Food Favors for Your Future Self

You'll be there for you

When I sat down to this lunch on Monday, I was filled with gratitude to the person who made it for me.

At that moment, I felt pretty low. I’d been up all night with a stomach ache. Daylight saving time made the lack of sleep even worse.

There was nothing I wanted to do less than make lunch, but luckily someone did it for me. My past self.

Sunday afternoon Joy had:

• Gone to the farmers market

• Chopped radishes

• Minced red onion

• Picked parsley

• Made salad dressing

• Prepped carrot sticks

• Made yellow split pea dip

So when Monday afternoon Joy needed a pick-me-up in the form of a fresh, flavorful bowl of homemade food, it was there, vibrant and full of variety.

I’ve learned this lesson over and over in the kitchen—even if my present-moment self doesn’t really feel like peeling carrots and simmering lentils, my future self will be so thankful I did.

It’s a lesson I try to globalize to the rest of my life: When my past self and present self are in conflict, defer to past self. Past self knows better.

Parsley as salad green

As is often the case, this salad was inspired by things in my refrigerator threatening to go bad: Wheat berries and parsley.

I had about a cup of cooked wheat berries, which I love in salad. The chewy texture and nutty flavor add variety to a leafy salad and they make most salads substantial enough to feel like a meal.

I know some people are a little intimidated about cooking whole grains. This is how I do it: I cover the berries in water in my Instant Pot and cook them on high pressure for 25 minutes. Easy.

Sometime in the early 2010s, I was served a salad composed of 90% parsley leaves at Prune restaurant in New York City. Since then, I periodically remember this and use parsley instead of lettuce in a salad.

This is the ideal thing to do with the rest of a bunch of parsley you bought because you wanted a couple tablespoons of it for one thing or another. It makes for a very interesting salad and it fights food waste. It also holds up great in the refrigerator for several days. I love a storable salad.

Fun fact: Did you know radishes are also cruciferous vegetables? Somehow that escaped my attention all these years until I made a radish forward salad the same week I was assigned an article about cruciferous vegetables that required in the content brief “a robust list of cruciferous vegetables.”

To round it all out, I added tons of diced radishes and a little bit of chopped kalamata olives.

Without cheese, most salads benefit from something rich. My favorites are avocado, nuts, or olives.

The gift economy

Months ago, a friend recommended the small book “The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World” by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

It takes the radical and kinda-hard-to-get-your-head-around stance that it doesn’t have to be this way.

And by “this way” I mean a capitalist hellscape where everything including the water and the land and the actual minutes of our lives has a price. The world is full of things that are privately owned that should not be owned at all.

According to Wall Kimmerer, Native people didn’t live this way. They didn’t have private equity. And, in theory, we don’t have to either.

Even she seems to understand that we’re not going to transform the economy any time soon but she did open a crack in my mind by writing about how we can bring gift economies into our lives.

I’m thinking about this because the split yellow lentils I used in my dip were a gift. I tried to let that generosity nourish me along with the calories when I ate it.

It makes me want to give more gifts myself.

But, even moreso, it inspires me to try to stop filtering every thought, action, and decision in my life through the lens of money.

To be creative under capitalism

It’s so difficult for me make things purely as creative expression. Even writing this newsletter feels like “a waste of time” because I am not (barf emoji) “monetizing” it.

Recipes I create without selling, words that I write without the promise of payment, feel literally worthless to me most of the time.

When I was young, a waitress earning my MFA in fiction writing, I assumed I would always be a starving artist. Money seemed like it was for other people.

I don’t know when money became important to me, and then all-important. In retrospect, I think it had to do with the blood-curdling terror of the student loan debt that ruled my career for 20 years.

And as appealing as taking an art class, writing short fiction, or making a collage sounds to me, I resist with every molecule of my being because there’s no one to invoice!

So why bother?

I think there might be important reasons to bother. The ratio of creating to consuming has gone off. And I suspect somehow my life is poorer for it.

That night I was lying awake with a stomach ache? In the moments between sleep and wakefulness when your brain is in that drifty liminal space—a dream space—I saw an Instagram feed scrolling there in my semi-consciousness.

It really disturbs me that I’ve scrolled enough for that image to be a default of my subconscious. I want my dream space to fertile for inspiration and original ideas.

Social media, probably including Substack, is a form of hypnosis, an unchosen meditation, that makes me receptive to—at best—plastic sneakers and colorful earrings and—at worst—pernicious ideologies and dark fantasy worldviews.

For me, Instagram has taken on a quality of spiritual and creative pollution. But without it, how would I know what the vegan specials are at my favorite restaurant?

How would I remind my clients—and friends—that I exist?

Given up for Lent

This is all to say I’ve deleted Instagram on my phone.

I gave it up for Lent.

I was inspired to do so after my 11-year-niece (not Catholic) told me she gave up meat for Lent.

It’s not going to fix anything, but I know we’ll both be better for it.

And maybe in that reclaimed time and space I’ll write more newsletters, make more salads, read more tarot, take a dance class, make gifts, or do something else that pays a spiritual currency that can’t be banked—only paid forward.