"Let me trust in my disabled pleasure practices"

an excerpt from Misery Meals, a crip community anti-cookbook

I’m super excited to share an incredible project with you from the queer mental health collective misery: a crowd-sourced crip community anti-cookbook edited by Aisha Mirza, with afterword by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. It’s choose-your-own adventure based on your energy levels, with a flow chart guide through the book’s recipes and a focus on visual design for when reading is hard. Please enjoy the following excerpt from Leah’s afterword, and order your copy here!

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To write down and collect a cookbook such as this is an affirmation that our sad weird sick foodways are real and matter and count. A literal recipe book of crip food possibility doulaing, offering to others like, no, you don’t have to wash the rice and every way you feed yourself is wild crip ingenuity and real. In fact, the weirder the better. In a time when we, our people, are under extreme attack from late capital colonial eugenics, it is even more important to write and share such a book. To assert our disabled foodways genius, all the crip hacks, and to literally show each other how we can manage to eat.

Disabled pleasure maximalism looks a million ways. I loved food when I was flat on my ass with CFIDS/ME and had negative million spoons and dollars, loved it when I started to be able to zip around more, and everything in between. My library book recipes, dollar value meals, careful menu planning to make $20 stretch, and stolen cups of coffee in the all-night diner, all mattered. They were all ways I cripped pleasure and all ways I fought for and claimed my life.

Our disabled food pleasure maximalism carries us through so many forms of crip grief and hard times. This was true before the pandemic, it continues to be true as food prices ever rise and pandemics continue, as genocides unfurl and the vibe is perma-grievous. I’m currently writing this, knocked on my ass from the devastation and shock of Alice Wong’s sudden death, on day 18 of healing from a long planned total hip replacement surgery. I’m healing well. I dunno if I’m grieving “well” but I’m healing well.

Two weeks before the surgery my friends were like um bitch where is the care plan. Yeah I wrote Care Work, but as it turns out I fucking hated receiving care. I would rather fucking die than let people help me with my garbage or cook meals for me even with stage 4 osteonecrosis. We know care is both a precious gift, and the place we’ve gotten abused and laughed at and mocked over and over. I left a relationship that started off very care4care and turned abusive, where the care became a place for the violence. It took me years to start trusting people again, especially lovers, and I’m still working on it. I know I’m not alone.

But it turned out that during this hip replacement recovery, my friends, sick ND weirdos all, brought me:

• Caldo with mexican rice,

• quiche from the frozen trader joe’s pie crust shells and pumpkin bread w five spice,

• GF Ethiopian fried chicken,

• collards and muhalabia

• chili,

• salmon curry and two kinds of frozen dhal,

• dirty rice with plantain,

• halloween candy and the rice donuts from P Bagg,

• chicken / falafel plate from the halal cart.

My friends brought me jokes, turned all the handles of my mugs so they faced out and watched Smiling Friends season 1 with me. My former roommate friend who is a crip nurse flew out to be with me during the first week and batch cooked all the fancy hard mode farmer’s market vegetables I bought the week before surgery so I could microwave rice, garlicky stewed kale, roast squash and a protein at will, while leaning on my walker, and have nutrient dense meals as my giant-Hitachi-magic-wand-looking new cyber hip bonded with my femur.

It turns out, it’s possible for people to love and care for you without violence, control or codependency sometimes. It turns out, when you are nurtured, whether it’s by yourself or others, you gain the strength to live and heal well.

I am writing this piece ten days after legendary disability justice writer and organizer and founder of the Disability Visibility Project Alice Wong died. Like maybe most of the people who knew her work or counted her as a friend and colleague, I didn’t anticipate her dying. I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye or process her going. Alice was a true pleasure freak and notoriously loved food. Pre and post J tube, that bitch had four kinds of ice cream in her freezer and ate and spat out food she couldn’t swallow. Alice Wong’s series for Eater, ‘Low and Slow’ was yet another thing that brilliant bitch schemed up. A whole ass Disability Visibility x Eater collab that brought a bunch of variously disabled, mostly BIPOC writers to write about our experiences with cooking, food and community gardening.

Most cookbooks never even think about disabled or depressed foodways, but we know that straws, pre cut veggies, mission critical shelf stable milk and foods and recipes that take zero executive function are the stuff of life. Alice’s crip food story writing joins Sonali Menesez’s Depression Cooking Zine, which in one good excerpt says:

Is it edible? Cool. Put it in your mouth.
It’s better to eat something than nothing
We’re in the business of surviving baby
We eat in the face of depression! Fuck you and you + you!
Meal categories? No thanks.
Breakfast for every meal of the day, we say! …

— excerpt from The Depression Cooking Manifesto

Alice would’ve loved this cookbook and probably had a giveaway for it. It is written in her lineage. I hate that she’s an ancestor. I want her on the earth plane. It’s too soon for me to be glad of how mighty a one she is. But I can honor her life and her crip pleasure modelling by going full out with eating. Let me buy the fucking ice cream and eat it. Let me trust in my disabled pleasure practices. Let us all do that, and write them down, and share them.

Let this be one of so many books throwing out lifelines of recipes and crip food hacks to each other and shouting: our lives are real, and we deserve to live.

Order a copy of Misery Meals here

Follow misery on IG and subscribe to misery mail

For more info on how the book came to be, listen to this interview with Aisha in The Sick Times.