You’re listening to Burnt Toast. This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.

Today I am chatting with Emiko Davies, an award winning Australian-Japanese food writer, photographer, and cookbook author based in Italy.

Emiko grew up in a diplomatic family and spent most of her life living in countries other than her own, from China to the United States. After graduating from art school, she ended up in Florence, Italy in 2005 to study art restoration, and fell in love with a Tuscan Sommelier. They live with their daughters in a charming hilltop village between Florence and Pisa and plan to open their own space for sharing food and natural wine experiences in San Miniato in 2023. (Book your travel now!) Emiko has also written five cookbooks, most recently Cinnamon & Salt, and she also shares her recipes on her Instagram and in her Substack newsletter, Emiko’s Newsletter.

But today we’re talking less about Emiko’s amazing food (although I always have time to talk about Emiko’s amazing food). We’re talking about Emiko’s experiences parenting her daughter Luna who is in a bigger body. And as you can imagine, that gets especially complicated for Emiko, as a semi public figure who shares pieces of her life and her kids online. 

Virginia

You have been on my radar for such a long time as someone who produces this beautiful and delicious food. You live in Italy and live out my dreams in many ways—or at least it looks that way. I’m allowed to fantasize. But I didn’t realize until you started doing your Substack about a year ago that you were also very firmly anti-diet. And I am always so thrilled to discover food people who feel that way. Because, as I’ve discussed in the past (here with Julia Turshen!), the food world has a complicated relationship with all of these issues, as I know I don’t need to tell you.

Emiko

Well, I actually didn’t realize that there was a term for anti-diet until I started reading some of your work. I’m pretty sure you had a lot to do with it, Virginia, so thank you. But I once I started reading about that I realized I’ve been anti-diet my whole life. Because I, like my daughter Luna, grew up in a in a bigger body. I basically went through puberty and then became thin, like over the summer. My body completely changed. And then I was a thin teenager and have been all kinds of body shapes as my through my 30s and now I’m 42. Especially having babies and everything else.

Virginia

We all try out a lot of bodies, a lot of shapes.

Emiko

Yeah, exactly. But one thing I have never been into was diets. I was just very lucky that growing up, that was something that my family never hinted at or never suggested that we needed to do. So I realize now, looking back, that I went through those periods of my life where I was in a bigger body completely unscathed really. I don’t really remember anytime ever feeling ashamed of myself or hating myself. For that, I feel really grateful. Restricting food was never something I was gonna do. I loved eating and I loved cooking. So when I realized there was a term for anti-diet, I was like, wow, this is, this is me. I found my home.

Virginia

What a gift your family gave you. Do you have a sense of why your parents or the adults in your life were able to provide that safe space? 

Emiko

I don’t know why I was so lucky. My mother is Japanese and she’s very tiny. She’s a really tiny Japanese lady. My father, though, is in a bigger body. And I don’t know if that had something to do with it. Body commenting or any of that sort of thing, it just was never something that we did in my family. I have a younger brother, who was always stick thin and still is stick thin and has never changed. My sister, though, was just like me, she had a bigger body as a child and as an adolescent. So maybe it was just a combination of the fact that we we all had different shaped bodies. And that was just who we were.

Virginia

They didn’t feel like, “We have to fight this.”

Emiko

I feel very lucky. Looking back on this now, I didn’t realize how lucky I really was. 

Virginia

So you had this realization when you started sharing pictures—particularly of Luna, you have an older daughter, too—that suddenly you were in this conversation in a different way, that you weren’t just sharing pictures of your kids.

Emiko

So my older daughter is nine and she’s straight sized. And actually, we had a few years of really difficult eating, where she basically was only eating a handful of things. She was so anxious about school that she wouldn’t eat breakfast or eat at school. So she would come home at four in the afternoon and hadn’t eaten a thing and she was getting so skinny. So she was a whole different thing. I was always trying to make sure she was really comfortable around food and that mealtimes were just really the chillest and most peaceful place to be. I didn’t want to create any more anxiety than what she was already going through. And then Luna came along when we were in the middle of this really difficult eating phase. I’m gonna say its a phase because she is getting out of it now that she’s nearly 10. But the ages between four and eight were really, really difficult years.

And Luna was born when she was five and a half, so right in the middle of this. And Luna was just this bubbly, funny, kind of crazy, little second daughter. When she was a toddler, I was posting photos and videos as I had always done on on Instagram and on my blog, of food things that we do together, which is basically like what we do whenever we have any free time. Almost every day, on the weekends or after school, we’re making something or at least I’m cooking something and my kids usually jump in and want to play with whatever it is that I’m making.

And when when Luna was a toddler, people loved seeing Luna content. You could tell she really loves food. She loves trying anything, eating anything, sticking her hand in a bag of flour or whatever it was. You know, making a mess. I’m usually in the kitchen testing recipes and things like that and I would post all these photos and videos and sometimes we’d be making pasta or baking something, whatever it was. And so that was great, people love seeing little Luna doing that.

And one of her one of the videos that that people still talk about when they write to me about her is Luna drinking a bowl of minestrone which was her favorite thing. She literally will pick up the bowl and drink every last drop out of there. And then like put it down and give this big sigh. Like, “That was so good.” So I was sharing these things. And when she was little, people just loved it and saw the joy and the innocence. That was the main thing people would write to me: This is just pure joy.

Virginia

I mean, her reaction to minestrone is exactly correct. It’s delicious. 

Emiko

The first time I got some really startlingly negative, really hateful comments was about a year ago. I happened to be making a tiramisu when Luna popped in like she always does no matter what I make in the kitchen. She’ll be there like, what are you doing? Can I come and help you? And she’ll stick her hands in whatever it is I’m making. I was gutting a fish and she did the same thing with a fish, right? She’s just in there, curious about whatever it is that I’m doing.

But this time, it happened to be a tiramisu, which, you know, is a dessert made with mascarpone, eggs, cream. I had some persimmons that were super ripe and I was using them in the tiramisu. And I think it’s kind of… what’s the word? Maybe predictable? That this was going to happen with a photo of Luna with a dessert. Not minestrone, which was full of vegetables, but a dessert. And the only actually the only times I have ever gotten negative comments is when they see Luna with something sweet. In this case, it was a tiramisu and she wasn’t actually eating it. She was helping me make… I wouldn’t even say she was helping me. She was just making a mess! 

Virginia

She was in the process.

Luna and the Tiramisu

Emiko

She was like, “What’s this?” And literally stuck a savoiard, like the lady finger biscuit, in the egg and sugar before I had even put the mascarpone in there. And she was just messing around. So I had these photos and I have the recipe that I was sharing in my newsletter. That was the first time that I got some really negative comments and the comments were basically, “What are you doing to this child?” This was clearly something that they saw as my fault. “What kind of parent does this to their child?” The assumptions are that she’s eating too much and that she has this really like hearty appetite, which also she doesn’t. She eats regularly! Thank god, she’s not a difficult eater, like my older daughter, but she’s not a particularly big eater, either. I just don’t think that that has anything to do with anything at all. But it’s this assumption that people have when they see her, especially coupled with an image of cake or dessert or sweets, right? The assumption is that I am to blame for how she looks. And I think that’s the problem.

Virginia

The problem is that they’re seeing her body as a problem, when it’s absolutely not a problem. It’s just her body. I have so much anger about this whole situation. They’re taking this one tiny snapshot of your day —I can’t even say it’s a snapshot of your life. It’s a moment of a day!—And they’re assuming that they know everything about your parenting, your feeding, her relationship with food, who she is. The number of assumptions being made here is staggering.

But what makes me saddest is that it puts you in this place of having to defend yourself—which you don’t owe them or owe anybody—and of feeling like you have to explain what her appetite really is, when that’s none of our business. Nobody needs to know how Luna eats or doesn’t eat. That’s this dynamic that we force on kids in bigger bodies and parents of kids and bigger bodies that you have to justify that things are okay. And you’re never asked those same questions if your older daughter is in the tiramisu picture. Nobody would have had anything to say about it.

Emiko

Exactly. Because I do have so many more photos and videos of Mariù, my older daughter, making cupcakes, making cream buns. They just see this thin, “normal” looking girl and there’s no problem there for them. Whereas when they see Luna, they think there is something wrong with that picture.

Virginia

Right, which is just anti-fat bias. You have also had a lot of really positive comments about Luna. So I wanted to also talk a little bit about that piece of that because I mean, I love Luna content. She is such a joyous child. She’s such a sunshine-y kid and I love seeing her explore foods. 

Emiko

I’ve actually been blown away by the positive responses from people, to be honest. They far outnumber the negative comments. People have have written privately and publicly to me—all kinds of people, younger people who don’t have kids, older people who were a kid like Luna, people who are in food, people who aren’t, so many people wrote to me—not only about this negative comment, but just in general. Whenever they see something of Luna, they just write to me to say, “I love this, I love seeing this celebration of food and joy and life.” So that has actually been something that has always encouraged me to continue sharing Luna and sharing just these little snippets of our life. Because I do get so many really, really heartwarming messages and actually quite often tearjerking messages, as well. 

One of the ones that really stuck out to me, for example, was I got a private message from Karen Barnes, the editor of Delicious Magazine in the UK. She wrote to me to say that she had grown up in a bigger body and how she was put on a diet. Like for Easter, she wasn’t given an Easter egg, they’d given her some tights or something else. And she felt many, many, many years of complete shame about her body and went through yo-yo dieting. She’s still now battling all of these issues, because of what was put on her as a child. And she wrote to me just to tell her her story, and to say how how happy she is to see that Luna is going down another path, and that there’s somebody showing that there is another path.

You can just continue with life and celebrate food as it is, encourage a good relationship with food, and do it no matter what size your child is. So when I when I get messages like that, I think, yeah, I’m not doing anything wrong. I should continue sharing this. 

emikodavies

A post shared by Emiko Davies (@emikodavies)

Virginia

I just had a message today from a reader who had taken her daughter in a bigger body to the pediatrician. And the pediatrician had made comments about “Are you eating healthy foods?” And she was questioning herself . When you get the negative comments, our culture has trained us to then think What am I doing wrong? They’ve called me out in some way. You sharing Luna and sharing the way your family is so joyful with food and so respectful of your kids bodies is helping families to say, “Oh, I can keep parenting my child in a larger body from this place of trust and respect and love. And I don’t need to do anything differently.” And it’s so powerful and we really need that representation. But I’m also very aware that it’s coming with a cost to you, because you have to deal with these other reactions.

Emiko

Yeah, it feels—and I’m sure you you feel like this, too—like you’re swimming against the stream. And sometimes I wonder, should I keep doing this? What am I doing? But on the other hand, I also think the percentage of negative comments I got were actually tiny compared to the outpouring of warm and supportive messages. I think I need to maybe learn to just to block those hateful comments and try not to take them personally, which is super hard. When it’s about me, it’s easier for me to not take it personally, but when it’s about my child, that’s that’s really that’s really tough.

Virginia

It’s so vulnerable. I completely get that. And, you know, in my case, my older daughter’s story was shared in a very public way. I wrote a book about it, I wrote a New York Times Magazine article about it. I’ve done dozens of podcasts about it. And I did reach a point where I thought, “I’m going to talk a lot less about her.” I don’t put her picture on my public Instagram anymore, unless you can’t really see her face. Because I wanted to start to give her, as she was getting older, more privacy. And with the younger one, I’ve started to move in the same direction. Even though she doesn’t have a dramatic story like that. It’s easier to share when they’re little, when they’re toddlers and babies and preschoolers, there’s something much more innocuous about sharing them at that point. So I really relate to the struggle you have of like, they’re a joyful part of my life, I share my life as part of my work and where do we draw these lines? How do we figure out what guardrails our kids need? There are no easy answers to this one.

Emiko

Yeah, the lines are very blurred.

Virginia

I don’t know if you’ve thought about either turning off comments on Luna posts or putting a clear disclaimer of “I’ll be blocking negative comments.” Having some clear boundaries set with your audience can be really helpful. What’s nice about it in a way is the the people who are going to make the negative comments are still going to make the negative comments, but it gets everyone else on the same page. Your audience, the ones who support you, the ones who get it, the ones who appreciate what you’re doing and realize the value of what you’re doing. So then I find it helps the audience step up. I’ll see people dealing with the negative comments for me, which is lovely and so supportive when people want to take on that work. It also clarifies, for me, when someone breaks one of my rules that I have set, it’s an instant delete, instant block. I just don’t even engage with it because I’ve set that clear boundary. I don’t engage with it, I don’t try to convince that person of anything. 

Emiko

I recently discovered that I can turn off commenting and only allow comments from people who follow me. 

Virginia

Yes, I did that! That was a game changer.

Emiko

Yes, it was. The most recent negative comment that I got about Luna, I just decided, I know that my community are the supportive ones. In fact, that one about the persimmon tiramisu, there were two people who wrote some comments and they got eaten up by my followers. I didn’t even have to say anything to them. They just got ganged up on in the comment section until they deleted their own comments. So it was incredible. I have such a supportive group. I really do. But yeah, turning off comments but allowing your followers to comment.

Virginia

That’s another reason why comments are a paid subscriber benefit on Burnt Toast. I don’t want Burnt Toast to be a place where I have to deal with trolls, or at least if I do they have paid for the privilege.

Emiko

That is really brilliant.

Virginia

It keeps this community safe. And as a result, it is a place where I feel like I can talk more about more complicated or personal things in a way that Instagram doesn’t always feel like the right venue for. So that’s really nice.

Emiko

One of the one of the places where I found this whole conversation really difficult actually is with a family member when I was recently back in Australia for the first time in nearly three years. They hadn’t seen Luna since she was one year old and they felt it necessary to comment. They again assumed that I was doing something really wrong, that there was something wrong to begin with all of that. That’s been more difficult because you can’t just block your family member. Well, some people do, but it’s a bit harder.

Virginia

Yeah, that is a tricky one. I think often in those moments—I don’t know if this comment was made within earshot of Luna—but I think what’s really important is to think, what do I want my kid to take away? I want my kid to see me trusting them. This person or family member making this comment has no business making this comment to you, so their feelings are sort of immaterial even if you have to be kind of careful because family social dynamics are complicated. I still feel like the most important thing is just, “We trust her body, we trust her, we are not worried. We don’t see her body as a problem.” And then that way, whatever that other person says, the kid is taking away that “Mom is not worried about this. Nobody in my immediate core family is seeing a problem.” And that is really powerful and something I’m sure Luna is getting from you regularly.

Emiko

I think that I actually read those exact words from your newsletter. I have them written down. This is something that I wanted to practice because it is so hurtful when when somebody says something about your child, and I wanted to be calm and collected and have the best thing to say back and those words are the best thing to say.

Virginia

It shuts it down because what does this person want to say? “Don’t trust your child?” They can’t combat that, they sound like an idiot. I developed that strategy when my older daughter was at the height of her feeding challenges, I developed that strategy because that’s another place where people feel very free to weigh in on what your child is eating or not eating or they’re only eating white foods or that kind of thing. I’ve actually used it with both my kids quite often, for a variety of reasons. It’s really all purpose, because these are very much the same problem even though they’re manifesting differently. In both cases, someone sees a child who only eats five foods or who in my case was on a feeding tube, and they see something’s gone wrong. There’s a problem and this child’s body is a problem. We see someone in a bigger body and we assume this is a problem to solve. In both cases, there’s this unsolicited input, feeling like they need to undermine or question your parenting in some way. It’s all coming from this larger cultural messaging about there being one right way for a kid to eat, one right body for a kid to have, and that the right way to eat should equal the right body when of course we know these two things are totally unrelated. 

Emiko

I have actually used that phrase as well with my older daughter in a parent teachers meeting where her teachers pointed out to me that she wasn’t eating anything at school and they were very, very, very concerned. They would watch her like a hawk and if she did take a bite, they would get the whole class to applaud. They were doing this for a couple of months and she didn’t tell me about this. I didn’t know the teachers had done this. And she had developed this fear of eating in front of other people. She felt really ashamed. She didn’t even want to go over to her best friend’s house if it involved a lunch or dinner. She was like, “You have to pick me up before dinnertime. I don’t want to eat there.” Because I think she had become so afraid of the adults judging her.

Virginia

It’s an amazing erasure of body autonomy. It just stuns me that people think just because this is a child, they have no right to any privacy. It’s a such a boundary violation.

Emiko

Mind boggling.

Virginia

So I think it is using all these skills you built with your older daughter and repurposing them for the same kind of boundary violation. I’m curious, too—I know Lunas only four, these conversations are very much probably just starting with her. But does she have an awareness of her body being different? Does she have any sense of that? Has any of that started to come up for you guys?

Emiko

I don’t think that she really knows or maybe doesn’t have the language for it yet. But we have had a couple of instances, especially this summer, like when we were at the beach, where other children have pointed at her and within earshot said something about her body. And I just had to whip around to them and say, “I’m sorry, but it’s really not polite to talk about other people’s bodies.” And just leave it at that. But either she didn’t hear it or she didn’t seem to care or she didn’t know really what they were saying.

But what breaks my heart is when she does say that she doesn’t look like Mariù, her older sister, and she wants to be beautiful. She only ever wants to wear dresses, the fluffier and the tutu-ier, the more sparkly it is, the better. She she wants to be ultra feminine. So it’s got to be pink or maybe purple, it’s got to be glittery. It’s got to be a dress. So at the moment, all she wears to school are dresses when all the other kids are wearing stuff they can get messy on the playground. But I’m fulfilling her ballerina dreams by letting her wear tutus to school.

Virginia

That is another form of body autonomy, letting kids lean into their own aesthetic choices. I say this as the parent of a child with blue hair at the moment. We’re embracing her aesthetic choices. And it’s pretty fun to see what they come up with and see their version of these things. I mean that “I want to be beautiful” piece is of course heartbreaking because bigger bodied is beautiful. These things are not in opposition to each other. And that’s a conversation that I’m sure will evolve as she gets older. There’s that wonderful kids’ book Beautifully Me by Nabela Noor. I don’t know if you have that one.

Emiko

I don’t, but I’m on the lookout for any book or film or anything that’s that has somebody that is bigger bodied and beautiful.

Virginia

Nabela is an influencer, she started as a beauty YouTuber. She is Bengali, she’s in a bigger body. And it’s a picture book she wrote a kind of about her own childhood. The main character is probably like five or six and aware of like her older sister on a diet and her mom saying something about her body and picking up on all these anxieties about the adults in her life. And then starting to worry, “Can I be beautiful if they feel like they can’t be beautiful. “The upshot is a really lovely message about you decide what’s beautiful and beauty is inside us, as well. I was surprised by how thoughtful and how nuanced the story is. So that’s certainly one to add to your library when you have a kid who is really interested in being beautiful.

The other piece of it is we have to help kids understand that beauty is the least important thing about them, that that’s not what we’re defining ourselves by, and that it’s an optional standard you can opt in and out of. That’s a conversation that takes longer. And when you have a kid craving this experience of feeling beautiful, it’s nice to be able to give them this book and give them the tutus and the sparkly dresses and let them enjoy that. 

Emiko

Yeah, that sounds great. 

Virginia

While we’re on the subject of kids clothes, you and I have also talked a little bit about the challenges of plus sized kids clothing. I’d love to hear any recent breakthroughs you’ve had on that front or, or struggle points that you’re having.

Burnt Toast by Virginia Sole-Smith

Where Are All the Plus Size Kids' Clothes?

Listen now (41 min) | It’s hard to be fat as an adult. When you are fat adult with a fat child, you’re a particularly kind of terrible in society. You’re listening to Burnt Toast. I'm Virginia Sole-Smith and I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter. Today I am chatting with Pam Luk, founder of…

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3 years ago · 21 likes · 31 comments · Virginia Sole-Smith and Pamela Luk

Emiko

Dresses are, I think, the easiest way to dress Luna. And the fact that she loves them and always wants to wear them tells me 1. She’s comfortable in them and 2. They make her feel good. Sometimes I do try to put leggings on her. The choice of girls’ clothing here in Italy is is really a disaster. Everything is made out of stretchy material so it’s more meant to be like skin tight, skin hugging. I think that she finds tights and leggings too restrictive because they are tight. She doesn’t like that feeling. So we’re still having quite a balmy autumn at the moment, so she’s still wearing her summer dresses. I usually look for A-line dresses. Nothing with a waist because those also like cinch in and are not comfortable. Anything that she can move around easily in because she’s really active. She’s a really active four year old. 

Virginia

Yes, she wants to be able to play. I was a big sparkly dress kid, too. I can remember one of my grandmothers being sort of horrified that I was playing in the mud in a sparkly princess dress. I think it was a bridesmaid’s dress, like I’d worn it to be a bridesmaid in the wedding and then I was still wearing it every day.

Emiko

That sounds familiar.

Virginia

And my mom was like, “Well, if she wants to wear party dresses and she wants to play then the party dresses are just gonna get dirty. I’m not going to say ‘Oh, you have to be so careful because you’re wearing a fancy dress,’ because then the dress is this barrier.”

Emiko

A barrier to having fun and being yourself.

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Virginia

The other thing I wanted to touch on quickly, is: You talk a lot in your work about your approach to family dinner. As you said, prioritizing comfort and relaxation above all else. This is so crucial and something I am always also struggling with. I would love to hear a little more about what you’ve figured out, and any sort of policies you have at your family table. 

Emiko

Our family has quite an unusual dinner time because my husband works six nights a week in a restaurant so he’s not there. It’s just me and the girls. And before even Luna was was here, it was just me and my older daughter. It was just the two of us. And so two things happened with that dynamic.

One was that lunchtime became our main family meal where we could all have lunch together because the girls come out of school early enough to have lunch, so like 1 pm. And it’s before my husband goes to work. So lunch was our main meal together. And I think that lunch just feels a little bit more casual. I feel like there’s a like a lot less pressure, as opposed to dinner.

For people who have trouble getting the family dinner together, what if it was breakfast or what if it was lunch that was your time together? Just a time that you are all at the table together and you’re all relaxed. My experience of dinnertime is this is the time of the day where my kids are there crankiest, I am my most tired. And then I’m on my own, on top of it, and having to get them ready for bed, get them ready for school the next day, make dinner, get them bathed, get them in their pajamas, get them to bed. It’s just all so much work for one parent to be doing or even two parents to be doing that. Or if you’re outnumbered. There was so much pressure in the evening. So I kind of liked that lunchtime became our our family meal time. And that really took the pressure off in the evening.

So dinner, when it was just me and the girls, has always just been what do you feel like? I would basically let my daughter choose what she wanted to eat based on how she felt because of her unpredictable appetite. I would say that whenever I did try to assume she would like this thing for dinner, even if it was one of her favorite safe foods, quite often she wasn’t in the mood for it. And then I would have wasted all this time like preparing something.

Virginia

Yeah, I’ve had that dinner about 4000 times.

Emiko

Exactly. So because it was just me and her, by around like 5pm I’d be like, “okay, so what do you feel like eating?” And let her tell me how she felt. And then I would usually have whatever the basics were there, whatever their safe foods were, I usually have those around. And then that way I would make her the dinner that she that she wanted based on what she she chose. It’s usually something quite simple because we have already have had a nice lunch together with with the whole family at lunchtime. So dinner might be like a bowl of rice with like a fried egg or something. And then whatever fruit was around or whatever other little things I could add, other little dishes. I could build on that and make like a little meal out of it and make something that I would like to eat. I always have something else that I want for myself. That’s important, too. Like, we’ll both be eating a bowl of rice as the base, and then she’ll have her thing and I’ll have my thing. That’s kind of how our family dinners evolved, when it was just her and me having dinner together.

And then when Luna came along, I just I just kept going because that was still quite a big thing for us. When we were at the table together, I just wanted that to be the most safe, comfort, comforting, comfortable place for her to be so that she could just be herself she could eat if she wanted to. She didn’t have to eat if she didn’t. I just wanted us to sit around a table together and and be able to connect and maybe chat.

Virginia

I think that’s a really helpful reframe. I mean, my family’s schedules and lives does make it so dinner is the time when we can come together. But I’ve been thinking a lot about how do we prioritize that this is the safe space and a relaxed place, and not prioritize what everybody’s eating or how much people are eating and all of that and just I think that’s a useful touchstone to keep coming back to so I really appreciate you speaking to that. 

Emiko

This might be wildly unpopular, but at the moment what is on my mind is tofu. And the reason for that is because I’ve just come back a couple of days ago from Japan. I haven’t been back to visit my family there in five years so it was a really special trip for me to be able to go back there. Also, before the country officially opened to tourists and travelers, because Japan has been closed this whole time.

Virginia

Wow. 

Emiko

So it’s a really special time to be there. And one of the things that I had organized to do, which was like a dream of mine, was to learn how to make tofu. And so my mom came from Australia to meet us there and my sister came as well and we all went to the mountains in Japan and we made tofu together, which was just so so wonderful, because I can’t get good tofu here. I always had the most amazing tofu at my grandmother’s home in Japan. I don’t know, maybe in the states you get better tofu, but in Italy you get really really bad tofu. There’s only one kind and it’s like ultra vacuum packed and it’s just…

Virginia

That’s certainly my experience of it here, but I’m not a tofu expert.

Emiko

So homemade tofu or artisan made, actual really freshly made, like made that day tofu, I would often liken this to Italians, I’d be like, “that’s like having really fresh buffalo mozzarella, like a proper mozzarella. And so doing this doing this tofu making class was was exactly what I was hoping for. It was exactly that. It was just like making cheese. We were able to eat it right after the class and it was just the most amazing. I was just trying to capture this very nostalgic childhood memory I have of eating tofu at my grandmother’s table and I have never found that tofu again until the other day when I was tofu making class. So I am now going to make it at home. I can get back to that flavor and that sort of that really like creamy, melt in your mouth kind of texture.

Virginia

I love that. I have to admit, that makes me want to try better tofu and give it another try.

Emiko

Yeah, it makes a difference. It was like a whole world of difference.

Virginia

Okay, well mine is like the opposite of this experience. Now I’m a little embarrassed, to be honest. There are no bad foods—I’m very big believer in that. But I’m recommending frozen dumplings.

Emiko

Oh no, frozen dumplings are a staple in our house!

Virginia

Oh good, because I was like, she’s making tofu from scratch, like as it should be made in Japan and I’m like, “this box of frozen dumplings just really improved my family dinner.”

But yeah, I had never made them before! I don’t know why or where they’ve been all my life, but we are doing this family meal planning where we sit around as a family every Sunday and everyone’s grumpy about it and I love their grumpiness and I make them pick meals. And I had seen a recipe in New York Times Cooking for a dumpling soup made with ramen noodles or rice noodles or whatever and vegetables and broth, like very simple. And I just thought, I’m gonna pitch this for my night where I get to pick because I knew at least one of the kids would likely eat the noodles. I was like, I can deconstruct this into elements they might go for and it looks really tasty and its fall and I’m craving good soups and soups that like fill you up because I feel like a lot of soups are not a full meal. And we don’t talk enough about that, but anyway.

Emiko

Absolutely.

Virginia

And it was so simple because you make the noodles, you make the broth for the soup with ginger and garlic and miso paste and stock and then just drop in the frozen dumplings. You can just drop them straight in and they cook in the pot. And it was a 75 percent success rate, which is the most I can ever hope for with the four of us. I will never get 100 percent. 50 percent success with the kids, one kid was delighted. And what was cool and I have to give props to their school, both of the kids had done some kind of dumpling lesson around Lunar New Year last year. So they had a passing reference for it and were like, “Oh, dumplings. We know dumplings.” And I was like, I didn’t know that your school had done this, I would have gotten on this bandwagon so much sooner. Now I’m just like, I’m gonna buy all the dumplings and I want to try other ways to cook them.

Emiko

Yeah, actually, frozen dumplings are a staple. We always have them in the freezer, because that’s something that everybody loves. So on those nights when you only want to cook one thing, It’s like dumplings. We’re all just gonna have dumplings. And actually what you were saying that soup, I was going to say that when we’re doing one of our family meals, one of the things that I really like is the dishes that you can build on or take away from. You’re basically giving everyone the same base, like tacos. You’ve got all the ingredients, you put what you want in them. Or like a noodle soup. I do a plain noodle soup, like the one you were just describing for the girls. And then for Marco and I, I will put all kinds of things in.

Virginia

Yeah! We added chili garlic sauce, I’m so excited about it. That is really helpful to think about.

Well, Emiko, thank you so much. This was a wonderful conversation. I loved getting to talk with you. I feel like we could do this for hours. Thanks for being on the podcast!

Emiko

Thank you so much. It’s been such a pleasure to chat with you. 

Virginia

Tell listeners where they can follow you and support your work and get more Luna content.

Emiko

You can find me at @EmikoDavies on Instagram or my website is Emikodavies.com. And I have a Substack newsletter, which is just called

Emiko’s Newsletter

.