Tanya Harris spent years as an assistant public defender before a food blog she started on a whim became something nobody around her could explain. Her Jamaican roots were there the whole time.
Key Takeaways
- Tanya Harris, raised in a Jamaican household, started My Forking Life in March 2016 as a creative outlet from her work as an assistant public defender, with no intention of ever leaving law.
- By December 2018, her blog income had matched her lawyer’s salary. By January 2019, it exceeded it. She quit her job in April 2019 and has not looked back.
- My Forking Life now draws over a million visitors a month, with Jamaican recipes among its best performing content and a newsletter list of more than seventy thousand subscribers.
A pregnant woman is standing in a store aisle, rubbing her belly, not thinking about the blog she had paused months earlier. She is thinking about french fries. Then a woman beside her reaches up and grabs an air fryer off the shelf.
Tanya Harris grabs the other one.
She does not know it yet, but that moment is the beginning of the next chapter. Not because of the air fryer. Because while she is home exhausted, her phone keeps buzzing. Strangers who found a shrimp recipe she posted before she stopped writing. People she has never met, coming back.
She cannot ignore them.
That pull is what brings Tanya Harris back to My Forking Life. The food blog she started as an assistant public defender in 2016 would go on to draw over a million visitors a month, build a list of more than seventy thousand email subscribers, and generate close to nine hundred thousand dollars in a single year.
None of that was the plan. There was a pregnant woman in an aisle, a stranger reaching for an air fryer, and a phone that kept buzzing with questions she felt responsible for answering.
Harris Grew Up in a Jamaican Household and Hated Every Minute of the Kitchen
Tanya Harris’s family is Jamaican. She spent summers there as a child. She is also half African, though she did not grow up eating African food. The food that shaped her came from her Jamaican side. Oxtail. Rice and peas. The dishes that Caribbean families carry with them across borders and decades, made the way they remember them.
Her family’s priority was education. Tanya ran track, earned a scholarship to compete in college, and trained alongside athletes who would go on to race in the Olympics.
“When I was in college and law school, I was a terrible cook and had no passion to make good food.”
The kitchen was not her world. She used homework as an excuse to avoid it. Her only criteria for food growing up was simple: this is edible.
It was not until she was living on her own that she started to cook properly. She picked up a cookbook, went home, and made scrambled eggs. They were perfect. Not because scrambled eggs are complicated, but because she had slowed down long enough to pay attention. She became obsessed with cooking from that point forward.
The Jamaican thread runs through everything she builds. The email sequences around Jamaican recipes. The oxtail recipe that became one of her most popular posts. Food that looks and tastes like the version her family actually made is what built the community around her site.
Harris Practiced Law for Seven Years and Never Hated It. That Was the Problem.
Tanya Harris started practicing law in 2009. She became an assistant public defender and stayed one for her entire legal career. She liked the courtroom. She was good at it.
She did not hate it.
“The job is fine, I don’t hate it. But something’s missing.”
Seven years in, she knew what the next steps looked like: more serious cases, running for office, becoming a judge. She visualized that future and felt nothing. So she started a food blog in March 2016. Not as a plan. As an outlet.
The first post was about how to get the fishy taste out of catfish. Nobody read it. She loved the feeling anyway.
The name came from a moment of frustration. She had been trying to think of something witty and kept coming up blank. One day she sighed and said it out loud. She bought the domain name that same day.
In Summer 2018 Harris Told a Facebook Group She Would Quit Her Job Within a Year. They Said Sure, Tanya.
In summer 2018, Tanya Harris typed something into a small Facebook group of food bloggers. She said she was going to quit her job and do this full time within a year.
They said okay Tanya, sure.
“I was probably just mad. I probably had a bad day at work.”
But she had written it down. Said it out loud. Something shifted. She stopped taking lunch breaks with coworkers and started taking her laptop to a nearby spot to work on the blog or watch a webinar. Whatever she was doing, it started working.
Her page views climbed. Then December 2018 arrived and her blog income matched her lawyer’s salary. January came and it exceeded it.
She walked into a coworker’s office and told him what was happening, because she did not know what to do with the information.
“Most of the time when people are making that much in business, it doesn’t just disappear. You have to trust that it will be fine.”
She needed someone else to say it. She had the numbers. She needed permission.
Four months of insomnia followed. The people around her were not saying go. What about health insurance, student loan forgiveness, you’re already doing both, why leave? She heard all of it and could not sleep through any of it.
Then a tutor gave her daughter a book from a Kickstarter. She opened it and read one paragraph. That was enough.
She texted a friend immediately. I’m quitting my job.
In April 2019, she did.
A Daughter Born Into the NICU Taught Harris That No Job Is Actually Secure
Between the declaration and the exit, there was a season that had nothing to do with blog strategy.
She and her husband went through IVF. Expensive, emotionally consuming, physically exhausting. Then she got pregnant. Then her daughter was born and spent time in the NICU.
“My job was very understanding, but I was like, my job won’t always be this understanding. It always depends on who my boss is. That could change any time.”
That thought did more than any income report to move her toward the door. The blog had proven it could make money. The NICU had proven that no job security was actually secure. She was not choosing a blog over a career. She was choosing control over contingency.
Her husband had quit his job first. He makes films. When she told him she was quitting, he said yeah, it makes sense, go ahead. He now works for the company.
My Forking Life Came Close to Nine Hundred Thousand Dollars in a Single Year. Ad Revenue Did the Heavy Lifting.
My Forking Life has been featured in the Washington Post, Food52, SELF, the Guardian, and the Kitchn. The traffic that gets her into those rooms comes from Google first, with Pinterest and Facebook underneath it.
Ad revenue is the largest income stream and the most passive. Affiliates second. Brand deals exist but she does not chase them. She prefers the model where the traffic does the work and the ads pay out, because that income does not require her to show up in a specific way for a specific brand on a specific day.
In her best year she came close to nine hundred thousand dollars. She is clear that it is not every year. She is equally clear that she intends to get back there.
Her Email List Has More Than Seventy Thousand Subscribers. She Writes Every Newsletter Herself.
The email list sits at more than seventy thousand subscribers. It used to be closer to ninety thousand. She cut it deliberately, removing people who were not opening emails, because she pays for every name on that list and an unopened email is not an asset.
She writes the newsletter herself and has not handed it off.
“I want to be the person that writes the emails because I want to be more strategic on the language I’m using, the things I’m deciding to promote.”
The Jamaican recipe sequences in her email system are some of her best performing content. The food she grew up eating, presented the way her family actually made it. That specificity is what built the community around her site.
Harris Left Law in April 2019. She Has One Thing to Tell Every Lawyer Still Thinking About It.
Tanya Harris lives in North Carolina now. She employs her husband and has hired other people. She does not argue with strangers on the internet. She deletes negative comments and moves on.
She still identifies as a student.
“If you can go through law school, pass the bar and do all that, you really can do anything. Lawyers are usually students at heart. As long as you take that skill and apply it, I think you could do whatever you want in the world.”
She would also tell them to get organized from day one. Track everything. Photos, videos, posts, files. Know where everything is before someone else needs to find it.
The fuzzy slippers and the two-pack t-shirt from the article that first told her story are real. She wore them the day the blog income exceeded the lawyer’s salary. She has moved since then. The shirt is around somewhere.
My Forking Life: myforkinglife.com | Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, Facebook: @myforkinglife
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Stephen Stanberry
