When food loses its taste

You open the fridge because it is dinner time and dinner time is when people open fridges.

It is full. The good cheese. The leftovers you were actually looking forward to two days ago. The fruit going soft in the drawer. You stand in the cold light of it, and none of it is food. It is all just objects that happen to be chilled.

You close the door. You are still hungry. Hungry, and there is nothing in the world you want to eat, and you could not explain the difference to anyone who has not stood in that light.

When hunger and wanting come apart

So many of you have described the same strange split. The stomach still asks. The wanting is gone.

Hunger is a signal. Appetite is a relationship, with taste, with looking forward, with sitting down to something on purpose. Grief can cut the one clean off from the other. The body says feed me, and the rest of you shrugs.

So you graze at the edges instead. A few crackers eaten standing up. Half a thing, cold, over the sink. Cereal at nine at night because it is the only food that asks nothing of you.

The favourite that stops working

Then the crueller version. You reach for the thing that always worked. The one meal, the takeaway order, the pudding you would once cross town for. And it lands on your tongue like cardboard.

It is not that it tastes bad. It tastes of almost nothing. The joy that used to be baked into it did not survive the loss.

You are not off your food. Your food is off, because the person it tasted better around is gone.

For a while, even the good things go grey. This is different from a particular dish that ambushes you with memory. This is the volume turned down on a whole sense. It is not you being ungrateful for a full fridge. It is grief flattening taste itself.

Forgetting to eat

And then the other end of it. Not the fridge you cannot face, but the meal you simply forget.

The afternoon goes. You realise you have had a coffee and one corner of toast, and it is dark now, and you had not noticed. The plate you did make gets scraped into the bin half-eaten, and you are not even sad about it, which is its own small sadness.

Grief brain runs the day. Eating slides off the list because looking forward slid off first, and food, more than most things, runs on looking forward.

The small plate

None of this needs fixing today. But the body carrying all of this still has to be carried, and it does the carrying better with something in it.

So, the gentlest possible version. Not a meal. Not nutrition, not a plan. Just something small and easy that asks nothing of you.

• A piece of toast. A banana. A yoghurt. The soup you can pour instead of cook.
• Eat it because the body asked, not because you wanted it. Wanting can come back later. It usually does.
• Let taste be flat for now. Grey food still counts. This week you are not eating for pleasure, you are eating to keep one grieving person upright. That is reason enough, the way sleep is.

If a day comes when something tastes of itself again, properly, all the way through, notice it. It is a small returning, and small returnings are most of how this goes.

The fridge will keep. So will your hunger for real things. For now, just the toast.

More in Grief and your body, or browse the whole library.

If it hurts too much right now, start here.