The Power Of Food In Times Of Grief
By Talia Lavin
Reminded of death, we yearn to be, and eat.
“The truth is that most bereaved souls crave nourishment more tangible than prayers,” wrote M.F.K. Fisher in 1949. “They want a steak.”
Like most of her pronouncements, this is so spare and elegant as to seem obvious; she goes on to recount the story of an acquaintance who gorged himself at several diners in the hours after his wife’s death — “and she not yet in her coffin!” — and arrived at Fisher’s glutted and ashamed. Gut full, heart empty, he deplored his own hunger. “He would always feel, in spite of himself,” she writes, “that sadness should not be connected so directly with gastronomy.”
The truth is, they are inseparable, an inextricable bond I discovered at the bottom of a ruby bowl of borscht.
When I heard the news of my college roommate’s suicide, I still had the taste of caviar on my tongue: I had just emerged from the Bessarabian Market in Kiev, where I’d gone from stall to stall, licking black eggs from plastic-tasting spoons. I was living alone in Ukraine that year. The bare-bones obituary was already up on our college newspaper’s website when I found out that the shallow breathing I’d learned to sleep through when we shared a double room had ceased…
