When Your Child’s Health Issues Force You to Become a Detective, a Nutritionist, and a Professional Chef
A review of Kitchen Medicine: How I Fed My Daughter Out of Failure to Thrive by Debi Lewis
The first sentence of Kitchen Medicine: How I Fed My Daughter Out of Failure to Thrive begins with an admission from the author, “I can barely cook.” It seems like an odd way to start a book about food and feeding, but the story that unfolds is the author’s often frustrating, sometimes agonizing, always evocative journey to feed a child who can’t seem to eat.
The birth of Lewis’s second daughter, Sammi, forces her to face a hard truth: she didn’t just need to learn to cook for her ailing child; she must become a nutritionist, a detective, and a chef.
Sammi’s multi-layered, years-long health battles necessitate extensive testing, hospital visits, and surgeries. Throughout these trials, the author faces evermore challenging nutritional restrictions. Sammi confronts a double aortic arch, eosinophilic esophagitis, floppy tissue in her throat, an intravenous infiltration, and more. While Sammi reveals herself to be tough, brave, and kind throughout, so does Lewis, despite the author’s self-doubt:
“Sammi was growing on my breastmilk, despite her inability to sleep well and despite the words “failure to thrive” appearing on a growing number of her medical charts. The label, I knew, had begun to apply to me, too.”
In Kitchen Medicine, we bear witness to a mother’s determination to fulfill her basic nurturing instincts. Faced with a “fussy child” and the requisite frustrations, Lewis struggles to find the balance between encouragement and being a nag, only to discover the problem isn’t her daughter’s attitude. Lewis’ doubts and fears populate the pages, yet she forges on, ever persistent and resilient, to nourish the whole family despite various dietary irregularities:
“Every Friday night for the remainder of the chylothorax diet — even during the two low-fat weeks that followed the fat-free ones — I made four plates of sushi rolls: one with fat-free cream cheese for Sammi; one with fat-free ingredients that we could all eat; one with full-fat dairy and avocado for David and Ronni; and one with vegan cream cheese for me.”
Lewis’s unfailing dedication to her daughter’s well-being persists, even in the face of healthcare professionals’ eye-rolling and negligence. The most blatant example is when the presiding doctor never read her daughter’s chart before dispensing medical advice and a course of treatment. Finally, after an agonizing series of unnecessary invasive tests and more than eight years, Sammie — and Lewis — realize the path to healthful eating.
While Kitchen Medicine is about a mother’s quest to fulfill the role of nourishing mother, it’s the author’s underlying personal journey with food and her metamorphosis that I related to at every stage and kept me turning the page.
First, she’s a careless young adult who eats tubs of tapioca pudding for dinner or tortilla chips with melted cheese. Next, she becomes the absentminded parent who can’t remember when she last ate or exists on apples and granola bars during long hours at her daughter’s hospital bedside. Lewis then takes up the mantle of anxious sous chef, and finally, a jovial Master Chef:
“And as for me, my chef’s skills honed under the most pressing circumstances, I realized that cooking had gone from a weight on my shoulders to — most days — a summoning finger, inviting me into an exciting unknown place… Even more profound were the moments I had started to accumulate when I prepared food just for myself. In all the years I’d been a parent, I’d seldom thought about taking time to make something just for me.”
Throughout the book, I delighted in the images of food and food preparations. A reference to angel food cake topped with plump ripe berries plucked from the garden transported me back to my childhood sitting cross-legged in the strawberry patch, picking berries for my birthday cake.
As a woman who spent years relearning how to cook after a diagnosis of Celiac Disease, Kitchen Medicine piqued my interest simply because of a sense of kinship, but as I read the book, I fell in love with the author’s determination, resilience, and beautiful writing. It is a medical drama, a reference guide, and a coming-of-age memoir that’s alternately funny and tender, it’s suitable for anyone struggling with complex food issues, who identifies as a foodie, or simply likes a good read.
Candace Cahill is a silversmith, musician, and storyteller living in Denali, Alaska. Her memoir, Goodbye Again — about losing her son twice — debuts November 2022. Her work can be found in Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog and Severance Magazine, and forthcoming from Journal of Expressive Writing. Find out more at candacecahill.com.
