Why We Can’t Stop Reading—and Writing—Food Diaries
On November 21, 2020, a young woman in Brooklyn named Tanya Bush began to keep a diary of sorts. On Instagram, under the handle @will.this.make.me.happy, she posted a photo of a craggy yellow pastry that fit perfectly in her palm. “No. Buttermilk scones with lemon zest do not alleviate anxiety,” she captioned it. On December 4th, she posted again, declaring, beneath an image of a sugar-ringed cookie perched between her thumb and forefinger, “No. Pecan shortbread did not help me reconcile my massive ego with my meager sense of self.” January 7, 2021: “No. Milk chocolate tart with hazelnut praline, devoured in the wee hours of the morning in a stress-induced panic, did not begin to ease my outrage at a congressional adjournment less than twenty-four hours after an attempted coup.”
Baked goods were not making Bush happy, she affirmed repeatedly in the following months, compiling a deadpan catalogue of tantalizing desserts. And yet, as she details in her forthcoming cookbook, “Will This Make You Happy: Stories & Recipes from a Year of Baking,” her commitment to baking, and to recording what she produced and ate, ultimately changed her life. “I was twenty-three, depressed, unemployed, and adrift. I just wanted to make something,” she writes. “Sometimes a single year can mark a sudden and definitive shift. In this one, I decided to become a baker.”
The book forfeits the puckish immediacy of Bush’s Instagram dispatches for more earnest, effortful prose. “I devoured slice after slice alone, feeling sticky, ethereal joy,” she writes, about baking banana bread during a spell of malaise. She charts her aspirations—and her romances, with characters she calls The Boyfriend and The Crush—through the seasons, as she moves from her home kitchen to an ill-fated internship in Italy to her first professional baking gig. (She is now the pastry chef at the Brooklyn restaurant Little Egg and married to The Boyfriend.) Recipes for dark-chocolate-and-toasted-coconut cake, soba-cha panna cotta, Concord-grape clafoutis, and other confections punctuate her drifting between listlessness and purpose.
The conceit of narrating a year in one’s life through the toils and sensations of the kitchen is one that many have taken up before. In the early two-thousands, the British cookbook author Nigel Slater set out to write a daily guide to seasonal eating; the resulting book, “The Kitchen Diaries” (2005), reads more like a travelogue, inviting the reader into the dulcet rhythms of Slater’s life in North London. “It is not unusual for the little stone terrace outside my kitchen doors to have a pall of smoke over it at supper time,” he writes in the entry for August 18th, introducing a recipe for whole chickens on the grill. “Smoke imbued with thyme, garlic and rosemary that wafts around the ripening tomato plants and pots of geraniums.”
Often, the year of cooking is undertaken as a quest for meaning, as it was for Julie Powell, a bored twenty-nine-year-old secretary who, in 2002, started a blog about trying to make all five hundred and twenty-four recipes in the first volume of Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” Powell was writing about a quarter-life crisis as much as she was writing about food, threading profane asides and meandering tangents between her experiments with flaming crêpes and butter-slicked calf liver. On day one hundred and eight, Powell, who married her high-school sweetheart, presented poulet en gelée à l’estragon to a friend who happened to be in the middle of a steamy office romance. “Gwen has a weekend of explosive sex, then comes over to my house depressed and complains about being served aspic,” Powell wrote. “This is a situation that Julia would no doubt handle with aplomb. But Julia doesn’t hate aspic as I do. And she probably gets more sex.” (Child, who died in 2004, was said to have been turned off by Powell’s salty language.)
When Ruth Reichl began recording a year of cooking, in 2009, she was despondent: Condé Nast had abruptly dissolved Gourmet, of which Reichl had been the editor-in-chief. Her cookbook, “My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes That Saved My Life,” released in 2015, expanded on the melancholic, haiku-like tweets with which she’d chronicled her sudden glut of free time. “Chilly gray morning. Empty day looms. I will make ma po tofu sparked with the strange prickly heat of Szechuan peppercorns,” Reichl wrote, nine weeks after the magazine folded. The book illustrates how cooking, and writing about cooking, became therapeutic for her, how taking stock of tangible pleasures became an antidote to grief.
It was in a similar spirit that, in the fall of 2023, the food writer Tamar Adler, struggling with depression, began keeping a daily journal of things that delighted her: the “numbing bitterness” of a grapefruit, the “tongue tip” of a lit burner in a dark kitchen. Adler, a Chez Panisse-trained cook, is best known for her 2011 book “An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace,” a reimagining of M. F. K. Fisher’s “How to Cook a Wolf,” from 1942, a manual for eating resourcefully during wartime shortages. Adler’s version, as elegant and lyrical as Fisher’s, enumerates ways to use every last scrap, bone, and core—and introduced her as a writer who made art out of the marginal.
Last December, Adler published her journal as “Feast on Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Every Day.” The book’s vignettes are all food-related, but it contains few recipes; though it’s personal, it reads less like a memoir than like a gently philosophical prose poem—a model for invigorating one’s life with sustained and granular attention. “The sound of my little bone-handled knife scraping butter across brown toast this morning reminded me to listen,” she writes, in the entry for January 31st. “Sometimes I think bells and sirens are the only things grown-ups hear.” What we do in the contained, tactile environment of the kitchen, Adler suggests, can ground us in reality and give us a sense of place in the world. “Ants, bees, mites, flies, birds, squirrels are all in constant motion,” she writes on June 2nd. “Perhaps this is why cooking feels so primitive and vital when one is in the act—not worrying about something else, but inhabiting the act of cooking. It’s when we, like ants, bees, mites, flies, birds, and squirrels, are in natural timeless motion.”
At the dawn of Twitter and Instagram, when the internet was newly awash in photos of avocado toast and latte art, the Luddite rejoinder was “No one cares what you had for breakfast.” Nearly two decades later, this has been roundly disproved. For the past ten years at least, I have begun every Friday in eager anticipation of a new installment of “The Grub Street Diet,” one of New York’s most beloved columns, for which some person of note keeps a chatty, descriptive record of everything they’ve eaten in the course of a few days. We learn which celebrities are passionate cooks—Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick save their Parmesan rinds and shrimp shells—and who eats solely to survive. (The novelist Jonathan Ames claims that vitamin gummies are enough to satisfy his sweet tooth.) Recently, I found myself moved to tears while reading an entry by the comedian Mary Beth Barone, whose contribution doubles as a disarming portrait of eating-disorder recovery. “I snack briefly on some chocolate-covered gluten-free pretzels from Brooklyn Harvest before I have to leave for soundcheck,” Barone writes, likening the challenge of eating “real meals” to “arm wrestling with myself. Either way, I lose.”
The food-diary form thrives on TikTok, where “what I eat in a day” is an extremely popular genre. There, you can ride along with a thirty-two-year-old stay-at-home mother sipping sugar-free Red Bull and making baked-potato casserole for five children, or a self- described “fat girl who isn’t succumbing to diet culture” enjoying a slice of vanilla-coconut cake topped with a jewellike smashed persimmon. (As her defiant framing suggests, “thinspo” and calorie counting are endemic to the genre.) One of my favorite accounts belongs to a grade-school teacher who eats lunch every day with an unfailingly cheerful group of colleagues, showcasing their foil-wrapped tuna sandwiches, Tupperwares of leftover chicken Marsala, and trays of pizza and fruit cups from the cafeteria. The videos sate a curiosity, held in amber from childhood, about what those figures of great and mysterious authority get up to when students aren’t around.
A colleague recently remarked that, while reading a “Grub Street Diet,” he thought about how horrible it would be to drop dead right then—if the last thing he ever read was someone logging a piece of toast. To me, this is exactly the appeal. We spend our lives in a cycle of having eaten and then needing to do it again; how we feed ourselves reflects our relationship to money, time, pleasure, place. If the food diary pushes its practitioners toward solipsism, or toward showing off, its popularity also evinces something encouraging: a curiosity about how other people live, the texture of their days.
In radio, it’s common for reporters to test sound levels—and break the ice—by asking their interview subjects what they had for breakfast. A segment that aired on “This American Life” last year documents a radio producer named Talia Augustidis posing the question to the same woman over several days.“The answer is probably I can’t remember,” the woman says the first time, in a tone of resignation. Then she brightens: “Oh, no—porridge, porridge. Porridge and blueberries.” “You always have the same thing for breakfast,” Augustidis replies, laughing. “It’s not hard to remember.”
The exchange repeats, the woman wrestling with her memory. “Porridge and delicious berries.” “Honestly, I can’t remember—oh, yes I can. It’s porridge, as usual.” We hear the scrape of a spoon against a bowl, the wet sound of food in her mouth. “It tastes absolutely delicious,” she says one morning, unable to summon what it’s called. “I’m flattered,” Augustidis says, laughing again. We never learn who the woman is or what happens to her—only that, one day, she barely touches her porridge, and she and Augustidis decide that it’s time to stop recording. ♦