Here’s something not many people know about me — I haven’t cooked a meal from scratch since, ooh, about 2009. I don’t know how my oven works, my expensive navy blue Shaker kitchen cupboards are full of meal-replacement shakes and I only learnt how to boil an egg last year, at the grand age of 37.
It’s a fact that horrifies friends, family and pretty much everyone I meet that if I could eat a pill at the start of each week that contained all the nutrients I need for the next seven days, I would do. Happily! With (metaphorical) relish!
Hi, my name is Cathy Adams and I … hate food.
I don’t hate the act of eating per se, I’m actually quite greedy. The point of food, in my mind, is fuel. I want to feel full — enjoyment is secondary. What I put in my body to achieve that goal is irrelevant, which is why I cycle through the same handful of healthy(ish) meals and have done for about the past decade: Covent Garden Soup, chicken and avocado salad, microwaveable rice packets, bran flakes. I could eat the same meal three times a day for the rest of my life and not get bored.
I know, I know. You’re horrified. Most people are. But let me explain.
I’m a thirtysomething mother with a busy job that takes up more brain space than it probably should. Food is just one more thing to add to the mental ticker tape that revolves around dress-up days, deadlines and, I don’t know, minor things like keeping my marriage, social life and mental health on track. Spending hours planning, buying ingredients and cooking meals — so boring! — feels like an unbelievable waste of time, so deciding what to eat is given the same cognitive space as something as mundane as brushing my teeth or having a shower. Food is something to tick off my to-do list when I feel hungry, nothing more.
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Friends have accepted that if they come round to mine for dinner it’s probably an Iceland party platter of 100 mini-sausage rolls, samosas and cheese and onion lattices. While at university I entertained with cans of all-day breakfast (beans, little sausages, a button mushroom, bits of “cereal”). I did once try a chilli prawn linguine recipe from Jamie Oliver’s 15-Minute Meals, but got bored waiting for the pasta to boil, so it came out in soupy clumps the texture of yoghurt; another time my fridge broke without me realising, so I had to store minced beef for a bolognese in a bath full of ice. The last time I did try to use an oven (last decade, in my old house), I set it on fire when I put fishcakes on greaseproof paper and turned the grill on instead.
Nowadays, when I host I stick to picky bits from my local M&S or just takeaway pizzas — which I’ll probably ask my husband to “cook” to be on the safe side. (The only thing I get stroppy about is bad booze — so if you do get an invite, I will at least have a nice bottle of Laurent-Perrier or some Chilean pinot noir to wash the cocktail sausages down with, and nobody cares about what they eat after a bottle of that, do they?)
The fact I’m not a — howl — “foodie” means that when I’m out I have the tendency to eat like a teenage boy at an ice rink. I actually like burger vans, hole-in-the-wall joints and, crucially, plane food. The last one is important. As a travel editor I get to visit some of the world’s best destinations, and fancy food is usually involved — awkwardly, most people apart from me now say that trying the local cuisine is one of the important parts of their trip. Instead I have to nod politely when the head chef comes out to explain the concept of dry-aged wagyu beef, the artichoke season and ingredients like… samphire, was it? I’m sorry to say that rather than a ten-course tasting menu in some poncey Michelin-starred restaurant, my troglodyte taste buds would be just fine with the kebab shop opposite. My eating habits abroad, whether I’m in Cameroon or Cape Town, Tampere or Tokyo, is whatever I can buy cheaply from a street food stall. I suspect this is why I rarely get sick. Silver (foil packet) linings indeed.
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Even living abroad has done little to encourage better eating habits. In southwest France as a student I spent more time in the McDonald’s on the ring road than in the lovely brasserie or boulangerie in the town square. In the four years I lived in Hong Kong I mainly survived on hot little takeaway bits from 7/11 convenience stores — garlic noodles and chewy pork buns, all in those polystyrene plastic trays that will outlive us all — as we didn’t have an oven, toaster or even a working microwave, entirely normal in the world’s most densely populated city. Now back in London, I long for the days when I spent £2 a day on food — a line that would make Martin Lewis weep.
That’s the best thing about this food ambivalence. It’s money-saving. In the past year I’ve bought perhaps five work lunches, and it’s always the sushi festival platter from Itsu (a princely £7.99). I’m never even slightly interested in wanting to try the latest “hot” restaurant either, which is why I socialise in the pub — I’ll always make time for the Wetherspoon’s Curry Club — or while doing something mad like mini golf or axe-throwing.
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My lovely kitchen extension that a trad wife would be overjoyed to cook in is instead the stage for a load of takeaway menus, holiday tat and some ironic hangings from Oliver Bonas saying things like “Yummy mummy” that my sly friends think are funny. A birthday present of a pair of bespoke oven gloves saying “Cathy’s kitchen” is for laughs only. Along with every other millennial I want to buy one of those lovely primary-coloured Le Creuset pan things but honestly wouldn’t know what to do with it. Keep stamps in it, perhaps?
Before you ask — yes, my family is on board with this oddity, although perhaps not entirely enthusiastically. My primary-caregiver husband cooks nice things such as pesto pasta and chicken curry for our five-year-old son, who has never known his mother to do anything but pour drinks in the kitchen and looks frightened when his dad is out and I have to heat something up for him in the microwave. He was weaned on Ella’s Kitchen pouches, and I must have done a decent job as half a decade later he still gulps down three a day. It would be cheaper to support a smoking habit. A family Sunday lunch for us is maybe a Nando’s or a Boots meal deal — less roast dinner and more roasted Ginsters pasty, probably purchased from the local Londis. No one could ever accuse my family situation of conforming to traditional gender roles, at least.
Still, I’ve got big ambitions for this year: I’m going to learn how to cook an omelette. Wish me luck.