A Different Kind of Materialism
Tamar Adler’s food writing doubles as a philosophy of kitchen scraps.
Broccoli stems don’t tend to rouse strong emotions. Most home cooks toss them in the trash or compost without a second thought. But when I threw out some broccoli stalks—tough and woody ones, let it be known—while cooking dinner recently, guilt overcame me. I could have pickled those stalks; I could have boiled them and turned them into pesto. Instead, I had turned them into landfill.Waste is endemic to American cooking and eating. The Department of Agriculture estimates that the country loses or throws away 30 to 40 percent of its food supply. But my stem shame didn’t come solely from this staggering fact, or from environmental consciousness. Though I was alone in my kitchen, I said quietly, “Sorry, Tamar.”Tamar is Tamar Adler, a former chef who has made a career of writing about humble ingredients, especially leftovers and scraps. Her 2011 book, An Everlasting Meal, an elegant manifesto urging readers to use every single thing that enters their kitchens, is the only reason pickling a stem has ever crossed my mind. Adler’s goal isn’t to guilt her audience: She wants to get cooks excited about kitchen refuse, to help them see cast-offs as ingredients in their own right. She wrote An Everlasting Meal, she told me recently, to convince people that when you throw usable food scraps away, “you’re just creating an extra problem for yourself—a dual problem.” Not only do you have more garbage to deal with, you also have to go buy more food.Beneath that pragmatic language lies a fundamentally spiritual approach to the problem of waste. Adler is concerned with both the environmental toll of trash and the prevalence of food insecurity in the United States—“We’re talking about aesthetics for the rich people and hunger for the poor,” she said angrily—but, as befits somebody who describes herself as “pretty woo-woo,” she also empathizes with the scraps. In her latest book, a kitchen diary called Feast on Your Life, Adler describes an audience member at an event who asked why Adler cared so deeply about leftovers. She writes, “I answered that it was because I love things so much. Because I am, most of the time, seized by a love for everything, awash in the tireless function of creation, the relentlessness of the world’s making. When you feel that, it is hard to throw anything away.”In general, Adler approaches her work more like a philosopher poet than a food writer. Her prose is distinctive and beautiful, with a slight but discernible theological bent. At the start of An Everlasting Meal, she notes that cooking with leftovers mirrors the behavior of nature, and she urges readers to “imagine if the world had to begin from scratch each dawn: a tree would never grow, nor would we ever get to see the etchings of gentle rings on a clamshell.” Shortly after, she interrupts her instructions on boiling—start potatoes and eggs in cold water, but drop leafy vegetables “at the last second into a bubble as big as your fist”—to remind her audience that “ecclesiastical writers on the subject point out that in the beginning there was water, all life proceeded from water, there was water in Eden.”[Read: Foodie culture as we know it is over]This is not the sort of writing that accompanies most recipes. It’s odd and earnest, impractical in that it doesn’t contain clear instructions and is not designed to awaken readers’ appetites for a specific dish. Rather, the book is meant to make its audience want to cook something, anything, everything. Adler’s existential intensity is such that An Everlasting Meal reminds me less of culinarily similar cookbooks such as Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, by her fellow Chez Panisse alum, Samin Nosrat, than of more sweeping pronouncements such as Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America, which offer grand philosophical approaches to poetry and farming, respectively. Berry, in fact, is an inspiration to Adler; she said that reading his work helped her articulate and embrace her sense that there’s an “innate holiness to all things.” This belief is the ethos of her books. It’s the reason she can make a waste-avoidance strategy like core-and-stem pesto sound delicious, even luxurious. I’ve learned that it can be, despite the effort, which sometimes overwhelms me.I asked Adler whether she, too, grows overwhelmed by her philosophy, or struggles to live by it every day. Surely she tosses out the occasional scrap—composts it, at least—when no readers are looking. But no, she said: She saves everything, no matter how tired she is. She was cleaning mushrooms the night before we spoke, and “there were all these little bits that I couldn’t really put into the pan because they were going to get burned, and they had a lot of dirt and pine needles stuck on them,” she said. “I really tried to force myself to just throw them out, and I couldn’t do it. I put them in a plastic bag. They’re in the freezer.” Someday, I’d wager, they will emerge to flavor beans or soup.To Adler, this practice is neither a compulsion nor a burden. (“Only for my husband,” she cracked when I asked about the latter.) Yet she understands—sort of—that not all readers will want to follow every bit of her advice. Anything that’s “stressing you out and feeling like a chore,” she said, you just shouldn’t do, even if that means the only practice you take from her books is using cheese rinds, which can sit ignored for months without danger, to later season a slow-cooking meal. She denies having ever been a purist, but when she wrote An Everlasting Meal, she was certainly more of an evangelist than she is now. She was coming straight from Chez Panisse, a restaurant famous for doing things by hand as an expression of reverence for its ingredients; she also hadn’t yet had a child. Only such a person could write, as she does in that book, “Unless you are an aspiring laser beam, your microwave won’t teach you anything. Use yours as a bookshelf, or to store gadgets you don’t use.” Now she sees that as “a little bit preachy.” She’s less interested in converting her audience to cooking her precise way than in sharing the habits and tendencies that allow her to cook good food easily, which to her means cooking without using hard-to-get ingredients or fussy techniques. (Also, she’s got a microwave in her new apartment, and she loves how quickly it lets her thaw food.)Ease seems to have become central to Adler’s thinking in the years between An Everlasting Meal and Feast on Your Life, though she understands it quite differently than many home cooks. In 2023, exhausted from writing that year’s scrap-use encyclopedia An Everlasting Meal Cookbook, she “went through a glorious period of just throwing things out.” She recalled a jar of chili crisp that “was empty; all the chili crisp was out of it. But instead of keeping it, and then cracking an egg into it to then put in fried rice, I rinsed out the jar and recycled it.” She’s remembered that jar for two years—which is to say she’s spent two years remembering the egg she could’ve made. It would have been a good egg.This reveals Adler’s true understanding of ease. For her, scrap saving is the single easiest way to produce flavorful food: The more bits of mushroom you can toss in your broth, the better that broth will be. This will certainly be true once you’re in the habit of freezing those mushroom bits—and yet it works only for a person with time to make broth at home. While An Everlasting Meal seemed not to remember the other sorts of people, Feast on Your Life shows glimmers of idiosyncratic anger on their behalf. An insulated mug that she borrows from her brother throws Adler into “internal disarray at a good invention—double-wall insulation—pressed into the service of constant productivity.” This, she told me, came from an entirely different place than her earlier reaction to the microwave: not a lack of comprehension of rushing, but a fury at “the structures that make us have to rush.”[Read: The culture war comes to the kitchen]Feast on Your Life also reveals a deep exasperation with fussy cooking, which Adler sees as both a cause of waste and an enemy of home-cooking ease. All she does, to borrow a phrase she uses in her newsletter, is turn things “from raw to cooked”; early in the book, she describes a simple farro soup that “tasted like water, beans, grains, vegetables. Why do we make eating complicated? Here, says Creation: Eat this! What should we say but, Thank you!” In reading this line, with its explicitly spiritual appreciation of simplicity, I registered the resemblance between Adler’s work and the prayers that observant Jews say to thank God for creating the ingredients of every meal they eat. Adler was raised Jewish, but she spent many years feeling distant from the religion because, pre-meal blessings aside, it tends to be grounded far more in interpreting scripture than in the physical world. Food and cooking, she said, “provided me an alternative, a material path.” It delivered her to something close to kitchen animism: a world in which ingredients come to life. When she tells readers of An Everlasting Meal about prepping their greens, she suggests that they just “wash everyone together.”This spirituality can sometimes verge on preciousness. I asked Adler whether she worries about this, and she said yes—or almost yes. Her dedication to saving every scrap “sounds ridiculous when I say it,” she conceded. But she sees that issue as a “style problem”: a failure of her writing, not a sign that her approach goes too far. My impression is that she’s far more interested in respecting resources—which to her always means maximizing them—than she is in sounding grounded or accessible. This conviction is the steel core of her books. It makes her writing, beneath its flights of verbal and metaphysical fancy, insistent and unembarrassed, willing to go too far (as with the microwave) in the service of what are, really, not so much habits as ideals. It also enables her to evolve (again, the microwave).Adler seems to believe more deeply in enjoying her meals than I think I believe in anything. Far more than any culinary trick or skill I’ve gathered from reading her over the years, this dedication is what brings me back to her work. Its frank strangeness, whether or not it converts you to stem saving, is a prime example of what I consider her books’ greatest pleasure: They let you visit lives and minds—and, in this case, kitchens—that may be nothing like your own.
