Nice Pear: a weekly(ish) feminist foodletter | Issue #027 | 28 March 2021
Hello!
*very slight TW for alcohol/sobriety, and also a small disclaimer that I’m not preaching sobriety at all. I absolutely don’t think it’s right for everybody, and honestly, as long as they’re happy/safe I don’t really care what other people ingest. I don’t think I’ve ever really written publicly about my relationship with drinking or with sobriety, and something came up this week that prompted me to think about it, so here we are*
I got a commission this week to write about gluten-free beers for The Independent (which is relevant to this story, not just a brag). When I first started blogging, I wrote a lot of content about gluten-free beer, and 2017-me would have been absolutely over the moon to hear about 2021-me writing about them for a national paper.
But.
I’ve also been sober since late-2018.
So this commission is bittersweet (I have the practicalities covered - the piece will require taste-testing but luckily I have an excellent husband who will help me out there).
I’ve been asked by a few people whether I’m tempted to just try these beers, in the name of science, and I mean of-fucking-course I’m tempted. I made alcohol part of my personality for about a decade. For a while there my friends could rely on me to always have a bottle of vodka in my handbag. I worked in a pub and was an insufferable beer know-it-all for a few years.
You can bet I’m ready to crack open a cold one now.
I was never an alcoholic, never even really a problem drinker. I didn't rely on booze (except in social situations), I didn't wake up craving a swig of whisky (though I was always up for cocktails with brunch) and I didn't (often) make a (serious) tit of myself, or put myself in harm’s way.
So when I stopped drinking, I didn’t join AA or make an announcement. I just quietly stopped drinking. When questioned (which happens a lot - please don’t do that) I just said I’m staying off it for a while.
And that wasn’t far from the truth. At first, I was just staying off it for a while- a few weeks, a month or two. I’ve had depressive episodes on-and-off for years, and at the time I stopped drinking I’d just had my dose of antidepressants upped - again - and the two (SSRIs and alcohol) were interacting badly.
I was also sick of spending all my time and all my money and all my energy on booze. I remember one day, it must have been early autumn, running through a train station with a sticky mouth and a doughy head and a nagging feeling of inadequacy, and deciding to stop, just for now, just to see how much more I could achieve if I wasn't constantly fighting a hangover, or itching to go down the pub.
And so I did. I think I’ve achieved more for my career in the last two years than I had before in the whole decade before, but more than that, I’ve had more - headspace? more clarity? more peace? Whatever word I use here makes me sound like a wanker, doesn’t it?
I still have a hard time with depression sometimes. This pandemic year has been hard for all of us, but I know I would have found it much harder if I was drinking alone every night and nursing a hangover every morning.
I have much healthier coping mechanisms now. I’m completely off the antidepressants too. In the past few years, I’ve been more honest - with myself and people around me - about what I want to do and who I want to be (and I’ve been able to focus on being who I want to be, too).
Maybe I would have got here either way. Maybe drinking wasn’t the problem, maybe I just needed to work on myself, maybe it’s just getting older, maybe I’d be writing this letter to you after a bottle of wine. But I suspect not.
So, I’m very excited to be writing about gluten-free beers again and I’m very tempted to taste-test them myself, but I won’t. I’ve never been able to have just a sip, just one glass, so I doubt this would be just one evening, and I think I like who I am better now than I ever have before.
Just FYI: There won’t be a Nice Pear next week! It’s a bank holiday weekend AND the first time in months that we can meet friends and family outdoors here in the UK so I’m taking the weekend off and will be back in your inbox on 11 April 👋
👇 Scroll on down for Things to Read & Things to Eat 👇
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Photo by JACK REDGATE from Pexels
Things to read this week
Here in the UK the ‘stay at home’ lockdown is due to end on Monday, and the ‘rule of 6’ (or 2 households) will be able to meet outdoors. Two weeks later, on 12 April, hospitality (among other things) is due to reopen for outdoor, seated service. There is already talk of using ‘vaccine passports’ to allow for more relaxed indoor gatherings at pubs and restaurants, but these are still controversial.
“Conflict, climate shocks and the Covid pandemic” (not to mention the storms of desert locusts ravaging some parts of the world) have put around 34 million people worldwide into emergency levels of acute hunger - just one step away from starvation.
This story about the Twitter account documenting all the food Sylvia Plath ate. We tend to see her as a tragic figure, but these extracts from Plath's diaries portray someone who took great pleasure in food and even in cooking.
All of us when we go up to fill our bowl/box at the salad bar. I frickin love a salad bar (and actually realised how much I miss them the other day when I walked by the sad empty fridge in Morrisons where the salad bar used to be).
Another foodletter I love is Jaime Wilson's At The Table, and this weeks’ essay on restaurant people bowled me over:
“A restaurant is a living, breathing thing. The sum of all its parts and people. The feet in clogs and Crocs who make it all possible, sheltered behind closed doors. The endless flow of visitors wearing high-heels and loafers who will never see through the illusion.”
And finally… just a highly-relatable tweet for my fellow vegan/gluten-free foodies
Where to find me this week
Nothing new published this week, though I am on test #4 of a cake recipe for the blog.
This week I sent 4 pitches, got 1 rejection, and an exciting commission - hmu if you have gluten-free beer recommendations!
As always, you can find me @ZoePickburn on Twitter, Insta, and other social media.
Thanks!
Zoe
Freelance writer & journo | Food blogger & newsletterer (she/her)
Say hello@zoepickburn.com with stories, commissions & foodie chit chat
If you enjoy Nice Pear & want to support it (or any of the other content I create online) you can always become a paying subscriber, buy me a virtual cuppa, or throw some change in the tip jar.