Years ago when David and I decided to become foster parents we put it up to a vote with Lucy and Edie. They were eight and nine at the time, and much like moving from NYC to Vegas, having more kids in and out of the house felt like the right thing, but also a big unknown. They voted yes because they, all of us really, had no idea what it would actually entail.

One of the things we did - which seems shockingly naive now - is watch The Fosters together. The Fosters is a Disney-ABC that ran for five years from 2013-2018. It was a drama about two women, a cop and a principal, who have a bio kid from a previous marriage, and bring in some foster kids to make this big, tumultuous family. It wasn’t super-realistic, but also it wasn’t super-unrealistic either. And it gave us a format to field questions from the kids about their concerns.

I loved watching the kitchen scenes most of all.

Every scene in the morning, the parents and kids piled into the kitchen, making eggs, pancakes, grabbing bowls for cereal, arguing, chatting, hunched over the island. From a writing stand point it was exposition and set-up central.

You should read the book.

But if you can’t, or it’s not your thing, or time is a motherfucker and you don’t have enough of it, I’m going to lay out the things that Desmond, in his new book, Poverty, By America, tells us about how poverty exists in the US and what we can do to abolish it.

And the point here is that we can change it. We can abolish poverty but it will require BIG lens shifts on our part - yes, us - and then we have to vote with that front and center and move through life with that shift in how we view our consumer choices and how we live.

As a food writer, I am committed to the idea that everyone should be able to have enough food (there is enough food theoretically), choose their own food, eat like they want to, live like they want to, buy what they want to eat, the brand they love, the amount they need. I want food charity to be unnecessary. Of course all of this is connected to poverty, housing, childcare, taxes, where the money flows, etc.

Food doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

I made the shiro wat without telling her. 

I wanted it to be a surprise. I wanted to please her. My friend Messeret, and I were hosting an Ethiopian-inspired dinner party. She was the chef and I was the sous. This was her native food, the food of her childhood and her heart. We expected about 20 friends, some mine, some hers, some ours. 

She made most of the dishes. 

But I got it in my head that I wanted to cook something too. 

I mean I got super-inspired when we went market shopping. We visited the butcher at Selam Market. He cut us ruby red meat for kit fo. Then to Goolit Mart, to inhale the spices and walk the store with Messeret. She taught me about the texture of the injera, what to look for, how to buy the softer, fluffier, better quality bread, if I’m not making it at home. 

“They make it fresh here,” she tells me. 

She made me smell spices and told me the uses for each kind. It was exciting and jiggled all my nerdy cooking neurons. She didn’t know this but after our shop together, I went back to Selam secretly. 

Last Friday I did an “in conversation’ with the brilliant Roxanna Asgarian about her book, We Were Once a Family: Love, Death and Child Removal in America. A masterful and beautifully-reported book, about the Hart Family murders. Two white adoptive moms, plagued by accusations of starving their Black adopted kids and with CPS on their heels, drove their family of eight off a cliff in California, killing all of them.

I went into this book knowing about the accusations of the children, who would show up at the neighbors house begging for food. Some of the children, one in particular was small and stunted for her age, looking years younger than she should. I went into this read really trying to suss out if the children were being starved in a malaise of intentional evil or if this was more of a locking the fridge and pantry situation gone terribly wrong?

The evidence Asgarian presents is intense, and the kids are clearly in distress, and after reading this book, I decided it doesn't matter what the moms intent was, but I do know that a lot of bad things can happen to kids and families when people start hiding, holding, removing and locking up food.

It’s 70 degrees in Vegas, proper March weather. And we had the kids at the park and somehow we all ended up at a nearby Red Lobster.

Just the thought of a Red Lobster jiggles and trips all the mechanisms in my brain.

When I was a kid, Red Lobster was the restaurant of excitement. We were solidly blue collar. Working class. But doing well enough. My parents had been poor, both of them. My mother was keen to remind me that I was one generation away from people who didn’t go to the store, but hunted for their food. They saved and scrimped. Mom clipped coupons.

Red Lobster was my birthday dinner. Every year. I loved the lobster tanks. I wanted to see the lobsters, get close up to their hard shells and weird insect tentacles and then once I did, I’d worry for them. Who would be killed first? The little dude in the corner or this big honking daddy? Would it hurt? Do lobsters feel?

Mom always ordered the fried fish. We never ordered lobster because it was too expensive. But I like to think it was because I was saving them from the boil. Even though I hear the chefs at Red Lobster halve them down the middle with cleavers first before boiling. Is that just PR?

Yesterday, I was driving my 11-year-old son Raffi home from tutoring.

The car is such a great place to learn about your kids. We talk. Mostly, I listen. Edie, for instance, plays music at full blast if she’s anxious. We listen to Ozzy Osbourne or Queen, whatever she is in the mood for, until she feels she can talk about whatever is on her mind.

Man, we spend a lot of time in the car.

Raffi, in the car, is non-stop chatter. He’s an extrovert. He doesn’t need the music. He wants to sort things out. This helps us work through his stuff.

We emphasize 1) helping him be aware of his behaviors and impulses and 2) rewarding him for being honest.

Emilie and Chantal have been together for five years. 

They have two kids, *Marley and David, both young-ish teens who live between their house and Emilie’s first wife, in California. Emilie and Chantal live with Emilie’s grandma in a trailer park in North Vegas. 

I met them during the pandemic. They kept their family fed by working Doordash and UberEats and making Target deliveries. Everyday that we operated a food pantry in our front yard during the pandemic, I’d see their beat up Suburban pulling up out front, kids clamoring out. Chantal with a sweet smile and Emilie, loud, hilarious and carrying boxes of food to give to the pantry. 

They picked up food for other people when they picked up food for themselves.  

This month, Chantal will lose over $100 of SNAP money that went to feed them, grandma and their kids.

“When Berto comes here, please don’t speak to me that way, “ I say to my son, Raffi, after a particularly rough conversation where he told me to “shut the fuck up” repeatedly.

“He will think you have been raised in a barn.”

This is the conversation I am having with my eleven-year-old who came to us from foster care at age four, with his sister Desi, who was then 7 months. Raffi's biological father, Berto, is coming for a visit this weekend. Berto is a recent addition to Raffi’s life. He was not even aware that he had this son until we discovered Raffi’s bio-sister on Ancestry.com.

For those of you new to my writing, Raffi has an attachment disorder, usually called Reactive Attachment Disorder (sometimes called: Disinhibited Social Engagement Disorder).

Essentially, there is a schism in how he attaches to people.

I was seasoning the wok. Giving it the old spa treatment in oil.

I rolled the oil over the carbon steel, over the flame, until the metal scorched. Until it changed color. It was a brand-new wok, ordered from Tane Chang’s Wok Shop in San Francisco. A big boy, twenty inches across, that was tinny and silver until I roasted it over flame.

It grew dark, nearly obsidian. 

That’s when I poured the oil out of the wok and all over my hand. 

I didn’t feel it at first. I saw it. 

She hated this photo. 

She hated that her nails weren’t clean. They were always black and greasy from working on bikes. She hated that her face was unshaven. 

Come to think of it, this was the first time I had ever seen her with razor stubble. Her body was usually immaculately hairless. 

How did she always stay on top of that while living on the street?

This photo was taken the day her boyfriend torched her tent, with her in it. He burned all her clothes and that really special eye shadow palette, name-brand and barely used. 

Still, she was alive, shaken. A small miracle.