gradfoodstudies Food and Loss, short-form, Special Issue

Crying at the Cutting Board: On Food and Loss in the Crisis Ordinary

A black and white photo of a kitchen countertop, featuring scattered ingredients including chickpeas, a yellow onion, two lemons, chives, and utensils such as a knife and a spatula. A bowl of mixed food sits nearby, along with jars and a cutting board.

Isabelle Bishop

Wednesday, November 6, 2024, dripped with dread. I woke up already aware of the results of the United States election, my body heavy with disappointment. I stumbled into the kitchen to gather myself. There were no immediately discernible differences in my life that morning; I made coffee and had breakfast like so many other days. But the threats that had yet to arrive—the future’s uncertainties and certain losses—were already pressing upon me. 

Living through unfolding political chaos disguised as ordinary democratic processes, I dithered around the kitchen that day to get what felt like a grip on the crisis-laden present. Absorbed by the general sense that things were already bad and only getting worse, I cooked one dish, then another, then another. Dicing a yellow onion, I lamented the ecological devastation that would be wrought by a second Trump presidency. Boiling a big pot of beans, I mourned the loss of what was already not working—the Democratic Party’s control of governmental power. I stirred the limas slowly, investing a vague hope in the gestures of ordinary life; I wanted the beans to offer relief from the wear of political disappointment and a pervasive sense of civil impotence. In between my swirls of the pot, I mixed flour and water and starter and salt. I worked with the nascent sourdough loaf, slowly kneading to release some of the pressures that come with the further unravelling of liberal-democratic ideals and institutions. 

In the face of world-altering losses—political, social, ecological, or otherwise—the kitchen is a space of potentiality. Cooking can’t guarantee anything, but it just might make possible safe passage to alternative affective registers: temporary release from the weight of political exhaustion and ecological despair served in spoonfuls. Cooking can serve as a ritual of loss that, as Lauren Berlant writes, “gestures towards therapy without narrating those ends.”1 Cooking might help one grapple with political reality without solving its problems. My beans didn’t offer clear solutions but rather a way to fumble forward in the face of frustration, fear, and futility. 

Crying at the cutting board the morning after the election was a means for mourning the decay of what felt like stability in the form of status-quo politicians. In this way, food and its practices serve as “a relief or a reprieve, not a repair.”2 I cooked to sense something else than loss and hopelessness. But others managing precarious lives at the margins might not make bread or beans or anything else to feel better about the oppressive conditions of contemporary existence. Food might feel instead like an unfair reminder of the inequities that suffocate dreams of a good life, or at least an economically stable one. 

Life in the contemporary age means enduring the pressures of ongoing crisis and loss.3 Thinking about crisis as ongoing means that it is not something extraordinary or temporally limited by a traumatic beginning or heroic end. Crisis and loss permeate the present, not extraordinarily but structurally shaping what Berlant calls “crisis ordinariness.”4 Berlant writes that “crisis is not exceptional to history or consciousness but a process embedded in the ordinary that unfolds in stories about navigating what’s overwhelming.”5 Part of what’s overwhelming about the rapid decomposition of liberal-democratic politics and the breakdown of long-term biospheric stability is how a gnawing yet nebulous sense of loss can saturate ordinary life. 

Cooking doesn’t offer solutions to global politics, much like ‘voting with our forks’ can’t remediate climate chaos. Food’s politics are never pure, even if one’s intentions strive to be—cooking in the contemporary United States is always already bound up with exploitation, expropriation, theft, genocide, ecocide… Cooking beans and bread were not so much a form of resistance as the actualization of distraction in a politically depressing reality.6 But distraction serves a purpose, too. When despair and apathy become default modes for navigating the overwhelmingness of everyday life, food holds promises that politicians can’t. Food can provide a sense of well-being, even if it’s only fleeting—an ordinary moment of respite in the midst of extended crises.7

  1. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 62. ↩︎
  2. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 117. ↩︎
  3. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 5. ↩︎
  4. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 10. ↩︎
  5. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 10. ↩︎
  6. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 117. ↩︎
  7. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 116. ↩︎

Biography

Isabelle Bishop is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Texas. She engages in interdisciplinary research, exploring intersections of environmental philosophy, food studies, and cultural criticism. Her dissertation examines the production of ordinary life in and through the contemporary supermarket. She considers how supermarkets shape the (in)ability to imagine and enact alternative food systems, investigating how hegemonic food norms are co-created with the spaces they emerge from, how they manifest in people’s habits, practices, and attachments, and how they can be changed and shaped anew. She is also a trained baker, specializing in whole grain sourdough breads.