ODE TO VELVEETA AND OTHER THINGS

I’m in the midst of finishing up my greens book, out in spring 2027 with Artisan Books. My life has been taken up with nettles, ramps, and all things spring greens, and while the markets are bursting right now, I’ve been neglecting my Substack. As soon as I get the edits turned around and into the design process, I will focus more of my energy here on this platform.

A few weeks back, I was at the Cherry Bombe Jubilee, where chefs Jody Williams and Rita Sodi spoke about what drew them to a life in food. Jody said she came to food because she was hungry. As a child of the 1970s, like Jody, I was also hungry, and my roots in food go back to that. I often had to start dinner before my parents came home, and I most definitely knew every plant in the garden because I was called to weed it on Saturday mornings. What I didn’t realize then was that the hunger itself was the gift. It was quietly building the work ethic I’ve carried ever since, and teaching me the cooking and gardening that would shape my life.

When I started this Substack, I said it would be a mix of recipes, travel musings, and some narrative memoir. A few years back I took a memoir class with Elissa Altman at the Provincetown Writers Workshop, and the piece I’m sharing today came out of that.

What follows goes back further than the garden and the Saturday weeding. It starts in a colder kitchen, in a house where food was something you found rather than something you were given. It has everything to do with hunger.

I was a latchkey kid for most of my life, though our doors were never locked. I often found my way to our neighbors’ house after school, most often when they weren’t home. I’d toast myself an everything bagel and smear it with good, salty butter from their fridge. I’ve often wondered what they thought when they came home and found the house smelling faintly of toast every so often. I’m sure they knew it was me. We had an open-door policy in our neighborhood full of feral children, but they never mentioned it.

ODE TO VELVEETA

I am always hungry. The distant consequence, perhaps, of a childhood with too few meals. We were often left to fend for ourselves in the kitchen while our stepmother chain-smoked and danced alone in the next room to Simon and Garfunkel’s “Cecilia,” before receding into another rosy puddle of Lancers for the night. We were forgotten about. I would tiptoe silently past whichever armchair had swallowed her, terrified of disturbing the eyes that lurked in the back of her head, and bringing on one of her ferocious moods. I opened the refrigerator like a ghost. Reaching a small hand into the cold interior, I’d slide out the long yellow box, cut myself a thick slab of Velveeta, and gently tuck it under my shirt, where it was secured by the waistband of my clover-green Danskins. Creeping up the back stairs, I pleaded with every board not to moan or creak. Alone. I shut my door and carefully removed the tile of cheese suctioned to my belly. And, like unholy communion, I gently bit into its soft, salty yellowness, savoring every morsel. On days when I greedily cut off more than I could stomach, I would tuck it under my pillow, saving it for later, only to find it hardened and shriveled like a little, abandoned baby-shoe, its edges dark and orange, curled and rough. But its center was a soft, oily yellow. I poked my finger into that soft spot and slowly dug inside.