I love food. I love cooking. I love eating. If you follow me on Instagram, you may be aware that my next deck project—or current, I suppose—is a food-themed oracle called the Magic Pantry Oracle. I’ve been posting timelapse videos of the painting process, with little additional information; this post will remedy that lack, diving into what I’ve done so far and what I have planned coming up to its 2023 release!
If you would like to listen to this blog post as audio (narrated by me!), you can do so while watching this slow timelapse video of me painting the Cucumber card:
ORIGINS OF THE MAGIC PANTRY ORACLE
After printing the Threadbound Oracle and Uncertain Oracle in 2020, I experimented with a number of ideas for my next deck. I had time to do so, considering that in 2021 I was reprinting the Numinous Tarot rather than a brand new deck.
If you were part of my Patreon at the time (now deleted), you might have seen the art for some of these attempts! There was a dark forest-y trauma healing deck with round cards, there was a deck themed around art and artists called the Creatrix Tarot (I still plan to make this one but under another name probably), and there was a food deck called the Stone Soup Tarot which became the progenitor for the Magic Pantry Oracle.
Old Stone Soup Tarot art:
I actually finished all 56 pip cards for the Stone Soup Tarot and I think at least some of the court cards, if not all of them—but I wasn’t happy with it. I went into this deck thinking it would be a smaller side project (the artist Tarot was my main focus), and in an attempt to reduce the amount of time it takes me to make the art, I decided to paint the cards on tiny 5”x5” pages in a simplified style.
More Stone Soup Tarot art:
This is where it went wrong!! By reducing the art in those ways, it made me way less enthusiastic about the project as a whole, which is basically a death sentence for me in regards to work, or anything else, really, as someone with an interest-based attention span. I could have easily finished the deck in a couple months and had something to sell in 2021 or ‘22 (I think? when was this happening? what is time? I have no idea anymore), but….I decided I wanted to redo it all in my usual, more detailed style seen in the Numinous Tarot and Threadbound Oracle.
Cedar, you may be saying, those look great! I don’t think they are bad, for sure … but they’re not what I want, you know? Maybe I’ll turn some of them into stickers or something.
ENTER MANY CHALLENGERS: depression, cPTSD, burnout, anxiety, figuring out I’m probably autistic, and physical health problems!! Also, writing the next book in the Eternal Library Series (that’ll be its own post!). Also also…. feeling burnt out on Tarot as a whole and as a concept. And the exhaustion of running my biggest and most lucrative Kickstarter yet (the last NT reprint) Ah. Well.
an extremely classic stu pickles meme for you to capture the mood
If you’ve noticed me disappearing from the internet in the last year or two, this is why. It’s no secret that I struggle with my mental health—my work is very based in that experience, and it’s my greatest hope that my decks and stories help other people in similar situations. I’ve gotten a number of messages to that effect and every one of them makes me so happy!
It does not keep the depression away, sadly. All of these challenges have led to two major things in this deck making process:
a) I changed it from a tarot deck to an oracle format and also changed the name.
b) Progress has been fairly slow.
I have since recovered from feeling burned out on tarot as a system, but I’m still keeping the Magic Pantry deck as an oracle, for a variety of personal and creative reasons. I love tarot and will make another one eventually, but I also love the freedom of structure with creating an oracle, comparatively speaking. So, what does it look like so far? Well, let’s get into that!
PROGRESS SO FAR - WITH PICTURES!
At the moment, I have 33 cards paintings finished for the Magic Pantry Oracle. I had 36, but decided I don't like 3 of them, which is par for the course. Had I scanned any of them? Barely, until just now, for the sake of this post. Do I have footage both in timelapse and real time formats of the painting process for quite a few of them? I DO. You’ll even be able to listen to these blog posts in an audio format while watching the real time ones, including this one! Though I believe I’ll have to speed up the “real time” footage a tad, though not nearly as fast as the one minute clips.
Okay, while writing this, I decided now is the time to catch up on scanning the paintings and adding their title text. The font might change before I release a final product, but here’s what we have so far:
(P.S. the color on the sides is not a card border, it's just background where I can plop my watermark and will not be part of the real cards!)
Thirty-three is a lot … but it’s also halfway finished at best, and that’s just counting the art itself, not the guidebook or the packaging or anything like that. The full deck will have somewhere between 66-74 cards, depending on my time and energy.
STRUCTURE, THEME, AND OTHER DETAILS
Disclaimer: since this is a work in progress, anything I write in this post is subject to change before the final deck is made and sold!
Deck type: Oracle
Number of cards: 65 - 75 (TBD)
Card size: Standard tarot size (2.75”x4.75”)
Cardstock: 350gsm (same as the Numinous Tarot and Threadbound Oracle), probably glossy as I find that it works better with the colors of my artwork than a matte finish. (Sorry, I know it's easier to photograph matte cards!)
Edging effects: Probably none, but depending on pricing and funding, might become an upgrade. MIGHT!!
Theming: The Magic Pantry Oracle looks at food at a single ingredient level, with a focus on foods in their most unprocessed state. Not as a judgment on processed foods, but to allow for broader applications across different diets and cultures. Most of the cards are plant-based foods. There are some processed items in the deck, along with some animal products, but they are in the minority. The idea is that you could combine these base ingredients in readings the way you would combine them in a recipe.
Structure:
+ 12-13 Vegetable cards
+ 12-13 Fruit cards
+ 12-13 Herb & Spice cards
+ 27 Pantry cards (starches, condiments, drinks, proteins, etc.)
+ 3-8 Utensil cards
Total: 66-74 cards
Exclusively plant-based cards + utensil cards: 57-65
Cards including animal byproducts: 6
Meat cards: 3
Because I reaaaaaally want to be veggie friendly, here’s the lowdown on that: I plan to include plant based versions in most of the animal byproduct cards! Whether you want to use them or take them out of the deck is up to you. As for the three meat cards, they will contain depictions of the animals they come from, NOT raw or cooked meat imagery. You can also take these out if you like, or use them to represent vegan alternatives (kind of awkward if there is a cow or chicken on the card though … which is sort of the point; we need to recognize where our foods come from).
There will also be cards for Tofu, Beans, and Nuts so you will still have veggie protein options in the deck. Maybe I’ll make the Tofu card include things like seitan and tempeh, I dunno yet. We’ll see!
Animal Byproduct (or vegan alternative) cards
- Egg (probably won’t have an egg substitute in the imagery, sorry)
- Sweetners (includes honey but also sugar, maple syrup, agave)
- Milk (includes plant based milk)
- Cheese (could be vegan cheese!)
- Butter (could be vegan butter!)
- Condiments (many condiments are vegan; some aren’t but have vegan versions)
Meat cards
- Seafood
- Meat (such as beef, pork, lamb)
- Poultry
Guidebook: The guidebook will be written and designed like a cookbook! My ideas for this are still vague, but here’s the experimental first draft of an entry I wrote for the Lemon card (text only, no layout design yet):
LEMON
Ingredients:
Sorrow
Bitterness
Regret
Resourcefulness
Instructions:
When life gives you lemons, they say you should make lemonade. But what if, in the process, you get a nasty squirt to the eye, or you run out of sugar, or you just don’t like lemons?
The Lemon card is about responding to unwanted and unpleasant situations. Whatever happened, whether it was something you did or totally out of your control, it’s now in the past and can’t be undone. Time to grab those lemons and see what you can make with them.
As a certain reality TV fashion mentor says, “Make it work!”
Aside from lemonade, lemons are a classic source of acidity for an infinite number of dishes, elevating their flavors to a new level. Think creatively about how you respond to what’s happened; can you use what you learned from this experience to brighten up another part of your life?
If you can’t, don’t beat yourself up. The sting of lemon juice in your eye is only temporary, and you will recover.
The guidebook will likely come in two formats, digital and physical. The physical version will be optional as it will be significantly more expensive than the guidebooks for my past decks. I haven’t decided whether it will be soft or hardcover, but I’m envisioning it on the larger side with full color illustrations.
I am looking into printing this deck and book in the US rather than in China, which raises the production costs—hence this split option. If you have a smaller budget, you can opt to only receive the (printable?) digital guidebook for better affordability. In addition, each card will also have keywords on it, or you can come up with your own associations.
There are still some major logistics to work out here, so this is the part that may change the most between now and the Kickstarter.
Packaging: To be decided. More info later!
Pricing: I am currently unsure exactly how the deck will be priced, but I’d like to keep the digital guidebook version around the same price of my current decks ($35-45 USD). The version with the fancy guidebook may be more in the $65 range.
Background and Biases: I am a white American millennial with mixed European heritage, with almost none of those food cultures passed down due to assimilation into monolithic whiteness. I was raised in a low to lower-middle class family mainly in an urban area, with a single mother who largely cooked easy meals from scratch and taught me how to do so from a young age.
As a teen and young adult I got more into learning to cook and bake from old cookbooks and later from TV competition shows like Chopped (yes, I know, a chaotic choice) and became interested in matters of food justice and production. We also moved to a rural area where we were able to grow some of our own food, which I helped with. The foods represented in this deck are largely a reflection of the foods I grew up on and/or now enjoy cooking.
13th birthday party! I made all my own birthday cakes from age 11 on up through my teens, which people thought was weird because apparently other people are supposed to make them for you? But I liked to bake!! Also this was 2003 so I was way ahead on trying to do a galaxy print cake, lol.
In the past, I have been both vegan and vegetarian, and still would be if not for a tricky combination of digestive health issues and money*. This deck is not 100% vegan/vegetarian, but it will be friendly to both of those diets, as described in the previous section. It will also not make anyone feel bad for not being vegan/vegetarian. I promise. No judgment!
*PLEASE do not advise me on my struggles with this in the comments; respectfully, you do not know the details, and I promise I did all I personally could to try to stay veggie before giving up. It actually quite upsets me at times.
Ethics: Food is a very complicated topic, and I intend to approach it with understanding and compassion. Though I have never struggled with an eating disorder, I intend to make this deck as safe for people who have as is possible. Hopefully I will be able hire a sensitivity reader. In the guidebook and imagery, there will be no discussion of weight or weight loss and no judgment of certain foods as “good” or “bad.” for you. I have been thin for all of my life and thus benefit from that privilege when it comes to my approach to food.
There will be no demonization of animal products, processed food, snack food, fast food, or any particular food components (i.e. fat, sugar, carbs). There will also not be any emphasis on certain foods being particularly healthy, “clean eating,” “whole foods,” or “super foods.” In the guidebook, I will do my best to consider things like allergies, medical diets, intolerances, financial availability, and culture.
The main focus thus will be on flavor, enjoyment, practical usage, neutral physical attributes, mythology, history, and how these things can relate literally or metaphorically to the rest of our lives.
i promise it is not worms
FUTURE PLANS AND PROGRESS
My current intention is to launch a Kickstarter for the Magic Pantry Oracle in the spring of 2023. However, because of my mental and physical health, I can’t say for certain that will remain the plan. For now, I mean to focus on completing the art for the cards, the bulk of the work, before moving on to the guidebook and packaging.
If things go well, I would like to post the cards as I make them both here (once per week, maybe on Fridays?) and on Instagram several times a week, along with both real-time and timelapse videos of the painting process on YouTube. I will announce more details about packaging and manufacture during the Kickstarter.
A RECIPE FOR DISASTER?
Earlier I mentioned that for the past few years, I’ve been dealing with some physical health problems. Either because the universe is a chaotic inherently meaningless place full of entropy or because of some sort of cosmic destiny, the majority of those problems are digestive-related. Moving states in 2019 combined with the pandemic has also interrupted my ability to get care and figure out exactly what’s going on. I only recently got back on the rails of that journey.
Something I was not prepared for in dealing with digestive disorders is the emotional toll it takes, particularly as a person for whom food and cooking has long been a deep interest, comfort, and way of expressing love for myself and others. I’ve been cooking since I was ten or eleven, I watch a lot of food TV, I read books about food production and food justice, I just LOVE FOOD!! When suddenly food hurts you instead? It’s a huge betrayal and even a grieving process.
So you can understand why I have some complicated feelings about the fact that my main project right now is a food-themed deck.
Kermit gets me
I have an appointment with the gastroenterologist in December, during which I plan to ask for some actual testing to be done to get to the root cause of the problem(s), which I’m hoping will help me and my doctors figure out what treatment is actually best and/or necessary. Even if this process ultimately helps me feel better, I expect there to be some difficult emotions involved.
Part of me sees all of this as an opportunity for personal healing of some kind, like I might be able to use the Magic Pantry Oracle as a way to process what’s going on with my digestive health… but it’s tricky. I have a sense that this journey will have an impact on what the deck finally looks like, how it works, etc., but at the moment I can’t say exactly how.
That’s all to say that creating always comes with unknowns and risks! For a while I wanted to keep it to myself to avoid too much public waffling on changes or even dropping of ideas entirely, but at this point I think I want to be open and talk about the difficulties of being a disabled creative and my creative process, including the lumps and bumps, to make the job as a whole more transparent. I know I’m not the only one with these struggles or fears of such struggles, and I want us to be able to talk about it together.
If you’re like me, you might also just like knowing how things are made! And all this is a big part of how my decks are made. One way or another.
TO WRAP THINGS UP
There’s still a lot of work left to do, but this is where I’m at! I hope you all are excited for this one—I promise that whatever changes or not by the time it’s released, it’s going to be awesome. Thank you so much for sticking with me and my work through all of these years! It’s only because of all the support I get from people buying and sharing my work that I’m able to do this great job for a living :)
me whenever someone buys something or comments something nice on Instagram
Much peace and love,
Cedar McCloud