“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

Thank you, Virginia Woolf, for that lovely, gorgeous and true advice. I have one amendment: act of cooking preempts the dining well, the thinking well, the loving well, the sleeping well. In fact, it preempts living well in general. To me, cooking means caring for myself – physically and mentally. 

First of all, cooking for ourselves is nutritionally better. In order to avoid overweight, obesity, anxiety, depression, stress, and most chronic diseases, we need to eat the correct amount of foods: those rich in the correct nutrients. As a general rule, it is easier to make the correct foods in the right amounts at home than it is to stick to the guidelines when eating in a restaurant or getting a take away (which involves a lot of conjecture, guessing, and lying to oneself). We are told in Michael Pollan’s Cooked series: ‘Eat anything you want…Just make it yourself.’ The words sound absurd in the face of official nutritional advice which routinely tells us that the path to health is sugar-, carb-, and fat-free. But such nutritional advice has failed miserably to account for the mis-aligned goals of food service and public health. Case in point: the continued rise of food-related chronic diseases in Western countries, in tandem with our obsessive dieting habits and the proliferation of nutritional information. Many years of working in the food industry have taught me  what the main goals of food service are: serve delicious food; make customers feel satiated and satisfied for their money; make a profit. There is nothing wrong with these goals. They’re what eating in restaurants should be all about – enjoying an indulgent experience and enjoying your food. Food served in restaurants or fast food outlets is not designed primarily to be healthy and nutritious (yes, even restaurants with a healthy or ethical ethos). It’s not unhealthy to eat in a restaurant. But it is unhealthy to do so for every meal. 

One recently published American study suggested that for every meal eaten at a restaurant, a person could expect to have a 0.8 increase in their BMI (body mass index). The answer to this is not to make every cafe list the calories on every dish (as is on the cards in Ireland at the moment). It’s to cook more meals at home. When we cook for ourselves, we are aware of what’s going into our meals, and we instinctively tend towards healthier options, or at least reckon with the reality of what we are eating. This is why from a purely nutritional perspective, eating in restaurants should be an occasional treat – a the time for rich, unapologetic indulgence – rather than the mainstay of one’s diet. 

What’s even more important than nutrition is the physical experience involved in preparing dinner, and the mental benefits this experience yields. It may seem deeply banal to those who have never suffered from depression, but sometimes, for some of us, the simple process of making a shopping list, going to the shop and picking things out is a frightening prospect. To go to the shop, first I have to get up, get myself together, get dressed, put on my shoes and walk out into the world. I have to interact with people – ask where things are, say please and thank you. Potentially have a bit of a laugh with the fella behind the cash register (I live in Ireland). Smile. I also have to interact with physical things: feel tomatoes, sniff herbs, pack my bag and carry it home… All this makes me feel a little more connected to the world and to the food I’m about to cook and eat. It involves patience, attention, and the use of my senses. It’s a process that requires being present. There’s more to come when I get back home and into the kitchen. The following of a recipe, the touch and smell of produce, the methodical chopping, the timing, the prodding, the poking, the checking, even the washing up: it all involves paying attention, interacting with the real and physical reality of the world, and not looking at my phone. For me, it requires the perfect amount of effort and attention – it’s difficult but not stressful, it requires my full attention but it’s not tiring or overwhelming. It’s perfect. And it makes me feel better. 

Beyond the benefits of the mindfulness involved in preparing food, cooking provides an outlet for skill building and self-expression. Gaining skills and knowledge in a particular area is uniquely fulfilling, peppering life with everyday meaning and magic, the likes of which I struggle to find in my other endeavours (maybe that’s just me). On days off, I almost always make something delicious and often learn something new, feeding and nourishing myself in the process. As well as serving as a canvas for learning, cooking provides an approachable and accessible outlet for creativity and self-expression. As a person who always definitively saw myself on the ‘uncreative’ side of the fence, gaining the skills required to experiment with flavours and (my very favourite!) presentation has been an incredibly fun and rewarding ongoing project. Cooking allows us ‘uncreatives’ to create beautiful, indulgent and delicious things, which we can share with others or gift to our deserving selves. Cooking can be intimidating, but the ubiquitous myth that cooking is an ‘expert’ skill needs to go. If you can read, you can follow a recipe. If you have eyes, you can follow a YouTube tutorial. When you’re alone, sitting down to a meal that you’ve made yourself feels like opening a thoughtful gift from one of your best friends. It says ‘I made this, for you, because I care about you.’ Anyone who has struggled with depression knows how transformative small kindnesses can be, especially towards yourself. It’s the metaphorical opposite of self destruction, and sets you the path to feeling (at least slightly) better. 

Another huge benefit that comes with cooking is an ability to share the food. Sharing the food that you make – be it simple, fancy, or even a terrible disaster – is met with good feeling all around,  facilitating relationship and community building. This study from Oxford suggests that “communal eating increases social bonding and feelings of wellbeing, and enhances one’s sense of contentedness and embedding within the community.” While I’m not sure that I’d go quite this far, I still  enjoy Alain de Botton’s assertion to this end that: 

For all the large-scale political solutions which have been proposed to salve ethinic conflict, there are few more effective ways to promote tolerance between suspicious neighbours than to force them to eat supper together (Religion for Atheists). 

He’s on the right tract at least: food helps us to connect and bond, and this can lessen conflict, foster community, and make us feel generally more happy. 

In modern Western society, we live in environments where the time we have for cooking and dining has plummeted, while convenience and fast foods have exploded and home-cooking has all but disappeared from many of our lives. Our brave new world has led to a rising tide of mental and physical problems: abominable obesity rates; an explosion in rates of anxiety and depression; more people reporting feelings of stress and loneliness. Obviously, the problems of modern life cannot be easily solved by any single action. However, there are often simple, pleasant changes that we can make to improve the aspects of our minds and bodies under siege by modern existence. Cooking can help us to access mindfulness, self-love, self-esteem, creativity, connection, greater happiness, health, and beautiful, delicious food, in-so-doing shielding ourselves some of the everyday hazards of life in the 21st century. Cooking for oneself can be a key step away from depression and other chronic diseases towards a more meaningful and happy life. This can happen by making porridge or beans on toast, to baking a loaf of sourdough or making your own lemon curd. Be kind to yourself and cook something TODAY.

 

 

Back in Ireland, we would cook for each other. The stars aligned, allowing us to become excellent home cooks: we worked in restaurants and were well connected in our city’s small, but great, food scene. The rent for our respective houses was outrageously cheap and we lived with or near many friends – a number of whom were as interested in food as we were. We were privy to leftovers aplenty, discounts galore, and disposable incomes befitting people with salaries much bigger than ours. I had (and still do) a relentless belief that one should spend most of their money on feeding oneself.* The pantry in my house was as well stocked as any chef’s. My boyfriend was always a little more skint than I, and so tended to be slightly less extravagant when it came to the groceries. Still, he knew exactly how to flaunt his rules: regularly, with relish, and invariably with the help of smoked cheese and white wine. We gave casual dinner parties, served beautiful food, argued and smoked and drank and played cards. I had a go at baking sourdough bread. We tried picking things, but failed. I was vegan for a while. We blew all our money eating out and pretended we were food critics, joyously sticking our noses up at almost everything we were served, loudly and tipsily exclaiming that we could do a million times better at home. We casually cooked exquisite things for each other. Once, we went foraging for wild garlic by the river and I made risotto. A few people came to the house as we stood in the kitchen wolfing it down, and I offered them each a little cupful with a spoon. For special occasions (any excuse), we bought fancy cheese, and he made carbonara with seaweed, white wine and kale.

We left Ireland to travel, separately and then together. We came to Vietnam and found ourselves in new, scantily equipped kitchens with no ovens, pondering over vegetables we didn’t know how to use. Cheese and olive oil were expensive and of poor quality, and came with an enormous side of guilt about the air miles. Some of our favourite ingredients we couldn’t find at all. Eating out was half the price of cooking at home. I tried to cook, but everything came out wrong: over or under cooked, flaccid or flavourless. A central part of my identity was missing. I hoped it was not gone forever. I thought that my skills and knowledge would rot and eventually wither altogether. I felt a fraud and a failure. I had been displaced from my culture of food – not ‘Irish food’ exactly, but the small food culture to which I, we, belonged at home. Our relationship floundered. We complained all the time about the food in Vietnam, then felt stupid and guilty. I got fat, he got skinny. We fought in restaurants and missed home. Once, he cooked a nice vegetable ragu, but it would have been ten times better with a little Parmesan and a glass of white wine. We argued that night. Food had been central to our life together. Cooking and eating and sharing had padded the cracks in our relationship with everyday gratuity, adventure and love. Now, the cracks were becoming crevices, and were soon to become chasms too vast to be repaired.

*Sidenote: I know that this is an utter luxury. But it shouldn’t be!