lists, its horrible dark energy will probably kill them instantly. They won't even have time to wonder why I have so many different kinds of fake milk while also using real cream in the coffee.

Like a lot of my anxieties relating to the pandemic, this new unhinged relationship to food feels... unearned. Whatever I'm feeling isn't food insecurity, a real actual problem that a lot of people have, especially now. The extremely disordered way in which I sterilize and put away the groceries (which is somehow both completely inadequate and wholly over the top?) may make me feel like Meredith Baxter Birney in a Lifetime movie, but I don't in fact have obsessive-compulsive disorder. So it's this very circular stupid psychodrama of having weird fears and fake problems, and then feeling guilty and even ashamed about the fears and problems, because honestly it seems reasonable that those of us who aren't sick or grieving or working for Bezos (yet) should buck up and not complain. Part of the problem is that I know my brain is equipped to scan the landscape for predators and instead it has been reduced to checking the same five websites for my preferred brand of paper towels. For the first few weeks I think my body was flooded with stress hormones, like I woke up every morning and ate several handfuls of stimulants, but that seems to have died down, at least. Finally, my nervous system (if not my brain) seems to have grasped that the stakes of human survival in this household are - for now - having enough cans of the good tomatoes.

Anyway part of this whole melodrama is the new (fake, but deeply felt) stakes of cooking, another formerly pleasant activity which now feels very fraught. There was a viral reddit post (also fake, imo) about someone's girlfriend burying cans of beans in the woods "for when things get bad" and that is like 100% the mentality I have to fight to cook a dinner. That reddit post is either a parable for whatever my problem is, or an actual story about my future, and I'm not sure which. Anyway I'm now (probably appropriately...) worried about food waste and using the gross stems of vegetables, etc. So a type of quarantine content I have really appreciated is chefs who are committed to helping people figure out how to cook stuff. I mean, I can cook, more or less, but it's been hard to take any pleasure in it. Or, worse than that, where cooking used to feel pleasurable, I find it sort of upsetting now. So I'm just intensely grateful for any podcast or show or anything else hosted by people who make me feel better about food: buying it, cooking it, eating it, experimenting with it. There's a lot of this content right now (I'm sure I haven't even scratched the surface), but my very favorite is a TV show with Jamie Oliver called Keep Cooking and Carry On. It's not available in the US, but some kind soul links up all the episodes on deep reddit.

Jamie Oliver is probably my favorite celebrity chef? In a profession that is so often about machismo and misery (which whatever, I'm into some of that too), he stands out. He just seems like a good person, plus I really like his recipes. One time someone gave Chris Morocco a Jamie Oliver recipe on Reverse Engineering. It was just the saddest burger in the world, and CM spent the entire show making fun of whatever chef had devised this terrible recipe. But then! After the reveal, when Chris Morocco he found out this burger he had insulted for half an hour was made by Jamie Oliver, he immediately backtracked and talked about how much he loved and respected Jamie. I'm not sure if that's a meaningful anecdote to anyone else, but to me it had the same kind of magic as when someone's difficult pet decides that you're all right. The Chris Morocco blessing.

The incredible thing about the new Jamie Oliver show is that it was sort of thrown together, but still quite well produced for about a week before he started literally filming it on a phone in his garage. After a handful of episodes it went from this:

To this:

Dirty t-shirt. Uncombed hair. I think the first thing he made was quesadillas. It was straight up dorm-kitchen cooking, albeit in the cake pan storage area(?) of his literal estate, and I love it so much.

You know...working through it.


Good things:
My favorite Jamie recipe
My other favorite
Highly entertained by these coronavirus update videos from Spiegelman and Seth
The Longform podcast interviewed Ed Yong, my fave science writer