Covid kilos, cake and kindness

I love cake.

When I eat vegan Italian yoghurt cake, it feels like I’m making love to a cloud. Pink yeast donuts taste like happiness and there’s a plant-based chocolate mud cake from South-West Sydney that tastes like holiness. I haven’t met a cake that I didn’t like. Except for “cakes” made by misanthropic bakers who replace sugar with Splenda and vegetable oil/butter with coconut oil. Those “cakes” taste like sadness and don’t count as real cakes.

Apparently the covid kilos are inevitable. I know lots of people are bored or suffering plague malaise. They attribute their covid kilos to boredom. Personally, I’m not bored. I’ve found a myriad of things to do in lockdown. Learning an obnoxiously high-pitched instrument is a lot of fun. But I still court those covid kilos.

It does make me thing about the role of food in our lives in times of uncertainty, crisis, and loneliness. In almost every culture, food is not just nourishment. Food is used in celebration, as a reward and sometimes as a sign of love. In many Asian cultures, the first thing you say when you greet a friend or family member is ‘Have you eaten?’ I’m certain there are comparable phrases in other cultures.

Now our friend Freud might say my love of cake is symptomatic of an oral fixation, unmet needs in infancy etc etc etc, but that’s a rabbit hole for which I don’t have time.  Instead, I’d like to take my analysis out of the psycho-analytic gutter and examine food craving in the context of human needs. Maybe our desire for comfort food is symptomatic of a desire for deeper connection. We desire the sensation of connection with others and ourselves. We desire comfort. We desire kindness.

But we’re taught to be islands of self-sufficiency. The Western lone hero does not ask for comfort or kindness. We are taught that kindness interferes with achieving our goals of success and proving that we are better than others. We’re taught that the only connection that is worthy is the one that takes place in the bedroom with an intimate partner.

We’re taught not to reach out if we are struggling, lest people see our human frailty.

We’re taught a lot of B.S aren’t we?

When there’s no one around, and the voices in our head are rather unkind, a donut (or a box of donuts), a piece of cake (or the whole cake), a piece of apple pie (or the whole pie), helps us forget our human desperation and disconnection. For a few minutes we are nurtured, loved, and connected.

Here’s the thing about cake. We can trust cake. Cake will not disappear or run off with another human on its own volition. Cake does not judge, or mock or make unkind statements. It just is.

We can be entirely vulnerable around cake.

I don’t know what the solution is. Perhaps it is about nurturing kindness towards our selves. Perhaps it is about nurturing self-friendship. Or maybe it is about daring to be vulnerable with others. Maybe it is about picking up the phone and saying, “Hey I’m learning an obnoxious instrument, I’m writing word upon word, but still, I feel sad.”

So of course, we should still eat the cake. But let that be the start of our kindness to ourselves, and not the end. Perhaps we can pick up the phone with one hand and hold the cakey fork with the other.