While I was writing my Small Fires, I realised that not-cooking was as complex and storied as cooking. There were many days where I was paralysed by anxiety or indecision or fatigue on the sofa: hungry. If only there were a Tavola Calda on my street! I began to think more deeply about moments when the thought of my own cooking felt unbearable, and what they could tell me. My appreciation for the infrastructures that supported my not-cooking grew and I wrote about takeaways and plastic-wrapped snacks and fish and chips and frozen pizza. I realised I could not write an epic in the kitchen without giving an account of not-cooking.

Not Cooking in Rome by Rebecca May Johnson