Hearty: On Cooking, Eating, and Growing Food for Pleasure and Subsistence andrea bennett ECW Press (2024) In their new essay collection about cooking and eating, andrea bennett offers an incisive, necessary response to the many questions about food that don’t often receive rigorous attention in contemporary food writing. The essays, which blend memoir with journalism, offer a meditative, lived-in antidote to the aspirational yet inaccessible-for-many appeal of mainstream food and restaurant writing. Announcements, Events & more from Tyee and select partners Behold! The Tyee’s 2023 Impact Report Our annual report back to our readers is hot off the presses.
CONTEST: Win Festival Passes to VIFF Two lucky readers will receive access to truly explore this year’s spectacular roster of films. Hearty brings us into bennett’s home kitchen on the northern Sunshine Coast of B.C.
, where they are a talented baker and cook. It also takes us back to their childhood in Hamilton, Ontario, where their father would engage in a Saturday morning ritual of making them baked beans on toast. The essays respond to critical questions about the role of such rituals in the production of sustenance, pleasure and family.
Elsewhere in the book, bennett considers what it means to make a living working in a kitchen of a restaurant whose menu items its workers can’t afford. And they offer needed reflections on what we can all do to make our food systems kinder, more ethical and inclusive of everybody who relies on them. Hearty is an essay collection that responds to critical questions about food and food systems.
I have the pleasure of working alongside bennett at The Tyee, where they are a senior editor. They’re a true polymath: Hearty arrives on the heels of a book of poetry they published last fall, and in addition to their work as a writer and editor, they’re an avid long-distance swimmer who co-founded an open-water swim club on the northern Sunshine Coast. After swimming a half-marathon in a local lake this past summer, bennett is setting their sights on a six-kilometre ocean swim for the Kits Challenge next year.
In their kitchen these days, bennett has been making a recipe for creamy gochujang pasta that Iva Cheung, an editor and cookbook indexer, shared on Bluesky. “It’s exceedingly good,” bennett said. “I've been making it with these gluten-free noodles that look like little mini lasagna noodles.
” Also on heavy rotation: the falafels from Falastin with such frequency that they’ve memorized the recipe. We sat down together recently to discuss Hearty and bennett’s expansive, generative approach to food and food systems. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
The Tyee: You’ve been growing an impressive variety of fruits and vegetables at home for a few seasons now. Can you tell me about what you’re most excited about in your garden this season? And what your garden has taught you about food and our relationships to land more broadly? andrea bennett: Somewhat ironically, I took the year “off” gardening this year. I usually grow, from seed, a chorus of vegetables, everything from broccoli and cauliflower to cherry and San Marzano and salad tomatoes to cabbages and carrots and eggplants and peppers.
We have perennials — berries, cherries, apples, asparagus — that we harvested this year. I've made a lot of apple crisps lately, and applesauce to freeze for pancakes, and apple chutney to eat with dal. But as far as annuals went, I went with snacking peas, soup peas and a variety of bush and pole beans, from Annie Jackson and scarlet runner to Early Pinkies .
These, I could all sow directly. I also grew some breadseed poppies, because I like to make my own everything-bagel seasoning mix, and I wanted to make my friend Emily a lemon poppyseed cake for her birthday this year. I’ve learned pretty definitively that I love backyard gardening, personally, but societally it’s not what’s going to solve the big existential questions we’re facing around climate and environment and food.
It’s really important to work in community, and support farmers, to address those questions. Local home growers like me have a certain role to play — you could argue that pretty easily when it comes to the preservation of heritage seeds, for example — but really for most of us it has to fall into the realm of a hobby. And so that’s the other important lesson: when there’s a year where it’s going to feel overwhelming instead of a joy, take that year off (or “off,” with some low-effort beans and peas).
Home growing and seed saving have encouraged me to think about the extent to which we focus on big-ticket vegetables, such as beautiful heirloom tomatoes, when we think about local food. But as farmer and seed saver and author Dan Jason has pointed out, in many ways and many venues, one cannot survive on vegetables alone. Gardens and farms need to have the space and support to grow grains and beans and pulses if we really want to bolster local food systems.
There were many moments in your book that sparked welcome moments of recognition for me. Like you, my childhood dinners at home featured many meals made with cream of mushroom soup and cans of tuna, or straight-up beans on toast. Can you tell me more about how these early experiences informed your curiosities about food and food systems, and why these realities may be missing from other contemporary food writing? I still love beans on toast! And they’re quite nutritious — lots of fibre, some protein, complex carbohydrates, some fat from the buttered toast.
My curiosity about food was really sparked when I got to experience foods outside of what we ate daily, if I’m honest. Like when I was working on a salad bar and got to taste some very ripe local cantaloupe. The cantaloupe blew my mind.
Lemongrass, cooking with a friend in high school, blew my mind. The tender, sweet carrots my granddad grew in his garden. A-plus stuff.
RELATED STORIES A New Book for Disabled Cooks Fresh off the Shelf But those childhood years eating a lot of microwaved food at home, and experiencing some food insecurity, really informs my approach to discussing food, and food systems, and what are variously called convenience foods, or “processed foods,” or “ultra-processed foods.” In most lower-income households, you're facing a crunch of both time and money. Nobody in that position needs to be lectured about soaking beans overnight instead.
Nobody needs to be reprimanded about feeding their kids canned cream of mushroom soup, which — the horror! — contains ingredients they cannot pronounce. And that’s so often how that food shows up in contemporary food writing. I share a desire with some of those writers to make big structural changes to our food systems to benefit the environment and benefit workers.
But when it comes to talking about the pleasures of food — and really, I’m not interested in conversations that don’t acknowledge that pleasure — my heart is more with a hungry someone like Jeffrey Steingarten, who unabashedly admits his love for a frozen Milky Way (known here as a Mars bar). And I think some of the judgmental food writers make some big mistakes when it comes to talking about poor people and food. Low-income people are not ignorant about food the way these writers so often imply.
Low-income people are incredibly resourceful. I think that more people who are poor or lower-middle-class need to be given space to write about the foods they eat and the foods they grew up with. I think we need to remove the judgment and sort of snobby piety from food writing.
We could have more interesting conversations that way. We could talk about why convenience foods serve us and what we gain from them. In the book, there’s a phrase that continues to stay with me: that we don’t owe our health to anyone.
Can you tell me more about what that means to you? There’s a real interplay between the structural and the personal in food. A lot of stuff that is rightly in the sphere of the structural is transmuted to the realm of the personal. Instead of focusing on how to make changes in farming and food systems so that farm labour is valued, and soil and water health are paramount, and animals are treated well, and people have access to that food that is created from that healthier, more ethical, kinder system, we get “the obesity epidemic.
” We get B-roll on the news of fat bodies walking down the street. Instead of living wages, we get the wellness industry. Instead of safe streets and public transit, we get the carnivore diet, or the Atkins diet, or the Mediterranean diet.
Most of us are doing the best with what we can. Nobody needs to be made to feel some kind of social guilt for being in a larger body, or having high blood pressure, or having diabetes. If we want a “healthier” populace — and I’m putting that phrase in quotes because societally we need to rethink what healthy means — then we have to create the conditions for people to thrive.
There’s a reason why rich people tend to live longer. Want to decrease rates of high blood pressure and diabetes? Address income inequality. There’s a refreshing, extended discussion about class throughout your book — something I don’t always see in writing about farming, food systems and the culinary arts.
Can you tell me about why the discussion of class was important to you? It’s so odd to me when class doesn’t form part of these conversations! Farm workers and cooks and people who work with food are often paid so poorly that they aren’t able to afford the food they are growing or making for others. In an interview for the book, chef and author Joshna Maharaj pointed out how ironic and disturbing that is, because food is so fundamental. It shows up the most acutely in fine dining, this disconnect.
A New Book for Disabled Cooks read more We grow enough food for everyone. No one should be facing food insecurity. But it feels particularly wrong for a person participating in that chain of labour that links farm with plate to be facing food insecurity.
When we talk about “sustainability,” this is a key pillar for me. Food cannot, by definition, be sustainable if it is subsidizing itself with underpaid labour. I appreciated your writing about the relationship between mental health and food throughout the book.
Can you tell me about what you were hoping to speak to when writing about mental health in Hearty ? There’s an essay in the book about working at a small curry restaurant in Guelph, Ontario, soon after I was diagnosed with bipolar II disorder. I was in university, on student loans, poor, and needed to work. There’s so much (necessary) conversation about what needs to change about restaurant kitchens.
But another thing that’s true is that restaurant kitchens are a safe place to land for a lot of the world’s weirdos. I was kind of a mess at that time in my life. In that restaurant kitchen, thanks to the people I worked with, who were also at messy places in their lives, I found a safe place to land.
I could be myself. I reconnected with a couple of the folks I worked with while writing the book, and it was meaningful to hear about what that time in our lives meant to them. There’s a lot of addiction, alcohol abuse, substance abuse in restaurant kitchens.
There’s a lot of poverty. And there are a lot of people caring for each other, keeping each other afloat. Fresh off the Shelf read more Is there anything else you’d like to add? I’d love to do some more classroom visits and community visits to talk about food and everything it brings along with it.
Please invite me places! I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention one of my favourite Tyee food series, which is Christopher Cheung's Fresh off the Shelf . This series asks a very salient question — “When we celebrate ‘local food,’ what gets left out?” — and it also highlights the importance of local food processing. It’s not sustainable to expect people, on a wide scale, to make everything they want to eat from scratch.
That mid-level, small-to-medium-scale manufacturing piece is such an important piece of the local food puzzle. We need more of it. To celebrate the launch of ‘Hearty,’ andrea bennett will be in a conversation about local food security and insecurity on Wednesday, Oct.
2, at 32 Lakes Café (6812 Alberni St., qathet, B.C.
) at 7 p.m. Joining bennett in the conversation will be Paradise Valley Produce farmer Rachael Sherstad and Susanna Klassen, a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Victoria.
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