Let them eat mahimahi fillets

Further to my last post on food and intersectionality, I did some googling for cookbooks, just to double check if I had to eat my words. Alas, no, although Kate's recipes will definitely go into my recipe notebook. Here's what I found in cookbook searches.

The overwhelming majority of cookbooks aimed at people with a specific named long-term condition (eg, arthritis, fatigue, fibromyalgia, autism) are not books that explain how to make cooking a simpler task, nor are they intended to expand your cooking repertoire in an easy no-fuss kind of way, but rather are intended to promote a particular kind of diet. They have titles with the word "cure" in them.

Look, I know that some elimination diets help some people manage their conditions. That's great, and I'm happy for you. What's much less cool is promoting the diet that helps you as a "cure" for everyone, unless you have a bunch of thorough double-blind studies to back you up. Plus, if we could actually cure autism, etc, with goji berries, I'm pretty sure there would be, you know, science about that.

So to the authors of these books let me say the following: thanks for playing, and I'm glad your diet helps you, but it's actually hard enough to feed myself already what with the whole frequently-feeling-too-shit-to-cook thing, without trying to cut whole food groups out of the equation.

Ok, I hear you cry, surely you could make some of these recipes even without sticking to the diet? Well maybe I could, but why should I help people who write these books to profit from promoting these diets? And anyway, the books seem to contain a number of recipes that are completely impractical in the context of my life. Here are some of the things I will not be cooking:

• Stuffed fennel. SpoonShortageFail. Life'sTooShortFail.


• Fresh salmon steaks. CostFail.


• Wild rice. CostFail.


• Escargot. CostFail.


• Fresh mahimahi fillets. CostFail. WhereDoPeopleEvenBuyThatFail.


• Shiitake mushrooms. CostFail.


• Flavoured oils. CostFail.


• Flounder. CostFail.


• Acai berries. IDon'tEvenKnowHowToPronounceItFail.


• Assorted SpoonsShortageFails caused by recipes that take ages and need multiple pots and lots of chopping.

Kaz and I spent an amused afternoon reading samples of these books out loud to each other. Kaz suggested that the SpoonFails may be caused by the assumption that everyone has someone to cook for them. If that's the case, it's a dramatic departure from the norms of cookbook-writing (which are general assumed to be helping you cook food yourself), but would be in keeping with the idea of disabled people as helpless and unable to do anything themselves. It would also be in keeping with the assumption that everyone is middle-class, and all middle-class people have A Woman to do stuff for them -- either in the form of a wife, or in the form of waged domestic help.

In other words, here's a memo someone didn't get: not everyone has personal servants, and some people might object to the keeping of women as personal servants. Disabled people are disproportionately poor and are disproportionately unable to do complicated cooking. Cooking is disproportionately allocated to women, who are also disproportionately poor.

Is the assumption that poor people with fatigue and mobility issues are going to be trailing round their local health food shops for mahimahi fillets and truffle oil? And since my local health food shop is not wheelchair accessible, am I supposed to believe that the truffle oil will cause me to throw my mobility scooter over one shoulder while I walk around the shop? Ahahahahahaha don't make me laugh so much, it hurts my costochondritic ribs.

Seriously though, why is eating food a luxury?

[Edited to add: Kaz has more on this topic.]

--IP