Nell Bernstein on Ending Youth Prison & Tamar Adler on Cooking As If People Matter

Writer’s Voice with Francesca Rheannon : Compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform

In this week’s episode of Writer’s Voice, we bring together two deeply resonant conversations that ask a shared question from different directions: how do we build more humane ways of living — personally and collectively?

Segment One: Nell Bernstein — In Our Future We Are Free

Journalist and author Nell Bernstein joins us to discuss her powerful and hopeful book In Our Future We Are Free: The Dismantling of the Youth Prison. Drawing on decades of reporting, Bernstein traces how incarcerated young people, their parents, lawyers, and organizers helped expose the violence of youth prisons and ultimately dismantle much of the youth incarceration system in the United States.

She explains why youth prisons are abusive by design, how racialized fear narratives like the “super predator” myth justified brutality, and why incarceration is not rehabilitative but criminogenic. Bernstein also reflects on what this movement teaches us about organizing under repression — and why long, patient struggles for justice still matter, especially now.

“Prisons in particular depend on invisibility to survive.”

Segment Two: Tamar Adler — Feast On Your Life

In the second half of the program, chef and writer Tamar Adler talks about Feast On Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Every Day, a month-by-month reflection on food, attention, and care.

Written during a period of depression, the book explores how small rituals — saving bean broth, sharing fruit, cooking seasonally, noticing leftovers — can help restore meaning when the ordinary feels insufficient. Adler reflects on sobriety, sustainability, imagination, and the quiet power of cooking “as if people mattered.”

“Leftovers are not leftovers, but beginnings.”

Interview with Nell Bernstein

Francesca:

Nell Bernstein, welcome to Writer’s Voice.

Nell:

Thank you for having me.

FR:

About 10 years ago, you wrote the book Burning Down the House, which was about incarcerated youth. How does this book, In Our Future We Are Free, build on your earlier work?

NB:

It’s very much a sequel.

When I was reporting Burning Down the House, I did a lot of traveling. I visited youth prisons in several states, and what I found was really dark. These institutions were so much worse than I knew, even though I knew a lot of young people who’d been in them, just tremendous levels of abuse, neglect, isolation.

It was hard to do that reporting, but everywhere I went, I met people who were fighting to simultaneously improve the institutions and also close them, especially people who had been inside them as young people. Their parents were a powerful force, and that’s kind of what sustained me emotionally during the reporting. The shift that I document in In Our Future We Are Free, away from the use of incarceration for children, was already underway.

But when I started reporting this book in 2020, I discovered that youth incarceration was actually down 75% from its 2000 height, and more than two-thirds of these places were closed. So that’s when I decided I really had to return to the people I had met while reporting Burning Down the House and figure out how this incredible shift had happened.

FR:

Yeah, it is just such a remarkable story, and a story of hope, I’d have to say, which we will get to. But first, I was just really shocked. I mean, I knew youth prisons were terrible, but I really was unaware of the extent of torture and degradation that young people are subjected to.

The stories are really horrific. I mean, you’re talking about long periods of solitary confinement, which has been defined as torture by the UN on human rights. I don’t know, Declaration of Human Rights.

It’s really shocking. So you spent years listening to young people who have experienced incarceration. Talk about how their voices shaped this book from the start.

NB:

As you know, I start with young people writing letters from lockdown units inside the California Youth Authority, which, you know, there’s no other word for these places than dungeons. These were kids who were kept in their cells around the clock. The one hour of legally mandated large muscle exercise was spent, in general, cuffed to a chair in the hallway, subjected to...

I thought after reporting Burning Down The House, I couldn’t be shocked. It turns out I was wrong. The guards would do things like seal off their cells with duct tape and then throw chemical grenade in.

And the duct tape was there to make sure that there was no ventilation. So it had the maximum impact. So even under these situations of torture and terror, these kids who were also denied all access with the outside world, they were generally denied contact with their families, with their lawyers, literally wrote letters with smuggled shards of pencils to a civil rights lawyer in San Francisco, an amazing woman named Sue Burrell.

And the thing that really stood out to me, besides how graphic and painful what they described in these letters was, was that they already were advocates. They often spoke of each other’s suffering and used the pronoun we. It was clear that somehow, even under these conditions, they were organizing to send these letters collectively.

They were doing things like going to the library and identifying the relevant clauses in the constitution and in the state code that they thought were violating. So what I saw there was even while they were still inside under these incredibly harsh conditions, they managed to organize and advocate for themselves. And that’s a thread that continues to this day.

FR:

It really was inspiring because these kids were also being denied education and oftentimes even food.

NB:

Yeah. And the other thing is that, you know, I think to this day, what happens inside these institutions is not as well known as it should be. But then nobody was talking about this.

They really were sort of the first ones to get the word out. And that’s important for obvious reasons, but also because prisons in particular depend on invisibility to survive. There’s multiple reasons that we cite them in rural locations in the middle of nowhere.

And usually people talk about the fact that they become job engines for these rural areas. And that’s true, but they’re also cited there so that we don’t have to look at them and we don’t have to think about what we’re doing. It’s very hard as a journalist to get in.

Even family members and lawyers can get to the visiting room, but to actually get onto the units where the kids are was and remains to this day difficult to impossible. So they really, I think the young people and then also their parents, the most important thing that they did was pierce this veil of invisibility that allows these tortures to happen.

FR:

And it’s just so striking how they did that. In fact, a central message really of this book is how this kind of organizing by the kids and their parents created models of organizing that are just really inspiring. But let’s kind of lay the groundwork and talk more about the system.

You write that youth prisons are inherently abusive by design. What do you mean by that?

NB:

So the levels of physical brutality are stunning. One of the prisons I write about that parents managed to close in Louisiana brought in a new warden from Angola who was shocked to discover that essentially every child had either a perforated eardrum or a broken nose. Sexual abuse is endemic.

Solitary confinement, which as you mentioned, has been defined by the United Nations Rapporteur on Torture as torture for adults, much less children. So there’s all that, right? But let’s say that you’re at a good place where nobody’s beating the crap out of you, right?

But you’re a child, you’re 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. And just yesterday, a friend of mine said, you know, sometimes somebody does need to be separated. There are kids who are violent who need to be, as she put it, sat down for a minute, but they don’t need to be isolated.

So I think the fact that these places are really devoid of human relationship, the fact that kids are put in uniforms, their shoes are taken, so they kind of shuffle around in these flip-flops to communicate with them. You have to use a prison ID number. Their name doesn’t mean what it used to be.

They’re called by their last name. Their individuality is stripped away right at the moment where developmentally they’re supposed to be figuring out who they are and how they fit in society. So even if the abuses that are endemic happen not to be happening to you, it’s a tremendously traumatic experience.

FR:

Talk more about that. In fact, you point out that far from being rehabilitative, which is supposedly the purpose of youth prisons, that they are actually criminogenic. They cause crime.

And I think you say where somebody, a kid can spend as little as two days as incarcerated and that will lead to higher rates of criminal activity later on.

NB:

I think that despite a couple of decades of research, which has been another important part of this movement, proving that, you know, I don’t know if we are at the moment, especially, right, if we are just cruel or if we lack imagination, but we’re stuck on this idea that when somebody breaks the law, the best and only response is to physically remove them from their home and community and put them in a building somewhere in the distance with a bunch of other people who have also probably experienced significant trauma and have also broken the law. And we take that for granted, but I don’t think we need to take it for granted. Where did we get the idea that forcible removal was the only inappropriate response when a kid crosses the line of the law?

FR:

It’s something I pondered, as well, as I was reading your book. I mean, it just seems to be so part and parcel of this extreme culture of cruelty that we have in this country, which really belies so many of, you know, our lofty national ideals. You know, can I jump in on that?

NB:

Because I do need to point out that it is not random cruelty and it’s not universal cruelty. It is racialized cruelty. There’s a robust body of evidence showing that delinquency is essentially a developmental phase.

For example, in self-reports, more than 90% of people say that they did something as a teenager that was against the law and could have gotten them locked up. White kids in resourced neighborhoods are not forcibly removed and put into boxes. There’s all kinds of community resources and even beyond that, just second chances.

In my experience, and again, there’s research to back this up, the way that kids who are not incarcerated get through delinquency is simply by growing out of it. The brain matures, the kind of group pressure abates, and if you don’t further traumatize them, most kids are just going to grow out of it. And those kids are vastly disproportionately white kids because they’re the ones who get the chance to screw up and keep going in the context of their families and communities.

FR:

Yes, I can remember my days of petty pilfering.

NB:

Right? When I speak publicly, I always ask people to think about their own adolescence, and generally there’s a moment and then there’s some sort of uncomfortable laughter because who gets through adolescence without crossing that line?

FR:

Absolutely. Can you share a story then from the book that illustrates how trauma and incarceration actually feed each other?

NB:

There’s so many. So I think of a young woman named Kristen Powell who ended up in a children’s shelter in Wichita, Kansas when she was a young teenager and was trafficked out of that shelter, which again is pretty common. Children’s shelters are very popular with traffickers because they’ve got vulnerable kids in them.

FR:

What do you mean by that, trafficked?

NB:

Well, they are brought into prostitution by semi-organized older men. And it’s an important shift that 10 years ago, these girls were generally just locked up for prostitution when this happened. Another sort of movement effort and partial victory has been to understand that a child engaged in this kind of stuff is being trafficked, is not a criminal.

The sort of slogan of that movement is there’s no such thing as a child prostitute. So what I mean is that when she ran from the shelter, there were older men who offered her a place to stay and she ended up being trafficked. When she was 14, after the first time this happened, the police found her on Christmas Eve in a trafficker’s trailer and the local newspapers ran the story of her ostensible rescue as a Christmas Eve miracle, but she was rescued in handcuffs and she was jailed on prostitution charges.

And that triggered a cycle of her being sent to various placements, which are just kind of lower key forms of incarceration. And the trauma that she’d experienced combined with the injustice of being rescued into a cell, it just kind of triggered this cycle of rebellion and running that escalated to the point that when she turned 18, the local district attorney charged her as an adult with aggravated human trafficking on the grounds that she had encouraged other young people to run who had then been trafficked. It’s a pretty extreme example of how early trauma can trigger this cycle, but it’s really just one of many.

FR:

So you mentioned the whole racialized nature of incarceration and of brutality while being incarcerated. In 1996, there was a Princeton University political science professor who created basically the idea, the notion of the super predator that was quite racialized. And I remember those times.

I mean, Hillary Clinton famously talked about super predators during her husband’s campaigns.

NB:

Joe Biden also hopped on that train.

FR:

Yes. And Joe Biden, who was very much responsible for the passing of mass incarceration legislation at that time. So tell us about this mythical beast of the super predator and what it spawned.

NB:

I will. And, you know, unfortunately, it’s a timely question because the super predator has recently been reawakened from its slumber, even though the story I tell is a very positive one. And I believe that the changes that we’ve seen will be durable.

We’re hearing language out of D.C. that is incredibly evocative of the super predator language. We’ve got politicians talking about mobs of youth, hordes of youth, crews. And, you know, what’s so interesting about both the super predator era and this current moment of backlash is that the language is always collective.

In other words, young people are always described in these these kind of inflammatory collective terms. Remember Wolfpack? Things like that.

And what’s so there’s a lot of things that are troubling about it. In the 90s, people like DiIulio were explicit that they were talking about black kids. Now, I guess it’s a little more implied, but I’m not even sure anymore that it has to be implied.

And I think, you know, when we were talking about the insane levels of abuse and mistreatment, the only and this is very applicable to our present moment, the only way that you can do the kinds of things that we continue to do to largely young people of color is to dehumanize them. So the language describes them in animalistic terms, then and now, in collective terms, then and now. And that, I think, permits many of the rest of us to see the kids we lock up not just as dangerous and scary, but as essentially different from our own children.

So I think really what that language allowed was was the kind of dehumanization that prison spawns, but also that prison relies on to continue in its in its current form.

FR:

So now let’s talk about the dismantling of this, because it’s really an inspiring story. In the 1990s, the California Youth Authority had the largest network of youth prisons in the country. There was a lot of abuse, neglect, isolation.

And yet it became then the first large scale experiment in completely eliminating the youth prison model in June of 2023. So how did this happen?

NB:

Well, that’s not it’s not a simple question, but I live in California. And in the 90s, when the super predator was roving our imaginations and the California Youth Authority was the largest network of youth prisons in the country, I was working with young people. I was the editor of a youth newspaper and seeing members of my staff get arrested and wind up in these places.

So to see it fall has been amazing. And it took everything. If I tell you what it took to bring down the California Youth Authority, I will tell you the story of the movement.

It started with the kids writing these letters to a woman named Sue Burrell, who is a very dedicated movement lawyer who made sure that their voices got to the media, got to legislators, got back to the people who ran the prisons. There was a powerful parents movement under the slogan Books Not Bars. Parents whose kids were in these places worked together.

They held vigils. They held protests. They organized statewide.

It took litigation. The prison law office filed a conditions lawsuit that dragged on, I think, for 13 years. And a conditions lawsuit can’t close a prison on its own.

But especially in conjunction with the kind of organizing I’m talking about, it also is a very powerful mechanism for breaking through that wall of invisibility. Because once you have a lawsuit, you usually have a consent decree because you can’t really defend against these lawsuits. And then you get monitors who can go into the institutions and talk to the kids and look at the conditions firsthand.

So that was essential to bringing it down. And then there’s this kind of virtuous cycle that can start. So as the conditions became better known, politicians were under pressure to do something about it.

So California passed a law. Sorry, I don’t have the year in my head right now. But it essentially told counties, you can’t just send everyone to us.

You can only send people who have committed a serious or violent offense to the youth authority. So the population starts dropping. And then when the population starts dropping, what happens is that the per capita cost to incarcerate an individual kid rises because you still have all this institutional overhead.

California had a very powerful prison guards union. So often these places remain fully staffed. And as the cost rose, there was not just a moral argument for closing institutions, but a fiscal one, which I think was easier for politicians to accept and promote without alienating their voters.

You know, the other thing, the other thing that is very much worth mentioning in the context of the super predator is that it’s not just youth incarceration that has dropped over the past 20 years. Youth crime is also down by 75%. And we could have an interesting conversation about cause and effect.

But, you know, the kids kind of killed off the super predator by just failing to fulfill that prediction. And of course, that also contributed to the downfall of these institutions. So it wasn’t one thing.

It was many people working from many directions, sometimes together, sometimes separately. You know, then in 2020, honestly, Governor Newsom very quietly just zeroed what was then called, they changed the name a million times, but the Division of Juvenile Justice zeroed it out of the budget because he was afraid of a budget crisis. So it kind of died with a whimper.

FR:

It’s an incredible story. So they closed the prison and those families, you know, had come to the conclusion that the prison system had to be closed in California. Why can’t youth prisons be made to work?

I mean, why can’t there be, you know, for example, we hear about prisons in Sweden where adults are incarcerated. I don’t know if children are, but probably not. But those prisons are much more humane and the focus really is on rehabilitation.

So talk about, you know, the conviction that abolition is what’s necessary, more than reform. Why is that?

NB:

So I don’t think that’s an either or. Prisons, including youth prisons, can be made better and conditions lawsuits are a powerful mechanism of doing that. Or I think of a place like New York where a remarkable administrator, a woman named Gladys Carrion, closed 21 of the state’s youth prisons during her tenure running them.

And in conjunction with a lot of allies, got a law passed that brings New York City kids back to New York and puts them in much smaller, more home-like environments. So that’s better, right? But what Gladys will tell you now is it’s much more humane.

She’s proud of what she’s done, but there still is a separate system for kids of color where even, you know, where the therapy and the art and the education are provided by the probation system. And that drives her and me nuts. You know, I think whether or not you’ve raised a kid, if you’ve ever been a kid or known one, it’s intuitive that kids grow and change and reform in the context of loving relationships.

And most often that’s their family and their community. So I just think, you know, even if we make these places nicer, which we should, it’s traumatic for kids. And look, if a kid is out there on a homicidal rampage, yeah, that kid does need to be sat down for a period of time.

But I think when we, you know, in sort of penal theory, there’s various justifications for incarceration. For kids, there’s rehabilitation, there’s deterrence. The only one that I think incarceration, even in its more benign forms, actually achieves is incapacitation.

So yeah, it can get a kid off the streets for a period of time. But I think we need to really radically reimagine what we do with that child in that period of time. And severing relationships is never going to be rehabilitative.

FR:

Well, I can hear people saying, well, if you’ve got a kid who’s homicidal, and a lot of these kids are pretty big and strong, you know, how are you going to keep the community safe if you don’t lock them up?

NB:

I will answer that. I’m not going to duck it. But I do want to say, how will you keep the community safe if you do lock them up?

Because you can’t lock them up forever, although there’s an effort to return to trying some kids as adults and doing that. But assuming that a kid stays in the juvenile system, in general, they can’t be kept past the age of 25. And in general, keeping them in these institutions doubles the chance that they will go on to commit more crimes as an adult.

So the notion that incarcerating kids keeps us safer is one I think that we have to challenge. That said, you know, will we ever get to total abolition? Only if we, if our country makes a big U-turn, we start investing in all kids.

We start intervening a lot earlier and just kind of really commit ourselves to equity and giving kids what they need. And I don’t see that as where we’re headed at the moment, right? So yeah, there are a small number of kids who do need to be removed for a period of time, but not to the institutions that we have now.

FR:

And you’ve been part of crafting the Bill of Rights for children of incarcerated parents. How has that experience informed your vision for abolition here?

NB:

Yeah, that’s a great question. I appreciate it. My first book, All Alone in the World, is about children’s lives when their parents are incarcerated.

You know, and I think the connection is that incarceration by, mass incarceration of adults by separating children from their families also has traumatized a generation. And I’m not going to say that that means that those kids then go on to become people who commit crimes themselves. There was some spurious research when I wrote the Bill of Rights that gained a lot of traction saying that parental incarceration meant a kid was eight times more likely to be locked up.

And that actually just isn’t true, but it does create intergenerational trauma. The interesting thing though, and there was a great piece about this in the Atlantic a couple of months ago, is that there’s a reverse effect. So because incarceration is criminogenic, as youth incarceration has dropped, that has actually stemmed the flow of people into adult prisons.

So we haven’t seen the kind of drop in adult incarceration that we have at the youth level. We haven’t seen a 75% drop, but I think we’ve seen a 20, 25% drop. And there is an argument that the main cause of that is that we’ve interrupted this cycle by not incarcerating so many people as young people.

Because in an adult prison, you don’t meet a lot of people who didn’t start out in juvenile hall.

FR:

I want to ask you another question outside the scope of your book, but we are seeing a massive, massive numbers of parents being incarcerated now and children by ICE. I wonder if you have thought about the implications of your book and of the movement to close youths’ prisons and what has been learned about that, an application to immigrant children who have not committed any crimes? Of course.

NB:

I mean, there’s obviously, analogy isn’t a strong enough word. We are doing the same thing. We have just found a different dark-skinned population to demonize and terrorize.

One of the things that really scares me about these ICE detentions is that we don’t know what’s going on inside these facilities. Even the sort of bare-bones skeleton of rights that citizens have that allow lawyers to sue, that allow some level of oversight, at least an argument is being made by the federal government that those rights don’t apply to people who aren’t citizens. So I think the struggle is going to be a lot greater.

The damage is almost unimaginable. But what I’ve learned from the people that I spent time with for both books is that what’s happening in this country is not as new and shocking as I think many of us would like to believe. You know, this kind of fear that I think many of us have that we are increasingly living under the boot of an authoritarian system, this sense of helplessness.

What can we do? My book is about people who didn’t just fear living under the sway of an authoritarian system. They were living under it, and they still found ways to resist.

I would also say that they found ways to resist because they had allies. The kids who were writing letters from the lockdown units had Sue Burrell out there making sure that their voices were heard. So I think that’s happening.

People are trying to do that now around ICE, and it’s what has to happen. They need outside allies continuing to make the case that they are human, which is a case you should never have to make about one of your fellow humans. But unfortunately, that’s the place we’re starting from.

That’s how we need to treat them. But yeah, of course, it’s more than troubling and horrifically familiar to see what’s happening.

FR:

And that really brings me to, I think, the point of your book that I alluded to earlier, which is that it may serve as a case study in how major social change can be achieved. I think you say, at a moment when regressive forces threaten to stall or unravel progress on multiple fronts, the unlikely success of this movement holds a crucial message. No matter how profound the obstacles, transforming an entrenched institution in the service of justice is possible.

So to sum up, talk about some of the major lessons of this book in how organizing in such a repressive environment was able to achieve such a resounding success. Not forever. You know, they won many battles.

The war is not necessarily won because, as you pointed out before, we need to create communities of care. All communities need to be communities of care to prevent these kinds of situations. But nonetheless, what are the lessons for us?

NB:

You know, it’s funny because one of the things that happens when you write a book is, unlike a newspaper or magazine article, there’s a year between turning in the manuscript and the publication date. So that sentence that you read, I think I’d write it more strongly now. Right?

It’s not just that there’s the threat that progress will be unraveled. It’s happening. It’s hard to distill one lesson, but I think what I would like the book to do beyond perhaps giving people a little bit of hope is break through this sense that there’s nothing we can do or that the things that we can do are too scary and too dangerous because if we speak up, they might come for us.

Because it’s a story, again, of people who were living under the direct power of authoritarian institutions. The young people and their parents faced explicit threats of retaliation if and when they spoke up, but they did. And something that I don’t think they or any of us could have imagined 20, 25 years ago happened.

This horrific institution, God willing, seems to be on its way out. I think also of Dr. King’s famous arc of the moral universe. It may bend towards justice.

That’s hard to kind of hold on to right now, but the part that really stands out to me is that it is long. And just because you don’t see a change overnight or in a year or in five years or 10 years doesn’t mean that you lost and shouldn’t keep fighting. The persistence of the people who fought this battle also stands out.

And for me, having known people as teenagers who were caught up in this system, several of whom are now prominent leaders, Latifa Simon, who is my representative in Congress, is still fighting the same fight. Right? So we’re not going to turn this around in an election cycle.

It requires incredible tenacity and imagination, the ability to continue to believe that things can be different.

FR:

Well, that is a very hopeful note to end on. It’s just a terrific book. It’s a really great read: In our future, we are free and let’s hope that future comes sooner rather than later. Nell Bernstein, it’s been a privilege to talk with you about this really important topic. Thank you so much.

NB:

I’ve really enjoyed our conversation.

Interview with Tamar Adler

FR:

Tamar Adler, welcome to Writer’s Voice. Thank you so much.

TA:

I’m excited to be here.

FR:

Feast on your life. It’s an inquiry into how the ordinary becomes extraordinary when we pay attention. What was the inspiration for this book?

TA:

That was such a nice way to put it. The inspiration was my feeling like the ordinary in my own life really wasn’t enough. I was really depressed.

It was not long after my third book had been published. And I think I was seized by the same sort of malaise that many of us are in our own everyday lives when they’re not being made glimmery and sparkly by what is obviously extraordinary. And it was in that state that I started writing down at first things about my life, facets, experiences, observations in general, for which I was grateful.

And then I narrowed the field of observation down to the kitchen to see if it made a more interesting literary project. I started it to sort of heal myself and it ended up as a book, but it also ended up having the therapeutic quality that I had hoped for.

FR:

You are an award-winning chef and you talk about cooking as if people mattered. Talk about how your philosophy as a cook is infused into this book.

TA:

It’s kind of extraordinary to say this, but I think, and I’ve never put it exactly in these terms, but I think that most of the time, most of us in the global North cook as though people didn’t matter. We cook as though our cooking is somehow isolated from all of the systems and structures that make up the world that we share. And they don’t, they’re not.

We’re actually all dependent and interdependent on systems and ecosystems and many, many, many people that we never ever will meet. And I think that what I try to at least write about when I write about cooking is all of the ways that seeing the connections between the seed and the plant, between the plant and the ingredient, between the person who harvests the ingredient and the person that sells the ingredient and ourselves makes the experience of eating richer and more rewarding. And I think that I write about leftovers a lot.

I mean, I’ve written two books really dedicated to ways of seeing and dealing with what we call leftovers and seeing them not as leftovers, but as beginnings, the beginnings of another meal. And that sense of continuity actually mirrors, I think that the structure of the world, which is quite continuous and interdependent. My sense is that if we, if we talked about cooking that way, and if we did cook that way, we would solve two problems.

One being how to cook more sustainably and, you know, in a way that better adheres to our philosophy, and another how to cook sort of more practically and in less time and spending less money. So that the one solution that I offer to the two often opposing seeming problems is the same, you know, to really see everything in the kitchen as connected to another meal or to its source.

FR:

And you have, well, as you say, you have examples of that in the book. One of them is the bean broth story, this pot of black bean broth, which is about preserving the continuity between something you’ve just cooked and something you’re going to cook. Could you talk a little bit about that?

TA:

That’s one of the things that I really like about this book, because in other instances of writing about the wonderful ingredient that is bean broth, I’ve written about it from the perspective of somebody who was slightly evangelical, you know, who really wanted people to understand how incredible the broth that is left once you’ve cooked a pot of beans is. And that’s all true, but because I was having to write something wonderful or delightful that I found in food every day, some of the entries I approached from a place of a kind of great negativity. And that was one of them where I actually was feeling terrible about everything in the world.

And I was trying to throw out that bean broth because I was just, I was sick of everything. And I certainly didn’t want to be some sort of virtuous saver. I didn’t want to save anything.

You know, when you’re feeling bad and you know that what would make you feel better is to kind of do something constructive, but that makes you want to do something destructive even more. That was the story with that entry. And I was actually trying to just get rid of it because, you know, it’s water and oil and herbs, and it’s all of these wonderful things that make an incredible basis for another meal, but it’s also things that often get discarded.

And I think in my sort of destructive mood, I really wanted to chuck it. And I was about to, but then I tasted it and it tasted delicious and not just delicious, but promising and suggestive of future meals. And it, I feel like I was being sort of grinchy about the whole thing.

And the bean broth wouldn’t let me be. The bean broth was like all those kids in the Grinch Who Stole Christmas, who just sing even though he stole their presents. It was like, it just would not permit me to destroy it because it tasted so great.

And then I saved it. And then having saved it and labeled it, you know, bean broth for soup, I felt a lot better about everything. And it’s like the, you know, the larger problems of the world hadn’t changed, but my ability to withstand them had a tiny bit just because I now had this, these several containers of really good food.

FR:

So let’s talk about the calendar. Your book follows the year, month by month. And January is also a time when you confronted sobriety.

This is a time when a lot of, when a lot of people also started dry January just to recover from the holidays. So talk about that. And also there was a time later on in April where you drank some champagne.

So this kind of bookends your relationship to sobriety and or changing a sense about it. So tell us about that arc.

TA:

Yeah, I, you know, I’ve had, you’re the second person who has mentioned it in terms of dry January, and I realized rereading it, that it kind of reads like that. But I, at the time, I actually think I had just decided not to drink anymore. That’s, that’s not the case now, but it wasn’t like a wholesale quitting, but it certainly was laying it aside for a number of months.

And that was the first time I had ever taken any time away from alcohol since I was a teenager, even individual nights other than when I was sick. I had never done a dry January or sober October or whatever else they were. And I had also not gone, there might’ve been a week here and there, but over 30 years there, it was really only just, you know, the odd sprinkling of days or weeks that I, that I took care not to drink.

So it was, it was actually pretty emotional and pretty strange to not have alcohol as a crutch during all of those months. And when I did drink small amounts again, it was pretty delightful in, I guess it was in spring, but, you know, to kind of understand again, what was so festive and special about one glass of something, you know, or tasting, I think what I wrote about champagne was that I tasted it again for the first time, which I think you only can if you don’t drink anything for a very long time, because I think it’s, you know, champagne is this sort of low alcohol thing that we sort of toss back usually during some festive time when we’re already drinking a lot and pretty distracted. And it was nice to have alcohol regain its specialness alongside the other things that, that seemed more special to me over the course of the year because of my intentionality about noticing them.

FR:

And Tamara Adler, another month that is bereft of produce generally, at least for those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere or North in the Northern Hemisphere, you have that as a month that is full of small rituals. And one of them is a daily, nearly unspoken ritual. Whenever fruit is packed for lunch, a slice is silently offered to those who are present, like your son.

So talk a little bit about those small rituals and the weight of them in a cold month like February.

TA:

I think that we all have little rituals like that. And I think that, you know, there are probably a ton that have to do with moms eating the crusts of their kids’ toast or the little bits off their kids’ plates. Many of us have funny little daily sort of meeting out of foods that if we thought of as rituals, I think would feel quite tender and quite important.

And certainly I realized that my husband and I had that unspoken ritual as we made our son’s lunch. What ritual does is it sort of makes brackets in time, makes brackets around the event that succeeds it or that precedes it, depending on what form of ritual it is. But you light candles, you blow out candles.

While the candles are lit, something is happening. And I think we humans are really wonderful at kind of getting the hint when we’re told that something is special. And one of the ways that we have of indicating that it’s special is to perform a ritual of some kind.

So I guess I liked the idea of starting to identify little daily food habits, little things that would be easy to ignore as a shared food ritual, because it meant something about the importance of the time around it. And for something to be important, all we have to do is kind of convince ourselves it is, right? And that’s what rituals are so good for.

They’re like blessings. I think that’s what a blessing is for, is to sort of ground your mind enough in a moment. I mean, maybe ground isn’t the right word.

But I guess I think blessings are for, again, creating some sort of boundary around an activity so that you pay extra attention to it. Yeah, especially when it’s cold. When it’s cold and there aren’t that many food rituals, letting yourself call the small funny ones that parents do or that people do with their pets, like always giving a dog the end of whatever, or always giving a cat some of your fish or whatever it is.

Pretty wonderful to notice and to call that.

FR:

There’s a funny entry in March where you’re wrestling with overbuying. All of a sudden, there’s an abundance in the stores of asparagus and strawberries, although I think they come later where I live. And you find yourself once again overbuying asparagus and strawberries.

So what does spring teach you about the relationship between appetite and self-awareness?

TA:

Well, it teaches me every year that I seem to lack self-awareness or that my appetite is more overpowers my self-awareness during that time because I never learn to not buy too many asparagus. But I also think that it’s sort of what we’re supposed to do. I find that the excitement that I feel over asparagus and strawberries to be very primitive and innocent and not something that I really want to talk myself out of.

Because I also think it is how I keep myself from buying out of season asparagus and out of season strawberries, which I don’t really do. I do wait until they’re in season where I live and then buy too many of them. And then stress myself out about what to do with them all before they go bad and then get kind of sick of them.

And then they’re out of season. And I think that’s a sort of wonderful rhythm. So I’m sure that I have the cognitive function to overpower what feels like my irresistible need to buy too many asparagus.

But I also think I probably don’t really want to. I think I probably indulge it because I think there’s something quite human and wonderful about getting sick of it every year and then longing for it every year and getting sick of it every year and longing for it every year.

FR:

And is that why you don’t buy them out of season?

TA:

I don’t buy them out of season because they’re not very good. You know, the way things taste when they’re harvested close to where you live is pretty different than the way they taste when they’re harvested far away, for the most part. And conscious of that taste difference, I’m not terribly interested in buying things that have been picked less ripe and then transported pretty far.

They’ve also spent so much time in coolers of various kinds, you know, that when I buy stuff at the farmer’s market, it’s generally been picked the day before and been in a cooler overnight and then I get it and it just tastes better. So it’s not the flavor of out of season asparagus that I want. It’s the flavor of in season asparagus that I want.

FR:

There’s an entry, green as rice, of risotto appears to you when you’re half asleep. It comes out of your imagination. How does imagination function in your cooking life?

TA:

Yeah, that was weird because that was a strange apparition. I think that usually it is mostly imitative. Like usually I get really excited about making something that is similar to a food I have recently eaten or an eating experience I’ve recently had.

I love traveling and eating while traveling for that reason because I find myself copying what I have recently been fed. So I think usually it’s that. It’s like my imagination functions to imitate some version of what I have experienced most of the time.

I don’t think I’m usually dreaming things up from nowhere. So I don’t know where that one came from, but it might have been a picture in a book. I’m not really sure, but I do think it’s usually, yeah, I think it’s mostly imitative.

FR:

And then in September, the harvest time, your prayer in the field entry is so moving. Tell us what’s happening there and what does that moment say to you about labor and gratitude and things like that?

TA:

I think that was when I was at Samiskat Orchards. And I was, it’s a really wonderful farm in Kinderhook, New York, where you can pick your own, like a lot of us do apple season and some of us do it berry season, but you can pick your own, anything they grow. And what that means is that when you’re there doing that, you look around you at the fields and what I saw, but I often see it at Samiskat is that it’s mostly Bangladeshi families.

It’s often it’s immigrant families usually who are taking advantage of the fact that for less than it costs at a supermarket, as long as you go out and pick it yourself there, you can get the most amazing. I mean, it couldn’t be fresher. Like you’re getting food that if you eat in a restaurant, if a restaurant has to pay the price for those vegetables or those fruits, it’ll be on the more expensive items on the menu because it’s picked locally.

It’s not stored in part of our large cold chain. It has to be brought probably directly from the farm to the restaurant. It’ll be dirty and recently alive and perfect.

It’s real food. And I was looking around and noticing that, of course, it’s mostly immigrant families where I was in the Hudson Valley. We have a big Bangladeshi population.

And I just noticed that because we were all picking, we were all in the shape of prayer, you know, and it was hot out. So everybody had their head covered and all of the women had veils over their heads and all of the men had hats on their heads. And I realized it was kind of extraordinary to be enacting the physical gesture of prayer while also harvesting food, which is the thing that I certainly pray over the most.

I mean, we say grace before dinner every night. And it was this kind of incredible moving prayer that I was part of. And that certainly was affected by all of our labor.

There was no other form of prayer than to kind of bend over and pick each thing.

FR:

Oh, that’s lovely. Finally, you quote one of my favorite authors, Ursula K. Le Guin, her carrier bag theory of fiction, although this isn’t fiction.

Tell us what that carrier bag theory is and how does that idea shape the way you think about food in writing?

TA:

I haven’t read it in a long time. That piece is this wonderful kind of like an essay about how we end up telling adventure stories with men out on great bloody adventures because they’re easier to tell. They have clearer shapes in them than other stories.

And it’s harder to imagine a story about, for instance, gathering food than it is about hunting food. And so we’ve ended up with this Western canon that is largely centered on male conquest and largely ignores the female experience and the gathering experience, which is mostly about holding things. And I love that so much that there is, and you certainly see that in Le Guin in like the second, I guess the second half of the Earthsea books.

She really changes the focus of who the protagonists are of that series. I think in part because she has this realization that maybe there is a version of storytelling that is mostly about holding things. And certainly in my persistent writing about the foods that are not considered heroic, not whole animals roasted over a fire, but sort of things cooked quietly in pots, which is a more quiet and preservative way of cooking them and things that you have to tend to, not things that you kind of make spectacles of.

I guess I think it’s like sort of a carrier bag theory of cooking or tries to be and takes a similar perspective, which is, yes, it is much easier to set something on fire and get people to look at it. But how much more interesting it is to put lots of bits and bobs that need to get used into a pot and gather people around the pot, not because it’s a spectacle, but just because it’s warm and because something nourishing will come out of it. And yeah, that seems, I guess that seems more worthy, or at least it seems worthy enough to me.

FR:

And I think that links back to the previous example of gathering produce at a farm together with other people, that it’s a communal ritual. And there we are back to rituals again, something that makes you pay attention.

TA:

Yeah, yeah.

FR:

Well, it is a lovely book, Feast on Your Life, Kitchen Meditations for Every Day. And it’s been delightful to talk with you about it, Tamar Adler. Thank you so much.

TA:

Thank you so much. I’ve had a great, great conversation with you.