The Mess

I met the chef Joshna Maharaj in September 2012. It was a team-building exercise: a day-long retreat to the University of Toronto’s Hart House Farm in Caledon. We were researchers gathered for the start of a fellowship year, and we were there to think about food. Maharaj was there to help us make some. Her booming, asthmatic laugh and no-nonsense directions turned a gaggle of awkward academics into a high-efficiency team setting sourdough bread to rise, slow-cooking beef, baking sticky toffee pudding, and prepping local greens for a giant salad.

At the time, I was existing in the purgatory of lost illusion. To the room, I was engrossed in chopping carrots, but inside I traded between grief, guilt, depression, and outrage. I was two months postpartum, emotionally raw. My caregivers had failed me. Yet I too had ignored the evidence of risk. My newborn son had died in hospital after...