making homemade rosemary focaccia, sun tea, and beeswax candles.

can the conversation ever become as anti-capitalist as the task?

I made focaccia last week because I was reminded that I could.

Over the course of the week, while diligently doing my doctor-ordered back strengthening exercises, I watched all eight episodes of With Love, Meghan. The Netflix series follows the Duchess of Sussex, the artist formerly known as Meghan Markle, in a beautiful sunlit kitchen with an even more stunningly beautiful view, as she makes one-pot single skillet pasta, quick pickles, carrot-top pesto and focaccia. The show has her pouring her own beeswax candles, brewing sun tea, and putting flowers into ice cubes and flower seeds into gift baskets, making her own bath salts and face masks and liberally adorning every imaginable edible with either flower sprinkles or lemon zest.

For anyone who has been following my online work over the past dozen years or so, you’ll note that I’m quite fond of doing this sort of thing myself. I’ve made all of this stuff, and photographed it, and written about it, too. I’ve done it for myself and for my friends and family and I’ve very often done it as part of my job. This isn’t to imply that Meghan’s work is tired or derivative—certainly not any more so than mine—so much as to say that I can confirm that these various projects are as beautiful and easy as she describes and also to acknowledge that they’re lifestyle content gold. There’s a reason that lifestyle magazines—glossy or online—have been featuring them for so long. They photograph beautifully, they call for relatively few supplies, and they require only limited skills to recreate at home.

Reactions to this latest assemblage of them have been predictably extreme. Any critique of the show that doesn’t acknowledge the rampant racism and misogyny that has plagued coverage of this particular royal highness are simply not serious which hasn’t stopped them from being published. Critics have harped on the fact that With Love, Meghan is filmed in a rented house and not her own. (What these people have to say about Julia Child or Ina Garten, we can only imagine.) I read one piece lamenting the fact that instead of seeing the innards of Meghan’s actual refrigerator, we see a pristine, herb-bouquet filled one. (I get it, though I’ll take the herb bouquets over half-empty condensing bottles of condiments any day.) For me, it was the sheet pans without a speck of baked on grease that drove me to distraction, but I also know that this is how aspirational programming works. It’s not real life—it’s performance. The goal isn’t a perfectly honest accounting of someone’s day to day experience, it’s to convey ideas and offer inspiration, and maybe to teach something along the way. At least it could be.

Some of Meghan’s show might not be to everyone’s taste, or mine. I’ve personally never been compelled to cut my children’s sandwiches into shapes and if anyone ever heard me call a breakfast sandwich a manwich, they’d know I’d been replaced by a robot, Stepford wife-style. I’ll never call my friends my gals or use the word darling to describe my work. James and I, to say nothing of our three children, have different last names from one another which does nothing to prevent us from being a family, thank you very much Mrs. Sussex.