Content Warning: this piece has a shadow of a mention of ED’s and/or restrained eating.
I’ve spent a week on the sofa– debilitated by a conglomeration of problems. God, what a sentence, I’m sorry but I can’t stomach self editing, and I can’t stomach ‘normal food’ either*. I can’t walk from the sofa to the bathroom without needing to sleep for a couple of hours afterwards, either – and though this is reading like a WebMD bullet point list for burnout, or a lacklustre lifestyle column in a shit newspaper – it’s neither of those things, I’m just moaning.
But enough of that though, and more, of this –
I’ve been feeding myself this week – a skill I learned from my Dad. I learned about the glamour of baking from my Grandma and my sister, with Victoria sponges, muffins, tarts, crumbles, meringues. I learned about the slap-dashery of cooking from my Mum and my boyfriends. With onion, celery and carrots at the bottom of a pan. Deglazing with butter, cooking off red wine – but feeding myself? That was Dad’s domain. An unglamorous, practical, fast and honestly, quite bleak skill that I’d argue is more useful than the other two combined. A skill that I need when I’m at the edge of sense and sleep.
Dad’s an essentialist when it comes to feeding himself. He doesn’t believe in glamour or time spent at a stove. He’s all about the energy in >< energy out equation. Eggy bread. Super Noodles. Stir fry packets from supermarkets. He’s taught me how to live when the weight of looking after myself seems too heavy, with the sort of cooking I turn to when I’m ill at home on my own, staring at a wall, curled up in pain.
Most summer evenings, with survivalist dinner on the beach, Dad would teach us how to boil Ye Olde Oak Hotdogs in their own can on a fire, and we’d eat them between bread covered in sand. Or, at the hob boiling Super Noodles with the stock sachet wiggling in our fingers, or stretching one tin of baked beans between all four of us. Lots of cheese. The hoof of a bread loaf. Worcester sauce.
I’ve been feeding myself in this way this week – with little patience or energy, interest or appetite. It’s all about the stodge. It doesn’t matter if it’s bad for me, or full of salt, or entirely beige. I don’t care. I just have to feed myself. Put the kettle on. I don’t care. It’s noodle time.
I guess I’m thinking about instant noodles so much because there’s been this shift in my approach to this sort of dinner, and this sort of feeding myself. Back when I was almost a teenager, as my parents worked on their own things and left me to cook for me and my sister, I would be filled with pride as I served up wiggly strands of salty, slightly sticky noodles into two bowls. I’d bring them over to the table with the sort of feeling I get now when I offer up a grown-up dish with tory-like ingredients. The sort of ingredients Ottolenghi would utter in a sans-serif typeface on a glossy paper. The sort of method only a tried and proven interest in haute-cuisine-farm-to-table-culinary-gourmandism could achieve. I would slurp the noodles up like an expensive oyster. I would cheers over the bowls. We were grown ups. We had, quite literally, made it.
I think being proud of how we feed ourselves is so wrapped, nastily, around goodness, nourishment, wholeness and health, and I think that’s fucked up. Of course it’s important to treat our bodies to whole foods that help us live a rounded and long life but, fuck, what about the times when we can’t lift our heads up from the sofa for long enough to say hello to our boyfriend when he comes home from work, because we managed to feed ourselves eggy bread at lunchtime using the only energy we had. That’s something to say cheers about. That’s something to be proud of – a plate of food with the crusts cut off, ketchup on the side and no vegetal component whatsoever. Just because it could be made my a toddler doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be proud of myself for making it. Just because it’s not something that diet-culture has told me to share with my audience doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be proud of myself for feeding myself with it.
I don’t know. I guess it’s just beige food. Maybe I don’t care. Maybe I’m in a fever dream fuelled by half a peach and seven salt and vinegar Pringles.
*what is ‘normal food’ anyway?
I love listening to you read this. Its so authentic. Beautiful writing
I loved listening to this, so many times I have felt like I've failed myself or that I'm a failure for (again) having instant noodles for dinner, but as you say, I am just feeding myself the way I can in that moment, there shouldn't be any shame in that.
Love that you are recording your writing through spoken word, there's something really lovely about hearing someone's words spoken rather than read. Thanks so much for sharing