Depression Cooking: Feeding Yourself When it All Feels Too Hard

A warm, generous, and illustrated guide to nurturing yourself when life — and the world — is too much

When artist Sonali Menezes found herself struggling with mental illness, disordered eating, and the crushing weight of capitalism, she began to look for easy and delicious ways to feed herself that would both fulfill her hunger and her need for care. Her method — non-judgmental, anti-diet, and approachable — became Depression Cooking, a book that combines recipes, personal memoir, and illustrations to provide a guide for those moments in all of our lives when making a meal, and loving yourself, feels impossible.

In each chapter, Sonali writes and draws about a challenging period in her life, when food seemed more like an enemy than an ally, and shares the recipes and cooking tips that nurtured her body and her soul. From dal to ramen to “things on toast,” Depression Cooking lays out an approach that helps us through life’s hardest challenges, whether that’s becoming a new parent, being fired from a job, weathering grief, or living on our own for the first time.

Part comic, part food memoir, part cookbook, Depression Cooking is a love letter to the sad, hungry, and exhausted versions of ourselves who always deserve care, community, and good food. This empathetic, innovative, and delightfully funny book is one of one, and exactly the permission we all need to enjoy beautiful meals just because we can.

AuthorSonali Menezes

PublisherECW Press

How to Eat with Your Hands: Roti Shoti and Other Ways to Settle In

Karahi chicken, channa dal, and sarson da saag. These are the sorts of meals that form the backbone of Khalil Akhtar’s day-to-day kitchen, the cuisine that he turns to when he doesn’t know what to make, when guests are coming, or when his fridge is bare. “Most of us have (or at least, had) a cuisine like this,” writes Akhtar. “Our parents or grandparents had dishes that lived in the very walls of the kitchen. One meal spoke to the next, last night’s leftovers could be coaxed into a meal for today, and the same predictable ingredients could be bent to dozens of different whims.”

How to Eat with Your Hands uses Akhtar’s relationship with Punjabi cuisine to offer a warm, open-minded examination of our intertwined relationships with food and home, in the process orienting readers toward understanding the values and knowledge available in their own kitchens.

Weaving together recipes, practical tips for organizing a kitchen, and memories of the Punjabi cuisine cooked by Akhtar’s family across generations, How to Eat with Your Hands is a rich, enlightening, and entertaining read on how to cook at home with a resourcefulness found in heritage, experience, and practice.

AuthorKhalil Akhtar

PublisherGoose Lane Editions

Queers at the Table

Lambda Literary Award finalist

An anthology of essays, comics, and recipes that reveals the dynamic and transformative relationship between queerness and food

Food has long played an important role in queer culture. Lesbian- and queer women-run feminist restaurants, cafes, and coffeehouses have been safe spaces for queer and trans folk where gender norms can be challenged and where female authority is legitimized. During the AIDS epidemic, gay men and their allies centred food as an expression of collective care for those who needed it most. And queer and trans folk have asserted themselves in a restaurant culture largely controlled by white cisgender men.

Queers at the Table celebrates the various intersections between queers and food. In its essays, comics, and recipes, the book shows how this shared culture fosters connections, defies norms, honours legacies, and creates community. Taylor Hartson and Tristian Lee write about a queer farming community in which queerness is part of a broad network of living things to be enjoyed and shared; Danielle Kydd writes about food security issues as faced by LGBTQ2S+ folk; and Blue Delliquanti’s comic on urban foraging in Minneapolis demonstrates the role of a queer friend group in a local ecosystem.

In full colour throughout, Queers at the Table is a diverse and enriching anthology that reveals the myriad nurturing ways that queerness informs food production and restaurant culture and how food empowers, transforms, and unites queer and trans folk.

AuthorMegan J. Elias, Alex D. Ketchum

PublisherArsenal Pulp Press

The Table Where We Meet

We all want to be known. Most of us just don’t know how to begin. When Jess Janz found herself craving deeper conversations—but trapped in a world of small talk—she took a leap. What started as a casual idea in a hair salon soon became Dinner With Strangers: a growing movement where guests gather around a table, introduce themselves without ever mentioning work and share who they are beyond a job title. No scripts, no expectations—just curiosity, courage and a seat at the table. In The Table Where We Meet, Jess reflects on what she’s learned from hosting dinners with more than a thousand strangers across North America. In ways that are both tender and practical, she explores what it means to belong, how to ask better questions and why connection requires us to risk being truly seen. Alongside her insights are unforgettable stories—funny, heartbreaking, deeply human—that reveal how much we all have in common when we finally let our guard down. This is a book for anyone who’s ever felt alone in a crowd, tired of surface-level chatter or unsure how to bridge the gap between isolation and intimacy. The Table Where We Meet is a guide, a memoir and a quiet revolution—one dinner at a time.

AuthorJess Janz

PublisherHarperCollins Canada

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