I’ve never been very good at letting go of the things I love.
When I said I was stepping down from Bristol Food Union in January, I had an email from Jonathan Nunn at Vittles, which read;
Congratulations I guess! I always congratulate people on divorces…they all happen for a reason. Very interested to hear your reasons why…
Call me naïve, but I hadn’t realised that like any good divorce, extracting myself would be more complicated than I thought.
I was expecting to feel relief, but I wasn’t ready for the recently incoming wave of grief. I didn’t think saying no would be so hard.
This year is the first since Slow Food’s Terra Madre conference in 2008 that I’m not delivering a major food event. 14 years of constant running. No surprise I got burnt out.
My career provided me with a shiny external shell of perceived value. I mistook it for self-worth, at a time when I wasn’t much able to love myself. Without it, I feel new and vulnerable. Slowly growing my hands back, inch by painful inch.
It turns out, slowing down is quite tricky when your entire nervous system is pre-conditioned to always running. I’ve been living fight or flight as an operating strategy for a long time.
When the war in Ukraine hit, doing nothing felt unconscionable. I told myself I could just dip a toe in. Just help a little. It was a mistake.
Returning from the last of my wild weekends in Devon, reality rushed in and hit me like an unexpectedly cold wave of recurring emotional trauma.
BOOM! Here’s how your career makes you feel. And guess what?! It sucks balls.
The wise man tells me:
Do not trouble yourself with the flapping red tongues of court. You are not here for them.
Last Saturday, Burmese food writer Mimi Aye, was accused of ‘biting the hand that feeds her’ in response to comments she made about Guardian restaurant critic, Grace Dent. She reminded me that the cost of speaking out is very real.
I utterly reject the idea that working in food, and being critical of an industry I love cannot go hand-in-hand. It’s a fragile ego that cannot countenance the space to entertain opinions they disagree with.
The brilliant Nashville food writer, Lisa Donovan, wrote in her newsletter on Monday morning,
It is sure easy, for me anyway, to be a real sceptic about the restaurant world at large. I can simultaneously be madly in love with it and fed the fuck up of it all at once, I’m complex like that (and so are you)
So, it feels like it’s time to go big or go home.
I’ve skirted around the edges since January. More focused than I should have been on owning my emotional trauma. Processing some internal need to let the world know that, I too, became a bit broken by it all. They can’t say shit about me if I’ve already told everyone everything, right?
But the last couple of weeks has caused a significant shift in my thinking.
Real change is slow and systemic. A million micro-actions, a multitude of minuscule smarter choices. It requires finding the courage, to tell the truth again and again… and again.
So enough of the fear. Enough of the silence. I permit myself to explore the issues here…
Who gets permission to do good things?
Why does social media support matter so much?
What the hell is going on with Keith McNally?
and what does the UK food media’s response to him say about all of us?
It’s time to fill that space. Use this newsletter to explore ideas and questions. To find the courage to say what needs to be said, and carve out the career I want. To stand up for myself.
Make a brew, pull up a chair, and settle down at the kitchen table. This one takes a while.
Look at the state of us.