If you’re ever feeling guilty about not cooking a fresh home-cooked meal, a reminder that people in cities historically either had cooks or ate at food stalls, going back to Ancient Greece. Ancient Egypt, too, although since everybody ate bread, beer, and onions, less of a thing.
It’s a weird quirk of our obsession with nuclear families that everybody is expected to have time, skill, and equipment to cook daily and that if you’re a woman, particularly, you are a lesser person if you aren’t casually able to cook every day with random fresh ingredients.
Don’t buy into that. People since forever have hired cooks, gone to inns, lived in extended families where it wasn’t always your turn to cook, or ate such simplified diets that it was less of an issue.
You haven’t failed at a normal human task,
you have been sold an unrealistic expectation and told it was a normal human task.
Go get takeout.
Or beer, bread, and onions.
Eat cheese and some dates.
Relax.
— Ursula Vernon via, Diane Duane
I stumbled across Ursula from her art.
Art courtesy, Ursula Vernon
And then I realised she is an accomplished children’s author
And she does not stop there, she writes Hugo award winning books for adults across genres; horror, fantasy and romance.1
And talk about making art from pain, she fucked cancer right in the eye!
Read all about her long journey here!
And if it does not inspire you, and make you shed a tear, I’ll eat my hat.
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P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.
I’d say she’s a female Neil Gaiman. But let’s face it. She’s far more talented and kicks ass. Gaiman is the male T Kingfisher! ↩︎