Friday Joy: Getting Older & More Irrelevant

But also wiser? Plus a feminist fairy tale & the dark side of meal kits.

Photo by Gritt Zheng on Unsplash

This was going to be an essay about granola. Because this week, I found a little joy in the kitchen when I made a batch of Melissa Clark's Double Coconut Granola, a recipe I've been making for…

(Then I Googled the publication date of Cook This Now, the cookbook where the recipe is from, and found it was published in 2011. I also found that in 2012, I wrote about how good this granola recipe is. I HAVE BEEN MAKING THIS RECIPE FOR OVER A DECADE.)

Ten years. There have always been small, jarring moments when I realize my age—a particularly harrowing one came the year I realized I was older than Marge Simpson—but those moments have been coming fast and furious lately. It's probably due to the resurgence of the '90s, and looking at all these baggy jeans and chokers and remembering myself in high school. It's also the frequent reminders of my own creeping cultural irrelevance: the music I like, the emojis I use, the jeans I wear, all of it wrong, markers of my age. The fact that I learn they are "wrong" by reading articles in The New York Times feels like an additionally damning marker of my age.

(I'm 43, by the way. A Xennial or Oregon Trail Generation or whatever you want to call it to signal that I was old enough to absorb the ennui of Gen X, but young enough to fold the Internet and new technology into my social world pretty seamlessly. We got the internet at home when I was 16.)

This is all expected. It happens to everyone at some point. What has been unexpected has been my reaction to it, which has been a kind of distanced delight. Given my Gen X leanings, I've always been a bit of an elitist about cultural tastes.¹ One friend I met post-college teased me relentlessly when she found out I refused to watch Dumb and Dumber in high school and college, and I really was such a snooty sourpuss about movies and music when I was younger. It's different now. I feel happy for anyone falling in love with something I love or used to love—cassette tapes! barrettes! thrift stores!—not judgmental, as I would have been in my teens and 20s.

A couple years ago I took that viral quiz that generates a list of the fictional characters that most match your personality, and my number one match was The Oracle from The Matrix. I was like, YES I'LL TAKE IT. My ultimate goal in life is to be a wise old matriarch.

I know I'm not that old. I have a long way to go to reach Oracle status (if I ever do). But it's feeling closer these days, in a good way.

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What I’m into this week

Reading

Chouette by Claire Oshetsky. This novel about a woman who is married to a very traditional man, but gets pregnant with an owl-baby by her owl woman true love is, obviously, extremely surreal. But in the specificity of its weirdness, so much truth emerges about the pain, the love, the grossness, the Sisyphean nature of motherhood – times a million if you are raising a "nonconforming" child, as Oshetsky describes her real life daughter. (I read an interview where she said she started writing a memoir of raising her daughter and then it turned into this book, which I love.) I was wary of the reviews I read that mentioned "body horror," but the overall tone of the book is frank and even funny at times, with a fairytale dreaminess at the edges. It's weird and wholly original and making me understand for a moment what raising an owl-baby might feel like.

Listening To

The Daily Harvest Food Poisoning Scandal on Maintenance Phase podcast. The whole story of how Daily Harvest's French Lentil and Leek Crumbles led to hundreds of reported illnesses—including hospitalizations, liver damage, and gallbladder removal—is wild, and I appreciated the additional context (and laughs) from the Maintenance Phase team. I was so shocked in school every time I learned about another place in the food system where food companies are basically trusted to regulate themselves, and apparently meal kits exist in a regulatory gray area. Sounds safe! I was clued into this episode by

kay(la)

of

Oy Vey It's A Newsletter

-- check out her newsletter if you are also the kind of person who gets pissed off by GRAS.

ICYMI

I was interviewed for a Vox article that came out last week: How to cook and eat well when food is more expensive than ever. And 

Laura Thomas

included my thoughts on health, race, colonialism, and violence in her excellent essay "What even is health?" Check them out, if you’re so inclined.

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1. I loved this article in The Atlantic comparing attitudes towards music in 1990s High Fidelity (the book and movie), and the 2020 Hulu series. It helped me understand so much about my grumpy, Gen X, cultural snob ways versus attitudes toward discovering new music now: The New Rules of Music Snobbery. Also RIP High Fidelity on Hulu; it was really good.