In this audio story, I explore my own personal history with making food, compare it with my younger brother’s experiences, and contrast it with those of my in-laws.
Audio Transcript
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
[Kat – narration]: The way that someone interacts with food can tell you a lot about them. Like whether or not their cupboards have always been full or if learning to make food with a social experience, or if they simply ate for sustenance. Some families, like the one that I grew up in, had somewhat disjointed or disconnected relationships with food; other families, like my husband’s, use food as a tool of connection and cohesion.
[Background sound of microwave cooking]
[Kat – narration]: When I think of cooking as a kid, these are the sounds that come to mind, not big family get-togethers or learning how to make an old family recipe or even eating together as a family. But this: Grabbing frozen meals heating them up and then heading to the TV. But I wasn’t exactly alone in this; my younger brother, Sean, joined me, too.
[Sean]: My relationship with food, if I were to be specific, is I think, because we were such latchkey children, and we didn’t express our emotions well, in my relationship with food, most of my memories around it are like, “Food you’re my only friend.” Food and television. So those are very linked in my brain with security, right? Those are very secure things to me in my brain: eating and watching TV, right? Which are habits that have carried through the rest of my life.
[Kat – narration]: When I was very young, my mother did a lot of what you’d expect from a good Mormon housewife of the 1970s. Primarily, she either canned or dehydrated fruits and veggies. She was excellent at preserving food, but she didn’t really like to cook it. I remember mysterious casseroles and somewhat questionable meat preparations, but my brother shared with me how he remembers the casseroles a bit more fondly.
[Kat]: Mom said that when you moved to Albany, you asked her for some casserole recipes.
[Sean]: I did, and she didn’t have any.
[Kat]: Oh, she didn’t?
[Sean]: She was like, “Just go look at the Betty Crocker book, that’s all I did.” I was like, “I want the teriyaki, or I want the stew or chili recipes” and she was like, “It’s just the ones in Betty Crocker.” I was like, oh, okay. She was like, “Just like my chocolate chip cookies were the Toll House one on the back of the bag.” It was like, oh, okay.
[Kat – narration]: And then there was my dad, who was kind of a pinch hitter when it came to cooking. He could make the basics like scrambled eggs and a few Mexican dishes that he learned while living in Mexico on his Mormon mission. So he’d step in every once in a while and make breakfast, or breakfast for dinner, or tacos or, as my brother remembers it: Steak.
[Sean]: I guess, you know, the steak thing, right, was what dad got obsessed with, there was the Suquamish Market and they would have a sale on meat that was old. That was just a little bit brown.
[Kat]: It was a better value.
[Sean]: Yes, it was a better value. It was just, you know, it’s, it’s still good, it’s just a little bit brown. And so I must have been…
[Kat]: The red dye is kind of faded.
[Sean]: Yeah! I must’ve been like, yeah, 9, 10, or 11, right? And I remember we would go there and we would get all the steaks. Cause it was like cheaper, you know? And we’d come back and, like, “We’re having a steak every night! We’re living like kings!” You know. That was the Home Improvement era as well, right?
[Kat]: Also incidentally, my vegetarian years, so I was not involved in this at all.
[Kat – narration]: All of that was until my mom went back to school to get her bachelor’s degree. I was about 10 years old when she started going to a community college part-time and I was 13 when both she and my father were gone in Seattle for at least 12 hours every day. At that point, family dinners were relegated to holidays, if then, and my brother and I became expert microwavers, eating alone — together.
[Sound of microwave cooking in the background]
[Kat – narration]: Those years of heating up prepackaged frozen foods left an indelible imprint on my relationship with cooking the eating, but also on my relationship with my brother. Sean and I spent so much time together, just the two of us bopping around an otherwise empty house in the woods, that we somewhat jokingly refer to that time as, “the years of us.” We have an entire shared language, complete with weird sound effects, voice caricatures, and inside jokes. He’s one of my best friends. But, like me, it has taken him years to feel confident enough to make food from scratch. And we’re still learning. One of the people who teaches me now is someone who grew up with a very different experience of food and family.
[Michelle]: When I was a little girl, my family, well, the women in our family, we used to all get together for holidays and each of the young girls had to learn how to make a certain dish.
[Kat – narration]: That’s my mother-in-law Michelle.
[Michelle]: So either you were on breads or you were on the vegetables or you on the meat or you were on the desserts. So each of the siblings, each of the young women had to learn how to prepare by one of the aunts. So my first memory of food was like four, four years old, four or five years old. And probably before then and I just don’t remember.
[Kat]: Were you helping to make it, or were you watching somebody else make it in that first memory?
[Michelle]: Always helping, whether it’s sifting the flour or laying the potatoes in a pan or adding the butter or using the measuring cup to pour in an ingredient or two. So we were always helping.
[Kat]: What do you remember the most about those experiences?
[Michelle]: Oh my goodness. Just being with my cousins and my parents, my aunts, you know, my mom and just, you know, that was what we did every holiday. It was always at one of the other aunt’s houses, you know, they rotated it. So it was always our family gathering with the different family members at their home with your cousins or at your home, you know? So it was just family fun.
[Kat – narration]: My sister-in-law, Kesha has a similar fondness for being in the kitchen.
[Kesha]: I remember being in a kitchen with my mother, with my grandmother, and it’s just, it’s like a getaway. It’s a kind of a go-to. It’s just, it’s just something that we do. We love to cook and to have the house nice and warm. You smell the fragrance of the food and all that stuff. That’s just like a happy home and makes you feel good about yourself and your home and everything.
[Kat – narration]: These early experiences show up in their family celebrations too. Celebrations that I’m now a part of. Small ones, like good report cards and big ones like birthdays or holidays, all involve the joyous, communal preparation and sharing of food. Cooking and eating together is woven deeply into their day-to-day connections, too. Here’s Michelle, again.
[Michelle]: Food, from very early on, has been a way to start conversations. It’s been a way to hash out any drama. It’s been a way to show your loved ones that you really know them. If you prepare a meal, that’s just for them, you know them, they know and they feel like you know them because you made something special for them. So that’s why food is important to me. And I think it’s important to celebrate with food.
[Kat – narration]: For most of my adult life, I looked at food and cooking as some kind of science project. Something that was a bit foreign to me that required study and technique. I’d arrange complicated dinner parties or work on endless iterations of a specific recipe, transforming my kitchen into a laboratory. And when life got too busy, I’d always revert to a frozen chicken pot pie.
[Kat – narration]: When I got married a year and a half ago and joined a family with a very different relationship to food, I’ve started learning new ways of connecting with and sharing food. But I think most importantly, I’ve become reacquainted with the food experiences and memories of my early childhood. Before the endless frozen meals eaten in front of the TV. It’s reminded me of watching my mother knead loaves of bread. Of the sound of beef sauteing as she crafted giant casseroles of Shepherd’s pie or beef stroganoff of sitting on the floor in a warm summer kitchen and smelling the cloying sweetness of strawberry jam boiling on the stove.
[Kat – narration]: But I think most importantly, it has reminded me of that utterly comforting feeling that, in that very moment, someone is caring deeply enough for me to make me something to eat.
This story was produced by Kat Oak Stevenson and features interviews with Sean Oak, Michelle Stevenson, and Kesha Burtle. Original soundtrack music was created by Sean Oak and background sound effects courtesy of Freesound.org.