Build Back a Body

Just a few days before beginning to shelter in place during the coronavirus pandemic this spring, I learned about the Korean concept of son mat, which means "the taste of one's hands." It's the complex network of preferences, training, familial traditions, and tendencies (I'm heavy on the salt) that make one's food taste unlike anyone else's. I was at a conference, sitting in a cold convention center with my close friend, Claire, an amazing writer and an equally excellent cook who had recently become interested in the panel's topic: food writing. Neither of us is Korean, but when a panelist, the food writer Noah Cho, described it, we both gasped in recognition. Son mat is the thing we're often trying to articulate—when she's describing her grandmother's Puerto Rican fried chicken, or when I'm declaring which mom-and-pop has the best barbecue in town. It's the thing we're supposed to cultivate in order to snag good partners, or the thing that makes my friend Josh's wassail taste like the simmering nectar of the gods.

The truth is that, at least up until now, my hands didn't really have a taste. I'm the child of a mother who cooked often, but rarely taught us about how to do it, and I can't blame her. My mother worked backbreaking jobs throughout my childhood: cafeteria worker, mail sorter at the post office, line worker at a trash bag factory. She also took care of her twin sister, who was disabled, and my sister and I weren't exactly considerate, polite children. (Well, at least not to each other. We still aren't.) My mother's time in the kitchen might have been her few sweaty moments of peace in an otherwise overwhelming day, so, for the most part, she left us out of it. She did, however, conscript us into the rote tasks of holiday cooking: grating pounds of vegetables for cornbread dressing, or shelling (for pies) the pecans she got from family members' trees, since store-bought pecans were outrageously expensive, even in Louisiana, where…they literally grow on trees. My hands would sting on Thanksgiving and Christmas mornings, covered in nicks from absentminded grating or intractable shells, and always smelling faintly of onion, even after a bath. I came into adulthood deeply indifferent about cooking: my favorite dishes tasted best when someone else made them (like Jack in the Box), and the thought of cooking for myself was as unpleasant as the miasma of chives wafting from my childhood knuckles.

And then one day, in my early thirties, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease: my body had begun attacking itself by attacking my digestive tract. I have my theories, and if I had to put money on them (and I do, sort of, since I pay out of pocket for my health insurance), I'd say this disease is my body's awakening siren. The years before its onset were calendars filled with disaster: there was a rape I couldn't admit happened until a friend told me about hers, and her story felt like she was reading my diary aloud. There was the man in the yellow car who tried to run me off the road in the middle of nowhere, who circled back around to call me "nigger" while I was checking my car for damage, too naive—or perhaps too optimistic—to understand the real danger wasn't something that could be covered by auto insurance.

My body responded to these moments of unforeseen harm with a hypervigilance that invaded every part of my body, down to my viscera, and then traveled up, out, onto my skin. When the doctors who diagnosed my illness prescribed biologics—which are created from living organisms, often using recombinant DNA technology—the medicines unleashed an explosive form of eczema: my hands, legs, and feet erupted into pustules that itched until they burst, taking the outermost layer of me with them. When I complained...