Pastry chef Lisa Donovan and Perpetual Hunger

“My blood pressure feels different.”

Not exactly what I was expecting to hear through the phone receiver as I settled into my home office chair to interview awarded local southern pastry chef and writer Lisa Donovan about her new memoir, Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger, a deeply personal work that no doubt cost quite the amount of anxiety to release into the world, not to mention having had that release during a worldwide pandemic. But the crazy times of this past year have allowed Lisa a greater space for something we should all be making greater space for: mental health. “My joy is more accessible,” she says. “The simple joy that I remember from when I was younger. That basic laying in the dirt and enjoying making food for my family out of what we have in the pantry just for fun.”

The pantry she speaks of was housed in a variety of different places as Lisa, a self-described “army brat”, moved around quite a bit during her youth. Her affinity for pastry blossoming with every press of her small forehead to bakery cases in Germany before her family’s relocation to the quiet panhandle town of Niceville, Florida. Lisa was filled with gumption and hunger and so, understandably, underwhelmed by the town while finding her footing as a woman and struggling to feel connected to her family’s southern heritage. That part came easiest when she was wrist-deep in a mixing bowl.

“Something as simple as baking can save you,” Lisa writes. “It saved me, again and again. There were moments of discovery when my hands were working pie dough, moments of grace and patience found in the learning, moments of perseverance in a cast-iron cornbread, moments of focus and intelligence and confidence in my research and recipe writing.”

When we talk about how health applies to food, we talk about calories and nutrition and fortifying a healthy body by what we put in it, but food doesn’t just feed our stomachs; It feeds our souls in ways and places that transcend understanding. The experiences and memories we have while making or eating it nestle themselves so deep, we can call on them when we’re hurting to fix all manners of evil; We can remake a dish or smell an aroma and be in the same room again with someone we lost.

Lisa affectionately recalls her grandmother making tortillas when she was a child: “The smell of that masa in a small kitchen in Florida… is one that still lives inside me, as if it were my own blood recognizing something out in the world that became richer and thicker for the experience of it in the moment.” Food is our lifeblood because our bodies need it to survive, yes, but it is also our souls that need to be fed to survive and to heal. This year has brought struggle and hurt and, perhaps, afforded us all a little more space to sit with what truly feeds us.

Lisa moved out of Florida and into Nashville as a young single mother trying to make a living, long before the city’s food scene boomed, and she found a niche within it. “This whole thing, this career, started as I worked my way out of nearly desperate times, hungry times as a mother and wife and woman in the world trying to create a life for myself and my family that I believed in,” she writes.

After spending years engulfed in professional kitchens including Nashville restaurants Café Margot, Husk, and City House, Lisa is aware that although that arena might be creative and exciting and a place to feed one’s calling, it’s not exactly the beacon of health. Restaurant work demands long hours which is hell on your feet, back, neck, and hands, not to mention the mental strain. This strain is intensified for women – a topic woven into every page of her memoir. The pages of Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger detail not only what it’s like to be a woman in the culinary world, but in the broader world itself. Lisa’s prose shines a glowing arrow toward conversations we should be having, striving to help break the stigma surrounding mental health and a woman’s place.

But for every struggle, food was there to heal her. “Stretching the food, stretching my need for it, and finding beauty in feeding others when I was both spiritually and physically hungry myself, was a pivotal moment of understanding for me, and it became the foundation for my life and career.”

One day, I hope Lisa and I will meet without the phone screen and add one more conversation to the larger dialogue between women. In the meantime, there’s cooking and reading and healing to do. In general, and especially during these cold winter months, we would all do well to take a deep breath and a queue off page 37:

“When it comes time to cook, enjoy yourself for Christ’s sake. Let yourself be a person you once were before the world and Instagram and expectation and all the other bullshit crept in. It’s food. It’s supposed to feed you.”