Someone, somewhere, recommended I read the book If You Can’t Take the Heat, by Geraldine DeRuiter. I put it on my TBR list and forgot about it until I was looking for something from the library and picked it up. I’m glad I did.
Geraldine DeRuiter (everywhereist.com) is known as a food writer, but this isn’t exactly a food book. It’s mostly a biography, but filled with both biting feminist commentary and hilarious turns of phrase. I don’t mark up books, or use bookmarks to remember particularly interesting bits in books I’m reading, but this one is full of sticky notes. Here are a few of my favourite lines:
- From page 11 of the first chapter, entitled “the First Taste of Defiance”: I wouldn’t touch hot dogs, but consumed pig’s feet and boiled cow’s tongue with all the restraint of an underfed hyena, delighting in my cousins’ and brother’s horror. (This was when I knew I would love the book).
- It’s a hard thing to learn: that we can ask things of other people, that we can order food how we want it. That our bodies deserve to be nourishing and loved and fed the way we want them to be.
- On being trapped in the kitchen preparing Thanksgiving dinner with the other women of her family: Growing up, I had plenty of examples of men cooking…In my ruthless assessment, when someone could not cook, they’d failed at adulthood. But I found myself judging women slightly more harshly than I judged me when I discovered they were inept in the kitchen. I simply expected lore of them, at least culinarily, which was unfair to everyone…I’ve accepted the feminist notion that women can do everything, but the idea that we don’t have to do certain things is taking a bit longer to sink in.
- On paying at restaurants: By not endeavouring to imagine that [women] might be the ones picking up the bill, the staff is not regarding them as legitimate patrons of the restaurant. They are there as accessories for the male guests. Given the transactional role that biting a woman dinner has historically carried in Western society, the entire situation becomes even more fraught.
- On coping with anxiety by amassing food in case of disaster: My favourite part of any survival story is the acquisition of food and water…I love when the befriend a dog, which people in disaster stories almost always do, because it adds dimension to the story, but also because dogs are edible!
- The contents of my pantry would not stop my father from getting cancer, would not prevent my mother from forgetting a portion the stove and burning down the house she had lived in for twenty-five years. I was ignoring the first precious word in the phrase “comfort food” – that in order to comfort, the grief and pain have already arrived. The casserole delivered in the wake of a tragedy does not reach back and undo the devastation. But…it reminds us, at a time when we so desperately need it, that we are loved.
- According to the psychologist Sandra Thomas, a leading researcher in the field of gender and anger, anger is often perceived as a distinctly masculine trait….In that same vein, women are taught that anger is undermined, and to suppress, it, until one day we drop dead from a lifetime of biting our own tongues.
- On body image: I had very distinct dietary goals. I wanted to outlive all of these assholes and be healthy enough to dance on their graves.
It’s not all snappy one-liners and fury. Her struggles as a child in a chaotic and sometimes abusive household, her complicated feelings about her mostly-absent father, the misogyny and hate she has faced for daring to have opinions in the public sphere are all laid bare. But she has great tenderness for her parents, her friends, and most of all, her husband.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I picked up this book. But I’m very glad I did.
