Appetiser: Mother’s Milk

When my daughter was placed on my naked chest for the first time she managed to find her way to her first food source. It was extraordinary to witness, this tiny new creature with shiny black eyes, wrinkly soft skin, not human yet, or maybe more human than she’ll ever be, snuffling and wiggling her way towards my breast. Until that moment, I had not thought beyond giving birth to her, never mind what it would be like to have to sustain her. This experience is now crystalised in my brain as an image that radiates relief and wonder at the fact that she latched and fed so easily. Her first meal from her first home, sweet, creamy-white and – chunky – when it quickly emerged again from her tiny mouth as spit-up. Nothing is perfect.

The next morning, her feed didn’t go as well. I didn’t know what to do and the midwife wasn’t coming until 3pm. Thankfully my much more experienced sister fresh from the train, fresh from her two small boys, unceremoniously grabbed my boob and mashed it to my daughter’s face in a way that seemed magical and so assured and confident that immediately the feeding process started once more. My daughter drank and drank – or ate – there was, as they say in West Cork, ‘eating and drinking’ in that milk. It was extremely painful for the first couple of weeks, that initial tug before she got into the rhythm of the feed. But I was fortunate that our breastfeeding journey was a happy one, though it did feel hard and stressful to be food source, to represent nourishment for her – fullness, satisfaction, comfort – but I got used to it and there was something so clean and simple about lifting up my top and nestling her in my arms, that release of hormones making us both feel so sleepy and relaxed.

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I find milk disgusting, I always have. It was somehow a primary school staple all the same – the tiny glass bottles of full fat milk delivered to our classroom straight from the truck. It was barely cold with a thick film on the top that was both divine in colour and abhorrent in texture. I didn’t know what to think. I drank it, I am sure I did because I can remember the almost slimy film it left down my gullet. Why was food often so utterly gross? The smell, the thickness, the feeling of it in my stomach was so unpleasant, yet it was supposed to be good for me. This was before veganism was a viable option in Ireland before vegetarianism became widespread even. I was a sensitive child. All that was still ahead of me.

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Weaning my daughter was far more stressful than breastfeeding her. I struggled with what to feed her, if she had had enough, if I was doing it right. There are so many rules about first solid foods, and so many possible dangers from allergies to choking. I have never been a good cook, never interested and never willing. I often marvel at those long foodie pieces in Sunday supplements about how people love baking and how they swap recipes. I find it so utterly boring and tiresome. Don’t get me wrong, I love food and I enjoy eating – but food preparation leaves me cold. There are too many steps, too many processes to go through. These skills are not mine. I am an excellent and appreciative dinner guest though, just don’t ask me to host. Something will burn. If not the food, then my temper.
Is it ok to admit that I hate cooking? I often feel ashamed of that fact. Give me a table to set and I can do that. I just don’t know how cooking works, or how it’s supposed to. I didn’t want my infant daughter to know this of course, I didn’t want her to see how her mother wasn’t a proper mother who struggled with mustering the interest to chop. So, I muddled through – I mashed sweet potato, I made smoothies, I watched carefully over mini banana muffins in the oven and later macaroni and cheese. Sometimes she ate, more often she didn’t and threw the lot on the floor or smeared it all over her face. Adorable. No. So frustrating and disappointing I wanted to rip my face off, but I didn’t. I smiled and cooed and said, ‘Not to worry. Next time.’
But inside I died every time.

Entrée: Porridge

I don’t know what to feed myself most of the time. I am on a quest for the perfect food to spoon into my mouth – the spoon is my favourite of all utensils. A nice big dessert spoon for Greek yogurt, peanut butter, chocolate spread and my new saviour food – porridge. There is a café here in Tralee called Wild. It’s great and they honestly do the best porridge I have ever tasted – peanut butter, sliced bananas, wild berries, cinnamon, yogurt, and a very healthy slurp of maple syrup. I think about it all the time. I am actually weak at the thought of it as I type this. I got my hair cut recently at a salon close to this café and I talked about the porridge to my stylist the whole time. More than once she said, almost desperately at the end, ‘I’m not a great fan of porridge to be honest.’
I don’t believe her.
She just hasn’t had the right bowl yet.
She’s no Goldilocks.

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I’ve recently been diagnosed with ADHD. Apparently, food sensitivity, particularly in relation to its texture is a symptom of this condition. It makes sense I suppose. I became a vegetarian at six because I saw turkeys hanging upside down in the English Market in Cork at Christmas. Dead bodies waiting for us to eat them. Delicious. It was the moment I truly realised the world wasn’t what I expected it to be, that I might be in the wrong place, but considering I was here I would have to get used to how horrible and weird and disturbing everything would be. I haven’t been proven entirely wrong – though I am often moved to tears by the beauty of it all – but I am constantly trying to acclimatise myself to the fact that we are wilfully burning our planet, and the like. Not eating meat helps with this. At least I am not partaking in that horror. I don’t mind if you do. Honestly. Please invite me to your house for dinner regardless. I will bring wine and chocolate and flowers and smack my lips and say everything is delicious. I will mean it too.

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But back to porridge, I am obsessed. I used to find porridge disgusting as a child. It seems I can change and grow – so I suppose there’s hope for us all. There was a period when my daughter ate porridge too before she ‘re-hated’ it, a special term she devised just for this dish. She’s like her mother in so many respects – a floury, mushy apple makes her cry. We’d ride or die for Pink Ladies no matter that they have eradicated native varieties. I know, I am a heathen. But the crisp crunch. My god, it’s just perfect. And we are not alone in this preference, obviously. We discuss bananas regularly too because they CANNOT. HAVE. ANY. BROWN. SPOTS. At all. None. They must be just underripe and sliced on porridge – yes, yes, a thousand times.

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I tried to eat meat as a younger adult. I drunkenly grabbed a burger out of a good friend’s hand just as he was going to bite down on it in a take-away in Galway one mad night out. He watched me with his mouth open. Burger-less, of course. He couldn’t believe it. Neither could I. It was such a joy to eat it, the extra chewing required, even for a mashed up measly burger, was like nothing I had experienced for years. It felt so wonderful and warm and exciting to eat it without worrying about the morality of consuming it, about the cow who gave its life for the alcohol soakage of drunken postgrads. God help us. There must be a better way.

Dessert: Peppa Pig

My daughter loves meat. Of course, she does. She’d go through the eye of a needle for a sausage. She asked me when she was only four why I didn’t eat sausages. I told her I didn’t like them. She didn’t believe me. Eventually, I had to tell her the truth. Let me make it clear here and now, I am very much into telling children the truth about everything – well, except for the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, Santa, Domestic-Goddess-Mother – so eventually I told her that I didn’t eat meat. She asked me what meat was, what sausages were, and I told her straight,
‘Sausages are made from pigs, from different body parts of pigs and they’re all ground up together and wrapped up in skin.’
She laughed, my wonderful, brilliant girl laughed and said,
‘Like Peppa,’ I kid you not.
I said, ‘Well, yes. Like Peppa.’ And for a minute, she looked at me with something like sympathy or maybe even pity.
‘Mama doesn’t like eating Peppa,’ she said tucking into her Annascaul sausage (by all accounts the best in the country and from over the road near Dingle) For her birthday that year, and every birthday since she has begged me to eat a sausage, or ‘just try it,’ echoing the weary lament of parents everywhere at dinner time. But I won’t, and I can’t, and she is amazed to see that defiance in an adult. I tell her why again. She puts her head to one side and just says, ‘Mama.’
To be honest, I am relieved that she eats meat, that she knows what it is, that she digests it without thinking it is mixed-up breadcrumbs and an egg – which is what my mother told me black pudding was at the beginning of my vegetarian journey. I glad she is aware of how things work – honestly, baldly and without sentiment. Sentimentality almost killed me as a child. I can feel it still, tugging at my sleeve with its snotty nose wanting me to acknowledge it and weep for all that has transpired since I was six, and before. All the dead people.

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I didn’t think I’d be able to breastfeed my baby. I didn’t know if my daughter would join me on that journey. We were both very lucky that it worked out when so much else didn’t. Now she cooks and bakes with me when I am going through a week when I feel compelled to cook or bake one-pot or one-tray wonders. I often buy things in foil trays. My daughter loves to put pre-prepared sausage rolls into the oven and watch them grow brown. They are delicious and fat she says. I should try some. I did try my own breastmilk once, enacting a tired trope of lazy late 1990s sitcoms. It was very sweet like I said earlier. I am sure I could get used to it if my survival depended on it. I am sure I could get used to it if there was nothing else.

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From Magma 86, Food

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