Featured Photo by Little Nguboy on Unsplash

I received a free ARC of Depression Cooking from ECW Press, so thank you to them for the opportunity to read and review this book.

While reading this book, I realized I may be more depressed than the average bear. It’s not looking good, folks.

When I saw this ARC in the Publishers Weekly Grab-a-Galley event, I was really excited to have a chance at it. Finally, there’s a cookbook for all the severely depressed bitches like myself. Ones who loved to cook once upon a time before the mental illness set in too deeply and made it too hard to do anything (*raises hand*). Ones who never enjoyed cooking and are just trying to keep themselves fed. And everyone in between.

I have multiple depression meal go-tos, though I don’t really think of them as “depression meals.” When your life becomes one long stretch of depression that never really ends, they just become regular meals. No need for a special title.

This book is part memoir and part cookbook and features a good variety of recipes, many of which center around the Big Three of toast, mac and cheese, and ramen. I want to stress the “part memoir” aspect since some other reviewers seemed taken off guard by this. In the introduction, Menezes makes it clear that she’s not an expert, dietician, or scientist, and is just trying to give people diverse, easy options for not starving to death during mental health episodes (or recovery). Each chapter starts with a reflection on a time period from Menezes’ life and then goes into corresponding recipes with ingredient lists and cooking/preparation instructions.

Some of the personal anecdotes seem unrelated to the recipes they’re paired with, and I truly don’t want to read about roach infestations and maggots in the same book I’m supposed to be getting food ideas from. There are also sex mentions, which may or may not be your speed. I gotta admit I was kind of tripped out to read about the author masturbating for the first time and then we head straight into a recipe after. (There’s also talk about her white husband’s pink penis in a later chapter…alrighty then!)

Capitalism is frequently referenced as the driving force for major detriment in the average person’s life, but the critiques of it feel surface level. We get a couple of sentences on it each time and then we move on. The deepest we really get into it is the chapter “White Girls with Lattes.” I know this is meant to be a cookbook, so we were likely never going to get page-long analyses of late-stage capitalism, but even including some studies at these points could’ve solidified the connections.

After reading through this book, I’m not sure I know what to say about it. I do know that I’ll definitely try to put multiple of these recipes into practice. (Update: This review was written over a month ago, and I’ve definitely eaten several of these recipes by now.) I get sad when I think about how much more often I used to cook, and how much I enjoy(ed) it. The effort I used to put in. I’d spend the time looking up different recipes, several from cultures I was unfamiliar with, and buying new ingredients.

One of my incurable chronic conditions (because I have more than one, lucky me) was bound to result in inevitable depression once I developed it, but things became worse when I realized I couldn’t eat many of my favorite foods anymore without having terrible reactions. Additionally, because I’m a diabetic, a lot of depression meals aren’t feasible because they’d drive my blood sugar through the roof and put me in a sick ouroboros of physical and mental pain.

I don’t look at many of the recipes I used to cook anymore, all lying in a pile underneath my printer, for reasons that I’m still too pained to talk about, and if I tried to explain, people would think I’m overdramatic anyway. Thankfully, books like Depression Cooking can at least help me deal with my present reality and find other ways to enjoy the foods I’m still able to eat.

Now, this is my heads up: A lot of the recipes in this book require sliced, washed, or cooked ingredients. I’m not sure about anyone else, but when I’m too depressed to function, summoning the energy to use a knife and cutting board or wash vegetables in the sink or even fire up the stovetop simply isn’t happening. This aspect of the book does make me wonder if many of these really count as “depression” meals. (There’s a popular social media post that recirculates every so often that says if one of the first steps of a depression meal recipe mentions pulling out an onion, it’s not a depression meal.)

Plus, years of looking at people’s depression meals (what some are now calling “girl/boy dinner,” from what I’ve observed) posted across social media has shown me that many people are just scraping up whatever junk they have in their kitchen. They’re often not doing tuna on toast with fancy greens like arugula or cooking a pot of soup that requires 5-6 chopped ingredients and a roux.

I’m gonna give Menezes some grace on this. I suppose she has her own definition of foods that fall into the category of “what I’m capable of cooking when I’m in a bad mental state.” Everyone’s energy levels and capacity for what they can handle are different, after all. (Mine seem to be a lot lower.) A lot of the recipes feature fresh/nutritious ingredients, so I also get that she’s trying to give us feasible, simple alternatives that are still beneficial for the body.

Despite my issues, I’m giving this book 4 stars because I like a lot of the recipes and hope they’ll work for me in moments when I’m more equipped to cook. I may end up buying a physical copy of this when it releases. As for the depression—I have no answer for that right now, and maybe I never really will, but we move.

Pick up this book if you like:

• Modern cookbooks
• The cookbook-slash-memoir format
• Recipes from different cultures

Pass it by if you don’t want to read about:

• The aforementioned pest infestations
• Eating disorders/unhealthy eating habits
• Sexual harrassment