What are recipes as feelings and why am I writing them?

I’ve been cooking for 20+ years, and participating in cooking with my family since I was a child. In college I lived off-campus with friends and then my sister, in part to have a kitchen. I love to wander and eat things, especially in cities, where I get lost and found again somewhere between the local coffee and whatever’s fermented or textured. I love reading about food, from Ruth Reichl to Alison Roman, with a never-ending love affair with everything written by MFK Fisher. The way she sips marc in Dijon or eats still-warm peach pie in the hills of California or tortillas and beans in Mexico as she grieves her husband are sensory memories she incepted in me through how she lived and wrote.

When I started working at Facebook in 2013, I floundered searching for a way to participate in the platform that felt authentic to me and didn’t disrupt our family’s flow. Taking pictures of family bike rides didn’t feel right, but extending an art process I had already started – cooking and photographing and then writing and posting – felt natural and deep and beautiful.

People seemed to feel the love.

The more I did it, the more aware I became of the feelings I was putting into my process and the feelings people perceived when I posted. I put my values in my cooking: connection to what’s alive in my community in that season, connection to death and tactility and depth. It felt like an antidote to the flatness of screens. And also, an antidote to the often negative energy that circulates and amplifies on social media – why not amplify love?

Cooking is a symbolic act for me.

It’s an embodiment of a feeling, what I’m summoning for myself and offering to the people I am feeding physically and virtually. This has become the form of what I’m creating right now – recipes as feelings. You could make what I’m making, or not. If you feel what I’m feeling, your recipe will take its own form, adapted to your own context. 

My husband reminds me that people still want actual recipes, so I’ll be mindful of that. In the meantime, I’m grateful for your participation in a feeling. This is being human. If we are going to build the systems and technology that will sustain us as humans – whether that’s economic, governmental, health, education, media, travel, whatever practice you are part of – we start with awareness of what we’re hungry for.

A transformation is underway, starting with a feeling that we have more to give to the planet and each other.

These recipes are my symbolic offering that we’re on the right path, even if it tastes bitter sometimes. We all need fuel for the revolution we are living.