Fear Cooking

An Omnivore Mom + A Vegan Teen Sort Out TheEnvironment & Their Relationship 

Lucy: Mom, if you could save the environment and erase all global warming and everything  that’s happening because of it…but to do it you had to kill me, would you?

Kim: I haven’t had my coffee yet, so I shouldn’t be making global decisions, but I’m gonna say….No. 

Lucy: One human is a small price to pay to right the planet. I would kill you. 

Kim: I’m sure you would, babe. 

Lucy: Global warming is on you, mom. 

--- A for-real conversation about the environment between a mom and her 15-year-old, vegan activist daughter. 

+++++

Saturday night, around Midnight, I make my 15-year-old daughter, Lucy, a bowl of fried rice and tofu. I make it because she is hungry. I get out the cooked short-grain rice, the pillowy tofu, the oil. Then, soy sauce, scallions, cabbage, cilantro, lime, salt, and my smallest carbon steel wok. I go to work.

Technically, I don’t have to cook for Lucy at Midnight. And truly, I have every reason not to. I’m tired. I took an edible the hour before (we live in a legal state) and it’s just kicking in. I turned down the heat to 69 and I know my pillow will be cold, and I can already imagine my body releasing to the tundra of the cotton sheets, falling into doped up nothingness. 

But I have to cook for her. She and I have barely spoken to each other all night. We are strangers in the family house. Lucy has barricaded herself in her bedroom. Her door is fortified and built with anti-mom bricks and stone and concrete and packed solid with don’t-even-friggin-try-it-mud and clay and anything that will keep me from scratching my way through to her. 

It’s true that the mother-daughter relationship is one of the great loves of our life-time. Researchers tells us that this intergenerational relationship, its existence and its absence, is more life-defining than any other, because mothers and daughters have the most similar emotional pathways in the brain. In one study, scientists found that self-esteem in teenage girls can be directly connected to the degrees of connectedness and trust in relationships with their moms. 

That means, who a girl turns out to be is as much about this relationship, as anything else. And so when trouble sets in with hormones and highschool, we mothers of girls are tasked to dig deep and get it right. But that’s easier than it sounds. Because teen girls are tasked with throwing down grenades and blasting it all apart. 

With Lucy, the more I move toward her, the harder she propels herself away from me. Which is probably why my teen decided to become a vegan in the most profoundly omnivorous household ever. Mine. 

We eat meat. Not just meat, but tendons and offal and scrapple and Spam and things that are beyond  gross to her, and feel more meat-like, more derivative of the animal, than something wrapped in plastic. We have about 25 chickens that we will kill and eat, after they burn themselves out producing eggs for us. And we eat eggs at nearly every meal, fried in duck fat and served over shrimp fried rice, deep fried and dribbled with oyster sauce, scallions and thai chilies, my son eats them scrambled with cream and butter and my baby likes them soft-boiled and jammy. There are always chicken feet in the freezer, and chicken fat and pork skin in containers in the fridge. All she has to do is open the fridge, or look across the dinner table, and our differences are pronounced and obvious. 

Lucy’s veganism is a signifier of who she is at the very core of her being, what she cares about, her aesthetic, her world-view. It’s the solution for her anxiety - what will the world look like for me? It is a way to differentiate herself from me, from the family. It is the beginning of her moving out and away from us. 

She is leaving me. 

There isn’t a lot of time for me to spend being the enemy. 

I made homemade meatballs for dinner that day, an affair that requires hauling out the food processor, and prepping quinoa, black beans and a raft of other ingredients. I serve them with sticky rice, pickled watermelon rind and a creamy salad. She was excited to eat them. But then she saw the bag of panko on the counter, and because she is a good vegan, she read through the ingredient list, until she found…

Honey.

Some asshole  in a factory in Japan thought it would be a good idea to put honey in the panko. 

I don’t even know if it was honey created by actual bees, or fake honey or a honey-like product, because the honey was at the very bottom of the ingredient list, right between the yeast food and the soybean powder, and it was like the last thing, the smallest amount. It was a whisper of honey. 

“Bees are exploited in the making of honey,” she reminds me.

“I’m not eating the meatballs.”

And this is where I  kinda lose my shit.

Because I made the meatballs by hand and mixed it with vegan parm, which sells for $10 for a tiny cashew-based parcel, and vegan worchesteshire sauce and copious herbs I grew myself in a pot, and condiments to make it tasty for her. And I’m not even getting to the invisible labor of cooking, the shopping, the time spent in the morning prepping ingredients, so they come together easily at dinner, the flipping through cookbooks and Internet recipe sites, the mental high-jinx of planning what to eat when our four kids eat different things, and my husband, David is super-keto, which is like the dietary polar opposite of being vegan.

And that’s how the fight begins, in the kitchen, as I’m putting dinner out on the table for us to eat together, and in my mind, have lively conversation around the table, all six of us. But this isn’t going to happen. 

“Um, I’m not eating this.”

This is where she flips her hair and walks off. 

She wasn’t just dissing my honey-tainted, bee-killing, panko-filled meatballs. No, she was dissing me. 

I called her a princess.

 I mentioned starving children, only the 2020 version where I outline that the starving children are not just on other continents, but right down the street, right near us. The starving children are our neighbors! 

“I’m moving to LA the minute I graduate high school,” she shrieks at me.

“Aagh, Vegans are so privileged,” I grumble. I don’t mean it. But I know it will piss her off. 

Yep. That did it. 

“I can’t wait to move away and leave this family! 

“Fine with me!” 

“You boomers are destroying this planet!” 

I might have mentioned again that our neighbors are hungry. And that I am way too young to be a boomer.

We sit down at the table. 

“I can’t wait to move to LA and leave this family,” she mutters. 

Lucy sets her iphone timer to 15 minutes and tells us she will stay at the table for that long and then she’s getting on with her life. 

After watching us eat dinner, she retreats to her bedroom. The wall gets built. I’m outside. It feels shitty. There is no path to her unless I make one. And it’s my job to make the path. I’m the mom. I am the keeper of this connection. 

So it’s midnight, and I know she’s hungry, because she hasn’t been out of her room all night.  I make fried rice, the way she likes it with more rice than veg. I knock and she looks up as I push open her door, through her barricade. She watches me silently from her bed. I have the steaming bowl in my hands. I have a fork, too. Not a spoon. Not chopsticks. Not a ceramic Chinese spoon, like I like to use. A fork. 

“I like to eat with a fork, not a spoon,” she told me once. 

“It gives me more control.”

She tastes. I wait. 

“I like how crunchy it is,” she says, taking a bite.

I add lots of crunch because I know she has food texture issues, nothing slimy, or remotely slime-like. I add sesame seeds, chia seeds, flax seeds, toasted sticky rice, crispy-fried shallots.I hand the bowl to her. 

That bowl of rice gives us both a reprieve. A chance for grace. A place to begin again.

I go in for a hug, and she lets me. But it’s tepid. Brief. 

I’ll take it. 

Then, she closes her door and she is gone again. 

This is the way it is now. She demands her freedom, her decisions, control over her own life.  She gets 

to decide how she eats, what she eats, how she will answer the moral challenges that life throws at her. How she will live her life. 

I am reconciled to this, although her leaving, as healthy as it is, scares the shit out of me. 

All I can do is watch what she does in the world, be silently proud as hell, and let her go. 

And maybe, if she lets me, I can knock on the door to her bedroom - or to her own apartment in LA - and bring her a hot bowl of vegan tofu fried rice, at Midnight, made the way she likes it, crunchy with lots of seeds and fried shallots. 

And a fork. 

So that she has all the control she needs. 

I know my cooking for Lucy is fear cooking. But I’m going to fucking do it anyway.