Chopping Club: Cooking Soup and Talking about Grief  in collaboration with Chris Alton
Comissioned by At The Library and Chopping Club.

A facilitated conversation about living with loss as we prepared ingredients for a shared lunch. Reflections upon the conversation, recipe and instructional prompts where produced into a recipe card which is available in Bootle Library’s archive.


As the aroma’s of cooking filled the room, we spoke about how smell can provoke surprising memories and associations to a person we’ve lost. We mentioned different smells such as; ginger, earthy potatoes, wet dogs, nail varnish, and how stumbling upon these smells can bring back memories we had sometimes forgotten. We spoke about how memories can be painful, but they can also make you feel warm - that grief looks different on different days, it evolves over time, an unending journey.


As we used our hands to chop, we spoke about the bodily sensations of grief, the ways we felt pain, and how that moved around our body; a lump in the throat that won’t budge, tight chest, heaviness, feeling weightless. Although we all felt grief in different ways, we were surprised at how the emotional pain of grief could have such a physical effect on the body. We were surprised that we weren’t prepared for this too; how no one talks about the weirdness of grief.


Before we sat down to share food, we spoke about the different tastes that remind us of the person who died; real ale, rice pudding with the skin on, cheesy potato skins (as well as laughing at some of their terrible cooking skills). We spoke about how preparing and eating these foods can create space to think about the person we miss, and how it doesn’t always feel like there are enough spaces to talk about them. We noticed that giving attention to our grief could be nurturing, and how cooking could bring them into the space for a moment.