I thought it appropriate that, on the day of my Cannonball, I declare that I have a new hero: Geraldine DeRuiter. In 2019, she won the James Beard Foundation Award, in the category of Personal Essay Long Form, for her Everywhereist.com blog post titled “I Made the Pizza Cinnamon Rolls From Mario Batali’s Sexual Misconduct Apology Letter.” This is not why she is my hero. However, if you read this book you may understand why her story resonated with me.
If You Can’t Take the Heat is a memoir and her second book. It is endlessly quotable. After much back and forth, I am only including my absolute favorite excerpts.
Geraldine explains what it was like growing up in the 80s and 90s in Florida with her Italian family and her overseas “probably a spy” father.
This is the least interesting part of the story to me. And it is still very interesting.
She takes us through the phases of her life and what food has represented at each stage. While on her first date with her husband, she got into an argument with the waiter, in Italian, when he refused to give her the bill because “a woman should not pay for the date.” She talks about diet culture and the language and messages women are told about how they should feel about food, their body, and their worth (or lack thereof).
I feel like I am failing at explaining why this book resonated with me so deeply. So, to spare us both the frustration, here are my favorite quotes.
Read this book. You will not regret it.
When Thelma and Louise came out in 1991, there was a moral panic that feminists were going to go on murderous crime sprees. It was years before I would learn that feminists simply wanted what everyone wanted: to be loved and respected, to spend some quality time with their best friends, and to maybe fuck Brad Pitt in his prime.
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can’t Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and FuryI’ve accepted the feminist notion that women can do anything, but the idea that we don’t have to do certain things is taking a bit longer to sink in.
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can’t Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and FuryWe can be a lot of things, but we can’t be angry (or president, apparently. Or have bodily autonomy in, like, thirty states).
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can’t Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and FuryMountain Dew tastes as if the entire product development team were going through a rough divorce.
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can’t Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and FuryThere would be books and columns with names like “Hungry Bitch” and “Skinny Shrew” telling me how to replace things I wanted to eat with things I did not in order to be dissatisfied and thin.
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can’t Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and FuryThe fat suit “perpetuates the categorically false and harmful myth that fat people are thin people for whom something went wrong, and that there is a thin person in every fat person who wants (‘deserves’) to get out.
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can’t Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury