I celebrated a milestone birthday this year, which involved, alongside drinking lots of champagne and eating lots of cake, some serious soul-searching. What do I have to show for my fifty years on this earth? How do I measure up? On a good day, I feel quietly satisfied that I’ve survived some bumps in the road, raised kind, well-balanced children and lived according to my values, despite not having much to show for it, at least by the standards of a society which mainly equates achievement with career success. On a bad day, I feel somewhat ashamed that, at gatherings with doctors and lawyers and journalists and teachers, I still struggle to answer that wretched question: “What do you do?”
I started well: a half-decent education; a degree from a good university; a high-paying graduate job, which earned me fifty-percent of the deposit for our first home (my husband contributed the same). I worked with bright, buzzy people on fast-paced projects, in exciting places like Paris and Brussels, and for five and a half years it was mostly good. But I grew tired of being a small cog in a large wheel, in a testosterone-fuelled industry that demanded most of my waking hours. There was no joy; for me, no intrinsic meaning in the work, and I couldn’t be bothered with the endless power struggles. With the security of some savings in my back pocket and a supportive partner, I stepped off the career ladder which I was gradually climbing and took low-paid work with no prospects in an industry where I felt I could make a difference – food. I did some research for the food and farming organisation ‘Sustain’. I weighed ingredients in an artisan bakery and made pies in the kitchen of a traditional butchers. I volunteered at ‘Slow Food’ events and helped out on cookbooks and catering gigs for chef friends. Then, before I could work out what I wanted to be when I grew up, along came pregnancy, and a brand new human being staked a claim to my time and resources, closely followed by another.
Parenthood and conflicting needs
Thanks to the bold deeds of brave women who came before me, I had acquired the currency of feminism: tender affection on tap; hard-earned cash in my pocket – I even had a room of my own. But no one could provide me with a satisfactory answer to this question: who would care for my child, if I was busy in the workplace? This soft, noisy bundle, hungry for responsive touch; this wilful toddler, living life at the boundaries; this curious seven year old, blossoming into herself; this snarky adolescent, self-assured one minute and fragile the next. Who would do the wiring, joining synapse to synapse with gazes and smiles? Who would curate the wondrous things of the world and share them? Who would teach the valuable life lessons: that you only get to take what you put in; that you give when you can; that you are enough; that all this will pass? Who would notice what needed to be noticed; see what needed to be seen?
It felt like the best person for the job was me. So, for a number of years I spent my days on hundreds of inconsequential tasks with inconsequential outcomes – folding laundry; moving piles of belongings around the house; making soup – and many more with no tangible return, at least in the short-term – pointing out Orion’s Belt in the sky; identifying birdsongs; sharing the pleasures of loud music; passing on countless ‘how-to’s: how to laugh at yourself; how to manage anger; how to handle disappointment; how to lose; how to fill a hot water bottle; how-to curl a ribbon; how to say sorry. And, as some of these things were new to me, I had to learn them first for myself.
I managed to find some freelance work for one day a week, but the funding dried up after a year or so. I made myself available to the children’s school, like lots of other bright, sparky parents, who were feeling their way through parenthood like me. I changed reading books; sharpened pencils; made photocopies; helped dripping chatterboxes find socks in steamy changing rooms; made cakes then sold them in the playground; watched proud kids hold up paintings of apples in Harvest assemblies; published a book of recipes for the PTA; painted a backdrop for a school play; bumped up the adult quota for school trips and sports tournaments. It seemed selfish not to.
Around this time, the mainstream political parties were falling over themselves to woo women voters by promising (theoretical) extra childcare hours, in (theoretical) extra nurseries. In a high-profile divorce case, the presiding judge, Lord Justice Pritchard, delivered the pronouncement that women with children should be expected to make a financial contribution in the workplace. But where were all these part-time jobs women should be taking? With the children in full-time school, I was itching to work. But I didn’t want to squander the gains won by previous generations on a soulless job that barely paid enough to cover the child-care, or on a demanding job (were I able to win one – it seemed doubtful to me) that would remove me from the work I was doing in the home. I believed it had value, even if Lord Justice Pritchard did not.
The Bookless Cook
I developed an interest in the problems of our food system in my twenties. I was concerned about the way farming was becoming more intensive: the increase in soy feed and routine use of hormones and antibiotics in livestock farming; the erosion of biodiversity in agriculture. It seemed to me that consumer demand was part of the problem. If we continued to buy cheap, ultra-processed food, the market would continue to supply it. I could see big differences in the way the French ate versus the way we ate over here. In the homes I had eaten in over there, ingredients were good, and simply combined. That’s how I wanted to eat, without spending hours in the kitchen or a fortune on ingredients. Over a period of about ten years, I taught myself to cook, trying to understand the essence of cookery, so that I could simplify things. Before kids, I lived in ‘Books for Cooks’, the culinary bookshop in Notting Hill. I devoured books by Harold McGee, Peter Barham, Shirley Corriher – anyone who could explain the science behind the recipe. I entered a cookery competition to find ‘the next TV chef’, which necessitated lots of research and recipe development (I got down to the final 32 but the channel went bust before filming started). It was a good means to an end though. I started to see patterns, and once I understood what I was doing and why, I was able to liberate myself from the step by step instructions, and streamline the process.
A lot of people have been fed at our kitchen table over the years. People started to ask me for private cookery lessons, mainly as gifts for partners and children. I taught a few classes in people’s homes. Then I thought, why not develop it further. In 2016, not long after Justice Pritchard’s pronouncement, I formally launched my little business, ‘The Bookless Cook’, providing seasonal cookery demonstrations in my kitchen, and bespoke lessons to groups and individuals.
A global pandemic changes everything…
My last group cookery class was on 19th Dec 2019, just before the pandemic. I delivered a few virtual classes during lockdown, but I found them ‘clunky’; people’s ipads ran out of battery; wi-fi was patchy. So instead I’ve been pulling all my materials and the research I’ve done over the years into a book. I enjoy teaching, but there’s a lot of work involved to pass on a bite-sized chunk of knowledge. I’ve got to have my kitchen clean and tidy, shop for ingredients, test the dishes, write and print the materials, lay the table, scrub the downstairs loo and clean up afterwards. This piecemeal approach is never going to make a huge difference to the way people eat. I want to teach a whole system. It’s what you have in stock, how you shop, what you prepare in advance, how you use your freezer, knowing what to do with the ingredients you have to hand without having to search for a recipe. I’m hoping my book, when I eventually finish it, will do a more effective job than my classes at helping people with the daily job of getting nourishing food on the table.
As well as writing every day during lockdown, I was also painting. Back in 2015, when the kids started to get a bit more independent, I signed up to weekly painting classes, run by Goldsmiths alumna Lesley Bunch. I painted my first still-life at the age of 43 and I thought to myself, “why didn’t I give myself permission to do this years ago”? A fan of writer Annie Dillard (“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives”), I resolved to spend some minutes every day painting. Minutes turned into hours and then, during the pandemic, hours turned into whole days. Now I can’t conceive of a life without painting.
And that is how I find myself here, splitting my time between my two great loves, food and painting. It’s been a long journey, from keen young graduate to disillusioned twenty-something to full-time parent torn between meeting the needs of my family and meeting my soul-needs for meaningful work, to, emerging writer and artist. Both occupations (writing about food; painting) are important to me. More than letters on a page or marks on canvas, they are underpinned by the same desire: to understand what it means to live well, and to share that with others.