Mary F. C. Pratt sets two kinds of "cooking" side by side. In the first section, the speaker is angry and sarcastic. Advertising and the news, she suggests, sell us a fake sweetness: the idea that being rich means being good, and that anyone can "have it all." The kitchen language, with its imitation cream and its stirring faster and faster, makes greed sound like a messy, careless bit of cookery, and the rhyme at the end gives it a tight, scolding snap. Birds, forests, air and water are the ones who pay.
The second section turns to caterpillars stripping oak trees. They are hungry and relentless too, and the poem even calls their biology a kind of "inner recipe." But this disaster isn't the end. The oaks put out tiny leaves and buds on every twig. The mood shifts from bitter and urgent to quiet, almost awed. The repeated "Every twig" reads as astonished relief. The poem seems to say that nature's destruction can be followed by recovery, while the human kind is far harder to trust.