The power of cooking during the coronavirus crisis

The power of cooking during the coronavirus crisis

Identity

Eating is one of the most powerful things. It’s one of those things we do every single day of our lives alongside breathing and sleeping and yet unlike the latitude, food is just so much more than something we do to stay alive. It can be a comfort and help us to connect and convene. Mealtimes act as nourishment of the body and mind. This week, I spoke to family, friends and acquaintances across the country and beyond about their experiences while cooking and how mealtimes have helped them reconnect with themselves and their loved ones during the coronavirus pandemic.

What led me to write this has been inspired by what is happening just in my neighborhood. Typically, I’d go to the office every day, at this time of the week, I am usually oblivious to what is happening in the neighbourhood. The first week was just joyful, thinking that everything was canceled. More like having that feeling as a child, that school is canceled. You can stay at home, but you have a lot of stress and anxiety at the same time because the news was really horrifying. Going to and doing some office work in the first days of lockdown helped break the anxiety. This week it is different, because it finds me right at home, not working from home, but trying to work while at home. As days turn into weeks, a theme started to emerge, cooking and quarantine.

Where I stay, I cannot readily buy food from outside, there aren’t a lot of restaurants and cafes or where to afford to buy cheap readymade food. In any case, most I’d consider close are closed. Soo…there was a practical reason to resort to the kitchen. I’m in a WhatsApp group where friends send recipes or record their voices and they appealed to me. I have a daughter who likes trying out exotic recipes especially keto diet, and we could do this on Saturdays and sometimes Sundays when the housemaid takes the day off. I found I could relax from the panic and anxiety because I was doing something with my hands, and was concentrating on something essential

Fulfilling; Healing

While for people like Peris, who is alone and has nobody, cooking in this corona period is simply fulfilling. It helps her feel like she isn't alone. For Cyrus, living in the centre of Satellite Kawangware, cooking during corona has had a different effect. He has been operating from home since mid-march.  ‘On a normal day, you hear cars, more than anything else. horns, brakes, motorbikes, and people shouting sometimes, but during the quarantine time, there has been silence, heavy silence. I could hear birds singing, I could also hear sounds of spoons and forks from the other windows which are close to my balcony with a heavy smell of food of course’.

For Cyrus, the power of cooking lies in its healing….’The kitchen is not a very relaxing and calming place for me. If I have ever cooked actively, it was for my friends but more like party time setting…nothing much like a basic need, wasn’t meditating or healing, … because I loathe washing utensils.  But now, cooking is an act of healing’. That repetitive tap, tap, tap on a chopping board as the knife sliced through an onion, the sizzle of its flesh when its dropped into a hot pan and the first waft of herbs as you roll them between your fingers as you add them to the mix. These daily rhythms of cooking is what made many of us who have the luxury of a kitchen come to appreciate more and more. It has become a way to slow down and reconnect with ourselves day by day. Along the way, some of us have come to learn a few things about their psyche.

Love

This is true for Anthony, an NGO worker living in Lavington, Nairobi with his fiancée Annaliese. Before coronavirus, they’d eat out at restaurants a lot of the time. They’d go to whatever restaurant associated with particular dishes depending on what they wanted to eat, they knew where they had to go. With instructions to work from home and a lot of time at home to kill, they took matters into their own hands. But it wasn’t just that, there was another need that cooking addressed. For him, who has been looking for ways to try keeping each other’s spirits up, sometimes cooking a meal was something to look forward to in the course of the day. And for him, her taking pleasure in preparing food for him is credibly important. ‘There is nothing sensational in the world like to know that something you have made with your own hand has brought joy and happiness to the people you love with your whole heart more than anything in this world’.

I asked him what things he knows how to prepare and what it has that taught him….’ when you are boiling tomatoes for the whole day and while you are doing that you chop onions and celery and you peel the garlic cloves and you ….when the tomatoes are done cooking down, you have to blend the tomatoes to get a smooth blend of sauce then you put in the vegetables then they simmer for an hour or an hour and a half then you blend it again then you season it, at the end of the day you are talking about 3hrs and that’s just the tomatoes sauce on the spaghetti alone.’

For Shifra, Andrew's wife, both living in Nakuru, It’s nice to have the roles reversed. For Andrew, Shifra was doing most of the cooking, and she now relishes that she basically doesn’t have just a husband but also a servant. And it’s been wonderful and delightful because he also enjoys it. But Andrew has also learnt a lot about himself just by the art of cooking, he has come to know himself. He is struck that there are a couple of qualities you need in order to really cook well that he had never been good at. One is patience. 'There are certain things that you just can’t really rush. You can turn up the heat and try and have things done faster but it’s not just going to taste nearly the same. The other is restraint…. there are times when two very well-chosen ingredients produce a much better effect than 20 randomly thrown in ingredients just because you have them. And as a Kikuyu man, I have often believed in the application of overwhelming force and have to learn the virtue of restraint as well, because it often produces a superior outcome'. In other words, he hopes to come out as a more patient and restrained person not just in the kitchen but everywhere else.

Identity

For Andrew, quarantine cooking has shifted his persona. For others, it has helped them reconnect with parts of their identity. Lilian, my sister, has been living in Mogadishu Somalia for the past almost three years. Since the restricted movement started in Mogadishu, it gave her memories from Kenya. Somalia has a lot of civil war around it and its infiltrated by the al-Shabaab. It’s always some kind of emergency situation…bomb blasts, shootings, suicide bombing, curfews, etc. and sometimes they have to stay home. And sometimes, you have to pretty much manage with what you have. Our dad died when Lilian was just 10 years old, and our mum when she was a toddler. She grew older and moved to Somalia to work in a hospital as a community nurse. She tells me that recent weeks have helped her reconnect with Kenyan dishes that she had left behind. It gave her the memories of food and the life she was living because she has plenty of time now, she can try recipes that her mum and aunt cooked for her. She lives with her boss’ daughter who actually helps in the kitchen. Her boss was a victim in one of the recent suicide bombings. She suffered multiple injuries and had to seek medical treatment in Turkey. With the corona pandemic, she was locked down there and won't travel back for some time.

She tells me, her boss’ is in the same place of life which she was in years ago. She doesn’t have a clue what Is going on outside so she asks her to help her during cooking like pounding the spices. When talking to her, I got a sense that She really misses Kenya, and today's lockdown has reminded her of that connection she feels she has lost in a way. 'It’s amazing how nostalgic food can be and also such a comfort. She says ‘When I’m cooking I feel like even though things around me and in the world are happening in an uncontrollable manner, at least I can control this part of my life. And that gives me some sense of hope and some satisfaction’.

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