On the day after Boxing Day last year, my dad and I went to buy some cabbage. My aunt and cousins were joining us for dinner that evening and we had a meal to prepare. The local supermarket was closed and the cabbage, sourced from an Italian deli around the corner, was obscenely overpriced. In a bind, we bought some anyway and headed back home to begin cooking. Standing around the kitchen island chopping and peeling vegetables, preparing a rib of beef and assembling a side dish of dauphinoise potatoes, we listened to music and chatted. The meal was a success and the cabbage – lightly browned and decorated with caraway seeds – tasty. But most important was that, for the time we had spent cooking, I felt closer to my dad.
This kind of intimacy almost always occurs for me while I’m cooking with someone. When I was 14, I was paired with a classmate in food technology where we were tasked with making a meal from scratch. We decided on a menu of jerk chicken, rice and peas. For practice, we gathered a group of friends at my house and, after procuring our ingredients, got to work. The results of our efforts were average, but that joint experience of clumsily blitzing fiery scotch bonnet peppers, onions, garlic and various sauces into a clumpy and barely edible mess cemented our friendship.
A year later, when my parents separated, cooking elaborate meals with my mum helped me feel less redundant in a situation that was out of my control. We’d make Caesar salads with homemade dressing (using crème fraîche instead of egg yolks), my mum toasting croutons as I bashed anchovies and garlic with a mortar and pestle, or spend hours slowly cooking rich ragù. In my mind at least, I was offering a sense of companionship that she may have felt was missing.
Later, when my dad remarried, cooking with my stepsister – making everything from fried chicken to parmesan custard served with anchovy toast – solidified our bond as siblings. When I visited her recently in Newcastle, the whole trip revolved around the food we prepared: blackened fish and Old Bay-seasoned corn on the cob on one night, miso-butter mushrooms on another.
Then there’s my dad. He’s a man of few words, but when we cook together we discuss films, music and books and update each other on our lives while chopping onions, preparing salads or making recipes from A Taste of Our Cooking, a book of traditional Ismaili recipes. One dish in particular, a chicken pilau spiced with cumin, cloves and cardamon pods, reminds me of the food that my grandmother, who lived with us growing up, used to take to the mosque to share with others. Cooking it with my dad takes me back to that time. I’m often relegated to sous chef, but it’s our time together and I cherish it.
“Food is at the centre of human connections,” explains Charlotte Hastings, a psychotherapist and the author of Kitchen Therapy, a book which explores the psychological, social and spiritual aspects of food. “That’s how we began as a species: by making and enjoying food together. The way we cook gives us a way of expressing love between one another.”
Hastings uses the shared language of cooking and food as a way to explore personal and interpersonal issues with her patients. It’s a technique, she says, that means she can move from emotionally difficult areas people are discussing to, say, whisking eggs, while drawing connections between their feelings and the food they’re preparing. “It allows us to stay in the room and not run away from those feelings, while not staying in a dangerous place for too long with people. It’s an effective way of working with trauma.”
While the intimacy I find in cooking with friends and family doesn’t always involve spilling our deepest held secrets or emotional pain, She suggests that the active nature of preparing food means the pressure or anxiety some people may feel in one-on-one conversation slip away. “We’re feeling that sense of being unified,” she says. “You don’t have to be having really big, meaningful conversations to come away feeling sustained and nourished in those moments.”
Dr Michael Kocet, assistant vice-chancellor for graduate education at the University of College Denver and a mental health counsellor who developed a graduate course that trains people how to use cooking in a therapeutic setting, agrees that cooking together creates a less threatening environment than sitting down face-to-face for a chat. “Research shows, especially with men and adolescents and boys, that parents often find their child opens up when they’re driving in the car. Why? Well, it’s because they’re not making eye contact. They’re focusing ahead, and that eye contact is less threatening,” he says. “It’s the same thing with cooking. It’s less intimidating, less vulnerable, because you’re focusing on a task of chopping or stirring or having a common activity together.”
Having recently moved away from my family in London to live alone in Sheffield, I’ve found that cooking together with friends has also often soothed those moments where I’ve felt lonely or isolated. “I think food is a binding opportunity,” Kocet says. “It brings friends together. It might not even be about being a good chef. I think it’s just a way to foster community.”
Leeds-based charity Zest is putting this into practice with its social enterprise Leeds Cookery School. Using profits made from hosting cookery classes for local foodies and hiring out their kitchens for corporate away days and private events, they offer a range of free-to-access community projects centred around education about health eating and the preparation and sharing of food. “Food crosses all barriers, languages and demographics,” says Joe Grant, who works as the charity’s head of social enterprise. “I could be sitting next to you and we could be talking in different languages. But if we were to cook a meal together and share it, there would be smiles, there would be laughter, there would be a connection, and there would be a bond that’s made.”
Grant highlights two of the programmes that the organisation runs: the Men’s Pie Club, an initiative which was first set up by Newcastle-based social enterprise Food Nation that aims to combat social isolation among men of all ages, and the Welcome Café, Leeds, a community cooking session for refugees and asylum seekers living in the area.
“The premise of the Pie Club is that socially isolated men can come to a session once a week, roll up their sleeves, make some pastry and a filling and produce a pie,” Grant says. “But the kinaesthetic act is somewhat secondary because they are having conversations. The pies just get made along the way.” He shares one story about a man who arrived at his first session with low confidence and social anxiety. “But since coming to the pie club, we saw that person come out of their shell,” Grant says. “Before too long, they were showing participants what to do and now that person is leading sessions.” Many of the men also go on to build friendships outside cooking. “They have a WhatsApp group. They go home and share their success and failures in pie making. It doesn’t have to be about in-depth chats. They’re making connections with people.”
This is the ethos behind the Welcome Café, too. Each week one person decides what the group will cook and they stroll through Leeds Kirkgate Market to pick up ingredients before heading back to the kitchens in the market to prepare a meal. “We have people from Somalia, Algeria, Hong Kong,” Grant says. “It’s just so international and varied. There’s 18 to 80-year-olds and so many different personalities. They all chip in and it’s this one big community meal.”
Despite the obvious benefits of sharing food together, a 2021 survey conducted by Sainsbury’s found that only 28% of households eat the same meal at dinnertime, with 55% saying they struggle to find the time to dine together. Meanwhile, a 2016 study found that parents of 1.5 million families in the UK had never cooked with their children. Hastings puts this down to the separation of our minds and our bodies. “Obviously class and gender play into this, but I think in a capitalist culture we’ve lost the spiritual structure of making food as an act of love and communication. There’s this real disconnect around what the purpose of eating is,” she says. “It is difficult when people don’t have enough time, but we need to ask ourselves why we don’t have enough time.Where is that coming from?”
“I don’t think it’s anybody’s fault: it’s the financial pressures, economic pressures and environmental pressures,” says Grant. “Life has just got so much faster, almost exponentially, over the past 20 years and convenience has accelerated that. It’s created this environment which doesn’t enable a family to have the luxury to make time to cook together, but that is so important.”
A few weeks ago, after a rough few weeks for my mental health, I popped to a friend’s house for dinner. We stood in his kitchen dicing peppers, celery and onions that would make up the bastardised jambalaya I’ve been cooking for years. As I browned the chicken and he measured out the rice, we talked and soon the pressure that I’d felt building in my life began to ease. And when we sat down to eat, the results of the intimacy I had felt as we cooked tasted good.
