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[H]er mother was dead, and the only thing worth remembering about her, in the end, was that she had cooked. Marilyn thought uneasily of her own life, of hours spent making breakfasts, serving dinners, packing lunches into neat paper bags. … How was it possible to spend so many hours cooking eggs?
In this passage from Chapter Four, Marilyn tallies the hours she has spent making eggs and sandwiches and worries that her life will prove as meaningless as Doris’s had been. The only thing worth remembering about Doris is that she cooked food for her family, and although Marilyn had wanted more for herself, she realizes that she, too, might end up with little to show for the hours of labor she’s expended on creating meals for other people. Betty Crocker’s Cookbook, a sacred text for Doris, fills Marilyn with horror and alarm, as she reads the passages Doris marked and realizes that its guidance elevates feeding a family into a full-time job. Particularly upsetting to Marilyn is a sentence the insists that every woman should be able to make eggs “behave” in six different ways, a verb choice that suggests that eggs are like children. Marilyn realizes she regularly cooks eggs in at least three ways and, stepping back, is horrified to think that hours and hours of her life have been spent in a way that has so little meaning.
His mother was in charge of bringing the world down to scale, chopping melons into dice-sized cubes, portioning pats of butter onto saucers to accompany each roll. He had never told anyone how the other kitchen ladies snickered at his mother for wrapping up the leftover food instead of throwing it away; how at home they’d reheat it in the oven while his parents quizzed him.
When James thinks about his mother cooking, in this passage from Chapter Two, he sees her in the cafeteria where she worked, not the kitchen in the apartment where they lived. Although following a recipe often involves thinking in terms of scale, this normal feature of preparing food is the main focus of her work. As she transforms industrial-sized containers into a scale appropriate for human consumption, her work is closer to factory labor than it is to the individual comfort outlined in Betty Crocker’s Cookbook. In this scene, not only is the motif of perspective evident, but mockery from the other lunch ladies suggests possible racial discrimination. Although James’s mother is an excellent cook, the family tends to eat leftovers, focusing their attention and energy on their son’s education.
Dinnertime comes and goes, but none of them can imagine eating. It seems like something only people in films do, something lovely and decorative, that whole act of raising a fork to your mouth. Some kind of purposeless ceremony.
This passag from Chapter One presents an alternative perspective to the novel’s representation of food. While many specific meals are described, here the family’s grief at Lydia’s disappearance and death strips food of its taste, significance, and appeal. Devastated, the Lees are so full of grief that they cannot fathom eating. While sitting around a table and sharing a meal is central to the family’s dynamic, even after Marilyn stops cooking, grief transforms this daily ritual into something new, a seemingly pointless luxury. The power of food to create community is disrupted as the solipsism of grief robs dinner of its function. This scene represents the many ways in which normal activities seem foreign, things such as cleaning, going to school, or doing much of anything they might usually do.
