Welcome back to the ‘architecture of food’, our third issue produced collaboratively with chlorophyll magazine. New pieces are published weekly, alternating on chlorophyll’s and FFJ’s websites.

Today, a double feature on dairy: Bryony Streets’s astute essay explores the Christian rhetoric of Western dairy marketing that disciplines appetites and shapes who gets to eat. And Apoorva Sripathi’s intricate poem explores the lineage and cultures of yoghurt. Thank you for reading and supporting us!

The Devil’s in the Dairy

By Bryony Streets

Walk down any dairy aisle in the Western world and you enter a moral landscape. Butter is ‘pure’, yoghurts are ‘guilt-free’, and ice cream is ‘sinful’. The language seems playful at first, but the more you look, the more you start to see something else: the foundations of an uncomfortable structure where pleasure requires permission and appetite demands supervision. Somewhere between the probiotic promises and the pastel tubs, eating becomes a question of virtue.

Let’s step back to 1993, when a US Dannon advert claimed that its Light ’n Fit yoghurt was ‘proof that there is a God and she is a woman watching her figure’. In this moment, God was reimagined as a dieting woman – low-fat yoghurt, her divine provision – and the idea seemed to stick.

Food is not supposed to function this way. Even Christian scripture insists that eating carries no moral weight: ‘Let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink,’ writes Paul the Apostle. ‘We are no worse if we do not eat, and no better if we do.’ But contemporary food advertising reverses this position. Across the Western dairy aisle in particular, a borrowed religious vocabulary has reorganised appetite into a system of judgement, where foods are divided into virtuous and sinful, and eating becomes a daily act of self valuation…

READ THE REST OF THE ESSAY ON CHLOROPHYLL.

Bryony Streets is a food and culture writer interested in how eating reflects and reinforces systems of belief, power and control. She has a degree in English Literature and Language from the University of Oxford and works in food media. Her writing has appeared in Scribehound Food, The Historians Magazine, and The Charles Lamb Bulletin.

Self preservation

by Apoorva Sripathi

READ THE POEM IN WRITTEN FORM ON CHLOROPHYLL HERE.

Apoorva Sripathi is a writer, editor, poet, and artist from Chennai, now based in London. Her projects include shelf offering, an archive of food, art, memory, history, and politics and the grounded report, a repository of her writing, art, and everything else. She is the co-founder and editor of CHEESE, the magazine of culture, and her writing has been published in Kinfolk, Vittles, Wellcome Collection, and Feminist Food Journal. She is also the co-founder and co-editor of chlorophyll.

By Misha Paul

In the home I grew up in, and the houses I frequented, every meal began with rice.

More often than not, I woke to the sound of a pressure cooker whistling nonchalantly, its drone punctuated by the smell of freshly tempered spices. Even before I had brushed my teeth and found my bearings, I could see that vegetables had been cut, and fish had been marinated. At the centre of the scene was my mom, briskly moving between sections of the kitchen in a soft taant-er saree — a traditional, breathable handloom cotton saree from Bengal, woven for comfort in the humidity of daily life.

As soon as she spotted me, she’d let me know that my breakfast was already on the table. And I could only wonder: How long had she been in the kitchen?

My parents always made it clear that for me, as a daughter in a middle-class Bengali home, education was the top priority. My mother rarely allowed me inside the kitchen — because helping her out meant wasting precious hours that could be spent preparing for a competitive exam or mastering the arguments for some extempore my dad had signed me up for at school. Meal preparation — washing the rice in a steel bowl, swirling it through water until the cloudy starch ran clear, and the eventual process of cooking —was an integral part of my family’s routine. But to me, it was rendered invisible. So, until the day I turned 18 and left home for my further studies, I was unaware of the true labour involved in maintaining a kitchen.

It is only when you begin buying your own groceries, deciding every day what to cook, and making those choices within the constraints of a tight budget — a result of the abomination that is an early-career salary — that you begin to understand the sanctity of cooking work. Later, when I began cooking regularly — only three years ago, in my late thirties, after embarking on a “fitness journey”— I finally came to appreciate the mathematics, physics, chemistry, and, above all, the love behind meal prep.

Recently, I also started to see how the kitchen is shaped by the ingredients it houses. After hovering around my mom’s kitchen and tinkering in my own, at 39 years of age, I find myself spending time in a faraway kitchen shaped by an entirely different foundation — my mother-in-law’s.

My mother-in-law is German, and in her home, meals often centre around bread. Germany has a strong tradition of Abendbrot (literally “evening bread”), where dinner is often a bread-based meal with cheese, meats, pickles, and spreads. This, for me, was a new world of ingredients: these breads aren’t just the Britannia or Modern brands of bread that I, as an Indian, was used to eating. In entering her kitchen, suddenly I was being introduced to Bauernbrot (farmer’s bread), Roggenbrot (rye bread), Vollkornbrot (wholegrain bread), Brötchen (crusty bread rolls), Laugenbrötchen (pretzel bread rolls), Schwarzbrot (black bread), Mehrkornbrot (multigrain bread), and Zwiebelbrot (onion bread), among others. These breads are made with sunflower, flax, oats, and sesame — ingredients that are generally absent from the Bengali kitchen.

During Abendbrot, bread occupies the centre of the table, sliced into immaculate, uniform pieces using a Brotschneidemaschine (a bread slicer —popularly used in German households, bakeries, and grocery stores— that allows you to cut uniform slices of fresh, crusty bread using a mechanically rotating circular blade), accompanied by a vibrant side of cheeses, butter, cold cuts, pickles, or jam. Every diner wields a knife, a fork, and a small wooden board to use as a plate. The meal unfolds through small, deliberate choices rather than helping oneself to a single, central dish.

Like in my childhood home, my German in-laws also try to keep me away from the kitchen so I can focus on my “office work”. But my curiosity draws me to this quiet space, one devoid of the whistle of the pressure cooker or the crackly tempering of the bay leaf, and built instead around differently shaped knives, temperatures, sauces, and much cold meat. In these moments, I began to notice how differently food can organize the domestic world. In my mother’s kitchen, the meal is constructed through layers of labour that unfold across the day (and sometimes even the previous day). Moving between Indian and German kitchens, I began to understand food as a kind of architecture —not just something we eat, but a structure that shapes our habits and expectations.

Total cooking time: ~1 hour 15 minutes | See full recipes at the end of this piece.

Note: The Bengali bhater thala (rice plate) is not a single dish but a composite meal, built from many small dishes that orbit a mound of rice. Traditionally, the meal begins with rice and bhaja, then dal, then vegetables, and finally fish curry. It ends with an assortment of sweets.

Total preparation time: Around 5 minutes.

Note: Most of the work lies not in cooking but in assembling. Bread is sliced, cheeses and meats are arranged, vegetables are cut, and homemade jams—often apricot or blueberry—have already been prepared, bottled, and stored. The rest is left to the diner, who composes their own meal from the spread before them.

In a Bengali kitchen, rice demands time. It asks for someone to be present in the kitchen, to check the flame, to listen for the lid rattling slightly as the water boils. It cannot be hurried. It teaches a kind of quiet patience, and perhaps a certain intimacy with the domestic space. The kitchen remains active; someone, usually a woman, is present within it. The meal carries the memory of that labour. Rice creates a meal that assumes presence and continuity. Someone cooks, someone serves, and everyone gathers around a shared base.

In my German husband’s family home, however, bread distributes that domestic structure differently. The bread has been either pre-baked or purchased from a bakery, so the work of the meal has often already been done before anyone sits down to eat; it’s up to the eater to assemble their plate with permutations and combinations of their choice. The meal becomes modular, assembled piece by piece by the eater. While rice-based kitchens depend on someone tending the cooking process from beginning to end, bread-centred tables allow greater flexibility, making the act of assembling a meal a shared responsibility.

Ingredients also shape individual eating habits. Rice encourages generosity. It is cooked in quantities that assume someone might want more. Meanwhile, bread encourages portioning; with careful slicing, everyone ensures the loaf lasts through the meal.

Even the gestures of eating shift. In many Bengali homes, rice is mixed and gathered with the hand or spoon, soft and adaptable. Bread requires cutting, spreading, and layering. The body learns these movements almost without thinking.

Neither system feels lacking. They simply organize time and space in different ways. Whether it is an elaborate Bengali meal that unfolds over hours, or a quieter German spread of bread, soup, and accompaniments, these acts shape the dynamics of a household — particularly when it comes to gendered labour. In my experience, it’s predominantly women who influence what ends up on the table. However, the demands and expectations placed on them between the kitchens are different.

In Bengali cuisine, the smells, the sounds, the shopping, the stocking, seem to happen so seamlessly that a woman’s presence begins to dissolve into the background, taken for granted even as it sustains everything. The elaborate meal unfolds course after course like a magician’s trick. Steamed Gobindobhog rice, masoor dal, labra, jhuri bhaja, fish curry, chutney, salad, mishti — each element appears at the right moment, hot/ cold and replenished before anyone notices its absence. But unlike magic, the labour is real, repetitive, and expected. There is rarely curiosity about what happened behind the scenes, only opinions about the final performance: the salt is too little, something is fried too much, the lentils are watery, the rice a little too soft. The meal invites commentary because it carries the visible weight of error.

Bread and cold cuts operate differently. An Abendbrot table asks less of the stove and less of the woman standing beside it. The labour is quieter, shifted toward sourcing, slicing, arranging, and preserving. Yet that subtlety also changes the expectations placed on the host. While the Bengali system expects the woman to constantly produce warmth, the German one allows her, at least occasionally, to step away from the fire and sit at the table sooner, to eat zussamen (together).

The kitchen is not the first place where I have lived between systems. I am a probashi Bengali, aka a Bengali who grew up outside of the native land of Kolkata. I grew up in the Hindi-speaking city of Bhopal, studied in an English-medium convent school, moved to Marathi-speaking Pune, and eventually worked in the sleepless city of Mumbai, speaking mainly the language of “time” and “deadlines”. Each place added its own tempering of spice, rhythm, and habit to my life.

Now, as I step into a German household, learning to navigate yet another new environment, my understanding of belonging and of a woman’s strong yet often invisible role feels ready for another quiet shift. I can sit at a table where multiple systems coexist, acknowledging the loving hands that are often taken for granted, and making space for both rice and bread. To belong is to learn to recognize yourself in both, even if completely in neither.

And perhaps that belonging also comes with a deeper responsibility: to appreciate the labour of the women who hold these worlds together. The women behind the steam of the rice pot and the careful slicing of bread, behind the stocked pantry shelves and replenished plates, behind meals that appear so effortlessly they are mistaken for inevitability. To see them as the quiet architects of a happy household. And to make sure they know — perhaps more often than we currently convey — that they are seen, valued, and above all, deeply loved.

Misha Paul is a reader, writer and marketing communications consultant based in India. She documents slow travels, lived cultures, and grassroots stories across India and beyond, focusing on sustainability, local communities, and meaningful storytelling that gives back. Find her on Substack or Instagram.

End note: Recipes for a feast

If you’re interested in recreating the sample Bengali menu given above — or a refreshing German gurkensalat — here are the recipes.

Saure Gurken

A cooling, fresh contrast to heavier foods, usually served alongside meat dishes, with potatoes, and as part of summer meals. Unlike a Bengali meal that unfolds through layered cooking and heat, Gurkensalat is quick, cool, and assembled almost quietly, and requires very little active labour.

Ingredients

• Around 1 kg of smaller cucumbers

• 1 litre of water

• 3 tablespoons of salt

• 6 tablespoons of sugar

• 13 spoons of vinegar

• Dill, onions, whole yellow mustard seeds, whole black pepper, bay leaf, all as per taste

• 1 mason jar with rubber seal lid and wide opening that can hold all the cucumbers and the liquid.

Steps

• Mix water and vinegar, add sugar and salt and bring to boil. Let it cool down a little bit afterwards.

• Put cucumbers and spices into the jar.

• Fill the jar with the liquid until the whole jar is filled. Seal the jar.

• Let it rest for a minimum about 1 to 2 weeks in a dark and cool place.

Total preparation time: 10–15 minutes

Steamed Gobindobhog Rice

Total time required: 20 minutes

Ingredients

• 1 cup Gobindobhog rice

• 2 cups water

• Pinch salt (optional)

Steps

1. Wash rice 3–4 times until the water runs mostly clear.

2. Soak for 10 minutes.

3. In a pot, add rice + water. Cook covered on medium flame for 10–12 minutes.

4. Once water evaporates, turn the flame low and steam for 5 minutes.

5. Fluff gently.

Start this dish while rice cooks. Total time: 20–25 minutes

Masoor Dal

Ingredients for dal

• ½ cup masoor dal

• 2 cups water

• ½ tsp turmeric

• Salt to taste

Ingredients for tempering

• 1 tbsp mustard oil or ghee

• 1 bay leaf

• 1 dried red chilli

• ½ tsp cumin seeds

• 2–3 garlic cloves (lightly crushed, optional but traditional)

Steps

1. Wash masoor dal 2–3 times until the water runs clear.

2. Add dal to a pot with water, turmeric, and salt.

3. Boil on medium heat for 12–15 minutes until soft and slightly creamy.

4. Stir occasionally and mash lightly with a spoon for texture.

Tempering

5. Heat mustard oil or ghee in a small pan.

6. Add bay leaf, cumin seeds, and dried red chilli.

7. Add crushed garlic and sauté until fragrant and lightly golden.

8. Pour the tempering over the cooked dal and mix gently.

Optional finish: a squeeze of lemon or a pinch of sugar.

Labra

Total time: 30 minutes

Vegetables (traditional mix)

• 1 cup pumpkin

• 1 potato

• 1 small eggplant

• 1 radish

• 1 cup cabbage

Cut all into medium chunks.

Other ingredients

• 2 tbsp mustard oil

• 1 tsp panch phoron

• 2 dried red chillies

• ½ tsp turmeric

• 1 tsp cumin powder

• 1 tsp ginger paste

• Salt

• 1 tsp sugar

• ½ tsp garam masala

• 1 tsp ghee

Steps

1. Heat mustard oil.

2. Add panch phoron + red chillies.

3. Add ginger paste.

4. Add all vegetables.

5. Add turmeric, salt, and cumin powder.

6. Cook covered for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.

7. Vegetables soften and begin to mash slightly.

Add sugar, garam masala and ghee.

Rui Macher Jhol

Total time: 25 minutes

Ingredients

• 4 pieces Rohu fish

• 3 tbsp mustard oil

• 1 potato (optional)

• 1 tomato

• 1 tsp turmeric

• 1 tsp cumin powder

• 1 tsp coriander powder

• Salt

• 2 green chillies

• Fresh coriander leaves

Preparation

1. Rub fish with salt + turmeric.

2. Let it sit for 10 minutes.

Cooking

1. Heat mustard oil until smoking slightly.

2. Lightly fry fish pieces until golden (2 minutes each side). Remove.

3. In the same oil add cubed potato. Fry lightly.

4. Add tomato and cook until soft.

5. Add turmeric, cumin powder, coriander powder.

6. Add 1.5 cups water.

7. Bring to boil.

8. Add fish pieces + green chillies.

9. Simmer 8 minutes.

Finish with coriander.

Jhuri Aloo Bhaja

This is the thin crispy potato served with dal.

Total time: 15 minutes

Ingredients

• 2 potatoes

• Mustard oil

• Salt

• Pinch turmeric (optional)

Steps

1. Peel potatoes.

2. Cut into very thin matchsticks.

3. Wash and dry thoroughly.

4. Heat oil in a flat pan.

5. Fry on medium heat, stirring constantly.

6. Cook until golden and crisp.

7. Sprinkle salt.

Bengali Salad

Total time: 5 minutes

Ingredients

• 1 cucumber

• 1 onion

• 1 tomato

• 1 green chilli

• Salt

• Lemon

Steps

1. Slice cucumber and onion thin.

2. Add chopped tomato.

3. Add green chilli slices.

4. Sprinkle salt and squeeze lemon.

Serve fresh.

Tomato Chutney

Total time: ~15 minutes

Ingredients

• 3 ripe tomatoes (chopped)

• 2 tbsp mustard oil

• ½ tsp panch phoron

• 2 dried red chillies

• 3 tbsp sugar (adjust to taste)

• ½ tsp salt

• ¼ tsp turmeric

• ¼ tsp red chilli powder (optional)

• 2 tbsp raisins (kishmish)

• 1 tbsp dates (optional, chopped)

• ½ tsp roasted cumin powder

Steps

1. Heat mustard oil in a small pan.

2. Add panch phoron and dried red chillies. Let them crackle for about 20 seconds.

3. Add chopped tomatoes and cook on medium heat for 5–6 minutes until they soften.

4. Add turmeric, salt, sugar, raisins and chopped dates (optional)

5. Cook another 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. The chutney will become thick, glossy, and jam-like.

6. Add roasted cumin powder at the end.
   
   

Welcome back to the ‘architecture of food’, our third issue produced collaboratively with chlorophyll magazine. New pieces are published weekly, alternating on chlorophyll’s and FFJ’s websites. Today, Lea Horvat explains how women in the Belle Époque Habsburg South carved out places for themselves in public cafés — as customers, owners, or employees.

Women at the Tables of Empire

By Lea Horvat

‘She enters a small room. It's filled with people, mostly men, with the occasional woman, but always accompanied. Everyone is dressed according to middle-class norms. No woman is alone. Yet, she boldly takes a seat. A strong, healthy woman approaches her, greets her, asks a question, and then brings her dinner.’

In the autobiographical novel Stone on the Road (Kamen na cesti) published in 1938, Zagreb journalist, author, and women’s rights activist Marija Jurić Zagorka expresses the unease of a woman alone in a restaurant, coffeehouse, or pub.

Mirjana, Zagorka’s alter ego, is turned away from an ‘elegant guesthouse where she used to eat in childhood with her mother,’ with the brief explanation: ‘Sorry, we do not serve unaccompanied misses.’ Next establishment, next attempt. An attentive innkeeper reseats Mirjana away from ‘men who are measuring you up’, yet the bohemian intellectuals and artists greet her with the same ‘crudish laughter’. ‘Why couldn’t a woman come here with honest intentions? Why do the people who should defend women from prejudice think like this?,’ Mirjana asks, hurrying to leave. At home, she downplays the discomfort: ‘I’m so unbearable(…). They have been drinking a bit. It’s nothing, nothing.’

READ THE REST OF THE ESSAY ON CHLOROPHYLL.

Lea Horvat is a postdoctoral lecturer at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany, Department of Cultural History and Cultural Anthropology. Her second book project focuses on coffee, gender, and labor on the southern semiperiphery of the Habsburg Empire. Her monograph Harte Währung Beton, a cultural history of socialist mass housing in Yugoslavia, was published 2024 by Böhlau. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Hamburg and an MA in Art History and Comparative Literature from the University of Zagreb. She is the editor and co-founder of the platform Women* Write the Balkans.

By Alexandra Badescu

There is a scene in the TV series Schitt’s Creek that I often return to. In this particular episode of the sitcom about a lovable-but-out-of-touch, formerly wealthy family, mother Moira Rose — in an attempt to prove she has cooked before — is instructing her son David in making enchiladas:

Moira: “The next step is to fold in the cheese.”

David: “What does that mean? What does “fold in the cheese” mean?”

Moira: “You fold it in.”

David: “I understand that, but how? How do you fold it? Do you fold it in half, like a piece of paper, and drop it in the pot, or what do you do?”

The scene ends with David storming off in frustration and Moira, clearly clueless, calling out to him to ask, “What does ‘burning’ smell like?”

As viewers, we chuckle at how the most basic of cooking skills appear alien to the characters. But this scene lingers in my mind because it captures a feeling many of us are familiar with: staring at a recipe and realizing it’s speaking a language we don’t quite understand.

“Whip until soft peaks form.”

“Fry until golden.”

“Season to taste.”

These are commonplace phrases in the English cooking lexicon. They have also, at one point, been completely baffling to someone.

I grew up with a fascination and reverence for recipe books. I’d spend hours flipping through them, tracing each step in my head, trying to understand how a dish came together. Recipes felt scientific and alchemical in equal measure: follow these instructions exactly and you will create magic. I took on the mantle of “chef” in my family from a young age, and it stayed with me.

But my siblings took a different journey. My sister, who is dyslexic, found many recipes frustrating and often unusable. This was always curious to me, as this didn’t reflect on her cooking skills. In fact, it was quite the opposite — my sister is a good cook. She rotates through a small but solid set of dishes (a curry-esque meal with a bit of every sauce and spice in the kitchen; stir-fry noodles, also with a bit of every sauce and spice in the kitchen; hearty salads; steamed veg aplenty), and at least somewhat enjoys cooking this way.

But when pushed to tackle a recipe, her experience is different. The first time her partner visited our house, she took it upon herself to cook two dishes from the oxymoronic cookbook Ottolenghi Simple. As an observer, you’d be hard-pressed to say she relished the process. I wondered what made following an Ottolenghi challenging-in-a-fun-way for some, but an experience-to-recover-from for others.

This also raised another question: who are recipes actually designed for?

Contemporary recipes are shaped into a standard template. A list of ingredients. A sequence of steps. Follow them, and you will arrive at the intended destination. But recipes are not neutral. They are designed —and their design assumes a particular kind of reader, learner, and body.

Many recipes imagine a reader who can comfortably process dense text, jumping between ingredients and instructions, as well as technical and vague sensory cues. They might tell you to remove something from the heat when it’s “perfectly caramelized”, or, like in Schitt’s Creek, ask you to “fold” in grated cheese.

Before recipes were written down, cooking knowledge was largely embodied. You learnt recipes through observation and participation. The earliest written recipes, found on Babylonian cuneiform tablets, show how much knowledge was assumed in their sparse instructions: a translated recipe for a beetroot stew includes steps like “leg meat is used. You prepare water. You add fat. You sear. You fold in salt, beer, onion, arugula, cilantro...”

It’s not clear who the intended reader was, but I wonder if a Babylonian cook ever scratched their head wondering, “how to fold in salt?” As literacy rates and printing capabilities grew, so did the spread of cookbooks, although instructions remained vague and measurements were loose.1

In today’s world, where kitchens, equipment and ingredients are far more standardized and homogenized, apparently imprecise instructions seem like a flaw. Modern recipes strive for reproducibility through exact timings, specific temperatures (thanks to thermostat-controlled ovens), and step-by-step instructions. Many assume a level of textual fluency and the ability to interpret and act out “cook speak”, as well as a cook who is full of energy, able to stand at a kitchen counter for long periods of time and move quickly around a kitchen.

I saw the limitations of this approach when I worked as a baker in a residential care community in South East England, where I ran workshops for adults with learning disabilities. People would get stuck because the instructions didn’t meet them where they were. A step might contain too many actions at once, or a phrase might be too abstract. In response, we found ways to adapt recipes by breaking steps down further and introducing visual cues such as Makaton, a communication system that uses signs and symbols.2

This type of disability-centred recipe design is gaining traction: in the UK, Tesco, a major supermarket chain, recently launched a campaign called Now We’re Cooking to highlight the inaccessibility of many digital recipes, particularly for anyone relying on assistive technologies such as e-readers. It also adapted a selection of its online recipes, making them available in e-reader, braille, and audio formats, while adding British Sign Language and closed captions to some of its video recipes.

These are welcome innovations, but of course, creating a dish requires more than simply processing a recipe. In Crip Up the Kitchen, a cookbook for disabled and neurodivergent cooks, Jules Sherred positions accessibility as a key part of the cooking process itself. In addition to communicating instructions in small, explicit steps, recipes account for levels of energy, pain, focus, and mobility — letting readers judge whether something is manageable before they begin. Most dishes use pressure cookers, air fryers, or bread machines to simplify and reduce labour. Through this care and consideration, Sherred shows how accessibility can function as a design principle and widens the scope of the imagined audience for recipes.

In this way, creating or adapting recipes with inclusivity in mind adds another layer to the cooking process. It emphasizes how a dish can realistically — rather than just ideally — be made.

Disability-centred recipe design also raises questions about mediums used to communicate information. These days, recipes aren’t only bound to printed text. From the classic TV cooking shows to short-form TikToks, recipes are increasingly presented through audiovisual media. These formats can communicate forms of culinary knowledge that written recipes struggle to capture: video allows cooks to experience ASMR-like sounds of onions softening in a pan, or to witness what “folding in cheese” looks like in practice. While the criticisms of social media cooking are many (and some are highly valid, particularly when aesthetics and entertainment are prioritized over creating reproducible recipes), it can also offer sensory and embodied cues that make recipes legible to a wider range of people.

So the next time you flip through a recipe book — or jump to criticize a short-form cooking video — consider who the recipe is for. Recipes are often treated as neutral, universal instructions, but they quietly assume a specific kind of reader, someone who can decode their language, structure and pace. Once that assumption becomes visible, recipes begin to look more like the designed systems they are, shaped by particular ideas of reading, learning, and ability.

With this in mind, David Rose from Schitt’s Creek wasn’t as hopeless in the kitchen as the show’s writers suggest — he was simply encountering a recipe that assumed knowledge he didn’t yet have. Rethinking the recipe in more inclusive and accessible ways allows for all kinds of cooks to take part in the joys and challenges of home cooking.

Alexandrea Badescu is a British-Romanian food writer, researcher and creative. She draws from her background in natural sciences, distilling and art to explore connectivity within gastronomy. Alex is the founder of ‘Cheers to...’ – an upcoming publication focused on drinks and culture. Find her @alexbdistilling on Instagram.

This week, for our collaborative ‘architecture of food’ issue with chlorophyll magazine, we have an essay by Rebecca Thimmesch on what gets lost when global dishes are given English-language names.

No English Menu, Please

By Rebecca Thimmesch

I don’t consider myself a neurotic traveller, despite being a neurotic person. I don’t overplan, I’m not dead set on certain activities or attractions: in fact, I’m quite chill. But where my neuroses come out is in my pathological need to be the waiter’s favourite foreign table. The prize? Being handed the native language menu.

There’s an element of tourist shame here. I know that travel contributes on some level to gentrification, housing crises, rising costs, et cetera, and that many aren’t happy to hear American accents in their neighborhoods. In some ways, the local menu is an attempt to assure my hosts – and perhaps also myself – that I have good intentions within a problematic industry, that I do not expect that my language is always the lingua franca.

But there’s also a practical aspect.

Culinary language learning is its own form of phonics. When we learn about a new dish in another language, we learn it as more than the sum of its parts – imbued with meaning via flavour, not merely translation from English…

READ THE REST OF THE ESSAY ON CHLOROPHYLL.

Rebecca Thimmesch is a writer and cook based in East London. Her newsletter Chic! focuses on food, culture, hospitality, and having fun.

This week’s essay — part of our architecture of food issue published in collaboration with chlorophyll magazine — is a portrait of the ways that women can build worlds with their hands (and a bit of semolina).

By Lina Saad

The first architecture I ever understood wasn’t a building. It was a pastry.

Growing up in Beirut, I remember my grandmother making maamoul in quantities that felt industrial in scale, trays upon trays of them, stacked like edible bricks across my grandfather’s home. The air was thick with the scent of pistachios, rose water, and orange blossom, a perfume that seeped into the walls and into my memory. I was too young to grasp the full meaning of what I was witnessing, but those wooden moulds, carved with ridges, lattices, and tiny sunbursts, were my first lesson in how women build worlds with their hands.

Maamoul has existed in the Levant for centuries, its origins stretching back to ancient Mesopotamia and the early Arab empires. Historically, it was a celebratory pastry, made for Eid, Easter, and other religious feasts. It was also a pastry made by women, who gathered in kitchens, courtyards, and balconies to shape hundreds by hand at a time. The work was repetitive, physical, and communal: mothers taught daughters, grandmothers taught granddaughters, neighbours taught neighbours. Even when war, migration, and displacement threaten the communities that make them, maamoul carry a lineage of ritual, relationships, and cultural continuity.

Maamoul structures time, marking the rhythm of the year. It appears every year at the end of Ramadan to signal a transition from fasting to feasting — from restraint to celebration. As a child, to me Eid morning meant waking to the sight of stainless-steel trays, each one holding dozens of pastries shaped, filled, and pinched shut by the women of my family. Their labour was quiet but immense, a choreography of kneading, filling, moulding, and baking that began days before the holiday.

When my mother moved to London, she carried those memories with her like a second spine. Her own mother had died while she was living in West Africa, building a business and raising a family far from home. Maamoul became her way of keeping that connection alive, a ritual that refused to let distance or loss erase the women who came before her.

In London, our kitchen became a reconstruction of Beirut, not in its layout or its appliances, but in its rituals. My mother’s maamoul-making was an act of rebuilding, a way of creating a familiar architecture in an unfamiliar city. She sat on the carpet because that’s how her mother had done it. She used the same wooden moulds she had brought from Lebanon. She insisted on resting the semolina overnight, even when time was tight, because some structures cannot be rushed.

I remember returning from university one year to find her sitting cross-legged on the carpet of our London kitchen, a large bowl of semolina in front of her. She was kneading it with rose water, orange blossom water, and ghee, her hands moving with muscle memory. She covered the dough and left it to rest for twenty-four hours.

“The longer it rests,” she told me, “the more rewarding the taste.”

It was a lesson in patience, but also in inheritance. Some things need time to become themselves.

Maamoul moulds encode a visual language that women have preserved for generations.

Maamoul come in different shapes, but these variations are not arbitrary; they are a form of code, telling you what to expect before you take a bite. A diamond shape signalled a luxurious filling of pistachios, often reserved for guests or special occasions. Domed, mountain-like maamoul held walnuts, a humbler choice. Flat, stamped discs were filled with dates, the most ancient of the three variations. As a child at my grandmother’s house, I learned to read these shapes long before I learned to read words.

Maamoul moulds are also carved with patterns that echo Levantine tile work and ancient motifs. Like my mother’s moulds from Lebanon, they are often passed down through generations, meaning their motifs can take on a particular familial resonance. For families and communities who have been scattered around the earth due to war and conflict, these traditions remind us of the homes and people we left behind. When I press dough into my mother’s moulds, I feel the importance of these legacies, and awed by how a simple pastry can carry history in its geometry.

In Lebanon, maamoul-making is rarely a solitary act. Women gather in groups — sisters, cousins and neighbours — to make hundreds at a time. The work is divided: one person kneads the dough; another prepares the fillings; another shapes the pastries, another bakes. Conversations flow as easily as the rose water. Stories are exchanged, advice is given, grief is shared, laughter fills the room. The labour is heavy, but it is held collectively.

This communal spirit is not incidental. In a region marked by political instability, economic hardship, and repeated cycles of displacement, communal food labour becomes a form of resilience. It is a way of reinforcing social bonds, preserving cultural knowledge, and asserting continuity in the face of rupture.

In the diaspora, this labour often shrinks to the scale of a single household. But when my mother and I make maamoul together in London, we try to ensure that the collective and communicative spirit remains. We recognize that we are supporting a structure that has held our family for decades.

Watching my mother work the dough, I see that diaspora is not just about loss, but also about construction. From fragments — a mould, a scent, a recipe, a memory — we are building new worlds, tethered to those of old. Maamoul is our way of saying: we are still here, and so are the women who shaped us.

These days, at Eid, when I take my first bite, I taste not just pistachios or dates or walnuts, but the entire world that made me.

Lina Saad is a London-based Lebanese food writer and award-winning author of three cookbooks whose work explores heritage, migration, and the cultural memory of food. Through recipes and storytelling, she preserves and celebrates Levantine culinary traditions, with a particular focus on women’s roles in sustaining family, identity, and community across generations. You can find her on Instagram as @alebanesechef.

This week, for our collaborative ‘architecture of food’ issue with chlorophyll magazine, we have a work of magical realism on inconvenient truths by , as well as a poem by on the meaning and making of yogurt. Both pieces were published by chlorophyll and can be read in full on their site. Next week’s essay will be published by FFJ.

The Whistleblower

By Margaux Vialleron

On a western island lived a woman who was said to be older than anyone else. She walked on the balls of her feet, and her hair was as long as she was tall, dyed in green. She spoke in lullabies. She was a healer and a sea forager, grilling clams and oysters for her supper, painting their shells, which she crafted into jewellery before selling the wearables at the weekly market. She was a cold fire whom the islanders had nicknamed Mum. She bothered folks with her unkempt appearance and her memory that never forgot; she was notoriously unforgiving, but she was loved. Mum was good fortune.

Until the morning when a strange man landed on the most western shore of the island. His body was lengthy and bony like a broom, and his hair was straight, thick, and rough, the colour of wheatfields in autumn. Locals nicknamed the solitary lad the Feather Man. He was spotted hovering on the edge of the cliffs often, his gait awkward and near gale speed; birds quarrelled above his head. Everyone in town talked about the Feather Man, but few folks had met him in the flesh…

READ THE REST OF THE STORY ON CHLOROPHYLL.

Margaux Vialleron is a French-born, Glasgow-based interdisciplinary writer. They’re the author of the novels Breaststrokes and The Yellow Kitchen, short stories, and the newsletter The Onion Papers, which explores the various aspects of life, from literature to cooking, language, philosophy and seasonal patterns. Find her at @margauxvlln or margauxvialleron.com.

Culture Club

By Apoorva Sripathi

READ THE REST OF THE POEM ON CHLOROPHYLL.

Apoorva Sripathi is a writer, editor, poet, and artist from Chennai, now based in London. Her projects include shelf offering, an archive of food, art, memory, history, and politics and the grounded report, a repository of her writing, art, and everything else. She is the co-founder and editor of CHEESE, the magazine of culture, and her writing has been published in Kinfolk, Vittles, Wellcome Collection, and Feminist Food Journal. She is also the co-founder and co-editor of chlorophyll.

This week, for our ‘architecture of food’ issue, published in collaboration with chlorophyll magazine, we have an evocative and visceral poem on the ritual, sacrifice, and performance of domestic labour.

ON YOUR HEART / على قلبك

by Hena Mustafa and Nasma Kublawi

like sandpaper on my palm, she slurps water out of cupped hands–
my offering to her before she’s offered to mine.

for mercy, for dignity, and for sanctuary, my back turns to her.
i tease the edge of the blade with my finger,

testing its sharpness, testing your will.
it’s your turn now. hesitation has no place in this process.

did your mother ever teach you how to forage a lamb? did she ever preach
that if you’re okay to chew on her belly, you must be prepared to sever her vein?

now, give her a kiss and repeat after me:
in the name of God, God is greatest,

in the name of all that is delicate, of a blushing bride, and of your clutched pearls,
one swift stroke and a steady arm swords through.

her jugular splits like a pea, her carotid arteries
hemorrhage, and her trachea takes its last heavy breath.

seven seconds only, and her consciousness melts.
three more minutes, and her body is barren.

the hunt and the gather both fall on our plate:
i tie apron strings around your waist, you roll up my sleeves, and

together we smirk at the winnings sprawled on our kitchen marble,
tenderise her flesh in laban and vinegar, let them shelter together in a ziplock bag.

carcass naps in a cool box to be fired only moments before the guests take seats.
we move on to the remainder: herbs to pluck, wicks to trim, aromatics to bloom–

a clean knife dismantles an onion and your tears spill: a moment to grieve,
a scant pause to honor, and we shift our mourning to motion and to bounty.

i finger out the zucchini’s insides, replace them with flesh and root,
submerge them in a broth of bone and bathwater,

stain my wood with sumac and blistered berry,
knuckle the yeast until it springs to genesis,

let pomegranate molasses trickle down the neck of its own bottle,
stick my finger in your pursed lip and ask if it needs more acid,

sing my feminine’s lessons in your ear,
measured only by zeal and gut.

we compose the table, and a pang reminds me of my mama’s warns:
we must architect for abundance, overflow for ease, and let our sacrifice remain unseen.

so i portion out pulverized walnut and pasted red pepper,
another bowl of pulsed lentils, another heaping of crimson,

then i catch a crust of red jabbed beneath my fingernail.
i pick at it, methodical, like a slinging prayer bead, and i let soap censor the kill.

i coat my lashes with ink of peppercorn,
adorn my body with petaled linen, fresh and unsullied,

ready to feast with friends, foes, and foreigns,
welcome the applause, light the match, ladle the celebration,

let their jolly fill our lungs, feel breaths of garlic,
breaths of praise, breaths of one thousand vitalities,

let them suck on the fruit of our invisible labor,
nourish from its sticky, spit the pit into a silver dish.

let the laughs of cigarette smoke ripple the room, let our people gnaw
at the marrow of our efforts, let them tongue its flavor from the ash.

i dip a piece of bread in honeyed blood and earthed oil,
we let the ram, the cheer, and the flattery heal our mortality.

savory swaps for sweet, crumbs brush off laps,
mistica chills the throat, and qahwa seals the eve in warmth.

صحتين. to your health. to your humble, to your refuge.
to her glory, to her return, to our seas.

HENA MUSTAFA (she/her) is a first-generation Palestinian-American lesbian poet and filmmaker. She uses words to create the homeland she craves. Her artistic medium is an attempt to visualize revolution. As the co-founder and brand director of BOYFRIEND co-op, a queer cafe/bar in Brooklyn, Hena fosters a hub for artistic connections and radical organizing within the SWANA community. She has published work in the House Anthology of Queer Poets of Color, and she has headlined performances at Banat El Hara and Kan Yama Kan. Hena’s writing is sensual, textured, and raw.

NASMA KUBLAWI (she/her) is a Palestinian writer and producer. Her poetry has been published in Chicago Quarterly Review, Calliope Art & Literary Magazine, among other platforms, and her short films, MAMA’S FATTEH and ORANGE BLOSSOM, have screened in festivals internationally. She also holds a Master of Social Work from the University of Southern California and practices psychotherapy full-time in New York. Nasma hopes to elevate & illuminate the Arab diaspora through advocacy, the written word, and the moving image. Nasma’s writing is intuitive, rhythmic, and sensory.

Hena and Nasma have been creative collaborators since 2024. Together, their craft and voice explore the ancestral femininity that binds them to their shared homeland. They have performed their works across leftist and Arab spaces in Brooklyn, NY, and are currently developing their chapbook, set for publication in 2027.

This week, for our ‘architecture of food’ issue, we’re sharing both an essay and a poem, which were published by our partner publication chlorophyll. Priceless explores the fascinating history of ladies’ menus, which omitted prices for women diners, while No Catch by Aileen McKay considers changing food practices in the age of technology and urbanization.

You can find short teasers below, and read them in full on chlorophyll’s site.

Priceless by Tien Nguyen

Tien Nguyen is a food and culture writer, an editor at Synonym Magazine, and the co-author of several cookbooks. She lives in Los Angeles.

On a Thursday evening in July 1980, Kathleen Bick and Larry Becker walked into L’Orangerie, an upscale French restaurant in Los Angeles. The two were business partners who’d had some success, so the dinner was to be a celebratory one, her treat. They were handed menus.

The restaurant was expensive, but how expensive, Bick didn’t know, because her menu did not include any prices. Becker’s menu, on the other hand, did. They learned that when men and women dined together, the restaurant gave men menus with prices; women, menus without. According to a discrimination lawsuit Gloria Allred later filed on Bick and Becker’s behalf, this policy ‘caused each of them severe humiliation’, so much so that they left.

When Allred asked L’Orangerie why it had separate menus, Virginie Ferry, who owned the restaurant with her husband Gerard, ironically invoked Gertrude Stein: ‘Because a woman is a woman is a woman.’

Allred’s response: ‘What does that mean, what does that mean, what does that mean?’…

READ THE REST OF THE ESSAY ON CHLOROPHYLL HERE.

No Catch by Aileen McKay

Aileen is a freelance editor and mentor. Her writing has found homes with little living room, From Glasgow To Saturn, Die Zeit, Common Weal, SNACK, Vegan Connections, Cosmofeminism, and Kendal Mountain Festival.

Previous inhabitants of this North Sea
neuk — Highlanders before me —
took quotidian care to use up every part
of their animals: unmeaty bits, too,
all grizzle and ruffage and gleam

swirled with meal and blood, then
sack-stuffed for boiling and boiling…

READ THE REST OF THE POEM ON CHLOROPHYLL HERE.

A classic symbol of sexuality, oysters are even more slippery than they look. Appreciated for tenderness but overlooked in strength, an ecological linchpin yet desired to the point of destruction, they embody the inherent contradictions required for any of us to survive in this changing world.

By Genevieve Bentz

I grew up shucking fresh oysters, only minutes out of the water. When shucking an oyster — leaning your body weight into the blade until it slides deep and far enough for its shell to finally, reluctantly part — it is hard to absorb how delicate they can be, the salty-sweet flesh splayed open, glisteningly alive. But to write them off as vulnerable is folly. These are creatures whose softness makes them tougher than one can imagine.

Our perception of oysters as defenceless perhaps comes from their reputation as the most “feminine” food that we eat, even more so than milk and eggs and chicken breasts. Their undeniable resemblance to the form of female genitalia peppers art from the Earl of Rochester’s “arch’d on both Sides, lay gaping like an Oyster. I had a Tool before me, which I put in / Up to the Quick, and strait the Oyster shut; / It shut and clung to so fast at ev’ry Stroke” to Jan Steen’s “Girl Eating Oysters,” where a young girl blushes at the viewer as she sprinkles a tray of soft wet folds with salt. Come, the painting seems to beckon. Taste this.

Yet beyond this sexualization, oysters are deeply tied to mythical figures and cultural traditions of womanhood, many of them strong and vital. In ancient Greek mythology, Aphrodite emerges, full-figured, from the sea on an oyster shell. Legends tell of mermaids bedecked with glistening pearls. In coastal Japan, Ama still dive in an over 2,000 year-old tradition. And in coastal New England, where I was raised, Native American women have gathered oysters since prehistoric times.

Female elders in tribes like the Mohegan, Wampanoag, and Pequot taught eighteenth-century European settlers to nurture the oyster reefs buttressing the shore from nor-easter tides and hurricane rip-currents. They bent green twigs into hoops, catching oyster larvae that latched and grew from these branches like leaves. Byssal threads and harvest nets stitched together in long, softly swaying lines which wove through the water. The larvae burrowed into the outside of both living and dead shells, anchoring there for the rest of their lives. Their crystals formed mounds of interwoven shells that spiral in three dimensions like tree rings — which, unlike clams or mussels or other deep-cupped mollusks, were edged by a jagged lip.

With the right conditions, a colony could quickly become a living breakwater, shells fusing into an almost impenetrably solid mass. These ragged, mottled, rock-like reefs created storm-stopping friction between angry waves and the smooth sea floor, and could repair themselves after a lashing.

Early colonists got the hang of the practice. Time passed. Bonds hardened. The cycle began again.

Like many precious things, oysters soon fell victim to their very appeal. As with wine or milk or honey, the flavour of an oyster comes from time and place. New England oysters are soft and sweet because beyond Long Island, there is only the empty Atlantic. The unhindered current brings a bright minerality and just enough turbulence from deeper waters, preventing them from becoming too large or tough. Abundant and cheap, easy to store in nets and baskets hung off decks and piers to open whenever convenient, and a tender meat substitute in stuffings and pies as well as stand-alone tavern snack — 19th-century cookbooks from the region include countless oyster recipes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Indigenous communities had farmed oysters on the coasts of the United States for thousands of years without causing a crash in the bivalves’ population. Once refrigeration enabled them to be shipped, voracious harvesting by colonizers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rapidly depleted their stocks. When John Smith explored the Chesapeake Bay in 1706, the oyster reefs were so prominent his ships had to steer around them or risk running aground. Since the early days of oyster harvesting, there have been anxieties over their decline: by the 1760s, laws were in place to attempt to maintain population levels on the east coast. But they failed to stop overfishing, and increases in the coastal human population, industrialization, pollution, and marine traffic have all compounded the death spiral.

Today, local oyster populations are estimated to be at 1-2% of historical levels. This absence has effectively dredged the East Coast and turned once-fortified walls of submerged calcium into soft silt dunes. Reefs are crumbling, and floods are getting worse.

In my hometown of Stonington, Connecticut, my neighbour was the designated town shellfish warden. From the shore, you could see him puttering along foggy coves in a small outboard motorboat, hunched in a bright yellow raincoat, and armed with a flashlight, like an aquatic firefly searching for poachers. Ripples from the blades of his motor would fanned out on the water’s surface in an unmistakable shape — that of a silent, softly growing shell.

When found and wrenched from their colonies, oysters may refuse to go gently down our throats. Growing up in coastal New England, it was hard for me to miss signs dotting the beach after hard rains: “Beds: CLOSED. “Toxic: do not eat.” A salmonella outbreak linked to oysters sickened scores of people across dozens of U.S. states, causing twenty hospitalizations, in 2025. That same year six people died from a “flesh-eating” bacteria after consuming raw Gulf Coast oysters. A woman asks my suburban listserv for help installing a ramp for her now quadriplegic husband. Sepsis. A “lucky oyster.”

In small numbers, oysters are vulnerable to pollution rinsing off the land into the sea. One can filter gallons of water an hour, dutifully processing algae and bacteria that then accumulate on their outer shells or are digested into harmless sediment left behind in the current. But in high enough concentrations, a week, sometimes two, is needed for them to purge the pathogens like e. Coli, vibrio vulnificus, and hepatitis A. When they are overwhelmed, poisoned water pools in their flesh and unmoors the bonds inside of their shells. We contaminate them, and they, in turn, contaminate us.

With oyster populations over-harvested and sickened, surviving colonies are vulnerable to the very floods they are no longer able to help prevent. This cycle is quintessentially American: knowledge stolen from Indigenous communities, then forgotten, now begging to be remembered.

As hurricanes continue to rapidly intensify and travel further north into the United States, paying attention to the plight of oysters offers us a way forward.

The US Navy is tuning in, having created artificial beds to help protect its bases. Meanwhile, the Billion Oyster Project in New York City has restored over 150 million oysters to date, protecting the city from storm damage and providing a safe habitat for hundreds of species. The Oyster Institute is developing new oyster substrates out of vinyl, rip-rap, and 3-D printed concrete to foster new reefs, making sea-hives from hexagonal tubes stacked one on top of another and undulating tile forms. Some feature spheres with holes punched out as if wiffle balls for a giant squid; others are prisms with porous sides that look like the first layer of a plaster cast, webbed threads whispering of future support.

The many Indigenous communities known for careful oystering practices have remained key players in restoration initiatives. The Rappahannock Tribe has developed a mobile aquaculture unit to restore oysters in the Rappahannock watershed, while the Nansemond Indian Nation raises and seeds thousands of oysters in the Chesapeake Bay as part of their tribal commitment to river and waterway stewardship. Andfor individuals who want to get involved in oyster preservation, collecting oyster shells helps new reef construction; states like Maryland will provide equipment, support, and baby oysters for volunteers to grow in cages off docks and piers.

Above all, it would serve us to think harder about the oyster. Its story is one of subversion: while popular culture has immortalized their vulvic form, oysters are actually born male, and can change sex in response to environmental conditions, physiological stressors, or even the reproductive makeup of oysters around them. Some oyster populations have been shown to be able to do this even more than once, proving themselves endlessly adaptable and stubbornly resistant to definition.

The contradictions of oysters remind us how to handle incongruity, to move forward in a warming and storming world. While it was lust that doomed New England’s native reefs — our insatiable appetite for delicate flesh bringing us close to swallowing the species whole — the aphrodisiac oyster reminds us that things can be at once soft and hard, fragile and resilient, independent and communal, an emblem of both grit and beauty.

From the oyster we can learn how to also grow quietly, deliberately, and bravely in the face of potential annihilation. Herein lies their slick truth: while alone we may be fragile, together we might be able to absorb and divert some of the power in the floods to come.

Genevieve Bentz is a lawyer living in Washington, D.C. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Citron Review, the Nassau Literary Review and on Substack. She has previously worked as a staff writer for the Brooklyn Quarterly and a ghostwriter.

We’re delighted to announce the launch of The Architecture of Food, a joint issue from Feminist Food Journal and chlorophyll magazine. chlorophyll is edited by Apoorva Sripathi (who has also done incredible writing, editing, and illustrating for FFJ over the years) and the wonderful Anne Wallentine.

For this issue, we asked writers to share prose, poetry, and essays about the structures and hierarchies of meals, menus, restaurants, and food systems, and they delivered a compelling array of perspectives. Coming up, we have:

It’s been a pleasure to explore this convergence of great writing in collaboration with chlorophyll, and we hope you enjoy the issue as much as we enjoyed producing it.

We’ll be publishing a new piece from the issue each week over the next few months, alternating between featuring the full piece on FFJ and on chlorophyll. In the weeks where content is not featured on our site, we’ll send a newsletter to direct you to chlorophyll to read the piece in full!

Today’s excellent first essay, launching on chlorophyll, comes from Beth Whelan and explores the significance of ‘meat and two veg’ in the industrial history of Northern England. Check out an excerpt below and read the full piece here.

Meat, Two Veg, and a Side of Comfort

by Beth Whelan | Read it now on chlorophyll

Meat and two veg is often dismissed today as a symbol of culinary monotony, an uninspired beige relic of a British past better left in the rearview mirror. But when I look at a plate of food, I rarely see a lack of imagination, I see my grandad and the fierce, quiet love of the woman who kept him alive. I am 35 years old, born in May 1991. Just two months before I arrived, the heavy iron gates of Agecroft Colliery, a coal mine in Pendlebury, Lancashire, closed for the last time.

My grandad had been an electrical miner there since 1940, navigating the labyrinthine depths of the coalfield for over 50 years. To the world, he was a skilled man, an electrician who crawled through gaps the size of a washing machine door to repair machinery in the damp, explosive darkness. To his family, he was the provider who carried the silent weight of the 1974 strikes, a time when he chose to cross the picket lines and accept the label of ‘scab’ to ensure his wife and three young children didn’t go hungry. That choice was made at the kitchen table, and it was the women of the north who ensured that the table remained a sanctuary.

If I ask any of my Welsh or southern friends who the best cook they know is, they’ll say their mum. But among my friends who grew up in the north, they’ll say anyone else…

Read the rest of this essay here and stay tuned for next week’s piece on FFJ.