Category: Posts

Food Is Love—The Book

In December of 2021, I wrote a blog post about biscuits. I had been on a long road trip, coming home from a friend’s memorial service, and I was all in my feelings. I stopped for a biscuit at a fast-food joint.

As I drove home, staring at the gray asphalt in front of me, I thought about how, in the midst of my deep sadness, I sought comfort not in a whiskey bottle, or illicit chemicals, or retail therapy, or any of the other ways our society connects with its feelings, but instead, I sought out a biscuit.

This led me to reflecting on all the ways food and memory and feeling are intertwined—how safe I felt at that potluck dinner in that church basement, how loved I was when mom made my favorite meal, the comfort at having the same three deserts at every family celebration.

It occurred to me that food is love, and that I have known this as long as I have known anything. The people who loved me in the rural hill country of Mississippi didn’t have many tools to show that love, but, by God, they could make sure I was fed food that nurtured my soul as well as my body. We might not have health insurance or name-brand clothes, but we could have cobblers and fudge pies and biscuits that flake like a pastry from Paris does.

After a long hard day at work, a pot of beans and ham and a slice of rustic cornbread give you strength to get up tomorrow, to take care of the people you love. And the health, energy, rejuvenation and even joy that comes from simple food, prepared well and with love and intention, can give downtrodden people enough margin in their lives to keep going and sometimes inch forward, even when everything around them seems to conspire against them. 

So, I wrote a book about that.

It’s 30 essays about food, love, and care. Interspersed, there are 25 recipes of foods that matter to me, and that have stories attached to them. Along the way, you will learn how to season a cast-iron skillet, the makings of a perfect barbecue bologna sandwich, and we will go hunting for muscadines in the thicket so we can make jelly.

But mostly, I hope this book will help you reflect on the foods that are tied to memories for you, and that take you back to the people you love, again and again.

You can buy a signed copy from me, or get an unsigned paperback of Food is Love at Bookshop.org, Amazon , on Kindle, or at Barnes & Noble. You should also be able to order directly from your local independent bookstore.

Goodbye, 2025

I hate the winter, but I love New Year’s Day. It’s a time when we at least consider what we can do differently in the future, while remembering the things we have done in the past. If you, like me, have the twin addictions of hope and nostalgia, it can be a wonderful time.

It can also be a time of depression and anxiety if you are not careful, especially if when you look back you see pain, and if you look forward, you see anxiety and scarcity.

Although I am addicted to hope and nostalgia, I live with anxiety and depression. And 2025 has been rough, y’all.

The back story:

In 2024, I was hired to build a nonprofit to connect living wage employers to formerly incarcerated folks. They had some funding commitments, and a general plan, so most of what I needed to do was to bring about implementation. In late fall of 24, those funding commitments disappeared, so we pivoted to getting federal money commitments to fund it. We reached terms in the first full week of 2025—the future looked amazing.

And then the inauguration happened. Federal money disappeared. People who had been eager to talk to me suddenly quit returning calls. Some of our best relationships lost their jobs. We came up with alternative plans to downscale, but couldn’t downscale enough, fast enough. By April, we didn’t have any money left to pay me. I lost my health insurance at the end of May.

I went into organizer mode and began having lots of one-on-one conversations with folks—here’s what I’ve been up to, here’s what I would like to do. Ideas coalesced, and people got excited, and some folks who were trying to reboot a failing nonprofit with an amazing legacy hired me to bring this vision to their org. They had some money, not much, but had funding commitments, and a rich legacy they were under-utilizing.

Friends, four months later the funding commitments fell through, and the philanthropic world had changed, and what would have been easy to fund in 2024 became a nightmare in 2025.

So, in early November, I found myself back to beating the streets. Right before the holidays is always a good time to look for your next career move (that was sarcasm). But more than that, I began to have some pretty severe doubts about the future, this country, and my role in it.

The navel gazing:

I have spent almost all the last 20 years doing “social justice work”, broadly defined. Most of my money has come from the nonprofit sector, but I don’t think of myself as a nonprofit professional. I just wanted to do good work, and that was the easiest, most legible way to get paid for it. And it has always been relatively easy to find work that needs doing, and that I am interested in doing, and that there were enough people willing to pay me to do it.

But the world has changed. I spent this whole damn year talking to philanthropy, and they are scared out of their gourds, y’all. It’s always hard to raise money for things in Mississippi—nationally, only 3% of philanthropic dollars come to the South. But the left-leaning folks who have always been eager to try new things are now holding onto every dollar, because the work they have funded until now is in danger. And they are scared of the IRS being weaponized against them for funding “woke” causes.

Individual philanthropists (read: rich folks of good will) are scared, too. Don’t attract too much attention, don’t take risks, don’t draw the ire of the administration.

As a straight white Christian male, I’ve never really been afraid of drawing attention—but that is when you can count on due process, and a stable federal government. But I am the sole income earner in our household. My spouse is disabled and dependent on insurance provided by the federal government to stay alive. Her meds alone would cost 36,000 out of pocket. My wife and five cats depend on my earning money to keep them all alive, and there is zero hyperbole in that sentence.

So, do I really want to invest in, and depend on, a future where I derive my income by being someone who gets paid to be a high-visibility, active combatant of the government?

It does not feel safe to do so. Or wise.

I dislike saying that. I dislike feeling afraid for my family and the people I love. And I dislike making money decisions based on fear.

So here we are at the end of this horrible year, and our country is in chaos, and our elected officials are untrustworthy, and I worked full time only eight of the last 12 months, and am really not sure I want to keep working in the nonprofit sector. And I’m 53, and God help my algorithm, which is filled with articles telling me how scary the job market is for folks over 50.

To be clear—I earn income from several places. I do some contract work for a local nonprofit—I earn about 20% of my annual income from there. I have a newsletter I publish, and other writing, and that is all supported by a team of patrons—that is another 25% or so. And I occasionally sell something I made, or a commission piece, and that is maybe 8-10%.

So, right now, bills are being paid, but losing half your income and all your health insurance leaves a mark. Emotionally, having started this year on a high note and leaving it in a severe deficit has messed with my head in all the ways you might expect it would for a 53-year-old male with depression and anxiety and ADHD.

Some conclusions:

In 2026, I will have to focus on making money. That is pretty much the filter for taking on new things next year: do they make money?

I’ve removed myself from some boards, and shucked myself from some other commitments. I’ve formed a new company to hold my creative work, and it will have a store where I sell the things I make and write (expect several big announcements on January 5th!).

Related to that, expect me to make and to write more things to sell. I’m working like a madman to revamp and improve my membership program, so it provides even more value to the members who support my work. (Expect an announcement on February 2nd.)

I’ll be writing more, and Facebook monetized me earlier this year, so I’ll have to figure out how to actually work that. God bless my heart and your feed.

 And yes, while I love the idea of making a living from just the things I make and the words I write, I know I will have to find at least a half-time job to fill in the edges. So, if you know of work you think I would be good at, please let me know.

Over 2025, I’ve felt at various times hopeful, fearful, optimistic, and betrayed. I’m tired and yet know the fight in front of us is long and hard.

One thing I love about social media is the opportunity to share in your joy, even when my supply of joy is in severe deficit. I love seeing your kids’ Halloween costumes, that perfect view from your window, the crumpled wrapping paper on Christmas morning, the excitement that is evident when you post the cover of the book you just finished.  

I see you, and am thankful for you. And thanks for sharing your joy.

Wishing you every good thing in the new year.

HH

PS: This is the sort of thing I used to write regularly, and which got me a reputation for being vulnerable. There are lots of people who are close to me who haven’t known about all the financial chaos of this year because I have been reluctant to write about it. I mean, “a straight white man is afraid—news at 11”.

And honestly, being vulnerable about your fears and doubts gets you clicks, but also takes a toll on your mental health.

But I still hold to the wise words of Mr. Rogers, who said that anything human is mentionable, and by talking about it, it becomes more manageable. Thanks for being the people to give me a place to talk about it.

Me say war

NB: Each week I’m posting something from the archives of my more than 20 years of writing on the web. Sometimes it’s a social media post, sometimes a blog post, or (like today) it’s an excerpt from a newsletter issue published in 2019. Each entry gets updated with some modern context or point of view. – HH

Back in 1992, Sinead O’Connor caused a sensation when, on Saturday Night Live, she tore up a picture of the Pope in protest of clergy sexual abuse. She was a young star on the way up, and it seriously set back her career and cost her a lot of fans. This was more than a decade before the worst abuses of Roman Catholic clergy abuse would come to light.

In retrospect, she wasn’t wrong, merely early. 

Two weeks later, she was at Madison Square Garden for a Bob Dylan tribute. She was introduced by Kris Kristofferson, who praised her integrity. The audience began booing her and would not let up. She stood there, stone faced, as they booed her. Finally, she asked for the mic to be turned up, and she launched into an a cappella recitation of War by Bob Marley.

Over the haters, she nearly shouted into the mic:

Until the philosophy

Which hold one race superior and another

Inferior

Is finally

And permanently

Discredited

And abandoned

Everywhere is war

Me say war

And when she finished, she walked off the stage, giving them her back, as my Latina friends would say, and fell into Kris Kristofferson’s arms and sobbed. 

It is one of my favorite images: a 25-year-old woman, in front of a hostile audience, standing firm to her principles, refusing to be cowed. Afraid, but convicted. Not without fear, but standing up for what she believed despite that fear. Speaking the truth, even though her voice shook. 

UPDATE:

Another tidbit about this story that I love. In the picture I used for this piece, Kris is whispering in her ear, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

Sinead replies, “I’m not down.”

It’s then she asks for the mic to be turned up.

It’s been six years since I wrote this. A lot has changed. Sinead has died. Kris has died.

But much hasn’t. It’s still war. And we still need people to speak, even when your voice shakes.

Punk Damage

A thing I love is when I learn about a word or phrase that gives language to a thing I have known, but did not have words for.

Like the first time I learned about harm reduction, which is a specific theory of social work that says that in order for people to make good decisions, they must first be alive so let’s focus on keeping them alive to buy them time to make good decisions.

So, under harm reduction, you focus more on making sure people who inject IV drugs can shoot up safely, instead of them having to reuse dirty needles. Teenage kids are going to have sex, so let’s make sure they have access to birth control and STD preventatives, like condoms. Mentally ill people who live on the street should have warm beds and hot meals so they can live long enough to access medical care.

Like that.

I “knew” that, but I loved learning there was a term for it. That people took it seriously. That people were actively working on it, and how to discuss it, and how to perpetuate it. I’m self-educated, so I sometimes feel embarrassed to learn the things I didn’t learn in school, that my impostor syndrome told me “everyone else” knows, because they went to better schools than I did, or went longer, or have more letters after their name than I do.

But a lot of that is context. Most folks who are not involved in some form of social work are unaware of harm reduction, no matter how many degrees they may have. It just doesn’t come up.

Likewise, as someone who grew up listening to Americana and 80s hair metal, I wasn’t much into punk, and never really identified that way. Although, in retrospect, there was a lot of overlap that just didn’t make its way into the social discourse of Independence High School in Independence, MS (population 106) in 1987. 

So, when I recently learned about “punk damage” in Beth Picken’s book, Make Your Art No Matter What, I felt known, despite my lack of punk credentials. 

There are many ways of money damage that are culturally linked and rooted in our families, religions, or communities of origin. One kind of money damage that frequently appears in my consulting practice is referred to as “punk damage,” which is a type of demonization of money and the people who seek it. According to the Lesbian Lexicon, Punk Damage (noun) is the sordid underbelly of self-limitation that comes directly from having come of age in a punk scene. Often marked by an extreme distaste for the making and/or spending of even small amounts of money. (p.73)

I didn’t get it from punk, though—I got it from poverty, and growing up in a strong DIY household, and then working in the finance world to get away from all that, and then finding that I hated that world, and then working for two decades in anti-capitalist spaces.

I have a lot of it, whatever you want to call it.

I heard a friend, who is a bestselling and award-winning author talk about how for decades her writing made a living for her publisher, her editor, her publicist, and her printer, but not for her, and that she just bought into that.

“I once believed that making money from my art was wrong, and so I lived in poverty. I no longer believe that.”

I love her putting it that way: I once believed x. I no longer believe x. So simple, so clean.

I was talking to my therapist this week about “acceptance” and my problem with it, because acceptance often seems like acquiescence. And there are many things in life that should not be acquiesced to. And as Dorothy Day said, “Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.”

I like Angela Davis’ remark that she is no longer accepting the things she cannot change—rather she is changing the things she cannot accept.

I’m coming to terms, in my sixth decade, with the fact that I need not accept the “punk damage” I have learned, and that my art can make money, and that while I once believed x, I need no longer believe it.

Slowly. But it’s coming.

Long slow suppers

Hi there. Each week I will post an excerpt of one of the thousands of things I’ve written in the last 25 years, and then follow it up with some modern context or point of view. Today’s piece from the archives was from my newsletter, and was written in summer of 2019. Enjoy! – HH

One consequence to the amazing sort of life I have had the good fortune to lead is that I know, and have gotten to work with, a lot of all different sorts of people who live all over the world. And this last week, one of those people happened to be in Jackson, MS, where I live, and so we had him over for dinner.

Eating with people is one of my most important spiritual practices. When I say things like that, I know I risk losing some people, but it’s true. I believe the Divine, the Universe, God, whatever you want to use as a metaphor for the organizing principle of the universe, is known in a unique way when we share a meal with another person.

So, when I found out Melvin was in town, then of course we will have him over for dinner. After all, our house was picked out with that in mind. The meal wasn’t fancy – red beans and rice, with a simple cobbler and good vanilla ice cream for dessert – but the experience of a long, slow dinner with lots of laughter, plotting future goodness, and sharing our victories and failures since we last laid eyes on each other was priceless.

His coworker thanked us for inviting her, and for the meal. And then, as sometimes happens, I said something off the cuff that was the right thing, and true.

“I think that we all agree that in the better world we dream of, there would be lots of meals like this one was. But the thing is, we don’t have to wait for that better world to come about – we can have those meals now. And by doing that, we build the better world we dream of.”

Here is to more long, slow suppers, and to the building of a better world.

Six years later…

COVID was 9 months away from kicking our ass when I wrote this. We went three years where we didn’t have anyone who didn’t live here at our table. And we were much poorer for it.

It may just be me, but I think the pandemic broke something in our fabric. I don’t get invited to peoples houses for supper nearly as much as I did before the pandemic. I hear that from other people too. And I think we are poorer for it.

Living off the rage

The restaurant was quiet, despite its being the lunch hour. The rain came down outside, no doubt part of the reason for the low turnout.

We hadn’t seen each other for a while and were catching up in that meandering, slow way friends do. Here is what her son did, and here are the pictures. Here are pictures of our cats, and did you hear about so and so?

Like that.

Eventually, we got to the current political chaos. It feels like that is the subject of a lot of conversations I have these days. How did we get here? How do we fight back? What can we do?

This led to different people we know doing various kinds of work around this, including one person in particular I think of as The Instagram Activist.

They are at every protest. Their Instagram page is filled with the hashtag de jour. They have an instant opinion on every issue, despite their lack of knowledge of the issue. From matters as wide-ranging as labor policy to race to LGBT issues to food accessibility, they are out in front of the cameras, giving their solutions. They show up at city council and school board meetings with a camera, trying to play gotcha with board members. They have selfies with every significant Civil Rights personality.

And whenever I mention this person to anyone, all people talk about is how angry this person is. No local politician will take their call or trust them with a meeting. All they have is rage.

But here’s the thing—the whole anger thing is a public persona. I’ve spent a fair amount of time with them one on one, and they are not like that at all when the cameras are off.

“They are angry for a living,” I said to my friend at lunch that day.  

She laughed and said that was exactly it.

“They are so caught up in the way it is, they don’t have a plan for what it could be like. They are not giving birth to anything; they are just living off the rage,” she said.

I know lots of folks who are living off the rage. Their Facebook feed is filled with “I told you so” posts. Outrage at the current administration leads them to fat-shame people who disagree with them. They are so mad they call other people who disagree with them names or slurs. The world is broken up into two camps, with the dividing mark being whether you agree with them. They are right; you are wrong. No curiosity, no nuance. Just rage.

Some people just like to fight, and are so busy fighting they never stopped to ask what they are fighting for. What happens if you win?

In May of 1780, John Adams was in Paris, trying to get help from the French government for the American colonies, then in the middle of the Revolutionary War. In a letter to his wife Abigail, he said,   

“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”

I want to be clear: I hate war, and every war results from a failure of imagination. But at least Adams knew what he was fighting for. There was a larger vision at work than just “owning the [political party I oppose]”.

Don’t tell me what you are against: what are you for?

Don’t tell us what you want to destroy: what do you want to build?

I don’t want to know what you hate: let us know what you love.

This post is not sponsored by Costco

I was in a bit of a funk, so I made chili dogs for supper.

Pro-tip: If you only need a little shredded cheese and don’t want to dirty up the knuckle buster grater, use a vegetable peeler and slice off thin slices of cheese instead

Also, if you are a Costco member, their Kirkland hot dogs are amazing. And don’t sleep on the Cabot Creamery 3 year cheddar.

This post is not sponsored by Costco, but if they want to talk, I’m open.

16 years ago today

Sixteen years ago today, we got married.

On that morning, I had less than $30 in my checking account, having spent the massive sum of $80 the night before on pizza and two liter softdrinks for our rehearsal dinner.

My car was a small Kia with a leaky radiator someone had given me, because I couldn’t afford a car. My bride was in the early stages of the heart failure that had killed her mother, grandmother, and cousin.

A friend had lent us his condo at the beach for a week, so we could have a proper honeymoon. Another friend catered the reception, and told us we could have a month to pay for the food costs. Mom and Dad paid for the cake – it came from the grocery store down the street.

And virtually every person at the wedding handed us some cash, so we could have a lovely week at the beach – else we could not have afforded the trip.

As I said, the car had a leaky radiator, so I had a trunk full of jugs of water, and every so often I would pull over on the shoulder of the road and top it off. While at the beach, the car had an electrical problem, and I worked on it late into the night in the parking lot of the nice restaurant where we are supper.

Sixteen years later, literally nothing is the same. A different state, a different city. My wife has a new heart. We live in a house we love, in a neighborhood we love, and we can afford to get to a different beach 4 or 5 times most years. Renee does kitten rescue and I write things that matter to some folks, and for 16 years we have made it work, mostly because we have decided it will.

Sixteen years. 30 percent of my life. 6,540-ish days, more good than bad.

I’m glad she said yes.

On my own

The little door to enter the crawlspace under our house is tiny – perhaps 18 inches square. Every time I have to go under our house, I swear I never want to do this again.

The plastic that has been laid in the crawlspace to keep the humidity down rustles as I crawl on my hands and knees over it. It’s dirty and opaque, and in the worst parts of my brain I imagine snakes slithering under it, keeping warm as the temperature drops outside.

I have never seen a snake under this house, but my brain knows they are there.

It’s seven thirty in the morning, and it’s 46 degrees outside, and I am crawling under my house with a flashlight in my mouth trying really hard to not think about snakes because both of the toilets in our house backed up yesterday evening and I’m afraid I shall have to replace a section of drainage pipe. I cannot remember what size drainage pipe we have from the last time I had to replace a section.

Most houses have 4-inch drainage pipe – and as it turns out, we do as well. But our house is seventy-five years old, and was built at a time when all the standards were not yet written in stone. You cannot take such things for granted with such a house as this one. Like the Holy Spirit, it goes where it chooses.  

At some point in the sordid history of this house, a jack legged renovation in the en-suite bath led to chunks of mortar and concrete ending up in the drain pipes, and shortly after we bought the house, I had to crawl under the house and cut out a huge section of the 4 inch cast iron pipe and replace it with PVC because the chunks of concrete had wedged themselves in there.

I assumed instantly that since they were both clogged, this must be a piece of the concrete we had missed, come back to haunt us.

The last time this happened, I tried plunging it, and tried pouring Drano down the tub drain, and I even took the toilet out and tried running a plumbing snake down the drainage pipe. That last adventure is how I discovered the chunks of concrete. It was then that I surrendered and called Dad.

My father was one of those men who could solve any problem. He could fix your air conditioner, rebuild your engine, or rewire your breaker panel. And for 48 years of my life, whenever I had a problem I could not solve, I called him for help.

I explained the situation to him, and said I didn’t know what to do.

He asked two questions. “Does the other toilet work?”

I said that it did.

“The one that is clogged – is it closer to the road or further from the road than the one that works?” was the second question.

“The clogged one is furthest away from the road”, I told him.

“Then it’s simple”, he said. “You have a blockage – probably some chunks of that concrete – between the clogged toilet and the wye where the other toilet joins the drainage pipe. You need to go under the house and cut out the clogged pipe and replace it.”

Oh. That’s all.

He heard the uncertainty in my voice, and walked me through what I needed to buy, the procedures of how to do it, and all of that. And that afternoon, I did it, saving myself probably $800 in the process.

But it had been five years since my Dad died, quickly and unexpectedly, one of the more than 15,000 Mississippians who died of COVID during the pandemic. In fact, it had been five years ago yesterday.

Five years since I could ask him for help. Five years since I had a backup plan. Five years since I could hear him on the other end of the phone and know that my worries were over.

For the last five years, I’ve just been on my own.

It turns out that I didn’t have to replace any pipe this time.  It wasn’t a piece of concrete, just a pernicious clog. In an attempt to avoid crawling under the house again, I decided to try snaking it from the cleanout in the front yard. This approach had hit me at 3 in the morning, when I remembered Dad’s two questions, and realized that if both toilets were clogged, the clog must be after the wye where the two branches join, and thus really close to the cleanout at the front of the house.

Twenty minutes later all the pipes were running freely, and the disaster was averted and I had spent no money at all. And literally my first thought when I saw the toilets flush successfully was that I wish Dad could know about this. That he could know I figured it out. That he knew I was OK. That I didn’t need a backup plan.

I wish he knew I could make it on my own.

Podcast Appearance: Soul + Practice

Kathy Escobar and Phyllis Mathis interviewed me on their podcast Soul + Practice: Raw Conversations, Real Practices, and it went live yesterday.

Kathy was an early role model as I carved out this weird life I have now – she is one of perhaps 5 folks whose work changed my life. I think I’ve known her for 19 years now.

If you are new here (or not), there is a lot that might interest you on here: My “origin” story, beauty as an antidote to despair, practices that can sustain you over time, and making room in the midst of it all for joy to happen.

I also talk a bit about what it means to live in the deep south when the country is on fire, and it’s probably not what you might think.

It was a lot of fun, and Kathy and I are currently trying to figure out more ways to work together. I know I’m really looking forward to that.