There are only a few things that can rob me of my appetite: depression, tonsillitis, and, perhaps most seriously, heartbreak . After my first boyfriend dumped me at 17, eating seemed futile, pointless. My angelic, doting mother pushed plate after plate of comfort food towards me, but it tasted exclusively of cardboard.
I’d already become interested in “cooking” by then (my specialties being toasties, paninis, and other forms of hot and cold sandwiches), but not even melted cheese and deli meats could do it for me anymore. I kept losing weight, my face becoming gaunt, until one day I decided to go to Korea Foods in New Malden, mainly to get myself out of bed. Walking through the aisles, happiness, or something like it, bubbled up inside me.
The garish packaging! The jumbo radishes! Maybe , I thought, I do have it in me to make something to eat. And so I filled my basket with whatever looked appealing, along with a candy-floss drink to have on the train home. Back in our kitchen, I sliced King Oyster mushrooms into thick wedges, frying them until they had crisp brown edges, then added garlic and a fat lump of butter.
I steamed some rice, piled some kimchi on top, then crowned the dish with the king fungi and all his savoury juices. As I ate, the butter coating my tongue, I felt content for the first time in two months, the meatiness of the mushrooms and the sourness of the kimchi like a promise that life wasn’t so awful after all, that there was still so much to savour. It wouldn’t be the last time that romantic rejection rendered my tastebuds temporarily useless, but I had learnt something important that day, standing there in Korea Foods, studying the 10,000 different varieties of soup bases on offer.
In my early twenties, I slept with a man who treated me like shit for months on end while I treasured him like a £50 note in my wallet. Sometimes, before or after sex, we’d go out to different Turkish restaurants near our respective flats. One night, when I was under the impression that things were getting serious, we sat down to plates of mezze, and he dropped a bomb; he’d been sleeping with another girl, whom, he told me, he “really liked”.
My stomach turned – and my appetite vanished. The lentil soup in front of me, a dish I’d been craving all day, now looked like warmed-up sick. I left the food, and him, and cycled home to bitch to my best friend over FaceTime and chain-smoke self-pitying ciggies – but then, after a few hours of wallowing, I decided I wouldn’t let him deprive me of a hearty bowl of soup on a cold winter’s night.
I stood in the blue light of my fridge, and pulled out some Italian sausage and wilted basil, an onion wedge and some flaccid celery, and fried them all up with some garlic, a scent better than any man filling my kitchen. I added some tinned tomatoes, left my anti-love potion to simmer, and had a shower to wash him off of me for good. Then I got into my pyjamas and ate my dinner cross-legged on the sofa, feeling weirdly superior.
Instead of sharing vomit soup with a bastard who didn’t deserve me, I was dining on a bowl of independence. And then there was the most recent time I lost my appetite, when, right before I had to start a double shift in a restaurant kitchen, a man I had been falling in love with revealed himself to be..
. a prick. I felt like my organs were shutting down one by one, but I had 16 hours of cooking in a windowless kitchen ahead of me.
I was an adult with bills to pay: I couldn’t go home to be fed jam sandwiches by my mother, or curl up in the foetal position with a bowl of ribollita and a WhatsApp group of girlfriends enraged on my behalf. I had to work, if not surrounded by chef daddies , then definitely surrounded by men and their manly ways. The thought filled me with dread, and yet, as soon as I got to my section and started chopping up mounds of onions and fennel, I felt undeniably better.
A sickeningly optimistic barman once told me that the joy of restaurant work is that it helps you to enter into “a flow state of mind”. The phrase itself is a bit nauseating, but fuck me if it isn’t true. Cooking makes time pass differently.
You can reminisce about what you’ve lost and let the sadness work its way out of your system, all while safely distracted from the gut-wrenching pain of it all by the fear of slicing off your own thumb or getting a third-degree burn from the deep fryer. Sure, maybe there are other ways to get over a relationship, or a situationship, or whatever – ice baths and sound baths, medication and meditation – but, for me, nothing ever works quite like cooking. When I see a pat of golden butter shining in a pan, I’m reminded that this too shall pass, that my hunger will eventually come back.
And, in the meantime, there’s always ciggies..
