Jess here from Juiced Kitchens. Happy belated New Year!

You likely subscribed between November 2024 and August 2025, likely due to my videos on communal kitchens, anti-collaborative kitchens, or linoleum (I was genuinely surprised this took off the way it did, lol). You might have forgotten you signed up for this newsletter. I hope many of you will stay, even though I did not publish a single newsletter in 2025 😅

I wasn’t writing because I was experiencing things you may resonate with:

You might think the last point is ironic, given the fact I make content about kitchens. I felt guilty. I felt like a hypocrite.

But my health issues forced me to realize something I didn’t want to admit to myself for the longest time: I kind of hate cooking. I actually really hate cooking when I have to do it every day, three times a day.

I am often exhausted by kitchens and the act of nourishing myself. And I imagine many readers are too. But once I accepted how I honestly felt, I was able to better see how I wasn’t accommodating myself in my own kitchen. 

It is no accident we struggle to feed ourselves consistently in ways that feel good to our bodies and in ways that are culturally relevant and/or representative of our ancestors’ foodways. 

It is no accident many of us experience friction and sensory overwhelm in kitchens.

It is no accident you feel like it is a struggle to commune, well, communally. 

These are systemic issues. We have such a fraught relationship with the kitchen and food because of so many intersecting factors: hate for women, hate for poor people, hate for Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color, centering the wealthy, property as investment, fear of leisure, the hyperindependence of our culture, ableism, the medical industrial complex, the list goes on…

Structural factors violently impede our ability to nourish ourselves and our loved ones in a sustainable manner.

Many of us are already painfully aware of this. I thought I was. But there’s a connection between the head and the heart and the body that I needed to bridge, and I wanted to invite you to do so as well. 

Indeed, as the firstborn daughter of cultures who pride themselves in eating well and sharing that abundance with others, to admit that I wish I didn’t have to cook felt like a moral failing. And refusing to accept how I really felt kept me from finding solutions that worked for me. 

So with this first newsletter of the year - before you solidify any resolutions around eating healthier, before you “should” yourself into meal prep and macros, before you start feeling guilty for not preparing handmade lunches for your kiddos - I wanted to remind you that it is ok to hate cooking. It is ok to not do all the cooking all the time. 

You may love food and kitchens. You may love cooking when it’s not compulsory.

But it is ok to still hate the drudgery of regular, degular cooking.

In future issues, I’ll delve into why cooking is so friction-filled, and how we can better understand this phenomenon at a micro and macro level. And through a more thorough understanding, I hope that both you and I can begin to 1) finally, genuinely feel good and safe in the kitchen 2) fall in love with nourishing ourselves again. 

Til then, stay Juicy 🍊

Jess