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Nausea and eating

Five things I can actually eat on day two, and none of them are crackers

Started 11 April 2025 · 8 replies · 327 hearts · read 5.1k times

TinukeManchester, UK · 11 April 2025
1.3 years ago

Manchester, Nigerian-British, two food cultures and one appetite, and I am tired of every list on the internet telling me to have plain crackers and a banana.

Here is my actual day-two list, arrived at over about seven months of trial and a good deal of error.

  1. Cold pepper soup broth. My mother’s, made at the weekend and kept in the fridge, and I drink the liquid out of a mug and leave the rest. Warm made me feel worse. Cold, in a mug, went down fine.
  2. Watermelon straight from the fridge. Cold and wet and almost nothing. On the worst days it is the only thing that has ever worked first time.
  3. Boiled egg with a lot of salt. Which sounds unlikely and is the only solid protein I can reliably manage on a bad morning.
  4. Yoghurt with nothing in it. Not the fruit ones. The plain sort, small pot, eaten with a teaspoon like medicine.
  5. Ice cold water with lime. Not a food, but it is on the list because it is the thing that decides whether any of the other four is possible.

Things that are on every list and have never once worked for me: crackers, dry toast, ginger biscuits, and anything described as bland. Bland is the problem. My mouth wants either cold or sharp and it does not want beige.

What is on your day-two list? I would like some things that are not beige.

109

PerlaManila, PH
#1

Manila, and this is the first list on this site that has looked like food to me.

Mine: cold rice porridge, thinner than you would normally make it, with a little salted fish on the side that I mostly do not eat but the smell of it makes the porridge possible. Calamansi in water. And mango, very cold, cut small.

The sharp-not-bland thing is exactly right and I have never seen it written down.

42me too 9

EphraimBrooklyn, NY
#2

Brooklyn, kosher kitchen, high protein, big family. Cold chicken soup. Which horrifies everyone I have ever mentioned it to and which works.

My other one is cottage cheese with a lot of black pepper. Wet, cold, savoury, no chewing to speak of. That texture category — wet and cold and salty — is the one nobody names and it is where all of my day-two food lives.

39me too 7

TanviMumbai, IN
#3

Vegetarian and stubborn about it, Mumbai. Thin buttermilk with salt and a curry leaf. Cold. That is the whole answer and it has never failed me in two years.

The other thing I would add for anybody vegetarian and struggling on the bad days: paneer, cold, cut small, with salt. It goes down when nothing else does and it is a proper amount of protein for very little work.

37me too 6

BrunoMilan, IT
#4

Milan. Italian family meals, going better than expected. My day two is a small bowl of cold rice with olive oil and lemon, and my grandmother thinks I have lost my mind.

Everything hot smells too much. Nobody warned me that smell would be the problem rather than taste.

33me too 8

RillaAberdeen, UK
#5

Oil rig catering, so ask me about cold storage — but on this I have a rig-specific answer. Tinned peaches in juice, cold, out of the fridge, eaten with a fork over the sink at four in the morning.

I have fed three hundred men and I cannot face any of it on a Tuesday. Peaches, though.

36me too 5

AshwinBengaluru, IN
#6

Bengaluru, vegetarian, protein is my project. Curd rice, cold, is my equivalent and it is what my mother made when I was ill as a child, which I do not think is a coincidence.

The childhood-illness food is worth a thought as a category, actually. Whatever your household gave you when you were seven is often the thing you can manage at thirty-eight.

45me too 10

BunnyWeston-super-Mare, UK
#7

Care home cook. Feeds everyone but me. I would add jelly, made up in the little pots — proper jelly, not the diet sort, which sets oddly.

Also, from thirty years of feeding people who do not want food: a small portion in a small bowl gets eaten and the same amount in a big bowl does not. Every single time. Whatever is on your list, put it in something too small for it.

51me too 8

TinukeManchester, UK
#8

Wet, cold and salty. Ephraim has named the category and I am going to be using that phrase forever.

Also the childhood-illness food idea, Ashwin. For me that is pap, which I had not thought of in about twenty years and which I made on Sunday and could eat immediately.

Small bowl. Noted, Bunny. I have been putting a spoonful of yoghurt in a cereal bowl like a fool.

44me too 4