Kitchen Medicine: How I Fed My Daughter Out of Failure to Thrive by Debi Lewis is a warm, honest memoir featuring Lewis’s youngest daughter, Sammi. In a book spanning the first decade of her daughter’s life, the author details the harrowing experience of navigating Sammi’s complex medical condition which leaves her unable to eat enough calories to sustain optimal growth. Sammi’s situation is further complicated by a misdiagnosis of eosinophilic esophagitis, an autoimmune disorder, which requires she temporarily adhere to severely restricted diets to test for allergens. The traditionally structured narrative not only braids together Sammi’s illness and journey to eventual wellness, but also embarks on Lewis’s own exploration of learning to cook, trusting her instincts, and discovering what it means to nourish both herself and those she loves with sustenance and care.

Lewis further highlights the value of cherishing generational family recipes, preparing homemade meals, and dining together: simple, intimate acts that build connection and deepen our understanding of tradition—and in her case, Jewish heritage. She writes that she made “Grandma Dorothy’s Kugel,” a recipe, “directly from [her] own lineage,” giving her a sense of “connection and confidence.” Even during the difficulty of Sammi’s elimination diets, Lewis recalls “never really cook[ing] alone,” recognizing that the support of family and friends can be transmitted through time and space via recipes and food.

Her engaging descriptions often take on a meditative quality reminiscent of Albert Borgmann’s celebration of the great meal (an example of a focal thing or practice)—a slow, thoughtful, and detailed experience. The great meal brings together carefully prepared ingredients, meaningful conversations, and transmission of culture. As Borgmann writes, eating connects us to our “intimacy with the world” by “taking […] in its palpable, colorful, nourishing immediacy”—a “union of the primal and the cosmic.” Lewis echoes this when she describes feeding Sammi a golden chickpea soup for the first time as a “holy, mystical experience.” While preparing it, she writes, “I invoked my ancestors more than once…[thinking] please, help me feed my baby,” while stirring the mixture of sauteed onions, olive oil, parsley, chickpeas, and spices. The author also transports readers into joyful, mindful sensory experiences—savoring peppermint lattes, anticipating a tempting knish, or smelling fresh-baked challah bread upon entering the kitchen after a long day.

The title of the book, however, is somewhat of a misnomer. Lewis does recount dedicating much of her time (even quitting her job) and energy to her daughter’s diet, desperately striving to find anything that could help her grow. Lewis’s efforts are nothing short of heroic and are an example of the difficult and often thankless work mothers must do to sustain their children. Yet, it is unlikely that the meals she lovingly prepared resolved Sammi’s health condition alone. If I am reading this memoir correctly, this is because Sammi’s problem was anatomical—a congenital blood vessel anomaly of the aorta called double aortic arch requiring surgery as an infant. Sammi’s difficulty eating persisted, however, until many years later when she had a second surgery to remove scar tissue and attach her aorta to her chest wall. A doctor tells Lewis her daughter is “congenitally small” and that she “cannot do this through calories alone.” The narrator seems to have a hard time believing in these words.

I note this not to disparage Lewis, but rather to help remind all women and mothers that they are almost never at fault if a child becomes ill or for some reason cannot thrive. Guilt, shame, and blame—emotions the narrator admits to experiencing—should not fall so squarely on their shoulders. Lewis writes that she “carried what felt like [her] personal badge of shame into every doctor’s appointment” because Sammi’s chart read “failure to thrive,” which she read as “failure to feed.” The diagnosis does have an incriminatory tone. The term “failure to thrive” is sadly consistent with the other negative medical terms that permeate women’s healthcare such as “failure to progress,” “incompetent cervix,” “inadequate pelvis,” or “failure to descend.” These demeaning words tend to implicate women and mothers for their own health complications and those of their children. Such words, and the negativity they generate, need urgent amendment.

Mothers, too, can get lost in the medical system, and as Lewis notes, become nameless “moms” without personal histories and identities. In crafting this story, the writer not only exposes some of the reality of interacting with the medical community—that it can be impersonal, designed for populations not individuals, and difficult to navigate—but also writes herself back into the narrative. Lewis reminds readers that along with her daughter, she also is a unique person with goals, frustrations, and joys. She offers medical personnel an invaluable reminder—that the patient and family experiencing a medical problem and its treatment are vastly different from the professionals offering that care. The narrator says that “in all the years of doggedly pursuing a better life for Sammi, I’d usually felt like an afterthought,” and that medical personnel often “dispense[d] test results that determined the fate of our lives without ever acknowledging the weight of their news or how long we’d waited to receive it.” What may be routine to medical professionals is often life changing, or even traumatizing, to those in their care.

Though the memoir details much adversity, I often felt uplifted by Lewis’s appreciation for special moments—like visiting bakeries or farmer’s markets with her daughters—and delicious foods. Her growing trust in her intuition about what could help Sammi, which led to the second surgery and feeding therapy, was inspirational. While I have never lived through raising a child with a medical complication, I did feel connected to the story. Her prose reads like an intimate conversation with a good friend who you’ve known for many years, and of course, each of you with a mug of coffee in your hands.