Its green plastic binding and bright yellow cover
belie its nature: this is no innocent
Ward Cookbook. It’s guilt incarnate.
Not ordinary guilt, dinners not often
enough, not healthy enough,
but this stabbing judgment:
all my dinners,
no matter how healthy or often
or tasty, basically suck
(none of the women who wrote
this tome would ever, ever say suck).
It’s not enough to cook dinner
seven nights a week
If you’re not also using up
Those giant bags of wheat.
Make gluten globs instead of meat:
make gluten meatballs, meatloaf,
even steak. Feed them to your children
if you’ve raised them right,
they’ll eat it all, grateful
for the meal.
Good moms grow all their veggies
which they can,
with the willing help
of children they have taught to work.
Good moms do this. I do not.
Lord, help me honor
their sacrifice of eating
gross food, in the name of food storage. Let
me see eye to eye with these diligent women,
holding no disdain for them,
or contempt for myself.
And also, Lord, I’m scooting this book
to the DI on Monday. A mother
much better than me
can learn how to feed her kids
homemade gluten steaks,
TVP, and powdered milk.
Please bless her
whoever she is, and help her
learn those skills so she can teach me
in the post-apocalyptic world.
I ordered pizza for dinner tonight.
It smells amazing.
Emily Milner mothers five children, writes, and attempts yoga poses. She has been on the editorial board of Segullah: Writings by Latter-day Saint Women, for which she has written essays, poetry, and many blog posts. Other publications include the personal essay “Beauty for Ashes,” previously published in Irreantum, and the short story “The Living Wife” in Monsters and Mormons, edited by Wm Morris and Theric Jepson. Since writing “A Comprehensive Study of Food Storage and Its Uses” she has dabbled with vegan eating, and even found a recipe for that same gluten steak on trendy vegan blogs.
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