Sometimes I think I became a mother not in a hospital room but in a Trader Joe's in New York City. It was May 2020. A masked but smizing employee took one look at my stomach and handed me a packet of dark-chocolate peanut-butter cups. 'Happy Mother's Day!' she said. I was pregnant, with twins, during the early months of the pandemic, and all I could think about was food'what to eat and how to acquire it. Once a week I dashed clumsily through the store's aisles, grabbing cans of beans and bags of apples while trying not to breathe, like a contestant on a postapocalyptic episode of Supermarket Sweep. Food then was interlaced with a sense of danger, the coronavirus potentially spreading (we worried, absurdly it turned out) even by way of reusable totes. Meanwhile, I knew from my relentless pregnancy apps that what I ate could have monumental implications for my future children's eating habits. I was scared, and I felt powerless, and food seemed like one of the few things I could...
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