I left my corporate gig to bake

An antidote to abstraction.

So many slices of prinsesstårta (princess cake).

This week I’ve made giant, glossy clouds of Italian meringue buttercream. I’ve scooped hundreds of rosemary-flecked, gluten-free oat cookies studded with sour zips of cranberry and shards of dark chocolate. I’ve baked tray upon tray of cheddar-scallion biscuits until their golden tops bloomed. I ate my staff meal perched on an upturned milk crate like a gargoyle: perfectly scrambled eggs, potatoes seasoned in a way you simply cannot achieve at home no matter how many times you whisper “more salt?”, and a salad squirted with strawberry-balsamic vinaigrette.

My feet hurt. My legs are permanently swollen in a way that’s giving baby elephant. My lower back throbs like someone thwacked it with a Louisville Slugger in a moment of game-time passion. My once-shellac’d fingernails have devolved into jagged little saw blades. And yet I am at ease for the first time in months.

When I finished writing my book (contractually obligated to plug The Curious Lives of Vegetables), I felt unmoored. We both know I don’t need to cite the data here, but in the name of journalism I will: Adults who spend more than six hours a day in front of a screen are significantly more likely to be depressed. Which is cool, because I had just spent roughly 2,000 hours doing exactly that. And when the manuscript was done, it seemed that I had no more original thoughts. I was wired but tired, like an iPhone running hot at 3% battery.

Without 65,000 words and a day job to distract me — I’d quit to meet my deadline — I finally had to face the void. Throughout my decade-plus of marketing stuff people don’t need to fund my creative work, I’d carried a niggling sense that I wasn’t in the right place. After a period spent writing full-time, the thought of returning to corporate life made my body feel like a sclerotic boulder; unable, or unwilling, to budge. Somewhere in my bones, I sensed I didn’t need a vacation (I definitely did) so much as a reorientation away from the endless cerebral wank of thinking and toward something finite and physical.

Always covered in flour.

So I got a job working one day per week at my friend’s bakery in Salt Lake City, making graham crumble for banana pudding, pastry cream for cakes, and sugar cookies rolled in aggressively joyful, rainbow-dyed turbinado crystals. It was supposed to be temporary — a little palate cleanser before I returned to my regularly scheduled existential dread and she hired someone else. But the work made me calm in my chest and quiet in my head. I loved it.

My friend Zoe Denenberg, who also left the food media world to cook at a remote Alaskan wilderness lodge, put it better in a recent voice message:

“We are so disconnected from all of these menial activities. We’re trying to optimize our time so that we don’t have to labor. And I feel like we’re just missing the point. What are we doing with the time that all of this saves us? Scrolling on our phones? Cooking just feels like a way better use of my time than being on a laptop.”

It must be said that I can only afford to work part-time at a “fun” food job because my husband is covering 100 percent of our shared bills while I try to figure out what to do with this one beautiful life. And I do feel insecure, sometimes, about sort of Benjamin Button–ing my career. We are implicitly and explicitly told all our lives, after all, that “the manual trades are given little honor,” Matthew B. Crawford writes in “Shop Class as Soulcraft.” To step out of the knowledge economy and into a bakery job can look like regression — a failure of ambition rather than an antidote to the abstraction of today’s “most ghostly kinds of work.”

Though, to me, it feels like a deep sigh. I now bake four mornings per week across two different businesses, writing essays like these in the afternoons. The work offers satisfactions my digital life (“bullshit job”) often didn’t: “an experience of agency and competence,” in Crawford’s words, with effects “visible for all to see.” By 8 a.m. this morning, the pastry case at my cafe was stocked with cookies, hunks of crumbly-topped black cherry coffee cake, apricot scones drizzled with chamomile glaze, fat slices of zesty orange tea cake, and the bounciest banana-tahini muffins you’ve ever eaten. In other words, something happened today because I was there.

The answer here for every disgruntled desk worker probably isn’t to go and get a near-minimum wage job. I’m aware that it’s a privilege to make things with my hands in a way that isn’t exhausting me and that being concerned about financial security is a necessary evil, particularly in a country with flimsy-ass safety nets and medical oppression. The deeper question, I think, is whether we’ve mistaken an upward intellectual trajectory for a meaningful life — and lost sight of the kinds of labor that actually makes us feel alive in our meat sacks. Work that asks for our presence but not self-concept. Zoe cuts right to it:

“I really just don’t feel fulfilled at the end of the day after sitting behind a computer and staring at a screen, even if I’m doing something that objectively excites me. Working with actual food gives me greater satisfaction than just thinking about it in an abstract way.

And it feels like I am actually doing something for the world — in that I’m feeding people and giving them nourishment to move their bodies and keep going. It’s very tangible. Whereas, if I’m writing, like, ‘50 Pancake Recipes to Flip Your Day Off Right’ — what am I even here for?”

That’s the irony of our current economic moment. All that energy spent climbing away from the menial, only to collapse when we reach the top.

Anyway! Three questions for you:

• If everyone on Earth earned the same salary, how would you actually like to spend your days?

• Which alternate career paths have you fantasized about that your logical adult brain shut down?

• Where are you performing success (or anything, really) at the expense of feeling okay in your body?