If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

I, like the entire rest of the world, heard about Geraldine DeRuiter when her blog went viral. For me, it was her second viral article, her review of Bros,not the first, her indictment of Mario Batali's cinnamon rolls. Reading it, not knowing anything about Geraldine or the Everywhereist (her blog), from the confident, dismissive tone, I realized I had assumed the author was a man. I was a little confused when the slim, white, bejacketed man in the header image who I thought was the author was later captioned in the third person, but it wasn't until more than 3/4s of the way down the article, when I reached a caption that caused me to realize that the author was a woman. It shouldn't matter, but to be honest, knowing the author was a show more woman made the writing much funnier.

Having now read If You Can't Take the Heat, It's not lost on me how apropros that reading experience was -- DeRuiter spends a lot of her time thinking about and writing about the gendered lens through which we read and write. Having gone viral twice, it would be an easy cash grab for her to just publish her most famous blog posts and call it a book, but she has clearly put a lot of work (successfully) into making the book flow across the chapters, which reference and build on each other. Both of her most famous blog posts are included here, but mostly in that she reflects on them and the internet's reaction to them and what she learned, as well as how after the article on the Bros she got involved in an investigative journalism piece about the head chef sexually harassing his female employees that got buried by the NYTimes. It is overall hilarious, reflective and a necessary voice about sexism on the internet, in the media and in the food world. But also, she's just a great writer and I'd probably read a blog post she wrote about a napkin show less

Our relationship with food is complicated, highly personal and often deeply connected to our childhoods and our families. It can affect how we see ourselves and others. The feelings food inspires are found all over the emotional spectrum. Our ties to food can be related to big ideas, societal workings and a deeply held belief in the way things should be.

Sometimes preparing food involves playing with ingredients and flavors that work together, creating a meal from scratch. Other times, there is baking, in which directions are required. Food essayist Geeraldine DeRuiter knows how much both tactics can work in writing, how to combine the love of food with the love of family and what's right and wrong with the world in ways large and show more small.

The essays collected in If You Can't Take the Heat, which publishes on Tuesday, feature love of all these elements with the fierce passion that comes from caring. They are funny, wise and sweet.

Readers may know DeRuiter's first viral blog post about Mario Batali's weird cinnamon roll recipe attached to his non-apology apology when he was first accused of sexual misconduct. She tried making the recipe, based on pizza dough, even though she was a good baker and knew that kind of dough does not produce flaky pastries. As she wrote: "Good baking means you have to trust yourself." She made them, they indeed turned out awful and she threw most of them away. After eating more than one.

The poorly crafted recipe, itself an odd way to end a non-apology apology toward how women are treated, brings to DeRuiter's mind the ways she was sexually mistreated by men at various jobs. The casual sexually based attacks will resonate with any woman who has been in the workplace.

And after she is right about the recipe not being successful, she knows that she, as a woman, will be blamed and not the male creator of the recipe.

The internet attacks against her after the post went viral prove her right. Many were sexually based, violently so. And she found out the hard way to not engage the trolls.

The same thing happened after she, her husband and a group went to a world-class restaurant during a trip to Italy. They were served course after course of things that resembled snippets of food, all tasting of fish. An online essay about their experience went viral and the attacks came from all directions, including the New York Times (which may explain the current vitrolic piece recently published).

As insightful as DeRuiter's musings are about these events, they are not the whole substance of If You Can't Take the Heat.

There is a terrific tribute to the love a daughter feels for her mother, even one who managed to burn her house down. There is the time the author tried to recreate a complicated dessert for an elderly relative. There is a heartfelt explanation of why a chain restaurant may have a special place in a grown-up's heart, even a grown-up who appreciates fine food (hint: it has to do with family gathered and peace reigning for an entire meal). And throughout, there is her husband, a kind, handsome man who is an excellent cook.

There is a thoughtful essay about the connection between being hungry and anger, and who is allowed to feel which. This piece includes a fascinating idea about Medea that makes perfect sense. There are referrals to Springsteen, which shows DeRuiter to be a writer of great discernment, and good fiction, including Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven and Rumaan Alam's Leave the World Behind, with the incredible scene of a group thrown together that bake a cake and add sprinkles to the frosting. As DeRuiter notes about the last, the idea of adding sprinkles in a situation in which the world may be collapsing upon people who didn't know each other until they ended up in the same kitchen is a profound one. Some things anchor the world. Sprinkles may well be one of them.

In myriad ways, If You Can't Take the Heat proves that one of the most sincere ways to show someone that you love them is to feed them with food you have created. It's a stabilizing and sweet idea that shines throughout this lovely book. show less

A wonderful feminist book about body image and food. Quotes:
"There are days when I wish she'd [my mother had] loved us better, and then I realize that what I really want--what I've always wanted--was for her to have loved herself a bit better."

Like Roxanne Gay's "Hunger," this book also addresses women being bold enough to take up space:
"Angry, hungry, fat--these are things women aren't supposed to be. We need, in every single way possible, to take up as little space as we can." (p 293-4)

Dnf at 6% exhausting to read