If It Smells Like Trouble. Stories About Food, Feminism and Anger. Brief. Geraldine DeRuiter

This book is an abridged version of Geraldine DeRuyter’s work “If You Can’t Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury.” We significantly reduced the text while preserving the key ideas. In her book, DeRuyter shares strikingly honest, sometimes painfully funny (and sometimes just painful) stories from the world of gastronomy. She tells how she overcame her exhausting anxiety by composing an emergency menu in case of apocalypse (“You’re probably worried that in moments of despair I’ll eat your pets. Yes, I really would.”). Or how she learned to accept her anger (“Because women can be anyone, but we can’t be mean. Or presidents, apparently.”). She also describes how she inadvertently sparked a new international incident by leaving a negative review of a restaurant (she ended up on the front page of The New York Times—and received even more death threats!). The book is full of perceptive and witty observations, offering a fresh look at food and feminism from one of the brightest voices in the culinary world.