After the death of my beloved dog, I’m thinking a lot about the role food plays in all of life’s big events – be they happy or sad
• Sign up here for our weekly food newsletter, Feast
I lost my beloved cairn terrier Wilf a couple of weeks ago, and when I say lost, sadly, I don’t mean I mislaid him yet again on Hampstead Heath. Rather, after 13 and a half years of (mostly) civil disobedience, we had to make the tough but ultimately kind decision to say a final goodbye. Since then, I have been bombarded with kindness. Friends and family have rallied round to take me out for breakfast, lunch, dinner and coffee, clearly worried that the bereavement might affect my appetite – well, apart from the one who responded by having a baby a week early, and who now requires me to provide for her.
It got me thinking about the part food plays in big life events. We so often cook, or otherwise provide for people in the aftermath of such shocks, be they happy or sad, as a way both to offer practical help and to show them how much we love them. Such tokens of affection tend to fall into two camps. The first is high-energy food that can be easily eaten with one hand while the other is holding a baby or clutching a sodden handkerchief, or simply when you’re just too busy to sit down. Just this morning, I received a picture of the new mother tucking into my extremely wholesome fruit and nut-packed granola with her daughter sleeping on her arm, but Melissa Hemsley’s five-ingredient flapjacks (pictured top) would fall into this category, as would Meera Sodha’s chaat masala popcorn and Thomasina Miers’ dark chocolate and toasted walnut banana bread. Like Anna Jones’s chocolate chip cookie power bites, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s spiced nuts or my own kale chips, they’re full of good things, and tempting enough to compete with the less nutritious options that are so easy to reach for instead. (That said, no one should judge anyone for the choices they make at times of stress.)
