90: How to Feed Yourself When the World is Burning Down Around You with Amy G.S.A. Brooks
If you have felt the pressure to put meals on the table that adhere to the expectations of others, even when you could barely function in life, this episode is for you. I’m joined by Amy G.S.A. Brooks of Wandering Ames. She’s one of my favorite content creators who posts about the OK Kitchen. There is more to life than succumbing to societal pressure to prepare perfect, five-star meals. Join us!
Show Highlights:
● The beginnings of the OK Kitchen and the forming of a new community
● Food insecurity and diet culture during the pandemic
● Messages surround us everywhere about how we feed ourselves and fuel our bodies.
● Thinking about preparing food for three meals every day seems like never-ending labor!
● Meal plans can be a helpful tool–but should be set aside when needed.
● Wasteful in food or wasteful in being unkind to ourselves? Which is worse?
● Be willing to break the rules: dinner doesn’t have to be a big meal or a fancy production, and food plans should be simple and flexible.
● The point of meals is to get what our bodies need.
Resources and Links:
Connect with Amy G.S.A. Brooks: TikTok
Connect with KC: Website, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook
Get KC’s book, How to Keep House While Drowning
We love the sponsors that make this show possible! You can always find all the special deals and codes for all our current sponsors on our website: www.strugglecare.com/promo-codes.
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KC 0:00
Oh
Amy 0:04
Hello, you Sentient Balls of Stardust, excuse my tight throat. This week, I have a little bit of laryngitis. But we are pushing forward. Because today we're talking to Amy G. S, A brooks of wandering Ames. And one of my favorite content creators who posts about the OK, kitchen. Amy, thank you for being here. It is my pleasure to be here, I stumbled upon your content because of your okay kitchen videos, which if the audience hasn't heard them, it's it literally opens with you saying welcome back to the okay kitchen, and then you make a meal. And it is a simple meal. It's a very accessible meal. Tell me how this started? Yeah, I need to take you back to the dark times of the early pandemic. To do that. It was very much an accidental journey in that, as with many of us, the walls were closing in around me. And I needed to continue feeding myself anyway, which is just absolutely the worst. But basically, in my house, we had leftover french fries, which is a concept that even I struggled to understand. I mean, to add some context, my wife and I went grocery shopping only once every four weeks at the time. And so the food available to me to make meals was limited in terms of freshness, at least as he got towards the end of that time. And some chaotic combinations followed. But the beginning of the story is that I had leftover french fries, and some assorted vegetables in the fridge and just thought, I'm just going to put this on a tray and sprinkle some cheese on it and were lifted up off the tray, it's going to be all gooey and delicious. Like, like a slice of joy and happiness. And what happened instead, cheese had I looked at it and I went, you know what, it's okay, I guess I'm eating this today.
And the thing is, I put that online because I thought everyone needs to just laugh at my aspirations versus the reality. And it turned out that I wasn't the only person here. So the walls were closing in and making the decision to feed myself daily, sometimes more than once a day was one of the struggles of the moment, people really responded. And a little community formed,
KC 2:19
it really reminds me of kind of my journey during the pandemic of trying to get my house, you know, cleaned and organized. And really putting it online was a way of staying motivated to do it. So I resonated with that part of your story. And here's the thing, there are accounts out there about how to cook about how to make meals, there are really great dietitians, and really great chefs, but there's just something so different about listening to someone who is in a similar place that you feel like you're in, but also like maybe has closer to what you one would consider like their own skills. Tell me about the response and the community that has built up around the Okay, kitchen.
Amy 3:05
Yeah, what always surprises me is I'm here for laughs most of the time. I'm very sincere in what I do. I'm not making bad meals on purpose for views, you know that those accounts do exist. I'm making food with the intent of eating it. And because our budget is limited, I will be eating it, no matter how disappointing the result. And, you know, it turns out, there's a lot of us out there, my journey over the last few years has included a diagnosis of ADHD and autism and part of the food piece has been learning to honor my own needs and how they differ perhaps from others. And that is people were I was astonished to find really enthusiastic about and, you know, to get really serious for a minute, every week, sometimes more often than a week, I have someone who comments or messages me and says thank you. You reminded me to eat today?
KC 4:09
Yeah, there's so much messaging out there. I mean, we live in a world that is primarily fueled by diet culture. And even if you're not in a diet culture by way of like, oh, you know, restrict your food and go on a diet. There's so many messages around eating and I found myself on more than several occasions kind of standing in my kitchen and thinking okay, I need to eat and having this idea in my head about what I should be eating and either not having access, like the either I don't have those kinds of foods or I don't know how to cook those kinds of foods or I don't have the energy to cook, whatever that could be and sort of feeling as though okay, I guess I'll eat nothing like I can't hit this like ideal version of like, whether it's, you know, the type of calories or the type of macros or the type of nutrients that I should be eating and so Because I can't get that sometimes it would happen in my house. Sometimes it would happen when I was out, right? And I think about like, Oh, I could go to this, you know, the three fast food places, but oh gosh, what would I get there that, you know, my dietician would be proud of. And so I just don't eat at all.
Amy 5:13
And I want to be real clear that I'm not a dietician. And I'm not coming to this with a medical background, I am just a human person. Part of the work I do professionally, outside of tic toc is working with human people. And I have my limit, and some of those limits around how I feed myself, for those of us and for many of us, who particularly those who are socialized, as women, we have received loud and clear the messages that externally, there are others who are allowed to dictate how we fuel our bodies. And I'm certainly not advocating for forget what your medical needs are, and just eat what you want. And I do believe that there is a balance between what my body needs, and what I can access on my body at this time. And a lot of the times, those are the same things. So some of the humor, in my kitchen videos, is putting random things together and calling it a different meal. So a bowl of cherry tomatoes with some chips on top, and calling a tomato salad with croutons. You know, it's not what you learned in school for the food pyramid, but it's got vitamins in it. And you know, enough of a carb to keep you going until maybe you do have capacity for something more involved.
KC 6:30
There's a gap, I feel like for the community that you are speaking to, because, yes, there's a time and a place for, you know, sitting down and really digging into, you know, what is the best combination of nutrients that you could put together for every meal. And you know, if maybe if you have some health issues or some energy issues, you know, how can you optimize, you know, those things through the way that you're eating, like, there's a time and place for that, and for the dietitians, and for the medical doctors and for the coaches and all of those people. But the reality is, I mean, like you I found myself in a place for years, where that's just not where I was. And there weren't a lot of places that were going, Hey, like it's just eat, like, if you can't get the quote unquote, right kind of meal, you should still be eating, like, I don't know how as, like, as a woman, I was convinced that, you know, the best option is the meal you should be eating, the next best option is to eat nothing. And the worst option is to eat something bad or something wrong or something that's you know, not quote unquote good for you. But that is how many of us approach sort of like our pyramid of moral priorities in eating. And, you know, the I've made a few videos about eating, I'm actually in the midst of writing a cookbook, and it's, it's similar, there's not a lot speaking to who you are speaking to, which is sometimes we don't have access or capability or energy levels, or budget or whatever. And the next best thing to just waking up with a completely different life is just to put any kind of food in your body. In reality, all food has nutrients,
Amy 8:04
right and food, there's a whole conversation. We raise our farm animals over whether people embrace veganism or vegetarianism. I'm not saying no ethical considerations for food, but food has no moral value, and particularly those of us who who have been sucked deep, deep down into the whirlpool of diet culture. And as someone who is invested in the work of liberation, for me, that includes fat liberation. So as a fat woman, getting to continue to feed my body as it is, and to love my body enough to feed it as it is, is feels like a revolutionary Atomy.
KC 8:46
I would imagine it does for a lot of people because there is an aspect of denying ourselves food. And sometimes we do it because we feel frozen or because of executive functioning or because of access. But I think oftentimes one finds themselves denying themselves food as a form of punishment. Yes. Yeah. You know, when you said you were going to read a poem, and it reminded me of one of my favorite ones that I hear in my head all the time, which kind of ties into like my background and troubled teen industry and evangelicalism. And but there's this really beautiful poem by Mary Oliver. And just the very beginning of it, I hear in my head all the time that says you do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for 100 miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. And that part of that poem just like lives in my brain rent free about everything. And I feel like in this conversation we're having about food and how many of us sometimes deny ourselves food as a form of punishment? That just feels like such a bomb?
Amy 9:50
Yeah, yeah, I definitely. I feel the power of like a Putin those words that speaks to me particularly as a poet, but also as someone who has As moved out of evangelical mindset, just understanding ourselves as human animals who have needs, and wants and aspirations and limitations is such an important part of living this life that we live. And we all have different values. And sometimes there are values that are shoved upon us that we might not hold to, if we really looked deeply at them. And one of those values in our society where white supremacy culture is so present ever present, one of those values is that the premium way of living, particularly again, as a woman is to be the Incredible Shrinking person to not take up space to not have needs or demands to not see the shredded cheese packet in the drawer and think I'm just gonna have a little crate. And that's okay.
KC 11:09
Have you seen the, there's a tick tock sound going around right now, this woman who made Tiktok, where she says, As a woman, you should not be eating plain z's. So I'm just going to have a quick quick midnight snack, a quick, quick snack, and it goes to her play it it's like this huge plate of food. And so many people have been using that audio. And I just for some reason, it's like my favorite audio right now. Because the amount of times that I've gotten up at like 1030, my husband, I'll be sitting in reading in bed, and I'll be like, I'm kind of hungry, and I'll get up and make up like, eat a full meal, or come back with some giant plate. And it's like, just a quick, quick snack that you should not be eating plane seats as a woman.
Amy 11:46
I love that. Oh, and it does take it does take me back to bedtime very early in locked down when my wife's a morning person, and I am very much not. And we would like greet each other as ships passing in the night. You know, I would be making myself a full meal at three o'clock in the morning. Because, you know, that was my supper time. You know, I had no reason to leave my house. My work had gone online, you know, time has no meaning anymore, all of that stuff. So yeah, I'm just gonna have, I'm just gonna make an entire meal today in the morning and eat it. Because that's what I need right now.
KC 12:23
Or what are some times when you make meals, I wonder if what some people respond to is that like, sometimes we just need permission to like, put things on a plate that seem good, even if they don't match. Like I know, that seems really simple. But like, when I first got married, and for several years into my marriage, I'm making dinner and it's like, okay, to kind of cook a meat, I have to cook two sides. And they all have to kind of coordinate and then I just kind of like burnt out. And so then over a long time, I was just cooking like a meat, then my husband would come home and I'd be like, here's the pork loin, there's nothing else with it. And he was like, cool, like he didn't care at all. And then, like, our kids got to an age where they needed to eat a dinner. And so you know, I was feeding the kids earlier before he got home and I would often eat with them and he'd get home and and then I'd have to cook a second meal. And finally, like fast forward to now like I don't actually make a grownup dinner anymore. And my husband comes home and like eats a bowl of cereal or makes himself a sandwich. And I'm Amy I'm 10 years in it took me this long to realize a shit if I make dinner, and I don't need I'm happy to eat a bowl of cereal for dinner. Like no one in my family ever needed me to be making this like idea of adult dinner every night at seven, which I did for years. Nobody wanted it. Nobody cared, everybody is fine. The kids get their meal at six, I feed myself whatever I want to feed myself. He comes home and feeds himself whatever he wants to feed himself. And it's just so freeing and it's taken off so much energy and labor off my shoulders that nobody expected but me but just even like the combination of like sometimes I want a pork loin and I don't have to make sides or sometimes I want to side and I don't have to make a meal. Sometimes I can put chips with cherry tomatoes. They don't have to match. They don't have to be the salad.
Amy 14:13
And that's awesome salad. Anything you put
KC 14:15
together to be as a salad. Like if the food is touching if they're like, intermingled it's a salad. Yeah,
Amy 14:22
yeah. I mean, I do feel like we I mean a lot of syrup. They're middle class or lower income, you know, subsistence type minimum wage jobs, trying to prepare meals, like we've got kitchen staff, you know, like, I just put this together, but my actual professional chef chef did most of the work, you know, and that's not the reality. For most of us. We're working harder at our jobs than we have before and we're doing so for less income and income has less buying power than it had before. So the classism involved, either open an account of Chef Boyardee Eat or drive through and get takeaway on the way home, you know, that's time for rest and time to be with your family or your pets or to water your plants or whatever is meaningful to
KC 15:12
you. Yeah. How do you deal with because what I find that most difficult is that, you know, I know that I need to eat. And I know I need to put a meal together, but I just it's like, the energy to put it together and then the energy it's going to take to clean up after myself. And of course, you know, I make myself do it. But sometimes honestly, like, thinking about how I have to feed myself, and my kids like three meals a day, and then I have to wake up and do it again tomorrow. It's like this never ending labor. And maybe that sounds silly to some people. But like, There have been days where I've been like, God, I have to do this every day for the rest of my life. Like just give me a kibble, give me a human kibble.
Amy 15:55
Why can't we take tons in water?
KC 15:59
Just hang me up a gerbil. Even somebody's making a glass of water when I was in a really bad spot like somebody get me a gerbil feeder, like a water gerbil feeder, and I can just lean over to the side of my bed to just suckle some drops of water out of it. Yeah.
Amy 16:13
Why is it all for this? Oh, you know, I think all our households function differently for us because we have some food sensitivity issues. And then because again, wherever a limited budget, so the way we deal with that is we have a meal plan. And that's a really strict meal plan only covers evening meals, because my wife has so far resisted the let's do this for breakfast and lunch movement that my autism would like us to do, we have a really strict meal plan. And we always stick to it. And we always have exactly what is on the plan, we definitely do say I don't have the energy for that. And giving yourself permission to put the tools in place that you need is, I think really important. And just as important is giving yourself permission to set those tools down when you don't have one. So last week, we baked potatoes turned out the member of our household he was meant to be baking, the baked potatoes had an unlimited meaning we didn't need the baked potatoes, potatoes are fine in the cupboard for a while.
KC 17:21
That's such a hack to like I have found that trying to gravitate towards foods that will keep if I decide not to eat them. And it takes a little bit of brainpower, but you know, I can leave a potato in the cupboard for a day or two. Whereas you know, if I bought a fresh chicken breast might be a little bit more difficult. So sometimes I'll opt for the frozen chicken breast and try to find, you know, the meal that I can cook it from Frozen because then if I do find that that day, I can't, you know, I haven't wasted the food that I may not be able to, you know, somebody may not be able to revive Oh
Amy 17:56
yeah. And that's another thing. But the little waste of shame in our heads is that but if I don't eat this, I'm going to be wasting food. And that is true. At times I have sometimes renamed my you know the drawer in the fridge where you keep your vegetables, not a vegetable crisper it is often the vegetable decomposer throw out last week's bad letters and put the new good letters in at the end of the day is more wasteful, to be unkind to ourselves. Like that's it. That's the whole thought it is more wasteful to be unkind to ourselves. And I'm going to throw away a couple of cherry tomatoes I didn't get around to eating but I'm not throwing away my sense of what I deserve as a person and how I deserve to be treated, including in the kitchen and at the dining table, then rip the cherry tomatoes, I'm fine with it. I'm
KC 18:45
with you. I also want a second, like your idea of having a little food menu but having it be like flexible. I recently did the same thing just for my kids, where I just sat down because my kids you know, they've got a limited number of things that they'll eat and trying to think about, like a fresh combination of those things every day was difficult. And I just finally sat down with them even and was like tell me the things you will eat. And we came up with you know, and just five, five days like you know, I think you made a good point that you do not have to have some really fancy all three meals seven days a week. I mean for me just having something on the fridge that has a dinner idea for my kids for the for Monday through Friday is a huge load off my shoulders. And it's not like we have to follow it every week and or every day, right? There's a whole weeks where I didn't follow it. But when I find myself in that place of like okay, they need dinner. Okay, what am I supposed to oh, I can just I can just go look at the fridge, you
Amy 19:39
know? Yeah. And the end of the day when you're at your like limits, you know, typically by the end of the day, your energy is at the lowest and everyone's tolerance for each other's quirks and they also have very low you know, we're queer house or the field joke that lesbians can't make a decision together is less a joke and more fat So, knowing I'm absolutely exhausted, but I don't have to make a choice right now, you know, what is the meal plan? Say, Yeah, I can probably make box mac and cheese. That is something I capacity for, or but I didn't have to call a family meeting, bring everyone together, put all the cards on the table, spend 45 minutes debating which of the Welch's, we would like to grace with our dining presents that evening, what the ingredients are, that we may or may not have, you know, all of that decision making is exhausting. And sometimes even with, yeah, you know, and to your point about how sometimes even with a meal plan, you just end up standing at the door of the fridge and going, I'm gonna eat this cheese stick and call it good.
KC 20:44
Yeah, and I think to your point about how you know, towards the end of the day, we often find ourselves with less energy, less decision making ability, this idea that like dinner has to be the big meal, I think is like a rule that nobody is obligated to follow, you know, it's totally fine. If you want, you know, if you do want to have a bigger meal in the day for that to be breakfast, or to be lunch, you know, but to be breakfast, maybe that's the meal that you cook, and you make sure that there's lots of nutritional options and things like that. And then by the time dinner rolls around, everybody has a bowl of cereal, right, some cheese sticks, or you're doing snack platters. I mean, I think that people, there's a lot of rules that we can break to give ourselves some slack.
Amy 21:25
Right, right. And then I believe it was from your Tiktok content that I first moving your jaws into the vegetable drawer and your vegetables up the so you know fruits and vegetables. So they're more the first thing your eye hits. And that was lacking for me, maybe I don't have a plate that has fruits and vegetables and protein and carbs on it. I'm snacking on the grapes that are in the you know, the shelf in the fridge door. So this rule that all the things you eat in your meal have to be presented on your plate versus what what you might graze through the day is another thing that I'm glad to let
KC 22:06
go. I worked with like a nutritionist. She wasn't a dietitian, but just a nutritionist recently. And one of the things that she was talking about was, you know, trying to get more protein into my meals. And she was like, you know, ideally, you get enough protein in your meals that you're not really snacking a lot afterwards. And she's very nice. And there's things that she's very helpful about, but in my head, I was like I'm not, I don't care, I don't care. There's nothing wrong with snacking, and I'm going to continue to snack all day long. Like I'm not going to push myself into this like picture of how I should be eating. I'm totally down for like getting more protein. And it has been really helpful to me, but I just kind of like let other stuff just pass on through like no, like, I don't have to force myself into somebody that only eats three times a day.
Amy 22:42
Yeah. And there are people for whom that works really well. They enjoy that God is bless them. That's not for everyone. I have a really good friend who one of her children is tube fed. So she has tubes than a formula that is made meals. So it's tubes that are surgically implanted in her intestines, basically. And the point is not to meet a benchmark of what meals should look like. The point is to make sure that we have what we need. And sometimes what we need is delivered by tubes medically determined by our body.
KC 23:17
So me You said you had a poem that you wanted to read? Yeah, true
Amy 23:20
fans of the okay kitchen scene that my content goes beyond badly named meals. And that I do write some poetry this one is titled A Manifesto. It's a clever poem that you cannot fully appreciate as I'm speaking it instead of saying it in text, but I am saying manner as in like, you know the Bible story of manna in the desert and manifesto, as in the declaration of beliefs, and the poem goes like this. Welcome to the ok kitchen where we eat the food we can access. Food is leftovers. Food is takeout food comes from gardens, freezers, packets and cans, we know that we can save time or money, but we can't save both. And that's okay. Welcome to the ok kitchen where we eat to fuel our sentient skinsuit where we understand our neuro brain. We eat our safe food we eat with the small spoon, we eat shredded cheese from the packet. We know that some days remembering to eat is an achievement. And that's okay. Welcome to the ok kitchen, where we eat in defiance of our disorders where we understand that food is just food. It is not good or bad. It has no moral value, it is not a reward to be earned. We know that divesting from the cult of wellness is a work in progress and that Okay, welcome to the okay kitchen, where we have our fill of food gratefully faithfully, courageously without shame and mats. Okay, that's
KC 25:01
beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. Amy if people want to follow you online, tell them where they can do that and plug anything else that you've got going on.
Amy 25:09
I am on tick tock as wandering aims mispronounce wandering games, but that's fine. I don't mind. I'm also scram and Twitter with the same title but with much less enthusiasm is one way to put it.
KC 25:26
And aims as a m e. S. Amy, thank you so much for your time, and I appreciate everything that you've shared with us today.
Amy 25:33
Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai