Learning to Care – when sealed off by crisis

Learning to Care by Krishnendu Ray was originally published in Bastard Cookbook by Antto Melasniemi and Rirkrit Tiravanija, in June 2019. In his essay, Ray – author of multiple titles focusing on food, culture and globalization and Chair of the Food Studies Program at New York University – reflects on ideas related to bastard cooking through the lens of domestic labor around the kitchen and home, and from the perspective of a single father in New York City.

The essence of the text – cooking as form of care, food as comfort, and sharing meals as a gesture of love – has never felt more relevant than now, during the global pandemic that forces us all to shelter in place, cook meals for the household, be it a solitary one or a family of any size. In Ray’s essay, a family member is absent due to illness – as for so many of us right now. While we worry about the sick and the lonely, we have to maintain focus on keeping ourselves and other family members nourished, and sane. The challenges one faces with the limitations of the domestic space and the chores that come with it are present in Ray’s text: 

Many have written about families and domesticity as sources of anxiety, conflict, and as spaces sealed off from the art of writing. Others have come to see that space as the very ground on which to prepare for the world in words and feelings. For me it has been both. A nightmare and a respite from one. Most importantly, it was the place I learned to take care of others, however hesitatingly.

As a writer Ray refers to writing as the art he sacrifices for the domestic duties. The current crisis seals us off from the art of everything we used to think of as the building blocks of our lives and societies – social gatherings, the workplace, any experiences that bring people together. For many it’s a nightmare, yet also a respite. A respite that forces us to care, and to learn from it.

Introduction by:

Kaarina Gould, Executive Director of the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York and co-editor of Bastard Cookbook

Learning to Care

by Krishnendu Ray

My son is heading to college this fall. We’re a long way from the six-month-old baby he was when he left the psychiatric ward in his grandmother’s arms. His mother has been physically absent for the last eight years, much longer still mentally, due to an illness that opened a chasm we could not bridge. She was away for treatment often, but she left us for good in December 2010, after years of difficulty. Lately, he has been rebuilding his relationship with her. They have visited campuses together and made short lists. She called every college she could. They volunteer at a soup kitchen with a measure of joy, and he meets people there, he says, who are dignified but struggling to quiet the voices in their heads. Yet, the drugs and the demons take their toll. Parenting him has transformed me in unpredictable ways.

This matrix of love, care, and despair emerged slowly in a world in which fathers are laggards in caregiving. I was too. According to the American Time Use Survey conducted by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, men, on average, spent about one hour and twenty minutes a day on household activities in 2015, while women spent an average of two hours and fifteen minutes on the same work each day. On average, women spent fifty minutes per day on food and drink preparation and clean-up, while men spent twenty-one minutes.(1) Although the share of household work done by men has been increasing in the United States, it is still less than half.(2) The disproportion in gendered work is worse in India. That is in my cultural DNA.

I came to the US as a young, middle-class man who had been cared for by others but had never cared for anyone else. I began doing my own laundry when I was in high school, but had never done anyone else’s. I did not know how to cook. In fact, I learned to cook in order to sate my hunger for Indian food, and then to feed my step-children, my growing family, and graduate student friends who would show up for dinner. I cooked badly, but with enthusiasm. The exceptionally fat chickens I found in American grocery stores were enticing. They would burn from the fat dripping onto the flame. I found a way around this, inordinately slowly in retrospect, after a lot of burnt skin enveloping raw meat. The flesh invariably tasted of the charcoal lighter. I learned by failing. David Sutton, a leading anthropologist who studies the cooking traditions of the Greek island of Kalymnos, has written that “each time a moussaka is made, a category is put at risk in practice.”(3) The relationship between skill and execution is played out in the recursive return to the failed and successful moments of everyday life. The “risk in practice” is the dynamic between continuity and change every time we cook a dish, or speak a language, or put on clothes to step out into the world.

I used spices to mask my ineptitude as I learned to cook. There was enough marinade on the chicken to disguise the odor of char, and rice and dal, the latter fragrant with onions, dried red chilies, and roasted cumin, helped to distract. Masoor dal is the most forgiving thing to cook. You can add or withhold as much water as you want, to make it thick or runny, and the flavors of the spices disseminate marvelously through the soupy legumes. Add a sautéed green on the side, like spinach or bok choy or cabbage or even collard greens. Any green with Bengali panch phoron (a mix of whole mustard, fenugreek, cumin, kalonji, and fennel) works well as a meal. We would sit down and devour the stuff with our fingers, our American children, Robby and Anna, loving the permission to discard the silverware. They were patient with the changes in the menu that depended on the time of the month (more meaty proteins closer to pay day), the rich but loud political conversation among graduate students, and the late nights. The Kellys – my step-children’s patronym – learned to eat curried chicken and sloppy joes with garam masala, and to relish them. Now, that is a productive bastardization of cuisine for you. Slowly, I developed a culinary repertoire that received more than the necessary attention from friends and colleagues, and patience from a slowly congealing family. My graduation came, and with it, a better paycheck. Finally we had some money, a home with a large kitchen, and friends with families that had to be fed diligently. We ate out regularly, trying every restaurant in the mid-Hudson Valley. That is where we as a family learned to eat sushi. At first we recoiled from its coldness and mushy texture. Everyone around us said it was the best thing in the world. We kept eating it until we found it good, too. But the kids loved the sandwiches and the steak with mushroom sauce at the local steak house that had been there for more than half a century. It became our regular Saturday destination, where Robby would claw out the insides of a roll to stuff it with his salad, making a crunchy sandwich. Each meal cost us about twelve dollars per head, which felt rich to us, newly escaped as we were from the genteel poverty of graduate school fellowships. Anna figured out that eating sushi would give her a cultural cachet unavailable to her friends, so she also fell in love with sushi. Chef friends started showing up for dinner, so we had to improve our cooking. Mike berated me for dull knives, Brian bemoaned that home cooks are afraid of using high temperatures and tend to cook everything in soggy, low heat. Ken nudged us to invest in better utensils, and to abandon meek salting. We became passable cooks with passable kitchen equipment. We even grew corn, cucumbers, zucchinis and tomatoes, basil and cilantro and green chilies in the backyard buffs of the Hudson River. Looking back now, that feels like a utopia. The high before the crash that was to come.

It came soon after the birth of our youngest child. I had not wanted another child. Never had any plans for him. But his mother did, and I acquiesced. Her sickness came spiraling back, and our family descended into despair, and then destitution. I became bitter. My stepdaughter left to live with another family. Each one of us was headed into our private hell. Police and social services entered our family as regular visitors, leaving no positive emotion untouched. As Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote of his own, similar situation, “I had been summoned to a meeting.”(4)

It was a routine meeting, they always arranged one when it happened, the thing that had happened here, but it didn’t leave me unaffected, and not just because it was humiliating to sit in an office answering questions from two young women, both of them in their twenties, about my children and about our life, but also because it was shameful, since it meant that we, as a family, had approached the zone in which third parties had the right to get involved, had the right to give advice, even had the right to enter our lives and take over.

In my case it was a kind, middle-aged, African-American man, but that did not soothe the sting of humiliation. We sold our home and moved to New York City for better care at the hospitals that line First Avenue. A new job provided an opening. Better care worked for a while, but the amplitude of the illness was unrelenting.

I began to take over the parenting responsibilities. At the elementary school I was the only father who could afford the luxury of staying for forty minutes each day to read to the children gathered around a little desk. Reading together became an envelope of calm for my son and me. We fought hard to stick to the ritual, the rhythm, the touch of our heaving bodies. We did that almost every morning at school and every night at home. Once he fell asleep in the evenings I would pour myself a glass of wine or beer and start reading and writing late into the night. The next morning, we would be up at 6:45 a.m. and make a breakfast of toast with crème fraiche, smoked salmon, avocado and cucumber, with a cup of tea. We ate that almost every day. We would walk over to school a block away. And then read again.

The child psychologist gave me terrific advice: name his mother’s disease to him even if he does not know what it means, because naming it will give him a measure of control over it. As a South Asian I am trained to hide adversity from children and from others. I would never have named it without professional advice. Years later, the psychologist told me, Tell him that it is your decision, not his, about where mom is going to live. I would pick him up from his after-school programs, we would play and read a bit, then cook dinner and eat, packing some to take to his mom on the sixth floor of Beth Israel or Lenox Hill where the psychiatric-hold wards are. Some days she would refuse to meet us. On most days she was happy to see him. She would eat. He would do his homework. We would go back home, wash the dishes, and I would put him in a warm bath.

When he was four years old, on a trip to Cuttack, a small town on the east coast of India, we found ourselves in the back seat of an old Ambassador car. He sat on my lap, facing me. “Dad, I don’t feel so good,” he said. I assured him that we would be home soon. He looked at me with large water-filled eyes and threw up right on my glasses. I was tempted to push him back, but I didn’t, and instead pulled him into me as he emptied his stomach on my face. I held him there. Once we got home, I carried him to the bathroom for a shower together in the middle of the night. Sometimes, back home in Manhattan, when I would give him his bath, the warm water would relax his muscles, causing him to poop in the bath- water. I would fish the excrement out with my fingers. My love for him overrode my sense of disgust. Almost every mother could vouch for this feeling, but it was a new lesson for me. I repeat those stories, trying to occupy a space mothers typically do, exaggerating my endless caregiving and selfless love.

The narrative of the heroic father wobbles here, with innumerable instances of errors, short-tempered outbursts, and insensitive comments. Once, while carrying him down the stairs, I tripped and he flew out of my hands, hit the wall and slid down it into a crumpled heap at the bottom of the stairs, too shocked to cry. There was another time when I set him up on the dryer, assuming he would stay upright, as I moved the laundry from the washer. He somersaulted right into the front-loading dryer. These physical errors are easier to explain than the many emotional failures when I have reacted with unreasonable anger and moodiness. My errors involving his mother also multiplied.

Nevertheless, in those childhood years we would get in bed every night and read for an hour or more. We worked through all of Dickens and Twain (changing the racist and anti-semitic language in them) and Conan Doyle, which was quite a favorite. He never really liked Harry Potter. He found those books too scary. I think both he and I are partial to retaining some connection to reality even in our stories, and to avoiding too much fantasy or wild imagination. What we really loved was John Flanagan’s The Ranger’s Apprentice. We read the series twice over, waiting hungrily for each new volume to be released. By the fourth volume he became too impatient with my sleepy pace. He started reading by himself.

If his mother was home, I would pull out the trundle bed and sleep next to him. Sometimes we were afraid, so we would lock the door. That was the routine almost every night. One day he said he did not want to go to the hospital any more. So we stopped going. We created a cocoon of love, added a beautiful cat to it, and lived in it for years. We read, we cooked, we played, we bathed, we did the laundry, we vacuumed, we cleaned the toilets, we crawled into bed together, smelling each other on days we were sick and on days we were happy, as Mommy suffered in hospitals and in her head, with no end in view. That went on for years. Sometimes, hot with a fever, he would crawl under my cover, the heat draining into the coolness of my skin. I came to enjoy all the domestic activities that mothers are both inordinately burdened with and often come to love, outgrowing early bouts of resentment and self-pity. Many have written about families and domesticity as sources of anxiety, conflict, and as spaces sealed off from the art of writing. Others have come to see that space as the very ground on which to prepare for the world in words and feelings. For me it has been both. A nightmare and a respite from one. Most importantly, it was the place I learned to take care of others, however hesitatingly.

As he grew through middle school, we walked together to school, walking across Manhattan every day, First Avenue to Ninth Avenue and back. He never liked riding the subway. Through rain and snow and sleet and on beautiful bright days he walked across the island to his little public school on the west side. From the time he was six years old, we would walk from 22nd Street to Central Park and back. It would keep us engaged the whole day and avoid the anxieties at home. We were at that tiny zoo in Central Park almost every weekend. Now that he’s in high school, we have become quieter and a little more distant. On our return, I from work and he from school, we cook. Some days we opt for “soup and sushi,” which we collate from Gracefully and from Bruno’s on First Avenue. Other days we crave buffalo wings from the Peter Cooper Diner, pairing them with a salad at home. For about a year he has had a girlfriend, and it has been tougher to get him into the kitchen and away from the phone. But when he does cook with me, the long narrow architecture of the kitchen, with the sink and the oven across from each other, helps to generate depth in our conversation. The ability to not stare at each other as we wash and clean and cut and chop and sear and sauce allows us to talk to each other better, longer, deeper. Sometimes, the silence buzzing with activity helps, too. We cook and clean in the humming room, where the refrigerator sighs, and the cat wanders in to lap up her chicken, cheese, and steamed fish. She loves the kitchen too, its warmth, the aromas, the working bodies in close proximity. Last night as Snowy licked her chops, we cooked pork schnitzel, with a mayo-gochujang dipping sauce, and a side salad of lettuce and tomatoes, drizzled with mustard vinaigrette. There you have, again, a delicious hybrid cuisine. Caregiving is what connects the personal to a larger social context. Cooking and cleaning for children and for seniors are the central elements of social reproduction in any society, which for too long and in too many places, we have expected women to do single-handedly. That has reached a breaking point as more and more women have been drawn into the formal labor force and commutes have become longer, our standards of cleanliness for our homes and our clothes have climbed, and women have been expected to be providers of healthy and sustainable food. That is one dimension of what Nancy Fraser calls “the crisis of care.”(5) We need investment in the social infrastructure so that households are supported, and men have to step up to the plate to do the necessary care work. In the process, men like me might learn the pleasures of caring for others. As I connected my personal troubles to larger questions, I recognized how the resources I took for granted are not available to many – the time, the space, and the money.(6) As my son heads to college – he is turning eighteen soon – I will celebrate the fact that I will never again run the risk of losing legal custody of him. Having taught me to cook and care without petty resentments, having made a sort of man out of me, finally, is what I will really thank him for.

Footnotes:

1. www.bls.gov/tus/charts/household.htm

2. www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf

3. David E. Sutton, 2018, ‘Cooking in Theory: Risky events in the structure of the conjuncture,’ Anthropological Theory vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 81–105. To dig deeper into the arts of everyday American cooking see Amy Trubek, 2017, Making Modern Meals. How Americans Cook Today, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press.

4. Karl Ove Knausgaard, 2018, Spring, New York, Penguin Random House.

5. www.dissentmagazine.org/article/nancy-fraser-interview-capitalism-crisis-of-care

6. See Sarah Bowen, Joslyn Brenton, and Sinikka Elliott, 2019, Pressure Cooker. Why Home Cooking Won’t Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do About It, New York, Oxford University Press.

About the author:

Krishnendu Ray is chair of the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University, author of The Ethnic Restaurateur (2016) and The Migrant’s Table (2004), and the co-editor of Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food and South Asia (2012). He serves on the editorial board of the journals Food, Culture & Society; Gastronomica; and Contemporary Sociology.

steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty/Krishnendu_Ray 

cityfoodresearch.org/

About Bastard Cookbook:

Bastard Cookbook by Antto Melasniemi and Rirkrit Tiravanija, published by FCINY and Garrett Publications, is part cookbook and part culinary misadventure. Originating from a shared appreciation for breaking the rules Bastard Cookbook is a collection of texts, photo essays, and culinary scenarios – questioning the meaning of authenticity. Available through select booksellers.

fciny.org/projects/bastard-cookbook

garret.fi/books/antto-melasniemi-and-rirkrit-tiravanija-bastard-cookbook