Each year when Mother’s Day rolls around my list of honorees is long.
As a mama myself, I find time to reflect on what the day truly means, and to remember the many women who have mothered me along my journey: friends, aunts, mentors, my own mother, and both grandmas, who were there every step of the way. From them, I learned how to nourish others—through words, through hugs, and often, through food.
For decades, Grandma Vicki worked the dining room floor of the Huron River Hunting and Fishing Club in Suburban Detroit, serving lobster, filet mignon, cherries jubilee, and cream-lacquered dishes to members in cocktail attire and gold cufflinks. After closing time, she would often arrive at our small house, her arms heavy with foil-wrapped leftovers and commercial sized tubs of food. My sister and I, raised on midwest fare and the occasional TV dinner, became acquainted with frog legs (sorry, Topanga!), fancy pastel candy coated chocolates, Manhattan-style clam chowder, and garlic toast still crispy and warm. What had been batch-cooked and didn’t get served often went in the trash. So Grandma struck a deal, and the food went home with her.
To me, as a child, these foods felt impossibly exotic—artifacts from a gilded world that existed just a few miles away but may as well have been another country entirely. We ate them fervently, after midnight, at a laminate kitchen counter and in polyester pajamas. Dinner became breakfast and luxury entered our lives through tupperware. And we felt Grandma’s love.
This was also one of the ways I first understood class. My father worked in a bank, and my mother taught nursing at a private college; we were middle class and moving upward. My grandparents lived in a mobile home. A WWII vet with hidden PTSD, my grandfather had traded his manicured lawn and brick facade for a more manageable space where he could prune tomato plants and isolate from the world.
Just as today, in the ’70s and ’80s places like country clubs—not mobile homes—represented wealth and exclusivity. There came a time when my father was a patron of the club where my grandma waited tables; he would hold lunch meetings with a board of directors, and she would take their orders. It was all love, and was not until much later in life that I realized the silent delineation that existed and the complicated intimacy of serving.
Behind the glinting silverware and polished floors, there was another story: the invisible labor of the staff. Service workers—busboys, line cooks, and waitstaff—were usually underpaid and exhausted, just trying to make ends meet. My grandma, standing for hours on end in wedge heels, bearing trays of food with a smile, knew that burnout intimately. She was the daughter of Italian immigrants. She lived through the Great Depression. She was not afforded the privilege of higher education. She raised her family in a working-class neighborhood. Perhaps because of, and not in spite of it all, she turned leftovers into a feast, in her own way helping with the grocery bill and the chore of cooking, collapsing the distance between worlds.
This lesson feels important. It is a reminder that it’s impossible to separate luxury experiences from the personal sacrifices that sustain them, and that exquisite meals ought not to belong solely to those with means.
As I celebrate motherhood this month, I hope the sons and daughters of LA farm workers—growing up at the edge of abundance without ever fully possessing it—discover culture and joy in the flavors around them. I hope as they bite into an heirloom recipe lovingly prepared in the family kitchen, or savor a ripe organic strawberry—the kind they charge an arm and a leg for at Erewhon—they feel rich. I hope they recognize that excess is often redistributed not as rebellion but as care. I hope they see that the same food their parents may have harvested finds its way onto the tables of fancy Michelin-starred restaurants, and also onto their plates. No distinction. Food connects us all.
In a moment when costs are rising and conversations about labor and waste feel newly urgent, I find myself thinking about those late-night arrivals. They were an early education in resourcefulness, zero-waste, and dignity. Grandma Vicki taught me the true meaning of abundance. I honor her, and all those whose love lingers long after the plates are cleared.
