It took me three years to realize not every hobby needs to bear a dollar sign
Ilive to eat. I have few photographs from my childhood, but there’s one of me whisking eggs, preparing to fry up chicken cutlets. I am 10 or 11, which year I can’t remember, wearing a purple sweater with white hearts. Begging my mother to get an action shot — me and the whisk. Me dredging the cold chicken in breadcrumbs and flour. Me laying them down gently on the frying pan. Me smiling at the hiss and spit and smoke rising out of the pan. Then there’s one of all of us, tucking into our food. Our faces slick with butter and crumbs.
We painted those days in sepia.
I wasn’t a child who longed for toys — I had so few of them. Big Michelle whose one eye fell out. A Chinatown Cabbage Patch Kid when I wanted the real thing, a premie. But if you wanted to make me happy you’d buy me a book or a meal. I’d dress up in my Easter Sunday clothes — that one white skirt suit I owned with pale pink and turquoise trim. The pleats of the skirt made me look like a human accordion. It was one of those rare evenings we were flush with cash and driving to King’s Plaza for a steak dinner.
We had our camera and I shook the table so hard you would’ve thought we registered 7.8 on the Richter scale when I said, “Get one of me eating the steak!”
Back then, a full cart in the supermarket was a victory — I’d race through the aisles picking up Stouffer’s meals and sugary rainbow cereal. When we got home, stocking the fridge was a treat. To see the once sparse shelves now crowded with milk and eggs and bottles of Schweppes ginger ale deserved a moment of silence. Our rapt attention. I wanted to hold on to that fullness for as long as I could, so when my mother retreated to the bedroom I snuck into the kitchen, opened the fridge and the cupboards, and photographed all of it.
It was so important to me that we not only had food but a means of documenting it. Collecting the evidence. Armed with proof that we were content. We were full.
We had a home near the supermarket and I decided to surprise my mother with brownies. We didn’t have measuring cups or stand mixers or any of the accouterments most children take for granted, but I had bowls and a whisk and a want and that was all I’d needed. With the allowance money I’d saved up, I splurged on a box of Duncan Hines and vegetable oil. On the way home, I passed the dumpsters that were typically parked outside of supermarkets and big-box stores back then. Dumpsters marked for clothing donations to local charities.
And I remember passing them, and what I had witnessed was revealed to me in parts. An image coming into focus. The film slowly developing. A pair of pants skirting skinny ankles. A mess of hair covering bloodshot eyes. His body was volcanic. I ran home as fast as I could and I remember thinking all you need to do was bleach the negative. Unsee what you’ve just seen.
Bake the brownies, I told myself. This was worth photographing. It occurred to me that I’d forgotten the eggs. Where were the eggs? No matter, there were two hardboiled ones in the fridge — I could use those, right? And so I mixed the brownie mix, the water, the oil, and the whole eggs, and smoothed the batter into a foil pan.
When my mother came home and I presented her with my gift, she cut into one of the brownies, and the white and yellow flecks of the egg poked through. She placed the uneaten brownie on the counter, turned, and headed into the bedroom. Locked the door.
I dumped the brownies I’d baked and the film of the pictures I’d taken into the garbage. It would be a decade before I baked again.
In 2002, I needed something to do with my hands. For the better part of two years I had been addicted to coke. I’d dropped out of graduate school. Worked at a glamorous dot-com where we spent evenings in cabs going to this and that party, getting high. Excised all my old friends. I was ravaged, a projector showing horror movies. Nose-bleeding in front of my boss. Then the music stopped, the company blew through $10 million in funding, and our vibrant office whittled down to three people.
I remember lying on a bench in Central Park, unemployment check in hand, wondering why I had allowed my life to fall spectacularly to pieces. I was 27.
At the beginning of 2002, I quit. Dumped my phone. Bought another. Changed the number. Excised another piece of my history. Torched the photographs. Focused on working at the most unglamorous job I could find where the average age of the employee was 40. Can I tell you what it’s like to feel your hands quake? To pass people on the street in hopes you’ll smell that familiar acrid smell — the smell that once made you feel beautiful, whole, and clean. But I’d said goodbye to all that and found myself in Bed Bath & Beyond buying bowls, measuring cups, and a hand mixer.
Your girl was going to bake brownies. This time using eggs I could crack instead of cut through. Then the brownies turned into collapsing cheesecakes that became feathery light cheesecakes that became a red velvet cake that made my kitchen look like a crime scene that became delicate, buttery layers of a kouign-amann that took me the whole of one Saturday to make that became the butternut squash mac and cheese that tasted just as good as the real thing, and on it went.
Whenever I broke, which was often and always brutal, making food pieced me back together again.
Weekends that were once spent falling down in bars and huddled in filthy bathroom stalls were replaced by the Food Network and Nigella Lawson.
In 2005, I started a food blog sharing terrible photos of delicious food along with the stories I wrote as a means to climb my way out of the dark. And yes, I was one of the highly annoying people who wrote an essay that made The Odyssey look like a commercial before showing you how to make beef and cheese arepas or pistachio pesto. But I loved it.
Cooking and baking became a way I found calm amidst the chaos. When I became an equity partner in a fancy New York agency, I spent Saturdays with white flour, leavening the elephantine stress weighing down on me. I upgraded my camera and whenever I entered a restaurant, I scouted the area for light. Marveled over the clean plates and linens. I was a child again, clutching a whisk, pleading for that action shot.
Whenever I broke, which was often and always brutal, making food pieced me back together again.
Since 2005, I’ve taken 17,312 photos of the food I ate, made, and loved.
Then, I ruined the one thing I truly loved by making money from it.
Early in 2017, a friend hired me to photograph food and drinks for the premium appliance brand where she worked. She wanted their Instagram feed to feel real, cultivated, created by someone who loved fine coffee and good food. I jumped at the chance because it was a way I could make and snap photos of food and get paid for it! Who wouldn’t leap at the opportunity?
Maybe someone who should’ve just savored a hobby for what it was — a means to be wholly creative and present without driving it to its inevitable ruin.
In reality, my friend had a boss, and bosses have bosses and global offices that wanted the photographs to be a bit more professional and polished. When it comes to writing or marketing, I’m used to viewing both as a means to make an income. For the most part, my marketing work subsidizes the very expensive hobby that is my writing career. I’ve always taken the view that if my writing did make money, it was a bonus, so I never put any tremendous pressure to commercialize it or pander to a fiefdom.
When it comes to building brands and telling stories, I’m impervious to criticism, unfazed by it. I’ve got the skin of swamp animals.
Food was different. Food was bound by familial history, of not having it, of celebrating it when we did. Food was the one place in my methodical life where I could make a mess and laugh at the flour on my face and chocolate batter strewn on the walls. The joy was in the discovery and journey. Of trying to make a croissant 15 times before I got it right. Food was my private, sacred space. A small vestige of my life where I felt unmasked and completely free and here I was delivering my still-beating heart on a platter to be picked apart by marketing executives.
I always made it clear I wasn’t a professional food stylist or photographer. I was just someone who was passionate about making food, eating it, sharing it, and photographing it. Mine was the smallest voice in the room.
So, I hired a stylist and wrecked that friendship because the stress had become insurmountable. We were styling and photographing 40 to 60 shots within two days, which is a lot. I hired another temperamental stylist whose diva behavior rivaled the A-list celebrities with whom I had worked in a previous life. She stormed, wailed, stomped, and rampaged. By the time I finally found a capable and chill stylist, I no longer wanted to make anything.
I became allergic to the kitchen.
After a year, I resigned from the project because it destroyed my sacred space. For the next three years, I stopped buying cookbooks. I sold my camera, lenses, and fancy equipment. I made the same dishes on repeat. I no longer snapped what I ate. I let my fridge become anemic as I subsisted on takeout and meal delivery — anything that would ensure I wouldn’t touch a single appliance.
It was as if all the lights in my house had flickered and flared out. My kitchen was no longer my refuge, but a reminder of how I ruined it.
I realized that just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you need to make money off of that something. Not every passion needs to bear dollar signs.
It took three years and a pandemic for me to find my way back to food. Making it, savoring it, laughing at the mess and wreck of it. No longer am I in my home — I live in temporary spaces dotted along Southern California. Kitchens that have the bare minimum and maximum. Appliances that aren’t mine, and don’t bear the weight of their history.
Traveling the world from the food I make and feeling a semblance of who I used to be while eating it.
And when the feeling of being boxed in became suffocating, I opened the cabinets, fridge, and windows and all the mothballs fluttered out. I bought two cookbooks and made French onion dip, lasagna, rosemary bread, sweet potato gnocchi. My first attempt at carbonara turned into a scrambled egg mess, and, in response, I scrambled eggs on garlic toast.
I am a child, an adult, a woman who wants to hold something in her hands. The tactile feel of the dough, the splatter of the frying pan, the calm music of the stand mixer — when people ask me how I’m coping with staying indoors during the year where I finally wanted to return to the world again and go on an adventure, I tell them I’m back in the kitchen. Making a mess in one place. Taking trips with my hands, heart, and head. Traveling the world from the food I make and feeling a semblance of who I used to be while eating it.
I may never be the woman who snapped hundreds of pictures at a food stall in Vietnam, but I am the woman who cracks eggs into a bowl to make a tray of brownies. A woman who will crack the eggs for the feel of it, the music of it, the heart once plunged out of chest taped up, made whole.
Source : Medium
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