Eating to Live
I started writing this yesterday, toward evening, and because it is about food I began to think about dinner, and the fact that I needed to make something for dinner, and so naturally became too depressed to continue. Imagine where I would be if I applied the same logic to literature as I do to cooking: what is the point of making something nice for dinner, I tell myself, when no one is going to eat it? I’d have published nothing, nothing of my own, nothing of other writers, although on the plus side I wouldn’t have to manage as many spreadsheets. And of course I’m exaggerating. I’ll eat it. My wife will eat it, even if she doesn’t like it. The kids, they’ll eat pasta with a drizzle of olive oil and some Parmesan, a grilled cheese, a quesadilla—with, God forgive me, ketchup. I think we’re pretty good parents, on balance, most of the time, but I don’t know how to get these kids to eat. My mom was this way, as a kid, refusing to eat pretty much anything that wasn’t a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I was picky, too. Maybe it’s inherited. Maybe it’s normal. Or maybe we’re raising monsters because we don’t consistently make our children eat what we eat—and then because I’m tired at the end of the day and cooking, for me, is more of a chore than a pleasure, and the thought of making separate dinners annihilates my will to live, the food I cook for us, the grownups, is often uninspired and sad. Last night, for example, for the ten-billionth time, I ran through a catalogue of possible menus and landed on our old standby: tofu wraps. If I ever eat another tofu wrap I’ll die, and yet, catch-22, there are nights, a lot of them, where if I have to cook anything more complicated than a tofu wrap I’ll die. Here’s the recipe: you cut some tofu into strips, you cook it in a skillet in some oil and you toss on some Creole seasoning or whatever you like and when it’s done you put some tofu in a tortilla with some lettuce or vegetables and whatever else, who cares, nothing matters, then when your wife is like “Tofu again?” you nod and say “We’re just eating to live.” It’s an old joke between us and now you can use it too.
The precise source is lost in the fog of last winter but something happened in the vicinity of the publishing world that annoyed me so much that I thought, you know what the Malarkey website needs, a recipe section. I put it out there, on the internet, noting that I don’t have time to be in charge of it but it would be fun to host some recipes, with the stories behind them, on our website. Quite a few people liked the idea, but no one stepped forward to take point, until Joey Hedger thoughtfully volunteered Donald Ryan for the (non-paying) job. Ryan is a librarian and writer and also a good cook, and he took my idea and made it better, much cooler, much more fun. In the parlance of our times, he cooked. There’s still time, if you can write and cook, to send us something for Mealarkey, a section on our website that is forever dedicated to poems and stories about food. I don’t really know how to describe it because it doesn’t really exist yet beyond the guidelines. But read those guidelines, and soon, soon there will be stories there, possibly even yours.
Anyway that is the thrust of this entire post: I think it would be cool if you looked over Ryan’s guidelines and sent something in for Mealarkey. We don’t have it in the budget to pay, but if your piece is selected and you live in the US we’ll send you a free book if you want it.
Read the Mealarkey guidelines here.