Disabled Cooking and the Path to Success
My name is Stephanie Pierce and I am a dyspraxic chef. Dyspraxia, as a relatively unknown and certainly hidden disability, is challenging to live with. It affects a number of aspects of life, such as verbal communication, sense of direction, penmanship, and social and motor skills.
My diagnosis took place quite late, at the age of 15. That merry year, I spent two days at the neurologist being told to tell stories based on pictures and place small screws in a peg board to receive a file filled with Bell curves and statistics was of no comfort at all. I begged my parents to send me to the school speech therapist, which they begrudgingly did. That ended after a few months of speaking alongside a metronome with little to no results.
The following year, tragedy struck in the form of a drunken motorcyclist killing my grandmother on a sunny Saturday morning in the French Riviera. That triggered all sorts of events, namely my mother, who by this point had already edged far beyond socially acceptable eccentricities, completely losing it and being sent by dashingly handsome rescue staff to a rest home outside of Paris. That day was when the last Harry Potter book came out, my teenage self greedily read it on the grounds while dad spoke to the doctors in terribly accented French.
My dismembered family traveled back to our Bay Area home with everyone walking on porcelain eggshells. A couple calls to the police station later courtesy of my desperate father, and his wife was locked up yet again, not in a rest home with a lovely garden, but in an in-patient program dosed up on lithium to catatonic doses to try to curb what ended up being diagnosed as bipolar disorder. In this time, I did some speedy growing up, namely cooking for me and my father during these increasingly long stays in the psychiatric ward. Food became a source of comfort for us both, and what used to be fairly silent family dinners were now dotted with the odd dusty Fleetwood Mac record in the background.
Still, my speech was out of control, I alternated between talking a mile a minute and stuttering to the point of preferring silence rather than trying to overcome the blocks. The early university years resulted in my dropping out and falling into culinary school. This experience lasted all of one semester, after which I got hired to cook at a San Francisco homeless shelter. This triggered a career as a line cook: I spent 5 years shuffling between Bay Area restaurants, learning all about California cuisine, to be sure, but mostly fighting my dyspraxia. By this time I’d also received my own bipolar diagnosis (whoop whoop!) and the mood swings, anxiety, and impulsive behavior were in full force. My struggles with organization and following directions didn’t fare so well in restaurant kitchens, and so the time came to go back to school.
I decided I wanted to become a speech therapist, but instead of applying to grad school once I’d gotten my bachelors, I went traveling through Europe. This three-month rampage landed me in London, where I found a job teaching cooking to adults with learning disabilities. The role was a great fit, so great, in fact that I threw myself into the position and wound up suffering from severe burnout that led me into a month-long outpatient program. Still, in my mind it was still worth it, I got to follow my passions and help people who otherwise might not have learned these new skills.
Sometimes good things come to an end, and besides Israel was calling, promising a free master’s degree. I answered enthusiastically, and a month later was on a plane to Tel Aviv airport, incredibly unsure of what the future was offering next.
I first joined an intense Hebrew course in Haifa, Israel. There, I met my now fiancé, and we moved to the Central District to embark on our respective university programs. The grad school experience went swimmingly, and I was one class short of graduation when COVID took over. I suddenly had no job and was stuck with lots of spare time.
This is when the idea for “Picky Tongue: The Cookbook” came to be. I started writing my recipes on the bus, pulling from numerous cooking experiences and family stories to create a very special little book. I worked with photographer Erin Erb Cohen to create a feeling of joy and sunshine through a series of delightful pictures.
But that wasn’t quite enough. At the end of the day, though I manage to bring joy into my life despite my constantly fluctuating moods, cooking wasn’t all about telling heartwarming stories. Instead, I chose to create a book designed to help people with real challenges in the kitchen and in life. What initially became a book for beginners pivoted massively into one designed for people with developmental disorders. Step-by-step photographs of each dish with pictures of the finished dishes in more somber, complex tones work together with clear language and explanations of the various cooking terms to create a resource that can be used by people of varying levels of abilities and literacy skills. The name? “Picky Tongue: Idiotproof”.
But Israel was becoming way too much for me, and my mental health suffered. I was becoming increasingly unhappy with myself and went through a slew of antidepressants that somehow made things worse. When my fiancé got a job offer in Montpellier, France, I was the first one to say yes please. Coming from a bilingual background, I was already fluent in French, which, unlike my terrible level of Hebrew courtesy of a massive stutter attack during the intensive program, made it possible to live a fuller, more satisfying life rather than being on the fringes.
The thing about living in France as a mostly untrained chef is that you end up feeling like your food doesn’t match with the culinary capital of the world. My current battle is no longer with my dyspraxia, nor my bipolar for that matter. Instead, it is with coming to terms with the fact that, no, I am not classically trained, my sauce skills are rudimentary at best and I’m slow at butchering, but my food is global, comforting, and full of flavor and soul.
My current project, which has been dragging since the pandemic, is called “Picky Tongue: Lockdown” (I like jokes in poor taste). It is an ode to slow food, the food that we had time to make during Corona and haven’t gotten back to yet. To complement this, I am back to teaching cooking, not to people with disabilities this time, but to asylum seekers in a neighborhood center.
A diagnosis doesn’t have to be an obstacle to living successfully. Instead, harness your strengths and use them as a tool to give it your best shot.
