When I was eight years old, I was taken to the Imperial War Museum to see a recipe book. It had been written by my then 95-year-old great-grandmother, Lilla, while she was starving in a Japanese concentration camp in China during the Second World War. The recipes were not what I had expected — how to survive on rotting vegetables and donkey meat — but quite the opposite.
It was a book that read as if the war wasn’t there at all, as if everyone was back in their warm safe homes with their families and friends, the larder full and the table heaving with fresh, just-cooked food. It was a book that made you believe that if you could fill your mind with a cream cake you could transform the bitterest experience into something sweet. And, more than 20 years later, it inspired me to write her remarkable story in Lilla’s Feast.
In the 1950s, a physiologist called Ancel Keys conducted a starvation experiment. This showed that, unlike people who impose weight-loss regimes on themselves and often find that their appetite becomes easier to control, prisoners deprived of nourishment invariably become obsessed with food — possibly as a survival mechanism. This had certainly happened to not just Lilla but to all her fellow-prisoners.
They risked severe retribution from the Japanese by hiding pigs under the huts, sedating them with aspirin to keep them quiet. They devoted every spare ounce of time and energy to obtaining extra food on the camp’s black market by breaking through and tunnelling under the perimeter fence. And, when the teeth of the children in the camp started growing without enamel, the adult prisoners managed to work out that feeding these children crushed eggshells would help to replace some of the calcium missing from their diet.
Starvation-related obsession, however, was not the only reason that Lilla wrote her recipe book. Having a project to occupy herself with was a way of making her time in prison pass more quickly — and it took her mind off both the physical discomfort of the camp and the mental discomfort of not knowing how many years she would be there. The other prisoners whiled away the long hours by taking it in turns to describe their favourite dish and discussing, mouthful by mouthful, meals that they had enjoyed in the past. Their behaviour was not unique. As hostages in Beirut, John McCarthy and Terry Waite also exchanged recipes to pass the time and to keep their morale up.
Thinking about food in this way is a standard distraction technique, says Peter Rogers, of the University of Bristol. “Our minds have a limited capacity for our thought processes to attend to more than one event.” Yet, even if semi-starvation was making these prisoners desperate for food, the fact that the idea of it managed to take them away from the rawness of prison life says a great deal about its power.
There are also examples of people who are not starving using concentration on food to endure extreme physical discomfort. Towards the end of SAS training, soldiers undergo an interrogation test. This involves spending 36 hours holding a succession of torture positions. Reciting recipes to themselves is a known way of lasting the distance.
Why does food — and just thinking about it — exert such a power over us? There are obvious explanations: we need to eat to survive and we have long known that food nourishes more than just the body. For babies, feeding is a stress-relieving activity.
Eating certain foodstuffs, especially fats and sugars, including glucose, releases chemicals that alter our serotonin and dopamine levels — and our moods with them. It is possible that concentrating the mind on these foods simulates this. Coincidentally, Lilla’s recipe book contains more than its fair share of cakes, sweets, puddings and ice-creams.
Making the consumption of food a part- icularly pleasurable activity — for example, a meal shared with good friends — will produce another definite change in chemistry, says Deanne Jade, the principal of the National Centre For Eating Disorders (www.eating-disorders.org.uk). The endorphins produced by eating fat/sugar combinations are similar to those produced by sex. Hence food’s longestablished role as a precursor to seduction.
Certain foodstuffs are believed to be aphrodisiacs: Isabel Allende has produced an entire book, Aphrodite (Flamingo, £12.99), packed with recipes to whet the sexual appetite. The act of eating, particularly with our fingers, is itself a sensuous activity, involving not just taste but smell, sight and touch — even hearing as perfectly fresh vegetables crunch or as that lobster claw cracks. And, Jade points out somewhat practically: “A full stomach is sedating and will discourage a person from standing up and walking away”.
But, according to Jade, chemistry aside, our appreciation of food is fundamentally con- nected to our emotional state. Even our everyday language betrays this. Think of the metaphors: an appetite for life, hungry for love, starved of affection. It is important for the mind, as well as the body, to have a healthy attitude towards eating.
“You need to be relaxed about food,” says Jade, or its role in your life can become distorted. You can end up using food to hide your emotions. “Food can be a comforter, a treacherous friend, a way to have fun, a way to have part of a social life.” And with a distorted eating pattern comes a distorted emotional state.
So how can we make our relationship with food as healthy as possible? Well, says Elisabeth Mapstone, the author of Stop Dreaming, Start Living (Vermilion, £8.99), this is a relationship that begins early. The very first thing that a newborn baby learns to do is to eat — and providing that food is a way in which its mother can show her love. From then on, our eating experiences are conditioned by our parents’ attitude to how we eat, and the subconscious messages they transmit when they eat themselves.
It is important not to make a behavioural issue out of whether your child eats or not. If a child realises that it can gain a reaction from you by not eating, it will not eat to provoke you.
Mapstone believes that, unlike today when it is easy for mothers to offer their children a succession of foods to try to persuade them to eat, her own wartime childhood provided a good basis for a sensible attitude towards food. “There wasn’t much to go around,” she says. “You either ate what was in front of you or you went hungry.”
Nonetheless, she says: “Cooking delicious, healthy food for your children is a way of demonstrating your love for them.”
Demonstrating love through taking the time and trouble to prepare good food extends beyond our children, says Jade. Cooking for your partner is a sign that you value and love them, too.
And last, but far from least, come ourselves. “People who do not bother with food are often those who are not taking enough care of themselves,” says Jade. “Cooking good food for yourself is a sign that you value yourself.”
So, pull those recipe books off the shelves, open a bottle of wine, switch on the radio and prepare to spend some time in the kitchen. Love yourself a little and feel good.
Lilla’s Feast by Frances Osborne, published
by Doubleday (£18.99), is available from
Times Books First at £15.19 plus p&p.
Call 0870 1608080 or visit www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy
