Almost nobody writes for the person suddenly cooking for one.

I started Table Set for One because of something I noticed.

There are millions of people who, at some point, find themselves cooking for one after a long time cooking for more. A spouse dies. A marriage ends. The last child leaves for good. Almost overnight, the whole shape of feeding yourself changes — the portions, the grocery cart, the reason to bother.

Recipe sites still assume a family of four. Writing about loss and change rarely mentions that you still have to eat, every day, in a kitchen that suddenly feels too quiet. There is a wide gap between those two things, and the people standing in it are mostly on their own.

I should be honest about who I am, because it matters. I am not writing this from inside that experience. I have not lost a spouse.

What I have is a close view of it. I have watched someone I love learn to feed herself again after a loss, slowly, over years — and I have enough respect for how hard it is not to pretend I know it from the inside.

So I write as what I actually am: an editor and publisher who thinks this is worth doing well, and who cares about getting it right for the people it is for.

In practice, that means the writing here tries to be genuinely useful and genuinely honest, and never to perform a grief it does not own.

Over time, the truest voices here will not be mine alone. They will be the readers’ — the small, real things people living this write to me and allow me to share. That is the part I am most looking forward to.

If you are newly cooking for one, I hope this makes a hard stretch a little easier. That is the whole point. If it does, the job is done.

— Chuck