In Lviv this summer, my son and I had some of the most spectacular meals of our lives. Salads arrived garnished with fresh flowers. Pastries floated by us adorned with fragrant wild berries gathered by hand or a special wooden comb in forests unblemished by mines. We were offered mint drinks, locally sourced rose petal ice cream, and lemonade with crushed sea buckhorn. This same summer, people just like us in cities just like ours were blown to pieces by rockets, drones, bombs.
For this essay, I was asked for photographs, and I foolishly missed my opportunity to photograph food. Instead, I tried to photograph couples kissing against walls of darkened buildings, on park benches, at tram stops. Here, a boy has a prosthetic leg, and a girl is wearing no bra. There, she pulls him close by the shoulder straps of his camo rucksack and places her mouth of his like she wants to consume him whole. Young men and women in uniform gently fondling fragrant fresh bread in the supermarket, passing it to each other, like a promise. A city in a country at war is a city of lovers parting and reuniting, and parting again. The partings of lips, and the parting kisses. Impossible to photograph this without feeling like you’re over-exposing their intimate –possibly last—shared moments, violating the trust and privacy that holds the world. Loss of detail, color shifts, grayish veil. In the corrosive glare of the war, food porn would have been a far less fraught subject matter.
On Facebook, I send a note to my classmate group, ask them to share photographs of the meals they had in the recent months. Pictures start trickling in, but none of them are too seductive. Great food is like great sex, I realize: it’s hard to capture the magic in a photograph. Luckily for me, one of my classmates, Oksana Nazarkevuch, runs her own one-person business called Lucy Cake. She sends me luscious photos and tells me I can harvest anything I like from her Instagram page. I scroll through the images, startled by the colors and silhouettes of the cakes. There’s one that’s shaped like a bomb, complete with a festive Bengal flare made to look like a fuse. Many others come in the colors of the Ukrainian flag – yellow for the wheat field and blue for the sky above it. Some of these are merely patriotic. But the sign “For the Loyal Son of Ukraine” suggests that it may be intended for a man heading to – or returning from – the front. I dwell on this, then observe, on second viewing, that it bears a sign “10,” indicating the age of the cake’s intended recipient. Higher up still, I freeze to see a cake resembling a child’s grave, complete with a cross and a tiny angel on top of it. I squint to make out the text, only to I realize it’s a cake intended for first communion.
I remember my own first communion – dressed in white like a bride, I went to a Catholic church, not having been raised a Catholic, without ever have been baptized, and partook of the sacrament. All religion was new to us back then, and we did the best we could. We still do the best we can, not sure where we went awry, transgressed, did wrong. Or rather: we admit we’ve committed wrongs. But are any of them exceptionally deserving of the wrongs we are asked to endure?
Oksana’s cakes, I decide, will be the only food porn that the essay will feature. Fragile, voluptuous – they are not there to last. These are the cakes that no longer exist. None of them had been a great source of nourishment, or a necessity. They are a sign of surplus, abundance, each one a whimsical treat, aiming to surprise and delight. Life would still be worth living without them. But it would be made immeasurably worse by the realization that for the rest of it, one would never see or touch or taste another cake.
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Oksana Maksymchuk is a celebrated poet, translator, and essayist whose works resonate deeply within and beyond literary circles. Her poetry collections, translations, and essays have received international acclaim, positioning her as a vital voice in the contemporary literary landscape. Oksana’s impactful work has resonated widely, with her latest book, Still City, captivating readers with its profound explorations of resilience and identity. She was the Winter Cheuse Center Scholar from December 8, 2024, to March 3, 2025, and her work appeared in an op-ed in US News & World Report. You can read it here.
October 17, 2025