March 2020 | Rolling Stone | 67
floors and busing tables there, and the rest is
Samin history: an apprenticeship in the kitchen;
a gig teaching the writer Michael Pollan to cook
(when he was a patron at another restaurant
where she worked, she passed him a note asking
to audit his graduate-level journalism class);
a column for The New York Times Magazine; a
book deal; a blockbuster show. On paper, it all
seems bold, confident, and self-determined. The
reality, she admits, is different.
“It’s funny, I don’t feel so courageous. Often
I feel very lost,” Nosrat says, describing her
life as an arduous swim through that sense of
otherness, constantly searching for mentors to
guide her. As an aspiring writer, she was already
bucking expectations for most first-generation
children (doctor, lawyer, engineer). But the
safest and most obvious career paths for English
majors — advertising, marketing, maybe a
Ph.D. — didn’t speak to her. Cooking “presented
itself,” Nosrat says, and she took a chance. “I
was like, ‘This is a beautiful thing, I’m gonna go
toward this.’ So, I’m just kind of blindly stepping
through the world looking for the thing that
feels good, and where good people are.”
Twenty years on, cooking is still fortifying for
her, a way of making her feel rooted, capable,
and present. She considers it the ultimate
antidote to the toxicity of modern life. Thinking
back to the previous week, Nosrat recalls a day
where she was feeling down. She decided to
make chicken stock and woke the next morning
to the satisfying sight of “three gallons of this
magical, liquid gold.” She gulped down a cup
for breakfast, then invited some friends over to
cook and eat some more. After a boisterous few
hours of chatter and children and dogs and food
and no internet, she says — with more than a
little amazement — her cloud had lifted.
“It’s so funny, it’s the thing that I’m always
trying to get everyone else to do, yet every time,
I’m surprised, like, ‘Oh, my God, it works!’ ” Her
big laugh unfurls. “Cooking really is a reprieve.
It gives you a chance to use your nose and your
ears and your hands, and to feel and to smell
and to taste. It reminds you that you have a
body, and that there are people that we share
this Earth with.”
It’s this feeling that she wants to impart to
others through her teaching — not a bunch of
perfect brunch recipes. “A big part of it is
self-sufficiency,” she says. “Some measure of
feeling like you can do something for yourself
and for the people around you. If I need to be
the cheerleader to make you feel like you can do
that, that’s a really easy thing for me to do. But I
think the thing I always remember is that as
much as I’m cheerleading everyone else, part of
me is just cheerleading me, too. I just want
people to feel a little more human.”
AFTER THE
2017 Wom-
en’s March,
women kept
stopping
Cecile Richards on the street,
on the subway, at events. They
all had the same question:
“‘What am I supposed to do
now? I’ve marched, I’ve called
my member of Congress, but I
know there’s more I can do,’ ”
says Richards, who helped
build Planned Parenthood into
a political juggernaut during
her 12-year tenure as president.
She wasn’t alone. Ai-Jen
Poo, co-founder of the National
Domestic Workers Alliance
in Chicago, and Alicia Garza,
who helped build the Black
Lives Matter movement from
Oakland, were having the same
conversations.
“We had this sense that
women were on fire and ready
to take action,” Garza says.
“And maybe also a little bit
anxious that energy was going
to peter out, that women
would turn away and go back
to their lives.”
So in 2019, Richards, Poo,
and Garza combined their
considerable powers to form
Supermajority, a community of
women activists now 200,000
strong, offering training in the
“nuts and bolts” of organizing.
The name is a nod to the num-
bers: Women, Richards says,
comprise not just the majority
of voters in this country, but
also the majority of activists.
And yet the issues that impact
women the most — reproduc-
tive health care, equal pay,
child care, sexual violence —
are treated as ancillary in the
political conversation.
Consider the fact that one of
the Democratic debates took
place on the second anniver-sary of the #MeToo movement
going viral, when 12 million
survivors of sexual harassment
and violence spoke up about
their experiences, but “not
a single question came up
during the debate about sexual
violence and how we would
support survivors,” Poo says.
Or the fact that women are
now the majority of payrollelected in 2018; the Equal
Rights Amendment is the
closest it’s been to ratification
in a century — and Super-
majority hopes to build on
that success in 2020. Its goal is
to organize 2 million women
ahead of the election with
voter education, registration,
and turnout drives. It plans
to target specific states, likeSupermajority
2018 was just the beginning. Activist superstars join
together to fight for fair representation for womenRichards
(left) and
GarzaPHOTOGRAPH BY Valerie Chiang
earners in the U.S. while
still being the vast majority
of caregivers, and in some
states child care is more
expensive than housing costs.
“The fact that [the burden of
caregiving] essentially falls
on women, who are now the
majority of the workforce,
is just completely unsustain-
able,” Richards says. “There is
literally no plan.”
There have been strides —
a historic number of womenMichigan, where more than a
million eligible residents are
not registered to vote — and
where the 2016 election was
decided by 10,700 voters.
“Women want to win,”
Garza says. “We’re tired of
being told that just because
there’s one woman some-
where that equality has been
achieved. We’re not passive
agents here. We’re actually the
people that this country’s been
waiting for.” TESSA STUART