Although Be Ready When the Luck Happens focuses primarily on Garten’s business success in the food industry, the memoir also stresses the emotional importance of food. The emotional abuse Garten faced at home is reflected in her mother’s austere cooking, meaning that Garten has no happy food memories from her childhood. As a result, Garten pours love into her food as an adult, cooking food that reminds her of happy times with Jeffrey. Garten writes that because her mother Florence “never served anything remotely comforting” (148), she spent her “early life searching—no, begging—for flavor” (16). Garten depicts Florence’s bland cooking not as a reflection of her lack of interest in being a mother. She envies her classmates whose mothers make them “warm homemade cookies and milk after a long day at school” (16), knowing that that’s not a possibility in her house: “not ever” (16). Garten’s repeated references to her mother’s bland, austere cooking style contribute to the depiction of Florence as a cold, emotionally distant mother by suggesting that she does not understand the emotional significance of food.

Because her mother’s food is so austere, Garten has no happy childhood memories involving food and does not truly fall in love with food until she is an adult.