Eventually, through ever-grimmer mass emails, she learned that she’d been furloughed and, in June, permanently terminated. “My first thought was not of liberation or of freedom,” she tells me over Zoom some days after the event at Yellow Rose. “It was terror. It was a feeling of, ‘I’m a nobody.’ Part of the toxicity of fine-dining structures is that I felt like I was nothing unless I was attached to somebody with credibility. I felt scared to pursue things on my own, like people were only interested in what I was doing because I was affiliated with trendy restaurants. If I’m just me, I’ve lost any clout or resources.”

I set a timer for 30 minutes, do as much as I can, then pause to toast a piece of that Mestermacher bread, to which I add some mashed avocado and nutritional yeast. My fridge is full of healthy fruits and vegetables and leftover marinated tofu and hard-boiled eggs and cooked rye berries, but all I really want is permanent financial and professional security, and a slice of white cake with white icing.