Hunger
Louise Gray
When my mother died she was still learning to cook. I know this because I have her recipe journal. It is a battered bright orange hardback illustrated with brown leaves and purple brambles, a little lurid to the modern eye but fashionable back in the 1970s. The yellowing pages are mostly blank. Under the index tabs for pastries and cakes are a few basics like rough puff pastry, sponge and scones, the kind of thing a young mother might like to learn as she starts to cater for children’s parties or grown-up drinks. I know these recipes are written by my mother because I have seen letters she wrote. She had a habit of putting the cross bar for t flying in the air rather than through the vertical line, giving the impression she was always in a hurry. The recipes she wrote are dashed off in note form and stained with splatters from a busy kitchen. It is clear she is just getting started, and then it peters out. I recognise my Scottish granny’s famously illegible handwriting (she trained to be a doctor before the War) in a few additional recipes for shortcake and drop scones. My aunts wrote down more practical recipes for things like fish pie, and a nanny perhaps added 1980s dishes like strawberry shortcake and lemon soufflé. There is a recipe in French for tarte tatin and crème caramel a la noix de coco, almost certainly by Francois, one of my dad’s early girlfriends. Then it is empty. Nothing in soups or fish, meat or vegetables, salads, preserves or sauces. My mother died when I was three years old.
I suppose the recipe journal was stuffed on the kitchen bookshelf and forgotten about, next to the Reader’s Digest Cookery Year and Friends of the Earth Cookbook. Life moved on in our big farmhouse kitchen. It had to. There were four children and my father to feed as well as various cousins, friends, tractor drivers and other men working on the farm, people who worked for us, felt sorry for us, or fell in love with us. Food was produced with remarkable alacrity from a fire engine red Aga in the main kitchen. Various women were employed to cook us meals, or stepped in out of the goodness of their hearts: Wendy, Dornice, Ruth, Julie, Vicky, Celia, Claire, Francis, Jackie, Alison. All of them were kind, but the kitchen was a contested space for me, somewhere a woman was trying to impose control on chaos and where I was apt to get in the way. I kept to the dining side of the kitchen, separated by rough beams pinned with unpaid bills and curling family photos. Here was the elm table, so warped with age that the crumbs fell through the cracks. We ate cereal for breakfast, meat for lunch, and boiled eggs or Findus Crispy Pancakes for dinner. It was a big, noisy, often boisterous place. We sat on benches, two boys on one side, two girls on the other, my father in the ‘captain’s chair’ at the head of the table. We fought constantly. I remember the feel of a roast potato thrown with some force in my face, Chinese burns and that lump in your throat when you’ve lost an argument.
As we got older and less lovable, the help in the kitchen drifted away. We ate at school, and during the holidays dad took us to the local pub for an omelette and chips. Every so often a new girlfriend would arrive and try to tame us with sophisticated dishes like red onion tart or couscous. It never worked. In the winter we sat around a wood burning stove, in leather armchairs so old the horsehair poked out, and roasted chestnuts. In the summer, French doors opened onto a brick patio where we ate chicken and sausages that were properly burnt, smoked roll-ups and drank rosé wine brought back from France in a trailer and bottled in the washroom. There was always a Jack Russell causing mischief somewhere. One of them, Lilian, famously ate a bar of Toblerone, a packet of Marlborough Lights, my birthday cake and a cassette tape – all in one night. The kitchen, originally designed by my mother, was the heart of the home. It was where we did our homework and watched telly as children, and where everyone ended up after a party as teenagers. There was only one flaw for someone as clumsy as me, the hard stone floor on which anything brittle broke.
In my twenties, we moved out of that farmhouse. Somehow in the packing and sorting, which I managed to avoid by claiming I was working though I was really getting drunk and forgetting the reality of losing the only home I had ever known – the recipe journal ended up in my box. I have carried it with me ever since, through every rented flat or shared house I have ever lived in. There was seldom a shelf in the kitchen, so it stayed in the box under my bed. In any case, nothing I cooked ever seemed good enough.
I have always found the possessions of my mother difficult to process. As a young child, I would sneak into my father’s bedroom and look through the items in her dressing table; clothing folded in mothballs, hippy necklaces and tortoiseshell clips. I knew there were stories behind these pretty objects and I desperately wanted to know more. But I also knew that asking for them would cause pain to my father, so I didn’t ask. Instead, I touched the soft Indian cotton that still smelled faintly of Opium perfume and warmed semi-precious stones in my hands. Grief, I was beginning to learn, was something to handle behind closed doors, with great care, and in secret.
As I grew older I started to construct a collage of my mother in my imagination from all the little scraps around me. From photographs I could see she was beautiful with chestnut hair and brown eyes, and she owned a favourite pair of pink dungarees. I knew she at least dabbled in feminism because there was a copy of The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer on the bookshelf. In a stack by the record player we no longer used were albums by Joan Armatrading and The Eagles and Jacqueline du Pré. I took note of the corner where she crashed a car and her favourite beach and the community hospital where she was a nurse. I overheard snippets of conversation about her feeding grapes to her children ‘like baby birds’ and letting my brother smear chocolate cake all over his face on his first birthday. In the kitchen I heard about the roast lunch she somehow magicked up for my father’s friends even though he had forgotten to tell her they were all coming, and the capercaillie she cooked for dinner once that tasted faintly of pine needles.
It was a fragmented portrait that I mixed in with ideas I picked up of feminine perfection until it became an image of a perfect mother I could not possibly emulate. Yet every day I would try. And every day I would feel the shame of having failed. Like many children, especially young females, food became part of handling these surges of emotions that I could not express. As a teenager at boarding school, I learned how to make myself throw up. I remember the feel of the hard linoleum on my knees and the drone of the extractor fan in the disabled look. I also remember telling myself why I did it, because a boy I fancied had not invited me to a party everyone else was going to. In my adolescent mind it made sense to punish my body for being ‘too fat’ and my mind for being ‘too greedy’. I expect I told myself a similar excuse each time I sneaked away to the toilet, pressure caused by shame, disappointment or fear building in my head. But in the end you forget why, it is just a way to release the valve.
Bulimia became a regular occurrence throughout my 20s, something I did when I was overwhelmed, angry or hurt and could not tell anybody, something I was deeply ashamed of. Although I knew other people did it, I told no one, always vowing to stop and referring to it in my diary as ‘the b-thing.’ It was only in my 30s, working in a high-stress job as an environmental journalist, that a series of panic attacks forced me to confront my behaviour. I began to see a therapist and talk about the feelings of fear, the ‘icy claw’ gripping my heart. I never spoke openly about bulimia, even in those therapy sessions. That is how shameful it was. But something else was shifting. I was finally unpacking some of the emotions I had pressed down, taking them out of the box in my head and examining them for what they truly were. Gradually I began to learn to recognise and regulate my emotions and, as a consequence, the ‘b-thing’ became a thing of the past.
At around the same time I also began writing about food. I found it a stimulating subject, a way to connect people with the environment around them and some of the impacts our food choices are having. I wrote about the carbon emissions from livestock and the rainforest lost growing GM soy. More than that, I found it was a neat way in to writing about emotions. Food isn’t just a choice about price and ethics and nutrition, it is about how you feel. When you are happy you want to eat a dish you consider a treat, whether that is savoury or sweet, and when you are sad you want to eat something your mother once cooked. To write articles about how we can improve our food system I had to ask questions about appetite. The science may tell us lots of good reasons to avoid meat or processed foods, but we won’t stop until we understand why we eat them in the first place. I wrote about how powerful culture and peer pressure and our basic animal urges can be. It led me to ask questions about my own past behaviour around food and why I had used it as an emotional prop. I felt I had the distance to write honestly about it and to even be of some help to a teenage girl somewhere telling herself she was greedy and fat. It was a hard thing to do, and I did not tell my family until the article was out because there was still so much shame. But I’m glad I did it. Fellow food writers, chefs and even doctors got in touch to say they had also used food as a way to push down difficult feelings.
When I wrote my second book about food, I decided to include the story of my mother’s recipe journal. I had grown in confidence and wanted to continue to explore the relationship between food and our complex inner lives. The article I wrote about bulimia had led to family getting in touch to tell me that my own mother did not have an entirely straightforward relationship with food. It did not lessen her in any way in my eyes, it made me want to hold her. Over this period I had my own daughter and saw for the first time how impossible it is to be the perfect mother. Through talking to other exhausted mums who had also failed to make homemade baby food or potty train in the first year or quell a tantrum in the middle of a busy supermarket, I became familiar with the concept of ‘good enough mothering’. It made sense to me to apply this same concept to food. If we could take the pressure off finding the ‘perfect diet’ and instead ask for the ‘good enough diet’ then maybe we could take the pressure off young women and men to look or act in a certain way. Anxiety makes people freeze. If we want to change the food system then people must feel they can act by making small changes. I ended my second book on a note of hope, that maybe now I was good enough to start filling the pages of my mother’s recipe journal.
Except I haven’t. I wrote down the 12 recipes included in the book, but since then I haven’t had the heart to open it again. To make sense of your emotions on the page is one thing, but to keep those emotions in check all the time is another. I was disappointed to find I still occasionally overeat when I am sad, or frustrated, or scared, or feel out of control. Though I do not purge, I still look to food for comfort or distraction in moments of distress. In the same way, I still have questions about my mother that will never be resolved no matter how many questions I ask, and I still have those moments to look at her possessions behind closed doors.
My favourite food writer, really the only food writer whose work I truly aspire to, MFK Fisher, wrote about grief and food. She was an American journalist who spent much of her life exploring Europe. She was not afraid to follow her passion for art and beauty and the sensual pleasures of life. She was fascinated by our need for love; ‘the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it’. But it was difficult to write about feelings in the 1950s, so she wrote about food instead. She wrote about a lesbian kiss and her first oyster, about chocolate cake at 3am when pregnant and dining luxuriously alone. In one of her best essays she wrote about hurtling in a train across Europe on the brink of the Second World War. Her lover was dying in front of her eyes and black shirts stalked the aisles, but still she drank Asti and ate ‘those big white beans, the kind Italians peel and eat with salt when they are fresh and tender’. There is a bracing defiance in her writing, in her insistence on joy in the face of death and fascism. Later in her life she admitted that she would have liked to write more novels, but food was a way to explore those difficult emotions we sometimes take our time to unpack. Through food she wrote about love and sex and rage and hunger, always hunger, a great insatiable hunger. After all, what is writing but a hunger for connection? For a way to be understood? Can you ever assuage that appetite? Probably not. There will always be empty pages. I will always be hungry.
First published in Issue #33
Louise Gray is a writer based in Edinburgh and the Highlands. Her most recent book is Avocado Anxiety and Other Stories. She is on Instagram @loubgray.