Roots and Mooring Lines

Food is a universal language. It is spoken in different dialects and accents, but its message is the same: I care for you. When I was 19, and someone I studied with bought me my first ever KitKat Chunky, she was sharing a concern that I’d not yet experienced true joy (a fair assumption, as KitKat Chunkies are top tier). Simultaneously, she was offering a hand of friendship. In the same way, taking the time to cook for someone, whether it’s cheese and beans on toast thrown together on a Tuesday after work, or a roast dinner with all the trimmings, has a way of healing. It’s the gold-dusted glue used to repair a cracked vase – it doesn’t get rid of the problem, but it rebuilds and makes you feel new again. 

Jason and I love food, and in a dream world we would have a kitchen with pasta arms on the wall, and one of those Sage coffee machines that lets you pour the coffee beans straight in, one that has a jug that changes colour to show you when the milk you’re frothing has reached the ideal temperature for a Saturday morning flat white. At the moment, we have a shitty electric oven with hot plates in our miniscule one-bed flat, and a camping stove with two burners on the boat. Though the latter isn’t normal, I would bet almost all of you have experienced the former.  And I would also bet that, like us, cooking can be uninspiring and even downright overwhelming. 

I sometimes feel like I’ve woken up in a surreal dystopia, where food is no more than a trend having ‘a moment’, and easiness is king. There are what seems like thousands of social media chefs sharing short form videos, waiting to welcome us to episode one of their new series where they give the latest untrendy vegetable in need of a PR boost a makeover, or make beans cool again; always in that same, slightly droning, excessively grating, vaguely-London-definitely-south-east-English accent. For a while, I had hoped that this might be part of the democratisation of cooking and food; that TikTok videos and Instagram reels were encouraging creativity in the kitchen, or that playing with flavour and taking your time with a meal was on the up. Increasingly, I’m realising that this is actually, potentially, sucking the soul out of the kitchen and creating a landscape in which we consume food not to nourish ourselves, but to tick off the latest trend. My bigger fear is that we’re not caring about what we’re eating at all. 

At the moment, this is just what the data is revealing. Research carried out by the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board found that the average amount of time spent preparing meals is at an all time low. They link this to a “desire for convenience,” a constant, nagging presence in our life in the 21st century. I understand why we need it, especially in this economy that makes it feel as if we are working harder and longer for less across sectors and social classes: the last thing so many people want to do is go home, and rifle through the cupboards to knock up a homemade soup, or make a lasagne from scratch. Add in factors like children, exhaustion from physically demanding jobs, and social pressures to exercise or see friends and I get it. I get why 40% of British shoppers are reaching for pre-prepared snacks and treats, and why sales of restaurant deliveries and takeaways in the UK are 11.8% ahead of this time last year.

Sometimes, convenient meals aren’t only necessary, but nourishing – even if that’s more for the soul than the body.

I can’t think of a single time, for example, that I’ve regretted a fat bowl of pasta and pesto, with lashings of grated supermarket cheddar, knocked up within 15 minutes of walking through my front door. Or an airfryer spice bag made with chips from the freezer and chicken goujons, lashings of mayonnaise, and some pepper and onion slices for flavour. These kinds of meals were normalised in Jason and I’s childhoods, when fears around pesticides, genetic modification, and ‘mad cow disease’ ran rife in the UK, but in 2026, when our food standards and farming practices are generally becoming stronger and better regulated, is it time we make a clean break from the past? That we start to move on? Because it seems that at a  time when the British Medical Journal has reported that the UK is the second biggest consumer of ultra-processed foods – at 56% of our daily energy intake, only 2% behind fascistic hellscape, the US – we can’t become complacent with food. 

With this in mind, we have made a decision that, whether we are in our flat in Newquay, or limited to a gas burner and a kettle on the boat, we are going to try and make our meals an event that we share and commit to. In short, we are going to romanticise the hell out of them.

We have never had a kitchen with all the bells and whistles. We have never owned a microwave (not for any real reason, just hasn’t seemed essential), but we really enjoyed owning a dishwasher for a year in the first flat we rented in Truro. We got an airfryer for the first time in April 2025, and have done all our slow cooking in a cast iron casserole pot we got from Sainsbury’s in 2022, not because we don’t want to get a slow cooker but because we just haven’t got one yet. Our approach to cooking is to use what we have and improvise around this, and I genuinely think that this is what has driven our creativity in the kitchen. There is always another way to do something, and just because it isn’t as quick or efficient doesn’t mean you should rule it out. Enjoy being curious and playing when you cook – who cares if it’s not as beautiful as the video you saw on Insta? You made it! And hopefully it’s still edible… 

Also, this high effort cooking, with loads of steps and handmade doughs or jus? That’s for nights when we’re not getting up before the sun to get to work on the other side of Cornwall. Midweek, our meals are easy, comforting, nourishing. Yes, they’re repeated, but not week-on-week: that’s a recipe for monotony and abandoning your efforts. Bolognese, oyakadon, chicken and sweetcorn soup, and speedy shawarma are absolutely in our heavy rotation, but we mix them in with all sorts of other quick bits – salads, curries, cheese toasties. Whatever your favourite go-tos are, spread them over a month and plan the rest of your weekly recipes to complement them; use the same ingredients and just keep it simple. 

Most importantly, share it. Eat with a loved one. Put your phone away. Turn Netflix off. All of it can wait, but your relationships can’t – they need to be nourished always, just like you do. And if you don’t have someone that you can share with, leave a comment and tell me all about your meal! There’s nothing I’d love to hear about more.