My mother thought of food the way we all now do: as a means of self-definition. Illustration by Michael Gillette

I’ve lost my copy of the first recipe my mother wrote out for me, which was also the first thing I ever cooked. It was for spaghetti bolognese, “spag bol,” a British recipe that blends a meat ragù of a northern-Italian type with the dry pasta beloved in the south, and was sometimes said to be Britain’s national dish. What stands out in my memory is not so much the dish itself—I’ve both cooked and eaten it so often that I know it by heart—as the recipe’s length. It covered two closely written sides of lined foolscap, and began with detailed instructions on how to turn on and light a gas burner. I was a graduate student in English literature at Oxford at the time, but my mother clearly had a low estimation of my practical intelligence and coping skills.

She was right. I didn’t know what I was doing in the kitchen. For the most part, recipes are useful only when you already have a pretty good idea of how to cook. Sweating an onion, browning ground beef, adding wine and cooking off the alcohol, seasoning with salt—all things you need to do in making even a basic spag bol—are all simple once you know how. If you don’t know, well, there’s a reason it took my mother two full pages of foolscap.

That spag-bol recipe was a painstaking document, and one in which you could sense the edge of anxiety. This was true of all my mother’s dealings with cooking, though not with eating. Love-hate relationships with food are common these days, but that’s not what I’m talking about: as an eater, my mother had a pretty straightforward relationship with food. She knew what she liked, and ate it, and while she’d complain about putting on weight, she took a simple, reliable pleasure in eating and drinking. Cooking, though, was different. It was a serious business, and although my mother was very good at it, I’m not sure she derived much pleasure from it. There was too much at stake.

Cooking was a skill that my mother, Julia Gunnigan, acquired late and in unusual circumstances. She was born poor in the rural west of Ireland in 1920, the eldest of eight children, of whom seven were girls. She took the path that, in her time and place, was the most glamorous imaginable: she became a nun. Her order was a missionary group called the Presentation Sisters; after her ordination, she took the name Sister Eucharia. Sister Eucharia spent most of the next fifteen years in Madras (now Chennai), where the Presentation Sisters have a group of schools known as Church Park, and she rose to be the head of its teacher-training college. When she resigned, abruptly, in 1958, it was a big deal in the educational community of Madras—and an even bigger deal for my mother, who left wearing her nun’s habit, with no possessions apart from a plane ticket to London, a city she had never visited, and ten pounds in cash.

The contrast must have been overwhelming between the closed world of pre-Vatican II religious orders and the life that my mother found outside—first London, where she met my father, then marriage and motherhood in Hamburg, Calcutta, Borneo, Burma, Hong Kong, as my banker father moved from post to post. In her forties, she had to acquire a great many skills in order to cope with this wide new world, and one of them was cooking. That, in short, was why cooking was so fraught for her.

Her own mother, a farmer’s wife, had been a good cook, but the kind of good cook who has to feed a large family on next to no money. In the thirties and “hungry forties,” the family, like almost everyone else in rural Ireland, was often short of cash. During those tight stretches, the only store-bought products were tea and sugar; everything else came from the farm. Foraging, preserving, and eating seasonally, my County Mayo grandmother was right on trend for the Brooklyn food fashions of the two-thousand-tens. My mother wasn’t that kind of cook. She was reinventing herself as a well-off housewife, a thrower of drinks parties and dinner parties, who knew the names of fancy foreign dishes and how to make them. Cooking was part of a project of self-invention; it was part of being someone different from the person she had been.

The specifics of how my mother came to be interested in cooking are unusual. She’s the only person I know who learned to make beef Stroganoff as part of the decompression process after running a convent school in Madras. At the same time, though, her story is typical: people have come to use food to express and to define their sense of who they are. If you live and cook the same way your grandmother did, you’ll probably never open a cookbook. Cookbooks, and everything they symbolize, are for people who don’t live the way their grandparents did.

Once upon a time, food was about where you came from. Now, for many of us, it is about where we want to go—about who we want to be, how we choose to live. Food has always been expressive of identity, but today those identities are more flexible and fluid; they change over time, and respond to different pressures. Some aspects of this are ridiculous: the pickle craze, the báhn-mì boom, the ramps revolution, compulsory kale. Is northern Thai still hot? Has offal gone away yet? Is Copenhagen over? The intersection of food and fashion is silly, just as the intersection of fashion and anything else is silly. Underlying it, however, is that sense of food as an expression of an identity that’s defined, in some crucial sense, by conscious choice. For most people throughout history, that wasn’t true. The apparent silliness and superficiality of food fashions and trends touches on something deep: our ability to choose who we want to be.

By the end of the twentieth century, it seemed that more or less the entire developed world was shopping and cooking and dining out in a way that was given over to self-definition and self-expression and identity-creation and trend-catching and hype and buzz and the new new thing, which sometimes had to do with newness (foams! gels! spherification!) and sometimes with new ways of being old (slow food! farm-to-table! country ham!). My mother was thinking about food like that from the start of the nineteen-sixties. I have spent a fair part of my working life writing about food, and have often been asked how and why I got interested in it. I was never able to give a full answer, because the pattern became apparent to me only years afterward. By now, it’s clear that my interest in food came from growing up with someone to whom food mattered the way that, to a great many people, it matters now.

Most of the energy that we put into our thinking about food, I realized, isn’t about food; it’s about anxiety. Food makes us anxious. The infinite range of choices and possible self-expressions means that there are so many ways to go wrong. You can make people ill, and you can make yourself look absurd. People feel judged by their food choices, and they are right to feel that, because they are.