Eating the Flood

Making a Menu Around a Storm

Before we dive in, some news:

 I was in the New York Times last week for my upcoming virtual event with Sandor Katz and KC Hysmith at MOFAD (April 5th, that’s this Wednesday!)

I have also been nominated for 2023 Georgia Author of the Year in the Cookbooks category. Wish me luck, and thanks as always for your support of my work!

I took a writing workshop recently, where we were prompted to write about a storm. I've been through plenty, particularly having lived in Iowa and then the South for much of my adult life, but I was surprised that the storm I chose was not a hurricane or a tornado, but rather a series of storms, which culminated in massive flooding in the Midwest in 2008.

As I thought about how I wanted to share this story with you, I started to revisit it with an eye towards transforming the story through my kitchen. I've told this particular storm story plenty of times, but how to tell it anew? And how might I offer myself new insights in the act of retelling?

In the end, I did what I often do with stories, and turned its key components into different dishes.

By turning a series of moments into a menu, I could transcend the worry, the smell of the floodwater (awful!), the cleanup, and everything else and dive into the story itself. What are the bones of my storm story really? And how, in finding those morsels I want to taste, can I expand it? There's something visceral, too, about eating a dish and relating it to a moment in a story. The story sticks with you, but you gain an understanding of the story and of its teller that transcends language.

Here, then, is my storm story, and the meal it inspired over a decade later.