How to Eat your feelings
Sometimes you may experience an unnerving sensation called ‘feelings’ It is often desirable to suppress these by the medium of food. What follows is a ‘how to’ guide organised by feeling.
Feeling: The feeling of having split up with some short term arsehole who just wasn’t really worth your time. Maybe they split up with you, maybe you dumped their sorry ass. It’s for the best, but a bit of sadness is almost required, and you are willing to oblige.
Food: Have a tub of Ben and Jerry’s, any flavour is fine, because this is fake.
Serving suggestion: Eat with a close but slightly evil (and ideally American) friend whilst emphatically saying ‘all men/women/non-binary people* are bastards!’ and ‘It could have worked!’ You may also choose to listen to some eighties ballads whilst you consume the ice cream.
*delete as applicable
Feeling: A blank yawning lonely expanse of empty time which is almost metaphysical. It is both within you and all around you. Impenetrable and eating you up from the inside. Nobody is going to pop round. Nobody is going to ring. You either can’t or won’t go out. On the plus side this feeling is very ‘in’ in 2020 so you are fashionable for a change.
Food: Many people think that sour dough bread is the solution to this one, but making a stinky living jar of mould and naming it Harold is not the answer. Neither is eating a bit of Harold. That will only make you feel more dead inside. No, for this situation you need something stimulating. First gather your ingredients; 3 packets of popping candy and a can of full sugar coke (any brand will do). Rip the tops of all three packets of candy and place them upright in an empty mug. Open the coke. You must now act quickly; pour all three packets of candy into your mouth and quickly follow up with as much of the coke as you can get in without choking. You’re welcome.
Feeling: Whilst not depressed per se you are often feeling like life would just be easier if you had a nice long lie down in the mud and decomposed relaxingly into it. The worms would tickle as they ate you up and then you could become a noble tree or some weeds or something.
Food: You need to snap out of this one, you could end up becoming a bramble bush that dogs shit on. You should eat a tub of some kind of expensive, but yet weird and not really very nice sorbet. Something like cardamom and pear, salted walnut, or nutmeg and liquorice.
Serving suggestion: Eat from a silver christening spoon whilst lying on your kitchen floor.
Feeling: ‘fat’
Food: Fuck this bullshit. Eat a fried egg sandwich, white bread, brown sauce and accompanied by a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale. Did you know that a bottle of Newkie Brown is more than a pint? You boss!
Feeling: A light smiley swelling feeling in the chest, could be pride, but is isn’t, its smugness. Other people really are just a bit shitter than you.
Food: Depends how you want to go, if you’d like to keep the feeling, boil a kettle, let it cool for five minutes and then pour out a mug of warm water. Gently kiss a herbal teabag to the surface before removing. Lift the mug with both hands and sip the resulting liquid over a period of not less than 30 minutes. If this feeling is unwanted, jog to the kebab shop, order a large chicken shish with extra garlic sauce and no salad, and throw it into your face as you jog home as fast as your legs can carry you. Make sure you are wearing athleisure (ideally the type with weird cut out panels) as you do so.
Feeling: everything you have worked and hoped for has just become irrelevant, crumbled around you or disappeared slowly while you stood by and watched uselessly. It didn’t even burn or explode excitingly, it just dissolved. Your purpose is now gone and there is a big space in the front bit of your head that normally provides you with direction.
Food: This is a hard one, but what you’re going to need to do is find all of the ready to eat white carbohydrates in your house; bread, crackers, plain biscuits, left over pasta or rice, even porridge that’s stuck to the bottom of a pan if you have nothing else. The next stage is to methodically consume all of them until they have gone.
Serving suggestion: Ideally you should be staring blankly at ‘homes under the hammer’ or ‘Bargain hunt’ as you eat, but any daytime TV will do.
