I was a bestselling recipe writer - then burnout killed my appetite for food, and life. This is how I found my way back

Three years ago, I fell out of love with food. I didn’t want to shop, I didn’t want to cook. I ate for necessity, not pleasure. The ends of a loaf of bread. An apple. A glass of oat milk. Whatever leftovers were in the fridge.

It wasn’t just food; everything around me had transformed into shades of monochrome. I couldn’t get out of bed most days, yet I couldn’t sleep. I was wired, tired and scrolling. I didn’t care much for whether the morning turned to night.

This loss left me feeling empty. Food was how I spent my time and paid my bills. It was the language I spoke fluently. Food was how I navigated my emotions and memory, and how I tapped into my past, bringing to life a family history that had existed in countries beyond England; in India and Africa before I was born.

I willed the emptiness to go away, but it refused to budge. It went on for weeks and then months. A year later, I realised that I needed to find a way back and fast – for myself, and for the people around me.

I’d like to say there was a single, neat reason for my breakdown but, like life, the truth is messy. Its origin can be traced back decades; to the start of my existence. But it reached a climax during the pandemic, after various stresses had accumulated. Like so many working parents, I was overwhelmed by deadlines and motherhood. I was looking after my six-month-old baby and my parents, who were both very vulnerable, and my cousin had died unexpectedly, aged 30. I was constantly lethargic. But who wasn’t tired in 2021? I kept on going, telling no one and ignoring my body’s pleas to slow down.

Even as a child, I never stopped. Neither did my parents, or theirs. They worked hard: as political refugees from Uganda, they had experienced poverty first-hand. By the time I arrived, my parents’ mission was to show me ambition and opportunity. They made me feel as if I could do anything with my life; the most prized gift you could ever give to a child, apart from love. My parents had lofty ambitions for me, but being a cook was never one of them – even if Mum was an exceptional one. After school, she would kick me out of the kitchen. “Go and do your homework,” she would say. “There’ll be plenty of time to worry about cooking later.’’ Mum created beautiful food for us day in, day out – like her freshly made chapatis. The stone-ground wholewheat flour charring on the tawa remains one of my favourite smells, as is the aroma of her daily dal. I could eat her spinach and paneer or her aubergine curry by the bucket-load. She showed her love through food and how simple ingredients can be transformed into magic.

Education was paramount in our family, and the learning didn’t stop once I had left the school gates: instead of a chocolate egg at Easter, I was more likely to be given a copy of The Children’s Encyclopaedia Britannica. After school, my parents would send me across the road to our neighbour’s house, where Raymond, a retired English teacher, would explain to me about syntax and semantics. During the holidays, I was told to pursue projects on subjects I found interesting, such as astronomy, so that I could submit them to school independently. I don’t begrudge my parents for this at all: they wanted me to be safe and secure because of the trauma and hardship they had endured.

As I got older, there was a lot of pressure to become a lawyer or a doctor – a success, so that I wouldn’t need to worry about money like the previous generation had. When my grandfather, a successful Indian businessman, arrived in Scunthorpe in 1972, he refused government handouts and took a job as a lorry driver at the steelworks. With one suitcase between my grandparents, mother and her two brothers, they had arrived in Lincolnshire with £50 to start a new life. They didn’t see this as a problem: the whole Gujarati community is very entrepreneurial. They brushed themselves down and just got on with life and work. And so did I.

After graduating, I worked voraciously. My plan to become a management consultant didn’t work out, so I tried my hand at a few different things. I founded one of the first online dating agencies, called Fancy An Indian. To facilitate that, I was doing shifts in a cocktail bar and at a call centre, I helped to set up an arts organisation called Sing London, where we put ping-pong tables and pianos on the streets in a bid to make them friendlier places. Then I went to work at Innocent Drinks, when they were a team of just 50. There were no boundaries when it came to work, and I threw myself into every profession; working late and hard, eager to make a success of everything I turned my hand to. I was known as the person who could pull anything out of the bag; so I took it personally when I got made redundant from Innocent. I fell into a depression and stopped socialising. It was impossible for me to separate my identity from my career. What would I say if someone asked what I did for a living? Who was I without my work?

Thankfully, my new venture as a food writer took off. It all started with a collection of my family’s recipes, Made in India. I created that book so I could keep a record of recipes that had been passed down from woman to woman for generations in our family kitchen. It was a beautiful experience that helped me navigate being bicultural. The book was so successful that I wrote another, then was offered a column, then another book. It was thrilling to do well, and I loved experimenting and learning about how ingredients behaved. I travelled to India, and discovered that behind every recipe was another family’s story. Food wasn’t just food. It is not just how we nourish ourselves – it’s economics, geography, memory, tradition and history.

Soon, I was going to sleep dreaming about recipes. I’d wake up at 6am to get started for the day, and Hugh, my husband, would come home and ask if I’d moved from the kitchen since he left for work. It was an unhealthy way to live, but the harder I drove myself, the more I could see it paying off. The formula worked.

A decade later, things started to change. The recipes I was writing weren’t ones written out of love, or for my family. Food became work, work was achievement. I would start each day with an intense desire to create something. Until one morning, it stopped.

About six months after my second child, Yogi, was born, I woke up and couldn’t get out of bed. I was so tired that I struggled to get down the stairs. It felt as though my mind and body were malfunctioning and I was in shutdown mode.

Then there were panic attacks. One happened at a restaurant, something I initially put down to post-Covid anxiety. Whenever I went somewhere, I’d have to suddenly leave. I felt discombobulated and was prone to dissociative episodes. My short-term memory was shot; I couldn’t remember a conversation I’d just had. I kept a diary during this time. One entry reads: “I am desperate to feel joy and life coursing through my veins again.”

I longed for the variety of human emotion, as my capacity to feel anything had narrowed completely. That worried me because I am a very sensory person; my work – and life – depends on it. At no point did I feel as if I wanted to end it all, but my identity had shifted into something unrecognisable. I cried a lot. I wasn’t talking to friends about it as I didn’t know how to explain what I was going through. I was the woman who could pull anything out of the bag. What was happening?

The sleeplessness was agonising, so I went to the doctors. They prescribed melatonin and said I was experiencing chronic stress. Hugh suggested that what I was going through might be a little deeper than just exhaustion, so I started seeing a therapist. Sometimes after the sessions, Hugh would find me shaking on the sofa. I couldn’t cope. I couldn’t do normal things. I was trying to fend off work and doing the bare minimum, but even then, I was doing it really badly.

Food just wasn’t a priority in my life any more. If Hugh didn’t cook, I wouldn’t eat, or I’d have just enough to keep my body ticking over. In my experience, Indians don’t tend to express their emotions with words, and, just like my mum, I articulated my love through food. What message was I sending to my children if I couldn’t cook for them?

One day, Hugh, who had been keeping our two young daughters and me afloat while somehow doing his own high-pressure job, admitted that he was starting to crack under the weight of it all.

“I would just really love it if you could cook a meal for me,” he said.

It was a simple request; but the emotional equivalent of him saying: “Help me, love me, take care of me.”

Hearing someone I love admit that they were struggling caused an automatic shift. As a kneejerk reaction, I stepped back into the kitchen, grabbing a pan and looking in the store cupboard. I intuitively picked up the red lentils. I found an onion, some coconut milk, and lemongrass and lime leaves in the freezer. Hugh ran out to a local Pakistani shop to pick up fresh naans, and I began to cook again; a simple Malaysian dal, similar to one we had eaten together in the markets in Singapore.

We ate this dal in relative silence, but we both knew it was a special moment. I could see how much it meant to him, just doing this one thing. He had been starved of everything – love, care, attention and food. By this simple gesture, I was beginning to resurface.

The next day, I started to cook with one new rule: I would only make food for pleasure, not work. I wanted to become more aware of my mood and feelings, and to figure out what I wanted to eat, to be led by my stomach alone. Slowly but surely, like kindling catching, I started to feel the fire in my belly again.

If the food was good, I’d record it in an old orange notebook, and next to each recipe I’d write the date and what had happened that day. The book filled up fast, and as it did I realised I was drawn to one meal above the others: dinner.

Unlike breakfast, which was usually toast at the kitchen counter, or lunch, constrained within the working day, our evening meal became the most important of our family life. I found that just thinking about that meal and planning it had the power to ground me and pick me up after a bad day.

If Hugh, the girls and I had been apart, dinner was a chance for us to come together again. Whether it was my eldest daughter, Arya, shouting about how someone had farted in maths class or about a plot twist in Unicorn Academy, or just a chance to reflect and celebrate the day, dinner became a comforting, profound event. The making of the meals, step by step, from A to B, seemed to be a button I could push. Cooking was something I felt entirely in control of – it was meditative and still; unlike the chaos of that previous year.

I didn’t want to be creative initially, so I made foods that I found uncomplicated, comforting and delicious, like koshari, an Egyptian rice and pasta dish. I made my mum’s aubergine curry, slow-cooked sweetcorn and spinach saag. There was a thick homely stew of borlotti beans, chopped salad and tahini. I made a lot of eggs. Omelettes and egg fried rice. One-pot dishes, too, like “Ben Benton strikes again”, a braised aubergine and celery dish named after the cook and writer friend who devised it. Being able to throw ingredients into a pot, one after another, and stare at it until it alchemised into something new was a gentle and magical process.

A lot of these were meals I could make with my eyes closed, meals that would allow me to disengage so I could focus on the kids when they came back from school and listen to them talk. It kickstarted a period of understanding who I was and what I wanted.

This is really how the story ends. I did fall out of love with food, but I have fallen back in love with it by following my stomach, by taking the pressure off, by cooking for friends and family, not for work or social media, or incremental gains, but for pleasure, and realising how much joy and togetherness simply cooking for loved ones can bring. This is the reason I fell in love with food and cooking in the first place.

Because of the sacrifice my parents made for me, I had imposed on myself a sense that I needed to repay them, to be a success. As a result, I have very rarely asked myself what I really want. What do I need now? That has been one of the biggest learnings I have taken from this breakdown.

Now, instead of immersing myself in deadlines, I see my friends. I used to think I had to prove myself as a good cook and I’d try to make fancy food for guests. I don’t serve starters now, I just get out my favourite crisps – sweet chilli with a sour cream dip – or bung some frozen dumplings in a frying pan. It’s no longer this horrible rush where I tidy the entire house and sanitise everything. I can focus on the people rather than the job ahead.

Exercise is also an amazing tool for my mental stability. Before, I didn’t have time to do yoga or go for a run; now I make sure those things are permanent fixtures of my calendar. Hugh and I go out once a week. We walk and talk, and share a bottle of wine.

I used to write a one-year plan and organise my life around goals and achievements, but I no longer do that. I’m comfortable with having no plan or milestones. No one on their deathbed wishes that they worked more. But everyone, I bet, wishes that they had travelled more; that they’d had more dinners with loved ones.

In many ways I am happy that I reached breaking point. If I hadn’t, I would have kept going; never in the present, never able to galvanise myself to change, to put myself back together, one dinner at a time.
As told to Harriet Gibsone

• Dinner: 120 Vegan and Vegetarian Recipes for the Most Important Meal of the Day by Meera Sodha is published on 1 August by Fig Tree (£27). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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