Kim Foster, a James Beard Award–winning food writer, has always been a storyteller. As a child, stringing words together was as natural as breathing. Despite her ease with writing, the rejections piled up. As a young woman, she wrote three books that never made it out of the drawer. In 2007, she started blogging, writing multiple essays a week about the flurry and chaos of feeding and parenting young children in New York City. She describes this time as the Wild West and graduate school wrapped into one. The immediacy and constant feedback from her readers kept Foster on her toes and most of all reinforced the ideas that first drafts always suck and writing is rewriting.
Nine years ago, she moved to Las Vegas where she found herself—via foster parenting and opening a food pantry in front of her house—in weekly contact with populations that are so often swept aside: people experiencing addiction, homelessness, and mental illness.
In her new book, The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Foster goes in eyes wide open, asking questions, helping, sometimes overstepping, always learning. The result is more than a memoir; it is a reckoning and a magnificent deep dive that is equal parts devastating and inspirational. Foster doesn’t let herself off the hook. In fact, she presses even harder, encouraging readers to do the same.
We spoke in depth over Zoom about the writing process, boundaries, family, addiction, empathy, and achievable ways of bringing people back to the kitchen table.
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The Rumpus: Did you write the book that you set out to write?
Kim Foster: The book proposal took a long time because I knew there was a disconnect between what I would put in the proposal and how the book would come out in the end. I don’t know what I think until I write it, so writing a proposal feels ass backwards. If it were up to me, I’d write the book then deliver the proposal. Ha! I was honest about that up front and said to the publishers, “Look, this is how I write.” They took a leap of faith, and I’m grateful. The team at St. Martins was incredible. They edited me ferociously and gave me great advice.
Rumpus: And were you surprised at all about what the book became?
Foster: My empathy grew as I wrote the book. I realized how limited my knowledge was around addiction, how cavalier I was about addicted people I’d see on the street. I wasn’t really asking why people were addicted, what were the systems in place that kept them sick, how could I be the solution and not the problem? As I was writing about Charlie, the handyman addicted to meth, who was working on our house and sitting and eating lunch with us every day, I had to confront not just his issues but my own. The book really helped me shift my entire perspective about my own place in the world with all of the imperfections of our humanity. And I think the book is better because of that.
Rumpus: Your evolution toward compassion comes through so beautifully. At the same time, you are very frank about your frustration and anger.
Foster: Well, a lot of people behave badly when they’re under stress. I do! Imagine facing eviction. Or having your child removed by Child Protective Services. Or having to figure out where you’re going to get food and shelter. That stress changes the prefrontal cortex. What you get when you’re dealing with people who are under serious stress is that they’re not always appreciative, nice, or kind. They’re not team players. They’re just trying to fucking get through. And it’s really easy for people who are not under the stress of poverty, say middle-and upper-class folks, to say that these folks should be nicer, or more appreciative, or that they should be saving money, or making different choices.
The research unequivocally shows us that people in the upper classes think people in the lower classes have more choices than they have. And really, wealth is all about how many and what kind of choices we have. So what happens for people in poverty is that long-term thinking goes away, the stress just flattens the prefrontal cortex. They are living purely in the moment. So you have this kind of thinking, I finally can do something nice for my kids, so I’ll just buy this TV and figure out the rent later because I get to make my kids happy and that means more to me at this moment. We as a culture need to be more accepting of the fact that people under stress do weird, off-the-wall, and unpleasant things. I didn’t get that connection before, until a lot of people who were in mental distress were in my front yard when I opened a food pantry.
Rumpus: Can you talk about how the food pantry started?
Foster: It wasn’t an intentional thing. One day we put out some paper towels and toilet paper in our Little Free Library for some folks in the neighborhood. We’d go to the grocery store, pick up vegetables, and neighbors would donate. It just became this thing in the community. Then we got a fridge donated and a bigger pantry set up. It became a green market on our street. First it was just families coming, and then word started getting around the community that this pantry existed and people started coming from all over the valley. The unhoused, people with a lot of baggage and a lot of needs, they all came. I had to get better at meeting them where they were.
Rumpus: With so many people passing through, was it hard to establish boundaries?
Foster: Yes. People who are entrenched in addiction don’t have good boundaries. People from dysfunctional families don’t have good boundaries. People from abusive relationships don’t have good boundaries. And I don’t come by them naturally, so it became really important for me to lean on my husband and also examine what an appropriate boundary actually looks like. We had rules, especially for the kids. We pretty much had the front door unlocked the entire time, but, for instance no one from the community came in and showered. No one stayed over. The house was for the family, and if somebody rang the doorbell, the kids were not allowed to open the door. There were things that we did to make sure that everybody’s welfare was taken into consideration. But it was a bit of an uphill climb for me because I’m all about “We can get that for you” or “What do you need?” I really needed to have reasonable expectations for what we could provide and how much help we could give people because I didn’t always have a sense of that since it was built on the fly. And so those boundaries were being negotiated all the time. It’s a gift to have a solid partner who excels at things you are bad at. I leaned on my husband a lot.
Rumpus: Did you sometimes feel like the more you helped, the more you needed to help?
Foster: Yes. It’s bottomless. I lump people who need support into two categories. The first is people who have problems that can be helped with something quick and concrete. Maybe someone is a little short and they need a hundred bucks, and that’ll get them through. Maybe someone has their childcare fall through and they just need help babysitting for one night. The person who resonates for me this way, in my book, is Destiny. We were the foster parents of her child. And this was a person who never should’ve had her child removed and in care. She had a run of bad luck and ended up in jail, and her kid ended up in foster care with us. But she was an excellent mom. The whole situation was tragic. And really, if someone had just given her a little bit of a boost up, if she hadn’t been so alone in the world, she could’ve avoided all of it. Being alone, feeling alone, is a big driver for crisis. We need families and communities around us to help support us when things go wrong. Often the people we helped had none of that. So that’s one kind of problem.
A lot of the people who were coming to the pantry had more of the second category. They had complex problems, some so extreme that you couldn’t help them enough to get them out of their situation. These are the people we give up on, as a society, not because we don’t care, but because their challenges are so huge, we don’t know how to help them. It’s above our pay grade. So we push them away, abandon them. That is our failure, not theirs.
Rumpus: Can you tell us about someone you didn’t know how to help?
Foster: Becca, in the book, is a meth-addicted Mexican trans woman who was brutally used as a plaything during her childhood by her mother’s boyfriends and was homeless most of her childhood. I was never going to be able to help her out of homelessness, and I couldn’t fix the gender, race, and class issues she faced. And I wasn’t going to be able to get her clean. So, there’s a temptation to say “This is a lot, it’s too much” and walk away because there’s no context for Becca, no place for her in the community. It was a really big education for me to just dig into that, even though I couldn’t solve anything. I had to change the parameters of what I thought success was. Success might be a plate of eggs with toast or a talk on the curb. Sometimes the most simple thing is the thing that makes the difference. I tried to do a few thoughtful things without trying to bust down a door and change their situations. I had to ask “What’s my role here? Am I helping? Am I not helping anymore?” You need to constantly ask these questions otherwise you can run into a saviorism model.
Rumpus: You mention in your book that you don’t want to be called a hero. Can you talk a little bit more about why this word feels so wrong?
Foster: Yeah. I mean, first of all, because I fucked up so much and made so many mistakes, that this is definitely not the right word! We naturally head toward the easy things, “This person’s so good for doing that,” or “this person’s so great because they did this.” But the truth is, we’re all a mix of good, bad, and gut-wrenchingly mediocre, and we’re all just out here trying to do our best. When I think about heroes, for example, I think of the Solidarity Fridge here in Las Vegas. They opened a pantry the same time I did. It’s Indigenous-run, and they are cooking fresh meals, offering fresh vegetables, meats, and dairy. By the time our pantry closed after a year, I felt like it was a blessing. Because it’s not just about providing food, you’re also carrying the emotional weight of the community. But the Solidarity Fridge never stopped because it got hard. As a storyteller, I can maybe help people examine their own views, but the real heroes are the people who just keep going and find new ways to be in their communities every day. And they don’t stop to write books! They are just doing the friggin’ work.
Rumpus: How would you define the word family and has your definition changed over the past few years?
Foster: As an adopted person myself, it doesn’t really connect to blood. Although I am connected to my biological family, my adoptive family, my children and husband, my husband’s family, and the biological families of my kids, family feels even bigger now. Family is about freedom and acceptance. It’s a unit of people who accept each other right where they are and want to do the work and the intimacy-building and the connectivity around that relationship. In a way, the community is a family. I now walk into the supermarket and see Ms. B, an unhoused elderly woman in our neighborhood, doing the slots and I give her a hug. I see Johnnie, the woman who was starved in a closet by her mentally ill mother, and she works as a cashier at that supermarket, so she is always surrounded by food, and we are hugging it out in self-checkout. I don’t think I’d be hugging people in the middle of a supermarket had I not had the pantry. It really expanded my idea of community, family, and equity. I think of Ms. B and Johnnie as dear friends. I love them like family.
Rumpus: You write about food in your book in such intricate detail. It’s as if the food is a character. At any point did you consider leaving out the food?
Foster: I’ve been a food writer for so long that it feels abnormal to not have food in my writing. But it can be jarring for people who don’t read food writing to understand why there’s so much dish description in my book! It’s a very primal kind of thing to be cooking for people and feeding them when times get tough. There is so much vulnerability for everyone involved. Instead of handing somebody packaged food, maybe I can come at them with a different, more intimate message, by handing them a hot bowl of congee with pork floss, crispy fried onions, and dotted with bubbles of chili crisp. “Somebody made this for you,” the dish says. “Somebody created this for you because they think you would like it. Because you are worthy. You deserve this.” The act of feeding the community changed my cooking because when we came out of lockdown, I really stopped trying to do impressive, technique-heavy kinds of cooking. Instead, it was about the intimacy and sometimes the discomfort that comes from feeding people and being close to them. Cooking was, for me, very integral to the whole process of writing this book. I don’t think I could’ve written it without the food. Sometimes the food is the character—I know that—but sometimes it’s also a moment of relief for the reader, a breath, because these stories can be so, so hard for us to take in.
Rumpus: Toward the end of the book, you have a quote from a poem by Angela Brommel: “Some people still fight it. They call the heat oppressive, they call it unrelenting. They have not learned how to live within it. You must learn to smell the water beneath the surface.” Can you talk about this poem and how it relates to your book?
Foster: Yes! I love this poem. It’s called “Mojave in July.” Heat is such a giant part of our lives in the desert, and water is everything. How much we have, how little, how we use it, how much we use. I love that this poem uses the landscape to remind us that we have to look deeper and use different strategies to find the relief. I can’t say enough about how this poem resonated with me and illustrates a kind of weathered, deep, hyper-imaginative desert spirit that Nevadans use to innovate and overcome. The desert really forms who we are, and Angela Brommel really nailed that. I am so happy her words and images are in the book.
Rumpus: How is your community doing now?
Foster: People are still struggling. Lots of pandemic safety nets have been removed. Also, I think the pandemic took a toll on people’s sense of well-being overall. Our values are different. We are different. I’ve put more focus on community and smaller, more intimate connections. For instance, I write a weekly Substack about the intersection of food sometimes and also culture, parenting, poverty, and community issues. I’m starting a new section called Kitchen Suppers along with my weekly essays. A kitchen supper is really the anti-dinner party. The idea came from Australian celebrity chef, Bill Granger. It’s brilliant. Think: a simple dinner, maybe something one pot, and it’s a kitchen gathering, not fancy, no dining room. Very casual, and it happens during the week, like on a Thursday, so there is no pressure to make it a weekend shindig. You invite a couple people you want to know better, sit around the kitchen island, eating a simple meal, drink a bottle of wine your guests bring, and get to know each other. It’s about being inexpensive, accessible, easy, so it fits our lives and is do-able.
Rumpus: I was just speaking with some friends about how, since the pandemic, people have gotten out of the habit of throwing dinner parties. This is a wonderful way back.
Foster: This feels worthwhile to me. If I’ve learned nothing else from writing this book, it’s that food is one of the best ways to invite people in. You can’t beat it for initiating change and connection in our communities.
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Author photograph courtesy of Kim Foster
