There’s this tension I keep coming back to—around food and womanhood and school campuses. Because unlike in high school or undergrad, women in grad school can be trying for kids, and I keep asking myself: what does trying even mean when you're in grad school? What does being pregnant in school mean? And what does it mean to suffer a miscarriage during the semester? What does that do to your calorie needs, to your mental health, to your capacity to show up in class?

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And then there’s menstruation—how do you feed yourself when you’re bleeding? When are we our best students, really? Is someone in the room pumping, nursing? Is this classroom a safe space to pump? We always talk about Plan B… but what was Plan A? I skipped teen pregnancy, but I might accidentally skip adult pregnancy too.

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By the time a woman gets to class, she’s often already fed everyone in her household, maybe her classmates too, and she’s still planning what’s for dinner. The grocery store she needs might not even exist in her neighborhood.

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I think about Meryl Singer’s work on biology and women and food. Who feels responsible for food? It's not always as visible as parenting, but even in grad school cohorts, that responsibility shows up. Traditional societies had recipes for women—for periods, for iron needs. That wisdom existed.

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My grandmother wrote about feeling stuck in the kitchen in her autobiography. And now, cooking has kind of devolved into this solo act—me watching YouTube videos instead of learning through gossip, boy talk, or recipe osmosis. There’s this time before we sit down to eat that matters, and I think we’re missing that.

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So I’ve been thinking—what if we offered a prompt through the registration process? Ask two or three structured questions: What does feeding mean to you? What are your iron needs? What’s your molokhiya? For me, it’s that Egyptian soup. For someone else, it might be something else entirely.

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We read Cooking is Love Made Possible from the Blindian Project, and I held onto that line. Because yeah—cooking is love, and feeding is a kind of radical offering.