How dementia robbed me of my love of cooking
Wendy Mitchell wrote a bestselling memoir about having Alzheimer’s. Here she describes how the disease has changed her relationship with food
Some days there is not much that I remember. When the fog comes down, I don’t know what day it is. I don’t know the time, or even the year. Those are the very worst days and, thankfully, they are still relatively few. But on good days, my memory is challenging. You can tell me a secret and I’ll always keep it because I simply won’t remember. But one thing I never forget is that food used to mean so much more to me than it does now.
We think of food as fuel. At its heart, that is all it is. That is all it is to me now. These days I even have to set alarms on my iPad to remind me to eat – the part of my brain that feels hunger stopped working a long time ago. Yet, when you no longer get pleasure from food, you realise it is so much more than that. It’s how we show love as a parent, it’s how we bond with friends, it’s an apology for saying the wrong thing, it’s a welcome to the neighbourhood.