Cooking for people who are not you

The problem nobody plans for

Your appetite changed. The household did not get a memo, and it still expects to eat.

This turns out to be one of the most persistent practical difficulties of the first year, and it is almost never mentioned in anything written about these medicines. There are children who want the same six meals. There is a partner who works late. There is possibly an elderly parent who eats at half past five. And there is you, standing in a kitchen full of the smell of frying onions feeling profoundly unenthusiastic about all of it.

Wren holds parents, carers and partners-and-family — three circles about the same underlying situation. What follows is largely their collected practice. The aim is a household that eats well without you cooking two separate dinners for the next two years, because that is a shortcut to resenting the whole thing.

The smell problem, first, because it is the real one

Members consistently report that cooking is harder than eating. Standing over a pan, tasting as you go, being in a room full of hot food when hot food is exactly what you cannot face.

What has helped:

• Extractor fan on, window open, from the start. Cheap and disproportionately effective.
• Oven and slow cooker over frying. Contained, less airborne, and you can leave the room.
• Leave the room. Set a timer and go and sit somewhere else. Nothing is lost.
• Do the prep in the morning when the nausea is generally lower, and only heat it in the evening.
• Do not taste as you go if that is the part that turns you. Season at the end, or hand a spoon to somebody else — members with teenagers report this is a popular job.
• Cook the smelly things on your better days. If your worst two days are predictable, put the fish on a different one.
• Delegate the cooking of specific meals entirely. Not forever. On the two days a week when it is hardest.

If frying smells are a reliable trigger, that is worth saying out loud to your household rather than gritting through it. Members who explained it once found people were mostly glad to know, and slightly relieved to have an explanation for why you have gone quiet at six o’clock.

Feeding a household without cooking twice

The structural fix that members land on almost universally: cook one thing that everybody eats, and vary the portion and the parts rather than the meal.

• Components rather than plated meals. A protein, a starch, a vegetable, a sauce, on the table. Everybody builds their own. You take a fraction of each and nobody has to comment.
• Serve from dishes, not plates. The single most useful change reported by parents in circle — a plated meal arrives at a fixed size and creates a conversation; a serving dish does not.
• Cook the normal thing and eat the part of it you can face. The sauce without the pasta. The filling without the pastry. Nobody is being deprived.
• Batch and freeze in small portions. This is the one that changes weeks. When you cook, cook once and freeze several small containers — then on a flat day there is something that requires no decision. Members repeatedly name this as the thing that stopped them undereating.
• Keep the family favourites in the rotation. Your reduced interest is not a reason to remove a nine-year-old’s favourite meal from existence, and children notice when the household menu shrinks around an adult’s appetite.
• Lower the standard. Beans on toast is a dinner. Wren’s position is that a household eating something simple together beats an exhausted person producing something impressive and then eating none of it.

What children pick up

Wren is careful about this and asked for it to be prominent.

Children are extremely good at hearing the rules the adults are following. If a parent’s eating has changed visibly, and the language around it is about being good, or careful, or earning things, that is what gets learned — and it lasts far longer than whatever is on the plate this week.

What the parents’ circle aims for:

• Say you are full, not that you are being careful.
• Describe food as food. No categories of virtue attached.
• Do not comment on anybody’s plate, including approvingly, and including your own.
• Answer questions plainly. "I take a medicine that makes me feel full very quickly. I am well." Children accept dull answers easily.
• Keep eating together, even if what you eat is small. Members who withdrew from family meals report that it was the thing children noticed and minded most.

Talking about food in front of children is the full guide, and it is one of the most-read pages we have. Teenagers get their own difficulties, particularly around noticing a parent’s changing body, and that guide handles it better than this section can.

When you are the carer

A different and harder situation, and half of Wren’s carers circle are in it.

If you are cooking for somebody with their own medical requirements — a diabetic diet, a renal diet, a swallowing difficulty, dementia and a fixed routine that cannot be disturbed — you cannot simply restructure the household’s meals around your own appetite. Some members are cooking to a specification while eating almost nothing themselves, which is exhausting in a way that gets no acknowledgement whatsoever.

What that circle has offered each other, in the absence of a fix: batch cooking on good days as the single highest-leverage habit; accepting shop-bought and frozen without apology; asking for the practical help that people offer vaguely and never specify; and eating something while you cook rather than intending to eat afterwards, because afterwards frequently does not happen.

And the thing Wren says in that circle more than any other: you are allowed to need something too. Members who are looking after somebody else are the most likely group in this whole community to be quietly undereating, and the least likely to mention it. If that is you, this guide was written with you in mind.

The feelings part, which is not small

Two things that surface in circle and deserve naming.

The first is loss. If you were the person who cooked — properly, for people, as an act of love — then losing interest in food can take something from you that has nothing to do with eating. Members have described standing in a kitchen they used to enjoy and feeling like a stranger in it. What tends to help is separating the cooking from the eating: plenty of members still cook well for other people and simply do not eat much of it, and report that the pleasure came back once they stopped expecting the two to travel together.

The second is resentment, in both directions. Yours, at still being responsible for everybody’s dinner while feeling awful. And sometimes theirs, at a household that has changed without their agreement. Neither is a sign that anything is wrong with anyone. When your partner is struggling with it takes that further, and it happens more than anybody admits.

Poppy in Leeds, two children and a very small fridge, summarised it in circle in a way that stuck: she stopped trying to be the same cook and started being a cook who was on a medication, and the household adjusted in about three weeks. Nobody starved. Nobody, in the end, minded very much except her.