Bereavement and Food

The Food Programme

BBC

Arts, Food

4.4 • 976 Ratings

🗓️ 9 June 2013

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the throes of bereavement food can seem unimportant. People lose both their appetite and their sense of taste. But food and cooking can also play a positive and healing role in helping individuals come to term with their loss. Sheila Dillon explores the healing power of food and how it can help to remember and recapture memories of those who have died.

Sheila visited the Hospice of St Francis in Berkhamsted which runs cookery courses for those who've been bereaved. Some of those taking part had lost the will to cook - especially the prospect of making meals for one rather than two. Others found they'd lost the partner or parent who'd made all the meals and found themselves not only grieving but without the knowledge and skills to cook for themselves. They explained how a simple course has given them far more than just a collection of recipes.

The programme also looks at the legacy of recipes which can be a way to remember loved ones and connect with them after they have passed on. Over the years Bridget Blair has gathered together the recipes of relatives, friends and neighbours for posterity and while the book is covered in spatters and finger marks her children are keen to inherit the secrets of those recipes and the memories. Meanwhile Rob Tizzard is trying to replicate his late mother's bread pudding recipe from memory which somehow never seems to come out exactly the way she made it but brings him joy trying.

Produced in Bristol by Anne-Marie Bullock.

Transcript

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0:39.7	Hello, I'm Sheila Dylan and welcome to this BBC download of the Food Program.
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0:52.6	UK slash Radio 4 and now enjoy the podcast Food has this incredible power, and smell. There's something about the two connected
1:11.7	senses that prompt memory possibly more than anything else to pull
1:16.0	you back to places and times that were good or bad.
1:21.3	Obviously the cookery itself is useful, but it helps you to get out of that
1:26.4	gray bubble that you end up in.
1:28.4	I was only 12 when Granny died. When I think about her, I just think about baking, I think about being off the school when I was poorly because I used to go and stay there
1:37.6	And she'd she'd asked me if I wanted to scone. I'd just have fond memories
1:41.6	Today the power of food to connect us to what's past and help us move through those losses that come to most of us.
1:50.0	I would cut all your stuff up through your lasagna and get your meat.
1:55.0	We've got a real recipe today and do that because that's going to be the one that's going to take longest to do.
	...

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