In the UK, writer and artist Aisha Mirza’s book, misery meals: a crip community anti-cookbook for when eating and cooking is hard is a 250-page glow-in-the-dark, spiral-bound cookbook, “or anti-cookbook as we like to call it”, says Aisha. It comes via misery, a queer, BIPOC mental health arts organisation, and comprises submissions from queer trans people of the global majority. It takes the idea of disability justice work as a lineage of thinking, and makes it beautiful. The title and chapters teach us that, in a vast silent chamber, it bears repeating: cooking can be fucking hard.
“There can be very lonely moments when you’re just like, ‘I can’t even feed myself today’. It’s very easy to turn on yourself in those moments,” explains book editor Aisha. “But [the book] is a flare into the world of people who are struggling to say, ‘You’re not alone.’ I wanted it to function not just as a cookbook, but as a companion in difficult times.”
Aisha uses Christine Miserandino’s 2003 spoon theory, the idea of spoons representing an energy capacity level of people living with chronic illness, to give each a ‘spoon rating’, from zero spoons (Nimbu Pani) to five spoons (Coconut and Peanut Butter Noodle Soup). Everything is also simplified to the least number of utensils, and the least amount of washing up possible.
Misery meals, as a result, is a joyous piece of art and printed matter which takes influence from the aesthetics of computer games, diaspora menus, comic book cartoon characters and illustrated mascots, all of which feature throughout. One page is an homage to ‘emergency sucky cap water’ and details things you can put in water, as a way of seeing human needs more magically. If it was the case that food culture tends to leave people out – and it does – you’d be hard pressed to find something more universal than sucky cap water.
Dining and Cooking