*Note: this is from when I was going through radiation for Thyroid Cancer. Totally not fun.

April 6, 2018

 

I hate food. Not true. I love food. I love making food and experimenting with flavors and ethnicities. I love tasting layered, complex flavors; sweet, spicy, salty, tangy – sometimes all together! I love the kick of acid in vinaigrette or lemon curd, the kind that gives a quick punch to the face and wakes up your senses. I love the taste of cumin, pepper, and orange in Carnitas and the way the pork melts in your mouth. It’s a little salty and spicy, but the orange gives it a hint of semi-sweet and citrus flavor. I could go on forever about the joy of food and cooking, but right now I hate food. I even hate making it.

 

For the last few months, my relationship with food has been terrible. It’s been tumultuous. Somedays I miss being in my kitchen and creating something amazing out of a few essential pantry items. Other days I want to blow up my cupboards and destroy my stove. I want to throw out everything in my pantry and my refrigerator. I want to take the ten different kinds of flour and five different kinds of sugar I have out of my pantry and toss them into the air, so it looks like it’s snowing cocaine. Today is that kind of day. I want to make flour and sugar look like cocaine snow.

 

I had Radioactive Iodine Treatment this week. I am not enjoying it, and today, I hate everything. And today, I hate food. Nothing tastes good. I made a very flavorful herbed chicken, a recipe from Gwyneth Paltrow’s cookbook, “It’s All Good,” and normally it is all good. That chicken recipe kills. I use it as a base for a broccoli, quinoa casserole and I use it as the main dish for roasted chicken and even as is as a grilled chicken. But today, it sucks. I couldn’t even get it down. What was worse, is that I paired it with an avocado. I love avocados. But the herbed chicken with the avocado was absolutely nauseating. I got three bites in and threw my hands up in the air and said, “Fuck this shit!”

 

Now I sit here, knowing: 1. I’m soon going to have an avocado crisis because I have too many avocados and I currently hate them and 2. I am sad that it is all going to go in the compost. There are starving children in the Philippines that would love to eat that and would never complain. Hell, there are starving homeless here in Seattle that wouldn’t complain about it and would be sad to see me throw it out. Maybe, I should drop off all of my food at the homeless shelter. After that, perhaps I should change my attitude. I’m not dying. I’m not homeless. I just have lost interest in eating and making food; which is devastating to me today. And today, I am depressed over it – today. Tomorrow – who knows?