Obsessed Interview: Devin Kate Pope's oatmeal obsession

On breakfast rituals, food history and taking care of your community

Courtesy: Devin Kate Pope

I’m thrilled to introduce you to my Obsessed Interview guest, Devin Kate Pope. Devin is a writer living in Tempe, Arizona. She writes a fantastic newsletter called The Good Enough Weekly, which explores the ways people are working toward a liberated world in the areas of food, climate, housing and caregiving. I’m a loyal reader of Devin’s newsletter. Devin always makes me pause and reflect, especially since the Arizona-focused themes she writes about often reflect what’s happening on a global level. If you haven’t checked out The Good Enough Weekly yet, you definitely should. It’s beautifully written, it’s insightful and you’ll love it. Subscribe to Devin’s newsletter here!

Let’s dive into the interview.

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This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Devin’s obsession. Courtesy: Devin Kate Pope

Michelle Béland: Devin, thank you so much for agreeing to talk to me today. Tell me about your obsession!

Devin Kate Pope: Yes. When you sent me the form I wondered “What am I obsessed with?” I have a hard time picking favourites and what not. So I was thinking about it for a day or two and I came to oatmeal because it’s something I pretty much eat every day and have almost without fail since I was a kid. It’s something I probably wouldn’t have called an obsession, but as I’m getting more into food history and food writing, I’m realizing it’s more than just a mindless thing, I’m really obsessed with it.

MB: Why do you think it’s an obsession? You mentioned that you’re writing more about food and that you’re learning about food history. You have an excellent newsletter called The Good Enough Weekly that I absolutely love and enjoy every week. So what is the link between food history and your passion for oatmeal?

DKP: I was reading this book Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. It’s a culinary history book that goes from the ancient times to now and maps how different cuisines are formed. It talked about how every culture had one starch; whatever the cheapest starch they could grow was the majority of their diet. In Scotland and Ireland it was primarily oats, and I noticed that because my grandfather’s grandparents came over from Ireland as children. It made me prick up my ears because I think how a lot of US people eat now is really in tune with variety and feeling like variety is necessary. I personally like variety too, but in another book I was reading, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, it was talking about how people ate this starch every meal and they would have different additives that they would put on, like different sauces and different things to break through the monotony of the oatmeal every day. So when I think about eating oatmeal again from a different perspective, especially since having kids and making decisions about food every day for a family, it became much simpler to eat oatmeal every morning for breakfast. That’s what my mom did when we were kids. Oatmeal is what I said I was obsessed with because I am. I eat it every day. I’m actually in the midst of a move and I haven’t eaten oatmeal for a few days and it’s a little bit weird. 

I think underneath it is the basic idea of hunger, and there’s so many people in the United States who don’t have enough food. A new report just came out from the USDA and it states that more and more people are having a harder time securing enough food. That’s one million more households with children this year compared to 2021. And so that’s what I’m thinking: if I can eat oatmeal every day because it’s cheaper, maybe more people could eat oatmeal every day or their culture’s cheap starch, their culture’s cheap grain, like oats, yam, wheat, rice… Those foods that, in my culture, you’re not supposed to eat a ton because they’re “too many carbs.” But that’s what kept people alive for a long time because they didn’t have as much access to as much protein or vegetables reliably as a lot of people do now. 

It feels really circular, but me eating oatmeal is connected to me paying attention to food, paying attention to what I’m trying to write about, which is food and hunger connected to social issues primarily in the United States.

Courtesy: Devin Kate Pope

MB: You live in Arizona. What’s the primary starch or indigenous starch of that region?

DKP: That’s a really good question. I live in the Salt River Valley on ancestral territories of Indigenous peoples, including the Akimel O’odham (Pima) and Pee Posh (Maricopa) Indian Communities. Across thousands of years, indigenous communities in this area have eaten the Three Sisters, which are maize, beans, and squash. Maize would be the analog to my ancestors eating oats. I’ve talked with Dr. Michael Kotutwa Johnson, who’s active in the food policy scene and a 250th generation farmer from the Hopi community¹. He’s been growing certain types of beans, corn, squash and other vegetables – his family has the whole time – and that’s how they fed themselves and practiced their cultural and religious traditions under persecution from the US government. Those plants generally don’t need as much water, which is why they were able to grow in Arizona across thousands of years before settlers came in and brought their preferred starches. And now we’re dealing with the repercussions of settler colonialism in depleted soil and food insecurity, among other issues. 

MB: There’s a quote in one of your most recent newsletters that I really liked. It’s from your piece called Reading about food to stay alive. You wrote “Cooking reminds me to see the humanity in myself and others, and I need this practice in a world that pits us against each other.” I wonder if you could expand on that. 

DKP: I wrote that recently because you can’t get away from it. You need to eat every day. We need to feed ourselves. If you have a family, we need to feed each other. I was thinking of that in the context of the constant violence of oppression happening in Gaza, the Congo, Sudan, and within the US. I think about that connected to living in Arizona where the indigenous communities have been forced into ‘reservations,’ and haven’t gotten their land back. I think that paying attention to food is helping me pay attention to things that are hard to talk about. As a white person, I could turn a blind’s eye to injustice because I am so privileged. My family is a family of immigrants, but from farther back to the potato famine, who fled Ireland because of starvation. It never made sense to me, the anti-immigrant sentiment in the US, especially when so many of us or our families come from somewhere else. When it comes to food and thinking about eating, it’s really hard to deny that we each have a body and all of us have that need. A lot of times you can get really intellectual talking about environmentalism and colonialism and reparations, but coming back to the food, it keeps it at a person level for me. 

That’s what is most important to me, taking care of the people who are in my community and getting to know them more, but not in a way where I act based on assumptions. I’m talking about actually being in community where you’re learning about each other and doing what you can do to make right things that should never have happened, including settlers coming in and pushing indigenous people into certain parts of the state and nearly eradicating their food ways.

MB: You mentioned in a newsletter that you were moving houses and sorting through all of your cookbooks. You said that nowadays you gravitate towards more personal essays, memoirs and academic articles about food. Can you share what you’re reading right now?

DKP: I just finished a book that was absolutely amazing. It’s called Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States by Héctor Tobar. He’s an American journalist and writer. His parents are immigrants from Guatemala and he grew up in LA. It’s an extremely wide-ranging book. It blew my mind, as a writer and reader. He’s basically writing about how the United States has become full of people from Mexico, Guatemala and all over South America and how it’s changing the face of the United States. It’s also about how immigrants, including his parents, deal with being an American and what it means to be a United States citizen. I found it because I was reading Rivermouth by Alejandra Oliva. It was a blurb on the back of her book.

MB: Gotta love those blurbs!

DKP: Right! Just following them around like a bibliography for memoirs. So I’m reading a lot about things that touch on living in Arizona, living in a state that borders Mexico. That’s been something that I’ve been focused on for a long time living here in Arizona. It’s been the site of a lot of awful things at the border, a lot of discrimination. Living in Arizona has always felt very diverse to me, there’s a lot of people who aren’t white, a lot of people whose family came up from Mexico and other places. It always felt really normal as a child, then I started realizing the politics and what was happening as I was getting older. I’m also reading Cultivating Food Justice, edited by Alison Hope Alkon and Julian Agyeman. It's a compilation of academic articles on how food accessibility is connected to infrastructure and social issues. Housing, food and immigration… it’s all kind of connected really tightly. So I’m trying to focus on where I live.

MB: Circling back to oatmeal… How do you take your oatmeal and what kind of variations do you do to keep it fresh and exciting?

DKP: So right now my kind of standard is rolled oats made on the stove or in the microwave for a little bit of ease with a tablespoon or two of peanut butter and whatever fruit I have. I went through a phase where I was eating savoury oatmeal, where I would cut up tomatoes and throw on some nutritional yeast and pepper. I love steel cut oats for a different texture and flavour because they’re a little more nutty. They’re a different texture than rolled oats. As a kid I remember doing quick oats. They’re processed differently, you just pour boiled water over them and they fluff up. If I want to be more decadent I’ll make it on the stove top with some water, a little bit of butter, some oat milk, throw in some cut apples and cook it all together. That’s pretty rare these days!

MB: Do your kids eat oatmeal? Do they like it?

DKP: I wouldn’t say they like it all the time. I think that’s part of it though for me, because I love food as an aesthetic thing. I’m definitely the foodie who takes pictures of my food, but also there’s a point where for me it’s just food and we just need to eat something to have enough energy. We’re incredibly lucky to have all this. Not everything has to be the pinnacle of deliciousness.

There’s a family story from when I was a kid. I have three younger brothers and we were at a restaurant for breakfast, which was unusual, and my brother who’s three years younger than me, he was probably four at the time, told the waitress that his mom only let him eat oatmeal. He had to tell her that because it was just so awful and he was so grateful to be somewhere else. So we joke about that a lot. So no, my kids aren’t thrilled about eating oatmeal. But it’s okay.

MB: It’s the same thing on my side with my kid. Sometimes I make something and he’ll say he doesn’t like it, even though I know he eats that thing. It’s just not his most favourite dish. Sometimes I feel with kids it’s hard to get them to accept that not everything you’re going to eat is going to be amazing or your favourite thing ever. Sometimes it’s just to nourish your body and give you energy and sustain you throughout the day.

DKP: Exactly. Sometimes that’s all the time there is and that’s it. I think it can be a reminder too that there’s so many people who don’t have food. I think moms can get stereotyped into “Eat your food! There’s starving children in X country!” But there are also people that are hungry here, down the street. I don’t put that on my kids every morning at the breakfast table but that’s something that I think about. We can think about it while also eating and not feeling guilty about the food that we have, but believing everyone should have enough food.

Thank you so much for sharing your oatmeal obsession, Devin!

You can find Devin on Substack.

1. The Hopi community is a sovereign nation located in Northeastern Arizona.