Grand Dishes: The Relationship Between Food and Emotion

© Grand Dishes

Food writer Sheri Castle wrote; “you can Google a recipe, you cannot Google a good food story”. Here lies the important distinction between food as fuel and food as pleasure. Everyone, regardless of background, has a food story. Though one of our most basic bodily needs, food can be a vehicle for not only sustenance but also experience and pleasure, both emotional and sometimes sensual.

In my opinion there are few things are more comforting than entering a room and finding I’ve walked into the smells of a meal I love, or spending the better part of an evening preparing food alongside friends and family. It can form the centrepiece of an evening, the basis of a happy memory and a means of comfort and self-care. It is a ritual that has the potential to calm and warm us if we remember it can be as much a pleasure as a necessity.

London-based friends and food-lovers Anastasia Miari and Iska Lupton set up the Grand Dishes project with the emotional side of food in mind. Inspired by their respective Greek and German grandmothers, the team has been collecting recipes from grandmother’s across the world to create a book that captures specific families, histories and cultures alongside each dish. Each recipe is accompanied by an anecdote from the grandmother who provided it, and includes age-old techniques such as cooking on a fire or making homemade pasta, detailing dishes that run the risk of being lost forever.

© Unbound

With the tagline “It's not about what it's like to be old. It's about what it's like to have lived”, the team taps into the fact that food has a lot of sentimental weight that we don’t tend to acknowledge. Especially for those who no longer live in their native countries, food is a window to a personal history and can be one of the strongest connections to home. The recipes included in the book aren’t chosen for their complexity or luxury, but rather for their cultural or individual importance; each is a piece of history for a particular region and a particular family, perfected over generations and captured by Miari and Lupton.

Reading about food gives us a vision of the good life, the indulgent life. It is such an enjoyable activity because in our imaginations the ingredients are always fresh and we always peel and slice to perfection, pulling the skin off the onion in one fluid motion. The joy of reading about food is not exactly an undiscovered market, and using it as a means to tell a story has been deployed throughout literature. Just look at Eat, Pray, Love where food forms an entire section of the narrative. Laura Freeman’s The Reading Cure sees her falling back in love with food through reading about it, and Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate documents a romance via the meals prepared at each crucial moment. In each of these novels, food is an avenue to some kind of self-discovery or self-care, the enjoyment taken in each meal is reflected in the pleasure each protagonist finds in their own lives.

Often we forget these sides to food. A Full Tilt Marketing blog said that currently only 1% of the population is involved in agriculture, with less than 10% involved in the food business. As such, there’s something of a disconnect between food and its consumers, though the popularity of food Instagram accounts mean people are also increasingly concerned with sourcing beautiful and healthy meals. The overall effect is a lack of real depth in our food consumption, and sparking this interest in food is something the Grand Dishes team seeks to address. Food is a necessity, but it is also a route to one of the easiest ways of enjoying life, inviting us to slow down and savour the flavour.

© Unbound