From embracing her hanger to her love of Red Lobster, Geraldine DeRuiter's new book looks at how food and food culture shapes our lives and relationships.
Courtesy of Penguin Random House
One of the main through lines of the new book “If You Can’t Take The Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury” is how women have historically had to make themselves more likable, or maybe more digestible, in order to find success.
The collection of 17 essays from Seattle writer Geraldine DeRuiter is also an autobiographical look of how food and food culture shape our relationships with family, with friends and with ourselves. DeRuiter spoke with OPB’s “All Things Considered” host Crystal Ligori.
The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
Crystal Ligori: Coming from an Italian and Greek family myself, there was a lot that resonated with me in the book regarding your family’s dynamic with food. Specifically, how the food we grow up with (as children and grandchildren of immigrants) is kind of “second string” to flashy American food that we may have seen on TV. Like Red Lobster, which one of the essays is essentially a love letter to. What do you think about food nostalgia and how that impacts how we eat?
Geraldine DeRuiter: You know, it’s such a complex thing and the more I talk to friends of mine across the spectrum of experience — friends who are first-generation, friends who are Generation Zero [who] came over as young immigrants — We all talk about our food experiences and the things that we put on a pedestal. It’s not like kids dream about fine dining, kids want Hot Pockets. Like, “wouldn’t it be cool if my mom got me hot pockets?” or for me, I really wanted Stouffer’s French Bread Pizza. Oh my gosh, I pined for that. And so I look at it as “Well, what do these things actually mean? What are we saying when we want this stuff?” I think it’s about assimilation. I think it’s about belonging, blending in with our peers. And I think as you get older, you come to a place of acceptance and appreciation for who you are and where you’ve come from and how far you’ve come in terms of appreciating great food.
Ligori: This book is largely sprung from the popularity of your blog “The Everywhereist” and specifically the food essays, one of which you won a James Beard Award for. Can you talk a little bit about the chapter called “Gender Roles and Cinnamon Rolls?”
DeRuiter: I will say this is one of the most surreal experiences of my life. To say I have a James Beard Award for writing is such a strange thing. It’s like saying I won a Grammy for having a clean house. But in, I believe it was early 2018, Mario Batali had just released a newsletter with an apology about sexual harassment allegations. And it turns out they were way worse than allegations and it was way worse than harassment. And at the end of the newsletter, he included a recipe for cinnamon rolls. Now, there was a huge record scratch across the entire culinary industry because obviously this was not the time to include a recipe and everyone was appalled. And of course, I did the next logical thing [and] made the recipe. So I included kind of my own experiences with sexual harassment, my thoughts on the Me Too movement and I interwove all of it as I was making this recipe, which when it comes down to it was fundamentally not a good recipe. Now, it got picked up by Martha Stewart, Dan Savage was retweeting it, Pete Wells from The New York Times was sharing it, and I was lying on the floor trying to understand what was going on.
Ligori: And the essay went viral, which essentially made you a target for anyone sitting behind a keyboard who had an opinion.
DeRuiter: I’d gone viral before, and so I’d seen this level of vitriol before. I had had tweets go viral, I had had occasional posts go viral. I had been online at this point I had been blogging for 10 years, and I realized that people were going to send you hate mail or death threats for literally anything that you did online. So I knew that my actions could not stop them and also made no difference one way or the other. And that is strange because it leaves you in a state of feeling a little bit powerless but also kind of feeling invincible. And I can’t really explain it better than that.
Seattle author Geraldine DeRuiter rose to fame through her blog "The Everywhereist". The popularity of her food writing prompted her new book which tackles food, feminism, and fury.
Rachel Crowl / Courtesy of Penguin Random House
Ligori: The subtitle of your book “Food, Feminism, and Fury,” could have also added love and loss at the end. The essay “Old Haunts” interweaves the story of a friendship that ends with the closing of the iconic Seattle spot Cafe Presse. What do you see as the relationship between food and emotion?
DeRuiter: I mean, it’s so intertwined, right? We share food with people when we are grieving, we share food with people when we’re celebrating. Food carries with it memory and feeling, and food is just tied to all of these experiences in so many beautiful ways. And so I think if we have a restaurant that we associate with a particular person or a particular time in our lives and we lose that person or we lose that restaurant, there’s so much to grieve there.
Ligori: The fury part of this book, I think, is something that a lot of women, people of color, and queer folks can easily identify with ... essentially having to tamp down your true self in order to find success. Does this book feel freeing in any way from that?
DeRuiter: It was difficult in a lot of ways to kind of access the anger? And I realized that I was exercising a lot of feelings as I was writing it. And there were times when my editor said, “You know, I can feel you holding back, I can feel you not addressing the things that you want to address here”. And I thought, yeah, because it hasn’t been OK for me to do that. And you know what’s been amazing is the response has been overwhelmingly positive and there’s been so many people who have said I relate to this. And what I think has been truly fascinating is the reviewer for The New York Times did not like the book because of my anger. She called me loud and irrational and she said that I screamed in all caps too much, and she questioned why my husband loved me. So, yeah, and I was like, “oh, well, I guess you just proved my thesis.” So that’s kind of interesting. I knew going in that it was going to ruffle some feathers, but in the end, I think that the juice proved to be worth the squeeze.