lawson
In Which I Contemplate Men And Vegetables
by Andrea Janelle Dickens

The only vegetable men really like
is peas. There’s no turning back:
you will carry around Brussels
sprouts for people who don’t like
Christmas pudding. Most of the other
women in my position distilled something
simple. Something completely different.

My mother was a believer in
the strawberry cheesecake; at the end
of the day the women want to rebel,
be taken into care like cranberries.
They spat it out sort of viciously, sort of
graphically but with more broccoli
and the metallic taste of spinach.

I’m sort of trapped. As long as you
don’t think they’re going to help you,
(as if you wanted the child labor),
the flames get us to stir things, the luck
of being very cosmopolitan, very very
tired. And the only vegetable
men really like looks the same.

SOURCE: Nigella Lawson interview by Becky Anderson, CNN (April 19, 2010).

IMAGE: Celebrity chef Nigella Lawson.

dickens_author_image1

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Andrea Janelle Dickens recently moved to the Sonoran Desert, where she lives among the sunshine and saguaro cacti. Her work has appeared in Star 82, cakestreet, Ruminate, Caesura, and The Wayfarer, among others. She teaches at Arizona State University, and when she’s not teaching, she’s backpacking in foreign cities, making pottery in her ceramics studio, or tending hives of bees.