What to Eat When You’re Alone
No one is watching. It’s Okay.
Alone in the Kitchen with Eggplant by Jenni Ferrari-Adler, is an inspired book of essays, that are really just confessions, about what we eat when we’re alone. Some of the essay-confessions, like the one by the graduate student who ate canned black beans so often they became his forever comfort food, made me feel seen. Finally, I thought, somebody gets the lonely ritual of eating alone.
Others, like the one from the New York Times food writer who claimed that while her husband was on a golf trip she made a dinner for herself of soft-cooked scrambled eggs covered in truffle oil and a butter lettuce salad, made me call bullshit. She didn’t make that. She was polishing her brand. Flipping through Eggplant again for this piece, I called bullshit a second time because we’ve finally had a reckoning about truffle oil: it is disgusting. But Eggplant was published in 2007, and people were still faking it about truffle oil. (Not unlike when our mothers were faking that carob was just like chocolate, but that trauma deserves a whole other telling).
The difference between the two essays was telling. One rang true. The other seemingly fake eggs/truffle oil/butter lettuce combination proved, in my mind at least, that some people still won’t admit what they actually eat when they are alone. It’s too…
