If You Can't Take the Heat by Geraldine DeRuiter

Author:Geraldine DeRuiter [DeRuiter, Geraldine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2024-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

10

GENDER ROLES AND CINNAMON ROLLS

In late December 2017, the celebrity chef Mario Batali sent out a newsletter, something that his marketing team had done countless times before. But this installment was a deviation from previous iterations. It was sent during the apex of the MeToo movement, and some of us were on a dizzying high from the idea that terrible men might actually be held accountable for the awful things they’d done, mostly to women. Batali had been accused of sexual misconduct and harassment, and in his newsletter he addressed and apologized for his actions. It contained the same sanitized, vague terminology that every missive of this nature included, something crafted by a PR and legal team to sound remorseful without being an admission of guilt. Batali’s was so scrubbed clean it became meaningless. He was sorry, he wrote, that his “past behavior” “disappointed” his friends and his family and his team. He went on that it was an honor to share Italian food and traditions with people, a strangely irrelevant digression that made me bristle. Batali had Italian ancestry but was born in Seattle. His food and traditions were my food and traditions. He concluded with a message about how he was going to work to regain everyone’s trust and respect. And then, at the very end, he wrote, “In case you’re searching for a holiday-inspired breakfast, these Pizza Dough Cinnamon Rolls are a fan favorite.”

It felt like a record scratch moment, the entire culinary community wondering exactly what the hell was going on. They were livid at the inclusion of the recipe, at the idea that a man who didn’t understand consent could determine what was or wasn’t a fan favorite. Here. Sit. Make cinnamon rolls. People love them, you know! Oh, by the way, everyone is saying I’m a sexual deviant. More icing? My anger had, during that strange epoch of time, felt untethered and hard to grasp, like a current running through the air. And, suddenly, it became focused, channeled at Batali’s insipid and completely ill-advised recipe.

If we were to travel back in time, wind whipping in our now graying hair, to a decade earlier, and locate me, this is what we would find: a white woman in her late twenties who’d recently been laid off and spent her days just oozing ennui all over the furniture.

Obviously, I started a blog. I had so much wisdom to share.

The Everywhereist has ebbed and flowed since I started it in 2009, a reflection of my own difficulties writing consistently, my doubts about my career, my inability to focus, something akin to writer’s block but less romantic that I attribute to laziness. Some years I’ve written 250 posts. Some years I’ve written roughly ten. I have wondered if I should abandon it altogether. Sometimes I do, for months at a time. But I always come back.

When allegations against Batali came out, I’d hit a personal and professional malaise that involved wearing a lot of pajamas out in public. I hadn’t written anything of substance in months.

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