Gratitude changed how I cooked this year

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PERSONAL ESSAY

Seeing cooking as a privilege, not a chore, changed everything — especially the leftovers

Published November 28, 2024 9:00AM (EST)

A woman cooking at night in the kitchen (Getty Images/Photographer, Basak Gurbuz Derman)

For much of my life, the concept of gratitude has felt like a well-intentioned holiday guest who overstayed their welcome. A nice enough idea, sure, but one that began to feel suffocating in its endless repetitions and increasingly strange associations. These days, “practicing gratitude” seems to come bundled with jade rollers, superfoods and the kind of journals that include prompts like “What’s your vibration today?” The wellness industry got its hands on gratitude and, inevitably, made it sticky with self-help slogans.

To be fair, though, I was a little suspicious of the concept long before it got Goop-ified . Growing up in a deeply Evangelical church, gratitude was often framed less as a virtue and more as a preemptive apology to an easily angered God. Be thankful, I was told, for your blessings — because if you’re not, He’ll know. It’s hard to feel a warm glow of appreciation when it comes with a side of cosmic guilt and the threat of eternal damnation.

But after my 30th birthday — and surviving a global pandemic in which the sheer magnitude of international loss seemed to magnify personal sorrows — I found myself cautiously circling back to gratitude. It started with a desire to reconnect with God, though this time, I left organized religion out of it. Gratitude seemed like a low-stakes way to restart the conversation: a quiet thank-you here and there, no strings attached.

At first, I stuck to the big stuff: my family, my partner, my friends. Then, my thank-yous got smaller, almost embarrassingly so. The crunch of fall leaves on my daily walk. How the really good cinnamon I splurged on enhances my morning latte. The way my dachshund, unabashedly ridiculous, rolls belly-up on the scratchy hallway carpet each morning. I worried for a bit that I was becoming a slightly self-involved dork, the sort of person who might, in earnest, Instagram a gratitude list. But over time, I stopped caring.

Gratitude’s real breakthrough came in the kitchen. As someone who writes about food and spends an … Read More