Food is More than Food

I have a vivid memory of being at my Great Grandma Betty’s house, sitting at her large dinner table that was usually full of family. This time it was quiet. The soft hum of the dishwasher was just as soothing as music. Oftentimes my aunt and cousin would be there with me and my mom. I was young, as was my cousin, and we loved helping Grandma with the beans. It was always getting dark outside when we cut them, or maybe it just always felt brighter in the house. The gradual darkness looming behind the window and the warm glow of the lights inside settled us girls enough to sit at the table that was always covered in a smooth, waxy cloth.

Our job was to cut the tips off with small pairing knives and place the beans and discarded ends in their respective bowls. Our chubby finders worked slowly and clumsily, my grandma’s working quickly, skilled. Her fingers were wrinkled, thin, and always adorned with rings. I liked her nails with their ever-changing colors, mostly French tips or shades of red. My mom and aunt would join us to tackle the enormous pile of freshly picked beans gathered from my great-grandparent’s garden.

My great grandpa sat in his recliner a few steps away in the living room, oftentimes with the TV on a little too loud. As the night stretched, we’d get antsy, turning to eating rather than cutting, and each time trying the crisp, bitter, grassy beans as if the flavor would change. This earned us a playful scowl and finger shake from our grandma.

As I grew older, so did everyone else. The visits lessened and the cutting of beans even more so. When we did cut beans, I noticed my grandma’s fingers had become thinner, the rings loose, and her hands shaky. Eventually, she couldn’t cut beans anymore.

Now, I see it repeating with my mother. Whenever I return home to visit in the summer, my brother and I sit on chairs at the kitchen counter and cut beans for supper. Her small, sun-spotted hands that are always more tan than mine work efficiently to prepare them for the meal. My thick, strong fingers go quickly while my brother’s little fumbling hands try to remain optimistic. I’m always sent back to my apartment with a bag full of beans. It struck me that eventually this too will cease.

So, while I was cutting beans for dinner one night, I was determined to always volunteer to cut the beans. I began to plan the garden I would have when I had my own house. At that moment, I felt that I’d be content if my entire garden was just green beans. At that moment, I realized that food is so much more than just food.

I think it’s fitting that a single vegetable, a stringy green bean, can come to stand for the connection my family has always had toward food. From prepping to tasting, I have always been submerged in this culture. It seems to be as much a part of my genetic makeup as being six feet tall or having blonde hair. It connects generations of my family. If my Grandma Lori, my great-grandma’s daughter, had made it to Minnesota, there could’ve been four generations of women cutting beans together. Or stirring soup. Or frosting cupcakes.

Now that my great-grandma has passed, I’m connected to her through cutting beans. It’s in the same way cutting beans connects me to my Grandma Lori, who lives in Florida. Across distance and time beans, and more broadly, food has served its purpose in more ways than just replenishing the body. And yet, when Covid-19 invaded my immune system, I was left without the strongest, most tangible way to connect to people I missed. Or to be connected with memories I missed.

Holidays are one of those memories I always long for during the year. They are something I look forward to, especially Christmas. They are an excuse to reunite with family and unwind. To play games and fill the house with the pleasant aroma of cooking meat and the refreshing sound of my family chopping fresh vegetables. Maybe, if we were lucky, the sweet scent of freshly baked pies would close the evening. We had a strict ruling: Thanksgiving is turkey, Christmas is ham. The rest was interchangeable, with mashed potatoes and stuffing being regular guests at both tables.

The house feels warmer during holidays, much like when I used to cut beans, and I think it’s because of the laughter and love. Cliché, I’m aware. And yet, it seems true. It wouldn’t be that way without food, without the all-day cooking and preparing and the satisfying feeling of sitting down to a meal while resting sore feet. We could eat the fruits of our labor and enjoy one another’s company. So, it came as a devastating shock when I could eat only a bread roll for Thanksgiving the November after I recovered from Covid. I had lost all joy around holidays, the smell of cooking foods became repulsive, and my mood took a turn for the worse.

Even while food was becoming my undoing due to my newfound lack of taste and smell, it has historically, ironic enough, been able to keep me from feeling as if my family were falling apart. When I was young, about eight, my brother was born prematurely. Two months premature, to be exact. He was confined to the hospital for much of his first year, meaning I was as well. It wasn’t horrible, but it was horribly boring and scary. Almost three hours away from my hometown, the city of Minneapolis was much larger than I was used to. Yet, every so often a bright spot appeared. A Sun in the shape of a bagel. Bruegger’s Bagels.

The wall facing the street was comprised of windows, where the warm sunlight would filter in and cast a spotlight on the plastic booths we would slide into. The cinnamon sugar bagel with honey almond cream cheese was my order every time because it’s essentially dessert for breakfast. Anything to satiate the sweet tooth I’d inherited from my father. The sugar on the outside of the bagel melted in my mouth and peppered my lips like chapstick until I’d swipe my tongue across them to get every last bit.

During those uncertain times, I found comfort in the big city, with its towering buildings and windows reflecting the glaring sun. Walking hand in hand with my mom and dad toward a familiar place was all I could ask for, all I needed, at the time. Cars honked and people bustled around, but it felt like routine. It felt as if our lives could be normal again. I was connected to a part of my life that I had lost since my brother was born, the close normalcy of a regular family eating together. I had taken for granted family moments before then, just as I took for granted so many things before COVID.

It’s easy to see, then, that my life felt as if it were crumbling on October 13, 2020. My nineteenth birthday. In quarantine for COVID, I sat with my mom, dad, and brother on our oversized white-turned-grey couch. We were watching The Chef Show on Netflix, and my dad had just gotten back from a curbside pickup at Grizzly’s Woodfire Grill and Bar. The black plastic container resting in my lap held mini corndogs and french fries. A birthday feast.

The heat seeped through the bottom of the tray, warming my thighs as I cut a corndog in half with my fork and dipped it methodically in a mixture of ketchup and mustard. I brought it to my lips and began chewing, but all I could feel was the heat of the corndog. I sniffed slightly to clear my passageway, but I still couldn’t taste anything. Not the hotdog, not the breading, not even the tangy ketchup or spicy mustard. I held the greasy corndog up to my nose, but it was as if I was breathing in normal air. I took another bite and scooped a handful of fries into my mouth just to be sure.

My vision began to cloud. I was afraid this would happen, but I hoped it would never happen to me. On my birthday, of all days. I looked up at my mom as she was making her way to the couch. Tears began trailing down my face in unison with the snot that had been building in my nose.

“I can’t taste anything,” I said around a mouthful of corndog.

It must have been a pitiful sight, but my mom only looked concerned and confused. My parents assured me that it was alright. That it was probably just my stuffy nose. But I had a gut feeling it wasn’t.

That day marked the beginning of my struggle with Anosmia and Ageusia, better known as loss of smell and loss of taste. For a couple of months, I completely lost both. After that for the next year and a half, up to the current day, I have struggled with partial loss of each. I wasn’t the only one to struggle, I wasn’t alone. I knew this, but it still felt like I was. I researched this semi-loss of senses, and yet even though, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, five percent of Americans have experienced “disordered taste” and one in eight have “smell dysfunction,” I still felt alone. I felt like a statistic, sterile and with nobody to connect with. Most of these facts had a catch, they occur with age. As people grow old, they naturally lose their full range of senses. A lot of these tidbits of information had the tag “over the age of forty.” I wasn’t over forty, I wasn’t even half that yet. I was supposed to have time to enjoy my food before the side effects of aging set in, before I had to lose something I loved.

So I knew there were millions of people affected in similar ways, including my mom. She lost those same senses a little while after I did, but it wasn’t nearly as extensive or long-lasting. I still remember her triumphant text: “I can eat celery again!!! :)" I was relieved for her; it was the last thing she had to get past. Yet, it felt like the universe was mocking me, showing me what I couldn’t have. It was, and still is, an isolating experience. Isolating from others and myself.

Slowly, my senses returned to me. But, like toys loaned to a careless child, they were returned broken. One of the most disheartening discoveries was when I realized that sugar tasted terrible. My mother and I had just finished baking dozens of caramel rolls from my great-grandma’s recipe. They had a faint scent of burnt sugar and were coated in a brown sugary glaze, and when I sampled a piece, my mouth no longer salivated. It tasted how curdled milk smells. Not wanting to be overdramatic, I took a container of them back to my college apartment. They sat uneaten until they became stale and were needing to be thrown. This trend continued with all sweets and dairy products, no longer could I eat ice cream, milk, sugar, or any foods that contained anything similar. No longer could I eat a bagel with cream cheese for breakfast, alfredo for dinner, or ice cream for dessert.

Meat tasted rancid. No form of meat could I consume: no fried chicken strips, lunchmeat, beef jerky, grilled steak. Late winter of 2020 my cousin desperately needed someone to watch her pet Ball Python, Bofa. She had just moved out of her apartment post break-up and was going to live with my aunt and uncle. The snake was not welcome. My boyfriend and I answered the call and drove an hour and a half to meet her at ten o’clock at night.

I was starving, I hadn’t been able to eat anything, and I was hoping the over-processed McDonald’s chicken nuggets would be the exception to the new rule I had acquired. When the grease-spotted bag was handed through the window, though, my hope fizzled out. The smell, indescribable and terrible, invaded the car. I plunged ahead anyway. I lifted out the nuggets, following it with the satisfying zip of the Tangy Barbecue's plastic cover being ripped off. I had done this a hundred times since childhood; my order has never changed. Yet, when I popped the chicken in my mouth and chewed the crunchy breading, the flavor was overwhelmingly rotten. It was something I’d never tasted before, the words to describe it are lost on me. I instantly felt the pressure behind my eyes. I cried an ugly, snot-bubbling torrential pour of tears. My boyfriend was helpless to comfort me. How could he help when he had no idea what I was tasting or how to fix it?

I became hyperaware of ingredients. The list of things I could not eat was extensive; I still can’t list exactly everything. It became easier to not eat. The thought of force-feeding myself something I knew I wouldn’t like became repulsive. My stomach shriveled and knotted itself, draining my body of any energy and nutrients it may have been hiding. It became exhausting to repeatedly tell family and friends that I couldn’t eat something. It felt as though I was desperately telling the same story, hoping for someone to understand, but every time it was met with deaf ears. As my body struggled to find a new way to live, the rest of me did as well.

At the end of November 2020, I began a new job at The Home Depot. I worked for the Merchandising Execution Team or MET for short. Work started at five a.m., meaning I was running on less sleep than usual and an unaligned internal clock. During my first week, I hardly ate anything. I remember watching training videos in the brightly lit, freezing training room. I’d been at it for two hours, my head pounding and stomach churning. In my state, the rolling office chair was as uncomfortable as a hard plastic one may have been. I decided to try eating a snack, a bland Fruit and Nut granola bar from Nature Valley. I shoved it down my throat, practically swallowing it whole so I wouldn’t have to taste it.

Ten minutes later I was walking quickly to the bathroom, my mouth hot and filling with saliva. Nostrils flaring, I was breathing in sharply and quickly, willing myself to wait. I threw open the swinging door and flew inside before throwing up yellow-orange bile with chunks of granola into the milky white porcelain sink. The clumps were too big for the drain, so I did my best to rinse what I could. My eyes were red and watery, my nose ran, and my throat burned. This was my new reality. Any food I consumed on such an empty stomach was launched out of my body one way or another quickly after it entered.

My mind blanked out a lot of the period when I could hardly eat. So many of my everyday foods contained ingredients I never thought about but was now face to face with. I remember crying often, bawling over plates of food that I had put my faith in. Any joy I had surrounding eating and cooking was gone. I was left with dread around mealtimes instead of desire.

I was calling in to question the healthy relationships I once formed around food. It was hard to connect with others when one of the first things I had to tell them was that I couldn’t eat the meal they had prepared for me. They would ask why, and my explanation never seemed to satisfy. It’s all in your mind, they would say. That’s fake, you’re fine, would be another. Or they would simply smile and nod in the way you humor a child babbling a story you can’t understand because they don’t speak in coherent sentences yet.

Guilt ate my insides while I couldn’t eat anything. I could see the hurt or annoyance in people’s eyes when I didn’t eat at Christmas, or when I didn’t partake in food brought and shared at work. While at Home Depot, a co-worker of mine was leaving so he brought in cupcakes. I knew I wouldn’t be able to eat it, but I also knew I’d feel guilty, somehow, if I refused. Instead, I told them I’d “save it for later” and put it in my locker, only to throw it away when nobody was looking.

My self-image was destroyed; feeling terrible for fuelling myself left me with a wreckage of a body image. I felt ravenous when I didn’t eat, bloated and nauseous when I did. I stopped looking at myself in the mirror and got used to eating less. I always tried to look on the bright side because I was putting less junk into my body than I ever had before. I could say no to a cookie offered without a second thought. I knew it would taste bad. But it wasn’t only the unhealthy foods that weren’t palatable: apples, celery, watermelon, tomatoes, and the list goes on. I felt as if I were drowning in a sea of foods that I couldn’t eat. Everyone wants to be healthy, everyone wants to lose weight, but how can you feel good about yourself when you can only eat a select few food items? When the unhealthy and the healthy are off limits?

For the longest time, all I could bring myself to eat for breakfast was Ham and Cheese Hot Pockets or Raspberry Toaster Strudels. They had to be those flavors; there was no coloring outside the lines. I suppose I should have been grateful as my senses slowly returned. I was able to eat like the college student I was. If I couldn’t make myself well-balanced meals, I could at least eat frozen foods like my peers. But I wasn’t grateful. Looking back on everything now, I try to take pleasure in the simple victories. Then, however, I just wanted what was mine returned to me. I wanted to not have a damaged body, but to have body that had all its parts functioning as they should be.

Eventually, I tested the waters with new flavors. I began to build a stronger foundation of food that I could eat, and with each month my body repaired the damage that was caused by the virus. I felt stronger with each new meal I was able to consume, it felt like my body was, at a creeping pace, forgiving and healing itself. My mind and emotions slowly did the same. I felt like I could begin to be happy with myself again because of a growing wholesome connection with what I was eating. I now anticipate cooking healthy meals each morning when I awake. I excitedly text in the family food group chat about the new recipes I’ve tried. A triumphant thrill swells my heart when they respond with “looks amazing” or “save some for me!” I had to adapt, an understatement I suppose, but there were good moments in my experimentation. Just as many foods tasted terrible, or not the same, some foods that I hadn’t cared for pre-COVID tasted better than ever. Black licorice, for example, has always been a food I hated. Perhaps it was my young age, but the flavor was overpowering and bitter. Post-COVID, it took on a new taste. My parents and grandparents love Wiley Wallaby’s Liquorice Allsorts, black licorice mixed with a soft, almost fruity fondant-flavored candy. Now, I can indulge in a few pieces, I can join in the tradition of buying them anytime we all gather to watch movies and play games. I feel older now, eating the candy only the adults liked.

When everything felt as if it were on an upward swing, gravity would come rushing back to pull me down. I had gradually been able to make Fettuccini Alfredo, but only with Classico’s Roasted Garlic Alfredo sauce. The flavors of the heavy cream or butter or any other dairy products that belonged were too strong and my tongue could pick them out and latch onto their rancid aftertaste.

However, in July of 2021, I thought I had gotten past it. While out to dinner at La Trattoria Oceanside with my grandparents in Key West, Florida, I decided to order the Fettuccini Alfredo. I had been doing well with certain dairy products, and I was hoping it would be a mild sauce like the one I had gotten used to eating. After the first bite, I had to push aside my $15.50 pasta dish and settle on a sparse starter salad. That was the basic plot for events that repeatedly occurred and still occur.

Food still tastes different. My relationship with food is still different. I’m unsure if it will ever go back to the way it was, I’ve just had to accept a new normal. My long-time friend Julia has Celiac Disease and starting in kindergarten she couldn’t eat any gluten without having a severe reaction. Yet, she still tells me she can remember how normal Oreos taste, and how none of the gluten-free options are ever as good as the real thing. That’s how I feel. None of the food I eat tastes the same, some of it is obvious and others are more subtle. Yet, I know food doesn’t taste how it used to, it doesn’t taste as good, but it’s a new reality I have struggled, and still struggle, to overcome.

However, with the support of my family, I have been able to connect to my cooking roots more frequently as time has passed. In early June of 2022, my Floridian grandparents came up to visit. It was a warm weekend, and the delectable smell of smoking meat wafted through the back screen door. The meat grinder on the kitchen counter crunched on in intervals and the door slid open and closed in time. The men of the family, my dad, uncle, grandpa, brother, and boyfriend, all moved in quick, fluid motions to complete each kind of sausage before the day ended. The women began to clear the deep mahogany table of clutter and set about plates.

Birds chirped from outside and the sun continued to slant across the table, warming it as the day wore on. Finally, all sausage making complete, sixteen different flavors were cut up into sample sizes and put on corresponding plates. As a family, we gathered to taste test each kind, marking our thoughts and rankings on an “Official Sausage Taste Testing” form I had created and printed for everyone. Meat no longer had its rancid tang. Instead, sweet maple coated my tongue, followed by smoky sausage franks and the strong herbal taste of garlic and rosemary. I was able to participate in a family event for the first time in a long while. The sound of chewing, approving “mhmms” and sighs from my loved ones mixed with laughter and serious conversation about the bettering of the sausages. I finally felt content, I was part of the beginning of a yearly tradition surrounding food. I no longer felt alone, even if my senses weren’t truly the same. I felt like a child again, just happy to be around the adults.

I now hold on to feelings like that, much more than I used to. I hold the joy of getting Half Priced Apps at Applebee's with friends deep in my gut. I contain the happiness of family food traditions in the cage of my ribs. I carry the love of cooking, of tasting, of smelling, heavily in my heart so that I will never forget to be grateful. Grateful for my body recovering, for the meals I am allowed to prepare and share, and for the new perspective I have towards even the most seemingly permanent of things. I feel as though, in some ways, I am a better person because of what I have been through. I feel as though I have more empathy for those that don’t live perfect lives, and that’s most of the people I come across. It is not easy, loss of any kind is not easy, it never was, and it still isn’t, but at least I have found a way to cope.