I've Always Eaten the Food
A flashback to 2020, when COVID took away my sense of taste completely and I still finished the whole Sunday dinner - a reminder of what my relationship with food actually was.
I was reminded just how deep this relationship with food went by something that happened years ago, back in 2020, when I had COVID.
I lost my sense of taste.
Sunday dinner became an absolutely miserable experience.
I could feel the texture.
I could tell what I was eating.
But there was no taste.
No flavour.
No pleasure.
Just texture and, as I remember it, the occasional appearance of what I can only describe as red floaty juice.
It was fucking miserable.
And yet I still ate the whole dinner.
That memory is important to me now because it demonstrates something I didn’t properly understand at the time.
I wasn’t eating because the food was particularly enjoyable.
I wasn’t eating because I was hungry.
I was eating because that was what I did.
The meal was there.
It was dinner.
And dinner got eaten.
Even when COVID had taken away the thing that made eating enjoyable in the first place, I still couldn’t seem to leave it.
That was my relationship with food.
Not a recent one. Not something Mounjaro created a version of. Something that had been there for years, well before any of this started, waiting to be noticed.