For as long as I can remember, friends have been synonymous with food. Like T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, measuring out his life in coffee spoons, I’ve measured out my friendships over the years in myriad greaseproof-wrapped parcels. There have been salted caramel brownies posted across the country to someone I admired; still-warm cakes balanced across bicycle handlebars on the way to various birthday parties; homemade biscuits snatched from the worktop on my way out to meet the diverse companions of endless pandemic walks. Friendships have been forged in the fire of a hot oven, consolidated through the bestowing of a freshly-baked loaf or a tinfoil parcel of flapjacks still oozing the aromas of hot butter and toasted oats. When I think of my dearest friends, I think as much of the feasts we have shared together as of their faces. Like some strange form of epicurean synesthesia, my love for them can be mapped onto the devouring of particular dishes, the ambience of particular restaurants, or the minutiae of preparing a particular recipe. A close group of friends in London will forever be associated with the night we rustled up a feast that, owing to various last-minute cancellations, saw us eating an entire block of halloumi each. My best friends from university are inextricably tied in my mind with our annual New Year’s cheese feast, also featuring a chocolate concoction now referred to, following a memorable typo, as ‘desert mouse’. I cannot separate the thought of my friend Victor from the time I once watched in disbelief as he popped whole segments of raw quince into his mouth.
As a Brit, it’s in my blood to reach for the ‘on’ switch of the kettle at the first sign of crisis, but it’s even better if there’s a home-baked biscuit to accompany the resulting brew. So much of our discourse around food hinges on community, sharing, and companionship - a word whose very etymology derives from the social breaking of bread. We take it as a given that the way to our hearts lies through the stomach, and those holidays we celebrate with our loved ones have become increasingly defined by the dishes we are supposed to share with them: chocolates for your Valentine; eggs at Easter; breakfast in bed for Mother’s Day. It has become a cliche for TV cookery show contestants, asked why they push themselves to their limits on national television, to state that they feed in order to show love.
But what if this habit were crushingly inadequate, or even potentially dangerous? What if the very food you might usually rustle up to mitigate a crisis potentially became the source of that crisis? What place can we, as a society, offer to those for whom food is not a marker of celebration or affection, but a source of fear and intense anxiety?
My dear friend Sushi was one such person. She passed away recently after battling an eating disorder for over two decades. I was completely unprepared for the news of her death, which came as a terrible shock. It hit me like a truck: a violent, overwhelming grief that bored a sharp hole straight through my pandemic-induced tedium.
I forget exactly how we met and became friends, perhaps because she made such an impression that she seemed always to have been in my life. She had a devilish glint in her eye and a wonderfully dry sense of humour - like a modern-day Jane Austen or Jonathan Swift, surveying the world around her with mingled delight and disdain. I always thought it particularly cruel that her brilliant mind was imprisoned in a frail body that didn’t seem a remotely deserving vessel for it. It was a body forever clad in at least three layers, to try and keep the cold from penetrating its tissue-paper skin. A body that, wrapped in her trademark fur coat and perpetually shrouded in the smoke from her beloved e-cigarette, exuded a kind of brittle, resilient glamour that I couldn’t help admire. Most of all, it was a body that, try as I might, I could not make better with food.
When your adult life has been defined by a passionate relationship with food in all its guises, a real sense of impotence strikes when your close friend has a debilitating eating disorder. It is difficult to express affection when the usual language for such things is lost in translation. I was suddenly struck by the utter futility of those habitual gestures - the paper-wrapped brownies, the biscuits, the cups of tea. They seemed ghastly and garish, somehow; a hollow substitute for something I could not do, which was to make her well again.
We have become increasingly conversant with the debates and issues that fall under that broad umbrella, mental health. Yet, as those far more eloquent and knowledgeable than me have identified, there is a problematic rupture in this conversation: a conspicuous absence of one half of the coin. While many are increasingly open about issues such as anxiety, depression and even post-traumatic stress disorder, the less palatable mental illnesses are still dogged by silence and stigma. Eating disorders fall squarely in this category. I have seen, first-hand, how people shrink from the spectacle of an emaciated human body, and I recognise something of myself in them, too. It is so very hard for us, enmeshed in a society that normalises the enjoyment of food and systematically excludes or ignores those for whom it is painful, to comprehend those who seem wilfully engaged in the destruction of their own bodies.
Sushi was highly aware of the thoughts that often ran through people’s heads upon looking at her; the less kind among those people would voice them out loud. She was abandoned by former friends, who declared themselves unable to watch her struggle. I struggled too, I admit, but more because it seemed so unnatural, for me, to dissociate food and friendship. I tried to avoid scenarios where food would be involved during our meetings: I made sure I had always eaten beforehand, so there wouldn’t need to be any added stress. On the couple of occasions that she insisted we cook and eat together - usually because one of us was staying over at the other’s house - the process was painstaking and excruciating. There were disagreements about cooking methods: she wanted halloumi, but baulked at my suggestion she dry-fry it in a hot pan, even though I insisted that no extra fat was involved; just the word ‘fry’ was sufficient to trigger her anxiety. There was impatience on my part at the process of cooking and eating taking three hours when it should have taken one. How ironic, then, that I would now give anything for a three-hour meal with her, however fraught.
I laboured under the naive and arrogant misapprehension, at first, that I might be able to help ‘fix’ her. I tried to help her come up with plans, strategies, and life-affirming aphorisms. I realised, fairly quickly, that I would be unlikely to succeed where decades of medical and psychological intervention had failed. I decided I would just offer her my friendship, on whatever terms she wanted to take it. It meant a reassessment of everything I took that concept to mean - a steady stripping back of all the extraneous baking, wining and dining. In a way, I suppose, this was friendship at its most genuine and unadulterated, uncluttered by the trappings of arbitrary gastronomic ritual. I accepted that food had become both absent, and yet somehow still a gigantic, spectral presence. I had to dig deep to figure out what I could possibly offer as a friend, without all of the culinary substitutes to fall back on. It made me painfully aware of how little place society offers for those who do not conform to normative body images or who might want to shy away from the pervasiveness of food; how difficult it is to escape its siren call.
We found life and joy in other things: our shared love of cats, English literature, and yoga. Food still made itself known, but in less conventional ways. Instead of sitting down to share a cake together, we would share our latest exasperations about social media food trends. She was at her witty best when providing scathing commentary on the insidious ‘wellness’ and ‘clean eating’ movements that plague our media, determinedly calling out their nonsense at every turn. No wonder, when such trends have been associated with rising anorexic or ‘orthorexic’ tendencies among a new generation of (overwhelmingly) women. My awareness of these is now heightened, and I hope in some way to continue the work Sushi did at calling them out for their dangerous lies. I will forever think of her when I see some bright spark flaunting their latest recipe for low-calorie, zero-sugar banana pancakes; what Sushi would refer to, with absolute disgust, as a ‘banana omelette’.
I will never feel that I did enough, and it is hard to acknowledge that what brings me so much joy in this world was, for her, the reason she left it behind. There is nothing left now but to do, in the unbridled space of my imagination, what I could never do for her in life: surround her with luscious tributes of food. I console myself by imagining her in a better place: a gilded Roman-style palace where she reclines on a chaise longue, fed delicious morsels by a band of minions. I like to think that somewhere she is voraciously sampling the most outrageous delicacies: white truffles, caviar, Wagyu beef. I festoon her, in my mind, with all the glorious treats that her vile illness never allowed her to enjoy, and I imagine her catching up, breathlessly, on a whole lifetime of flavours unexperienced.
I hope that, some day, we might meet again. On that occasion, you can be sure that I will rustle up the most epic feast I have ever created, and we will dine like queens.