Having Kids Stole My Favorite Hobby From Me. Here’s How I’m Getting It Back.

Food

Parenthood took cooking from me. Here’s how I’m getting it back.

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In the small town where I live, there are few takeout options. The community has worked around this fact with active use of meal trains. I always sign up. And as I press foil-wrapped containers into my children’s hands, sending them to knock on the doors of friends and acquaintances—or to not knock, to drop on a doormat and retreat quietly—I tell them why cooking and delivering food to people who have new babies, or who are ill or impacted by natural disasters, is important. Food is the thing that we all share, I say; it’s a way to tell someone you see them.

I do not tell them about my own ambivalence about making that food. It’s new. “I used to love to cook,” says nearly every parent I know, “until I had children.”

I enjoyed cooking, too, probably thanks to my own mother. She is enthusiastically present while cooking and eating. She paid attention through meals, coaxed me to talk as a reticent teenager by assigning me cooking tasks. I made jubilant, chaotic, casual dinners in dorms, apartments, and hostels, in various cities, every year of my adult life. But with small kids, I am nearly always low on time, deluged with physical labor, and cleaning something up long before I enter a kitchen. At the same time, magazines, influencers, and occasionally the New York Times Parenting section tell me that what and how I feed my children will shape their immune systems, palates, and eating habits for life, not to mention the environment and foodways around us. The result is that I spend more time than I’d like to thinking about what my children eat.

The change happened slowly. I never stopped cooking; children need to eat. But suddenly, I could not remember the last time I felt joy, creativity, or pride while making or serving food.

At first I thought my pleasure had been felled, as for others experiencing post-COVID cooking burnout, by stale recipes. Fine. We live in an era of briskly selling cookbooks and so many food blogs they have meta-guides. Yet none of these helped me. The knowing authoritarianism of the domestic goddess, the inaccessibility of the lauded chef, the science-of-food authors who complicated things beyond my means to care or clean up—they all made my malaise worse.

The always growing “quick and easy” genre felt especially tricky. These recipes mostly fell into two camps. First were those that were, despite their claims, quite complex, with hard-to-find ingredients and 16-step instructions that would surely take me longer than the projected 15 minutes. On the other hand, some simple “quick school-night recipes” produced bland food that, mommy blogs seemed to say, was just my lot now. Optimistic advance-prepped casseroles, meatballs, and one-pot meals estranged me from life with small dependents far more than my three funny, hearty-eating children had.

Could I research my way back to joy? I tried to. I talked to friends: sympathetic but unhelpful; those with children missed enjoying cooking, too. A chef: vaguely amused—joy? In cooking? Food journalist Elizabeth Dunn, whose podcast explores the many issues around children and food: The physicality of having small kids, she told me, stole her enjoyment of “the sensory quality of cooking.”

Political scientist and Cookbook Politics author Kennan Ferguson hinted at why books had not helped me. Cookbooks, he said, “both bring you into and demand a collective response.” Many reinforce traditional gender roles and family dynamics. And others are “about performance and enjoyment of performance.” I disliked both categories.

“Our contemporary food culture makes multiple ethical demands on parents,” Ferguson explained. “Cookbooks similarly can feel particularly oppressive about a sense of perfection and performance.”

Finally, I understood my own reaction. Parenting small children can, in its harder moments, feel theatrical to me: performing patience, performing familiarity with new school and playground communities, performing confidence in the precarious social and political systems around our family. And food, obviously, is not only about eating or nourishment. We talk easily these days about how what we eat encompasses logistics, care, attention, economics, politics, environment, culture, a relationship to a physical body. As Ferguson put it, food is about the entire “human sensorium.”

But the sum of the proliferation of food culture, to someone raising a young child, is pressure and judgment. It stems, researchers have found, from the precarity and stress that dominate many aspects of raising small children in this country, and it’s felt by American parents across the economic spectrum. Well-meaning emphasis on the many ways that childhood food exposure shapes our children often leaves out an essential element of preparing and sharing food, one that fights against the anxiety that cripples many contemporary parents: sheer pleasure.

In the same way that children’s eating gets fraught when they’re forced to clean their plates, the joy a parent might take from cooking often dissipates under pressure. And a parent’s happiness matters to children’s physical and mental health and to broader political activism, too.

Holding the importance of my own lost pleasure in my mind alongside the stakes of what my children eat hasn’t exactly brought it back. As Dunn told me, “I still don’t love cooking anymore.” Instead, I’ve looked at the sincere joy in cooking-adjacent moments. Watching my 3-year-old son cut mushrooms with gorgeous determination, or realizing that my elder child learned to crack an egg at school. Listening to them all giggle as they vigorously mix rice, dal, tomatoes, and yogurt together—feeling gratitude for the Indian takeout place a few towns over—and call the process “making butter.” They understand, already, how food can feel alchemical.

One book, though, helped me feel certain that my earnest love of cooking will someday return. A collection of novelist Laurie Colwin’s food essays reminded me of all the things cooking does far beyond nourishing children—offering social connection, aesthetic experimentation, political engagement, sheer deliciousness. She does not emphasize performance or perfection, her recipes are devastatingly simple, and my copy of Home Cooking contains zero photos. Colwin is suggestive rather than prescriptive. I made her chicken with paprika and apples.

A chicken, quartered; two apples, sliced; paprika, dusted; a little butter.

Books

Cooking

Family

Kids

Parenting

Recipes

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