In theory, the holidays should be a time of joyfully convening around sumptuous homemade meals and giving thanks for life’s great bounty. In actual practice, though, I know that I am far from the only one of my friends who’s burst into tears after a long-awaited Thanksgiving recipe came out inedible, or who picked a totally unnecessary fight with a partner after the accidental dropping of a carefully iced cake.
Even in non-holiday months, though, depression, anxiety, and a host of other mental illnesses are uniquely skilled at depriving us of the executive functioning necessary to feed ourselves in ways that make us feel, well, good. Enter Philadelphia Inquirer deupty food editor Margaret Eby’s new book You Gotta Eat: Real-Life Strategies for Feeding Yourself When Cooking Feels Impossible, an amalgamation of recipes, tips, tactics, kitchen hacks, and general pieces of wisdom for all the self-described kitchen flops out there.
Vogue recently spoke to Eby about the parts of food media that she finds antithetical to taking genuine joy in cooking; borrowing inspiration from stoner cuisine; and preparing for first-time parenthood.
Vogue: How did the idea for this book come about?
Margaret Eby: I am a person who has depression and anxiety and normally takes a lot of joy in cooking. I do a lot of weird, experimental home-cooking projects, like chili crisp and pretzel croquembouche and other bizarre things. But I went through, like, a couple-month period where not only could I not possibly fathom making anything like that, I was like, I don’t even know how to eat food. My loving partner would sit next to me on the couch and be like, “You have to eat a banana.” Thanks to therapy and medication and the wonderful people in my life, I got through it, but I was chatting with my editor Jess at Quirk, who also happens to just be a pal of mine, about: What if a cookbook…for depressed people? It was one of those jokes that’s like, “Ha-ha, unless…?” It sort of grew from there.
Photo: Courtesy of Margaret Eby
And because Quirk doesn’t really do traditional, big, glossy cookbooks, it grew into a book for anyone who is having a really hard time and wants to cook, or has some motivation in their life for cooking, but really cannot figure it out. It’s about using the resources that you have on hand, meaning not just what you have in your house and in your pantry, but also, like, your emotional and your energy resources, because there are a million cookbooks out there with easy and simple recipes, right? That’s not unique. But the big question I always had was, easy for who? Simple for who? Like, does this factor in access to fresh ingredients? Does this factor in how much time you have to use to clean up? I developed these weird mental blocks around certain tasks. In the kitchen, I’ll just be like, I cannot take out this pan and wash it. I do not have it in my heart to do it. The book came out of that, and I think, with the excellent guidance of the team at Quirk, it sort of became not just a cookbook, but, I’m hoping, a pep-talk and a permission slip, if you need it, to just do what you need to do to get by. If you have capacity to find a little joy or creativity in it, that rules and is amazing. And if you don’t, here’s a cool way to make a frozen dinner taste better.