[Februaryuri 2026] She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat
(base post on Februaryuri 2026 here!)
She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat (Tsukuritai Onna to Tabetai Onna) by Sakaomi Yuzaki
Publication
Ongoing (5 volumes so far, started in 2021)
Published in English (Yen Press), 5 volumes so far
Published in French (Akata editions), 4 volumes so far, under the title L'amour est au menu
Summary
Nomoto and Kasuga are neighbors. As you'd expect from the title, Nomoto loves to cook, and Kasuga loves to eat. As they realize that, they start eating together regularly - and happily, effortlessly grow closer.
But this story feels like much more, as it addresses gendered expectations around cooking and eating, and various kinds of discriminations the two women find shelter from with each other. As they end up adding a few friends to their table, Nomoto and Kasuga build together a small community of women reclaiming for themselves the joy of eating together: without judgement on how much or how little they eat, and without all the oppressions and pressure that can cloud these moments in so many contexts.
CW
All content warnings are always indicated prior to the corresponding chapters, are relatively contained within those chapters, and all are addressed as themes in the narrative with great care.- lesbophobia and internalized lesbophobia
- acephobia (discrimination against asexual people), external and internalized
- representation of eating disorders, microaggressions from other people on that topic, and panic attacks from public pressure around eating
- patriarcal family with sexist and generally shitty behavior, with attempts at guilt-tripping a character who considers cutting off contact
Sexual elements?
Nothing yet, and probably nothing at all: Nomoto is explicitly asexual. It would be interesting to see the two leads navigate a difference in sexual attraction one way or another and find how to function together on that front, though.Comment
I had seen this yuri manga praised everywhere for years, and I finally got to read it last year, and what can I say? It has immediately become one of my favorites, and I think it deserves all the praise, and then some.
Behind its "food manga" appearance, this manga may be the most outwardly queer activist, Left-leaning one I've read. And this can be felt in everything it does.
First, because She Loves to Cook (I'll shorten it) has a clear grasp on how sexist everything around food is, from Nomoto receiving constant comments that her talents as a cook would make her a good wife, to Kasuga cutting ties with a family that would control how much she eats (and facing a generally fatphobic society1, in ways that often intersect with sexism). Kitchens and family tables are heavily gendered spaces, and She Loves to Cook depicts it with a blinding clarity.
Obviously intertwined with this, She Loves to Cook depicts and vehemently denounces the omnipresent heteronormative pressure of society (in professional environments, in assumptions from parents, in ads, in love advice...). It shows its characters understanding themselves by finding a community, and notably by seeing other queer people in social media in ways that resonate.
Nomoto in particular is figuring herself out as an asexual lesbian(!! all these words are used explicitly!!!), and her way of doing so is immensely relatable. She does online quizzes. She tries to look for lesbian content on the Internet and is only greeted with gross fetishization. And so, she is struck by lightning when seeing her online friend Yako being out as an ace lesbian too.
Seeing Nomoto slowly grow in confidence about her identity with Yako's support and a growing exposure to lesbian accounts, and eventually writing into her social media bio that she is ace and a lesbian, is such a realistic thing. Through her online presence, she slowly becomes a queer beacon for other people just like other people were for her. It just means the world.
This isn't just "representation": it's showing how much of an epiphany it can be to find other people with similar experiences (and how isolating larger queer communities can be sometimes, as Nomoto doesn't resonate with many accounts of lesbian coming-ins). Seeing other queer people exist out there can sometimes change your life; and it's obvious that She Loves to Cook writes this from the heart.
And it does that with everything else, too.
Kasuga has been living away from, and with as little contact as possible, with her patriarcal, sexist family. She wouldn't get back there for the world; and a good part of the manga is about Nomoto and her friends helping Kasuga break off all ties so that she never has to interact with her family again. I mean, the manga even has Kasuga hearing about the concept of found family and immediately feeling all teary-eyed, clicking with it while thinking of Nomoto. It's just so clear that biological family can be shit, that severing all contact and finding your people can be the very best thing in the world instead. What else is there to ask?!
At some point, it also introduces new neighbor Nogumo, who explicitly suffers from eating disorders. Her intense exposure to her family and peers' judgement when eating in public has made it impossible for her to eat in the presence of other people, and this is clearly horrible to navigate socially. And so, when she is kindly welcomed by Kasuga and Nomoto no matter whether she eats or not, with the two leads caring so deeply about how they can adapt to her boundaries so that this moment is agreeable to her too, of course she'd cry from feeling accepted! And of course I'd cry too.
Because it's just so easy to care for others' boundaries and to not judge them, actually. The entire manga's message could be this: of course your needs and specificities don't make you a burden. It's easy to be a community that adapts to it and learns it with you.
It's easy.
And of course the author is aware that somehow, this message makes her an activist, in the horrendous political landscape we live in. So of course she is. She is when showing our lead characters fed up with fictional politicians ranting about "the traditional family". She is when the manga's third volume's revenues partly go to Marriage For All Japan2. She is when her afterwords insist on how gay marriage should be legal in Japan, and on how important it is to also have the right not to marry. She is when those afterwords also mention how great it is that her editor left her more time to finish a volume and gave her regular time off, and how this should be the baseline for all mangaka.
This is the kind of manga so obviously written by a queer person who cares, for queer people, with so many little things that hit home in every volume. Heck, it's also one of the only two mangas I know3 that has detailed content warnings written by the author before each of its heavy and potentially triggering chapters.
With all this, the only thing I would hold against She Loves to Cook is, in the end, its food aspect. Not because that aspect is badly done, but because this manga is one of the most clearly intersectional mangas I know, yet it has such an obvious blind spot around veganism, and more largely antispeciesism. Because if there was one manga to interrogate how the content of our plates hinges on killing other sentient beings en masse, it should be this one. It has the perfect setup for this; but despite all its care, this same care doesn't extend to nonhuman animals.
And yes, eating fish and octopus and beef and all of it is an important part of Japan's culinary culture. But vegetarian and vegan alternatives exist. Somewhere in there, when seeing our caring main characters eating dead animals while praising how delicious they are, I can't help but feel a strong cognitive dissonance with the manga's sincere message of care, and its clear awareness of so many other systemic oppressions4.
The sad truth is that carnism is everywhere, of course, invisible and unpacked until it is made visible, just like any other domination system (though it may be the most overlooked one amidst Left-leaning spaces). So somewhere, I'm still hoping to maybe see this series touch upon this someday. With little hope. But still.
With that, She Loves to Cook is still one of the best yuri I've ever read, period.
I didn't even talk about the yuri much, when I should, because the two leads' relationship quickly turns into such sweet domesticity, into a shelter of good food and love against the lesbophobia of the rest of the world, that it just makes me swoon. Its explicit discussions on consent for all kinds of physical contacts, including hugs and kisses, are also such a joy to find compared to how pushy characters remain an uncomfortably normal stereotype in the general yuri landscape.
Because instead of relying on pressure, assumptions and traditions, isn't it easy to accept the people you love as they are?
Extra
This manga notably received a live-action adaptation of which I've only read excellent reviews. Somehow I haven't tried it yet, and am afraid I will be all the more put off by the food part in it. But I'm still pretty eager about trying it one of these days.
Aside from that, I'd joyfully recommend the French version of this manga - even if Akata editions, for all the love I have toward their catalogue and what they do as LGBT+ manga publishers, have a knack for using somewhat weird French titles5. The translator here, Blanche Delaborde, is a queer person who has translated a sizeable amount of my favorite yuri, including Run Away with Me, Girl and Hanamonogatari (that I'll unpack later in this Februaryuri 2026); and others like Boys Run the Riot, Sasaki and Miyano, I think our son is gay or The Delinquent and the Transfer Student. To me, she's the MVP of translating queer mangas to French, and I really like how fluid and natural his translations often are.
And now for an overly expressive conclusion: look at this official art!! Aaaah!! I'm really happy these characters exist and that this story is told: this is so obviously what unabashedly queer yuri feels like.
On that matter, in one of the volumes' afterwords, Yuzaki-sensei worries that she may not be the best person to tell this story. This is humbling and strange, somehow - I feel that so often in what I write, and for someone to feel the same while making one of the best existing yuri is really telling of a big systemic problem regarding self-confidence... So, I don't think I'll ever be able to tell her otherwise directly, but I sure am glad that she's telling this - and that she's the one telling it. After all, it just wouldn't be the same series told by anyone else; and it's been obvious throughout these volumes that I want to keep reading hers. It really means a lot.
To be honest, I was a bit afraid at first when seeing Kasuga being the one fat character of the narrative and defined as the one who "loves to eat". Seeing her navigate a fatphobic society instead, and embracing eating for herself, has been extremely helpful in defusing my worry. There are still too few stories that deal with fatphobia in manga and anime - or in fiction, really - but the slowly growing number of sapphic plus-sized characters still makes me hope for more sensible depictions to come.↩
and similarly, for what I can tell of the French edition, its first volume's sales went in part to the historical SOS Homophobia.↩
the other being, to my understanding, Witch Hat Atelier in later volumes, though I have yet to read that part as I am waiting on the anime adaptation.↩
and there's so much to say here! There's a lot of sexism and gendering to unpack around eating meat for example, as an assessment of masculinity and domination on other animals - and this domination constructed as "natural" tends to feed so easily into others like sexism and racism, too. There's a lot about the social lie constructed around the "importance" of animal products to be "healthy". There are many discussions to be had on building communities that strive to stop slaughtering nonhuman animals, but that also accomodate to their individuals with food restrictions, by not turning this into a moral imperative that would have ableist consequences on some autistic or severely allergic people among others. I want more antispecisist fictions.↩
L'amour est au menu (love is on the menu) is fine, as I understand how the original title could feel stilted. I'm more doubtful about Entre nos mains (in our hands) for Run Away with Me, Girl, or Les fleurs se maquillent aussi (flowers put on makeup too) for the admittedly untranslatable Hana Monogatari which references Nobuko Yoshiya's seminal Class S work. I'm also frankly angry about Si nous étions adultes (if we were adults) for Even Though We're Adults, which feels frankly misleading; and La belle et la racaille (the beauty and the racaille) for The Delinquent and the Transfer Student, where racaille in French is historically charged with a lot of Right and far-Right use, often racist - compare to the original term, sukeban, which isn't.↩