Farinata as a Practice in Liberation

“Pleasure and delight in living are not peripheral to the project of liberation!”

This morning, at an impasse of how to feel or what to do or how to go about life and breakfast, as we invoke and plead and pray for a cease fire, I started reading Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires An Epic in the Kitchen and was struck by…everything really, but one section especially— her chapter, Cooking is a Method, is part blessing, part instructions, and part permission to take time for beauty and pleasure in the face of oppression. A reminder that cooking and eating well and feeding ourselves and each other is a radical act.

After sitting with this passage for a while, I got up, turned up the music and made a very late breakfast. With my partner watching from the stool, drinking his coffee and holding our 5 month old baby — each of our movements there, in the kitchen, were documents of belief — in divine intervention, in safety, in freedom, in human dignity.

I made the simplest and most stunning thing I know (by heart), lit a few candles and we ate at our table with hope and fear …