My Mom is Many Things

Many cooking and food podcasts start with the question, “What was food like in your home growing up?” I often think about how I would answer that question, as there wasn’t much cooking in my house growing up.

Today is when we celebrate mothers/mother-figures, or think of them. My mom, Carla, is a very special person in my life. She is adventurous, silly, ambitious, creative, and loving. For example, she recently signed up for an in-person StorySLAM competition, telling a story about how she lost her phone in London and her quest to figure it out. Or her upcoming trip to Spain later this year with a friend she met in England in the 1970s, that’s my mom. My mom is a lot of things, but I would not call her a cook.

Growing up, both my parents worked, and I have very few recollections of my mom in the kitchen. My mom had a complicated relationship with food, and in my youth, I was often thinking about losing weight, so food had more of a negative undercurrent rather than a celebratory one.

In the last 5 years of thinking primarily about food, I have tried to think about what my ancestors ate and what food culture I came from. My mom’s mom wasn’t a cook either, and seems to have left much of their Eastern European traditions behind. I often think about what my mom and her brother, Richard, ate growing up. I love to learn about the popular dishes of the 1960s and imagine my grandmother, also not a stay-at-home mom or cook, as one of the first of her generation to be targeted by ads for convenience and processed food.

Fast forward to today, I often joke that my mom lives a dream life because my dad does almost all the cooking. 😊

In thinking about Mother’s Day as an occasion to learn more about my mom and her relationship to food and cooking, here’s our conversation:

What was dinner like in your household growing up? Who did all the cooking?

I grew up in the 1960s, when the “man of the house” expected meat and potatoes on the table at 6 p.m. sharp. That’s what my dad wanted, but my mom didn’t always oblige. She wasn’t a natural cook, and as a working mother (both my parents were teachers), she couldn’t fathom why shopping and food ...