chicken soup for someone else's soul

on labour from the body, for a body

Two weeks ago, when the last of my posts found its way to your inbox, I was somewhere close to the Welsh border, in a house full of mothers. I’m in my late 30s, which means that every single person I know is either parenting, or pregnant, or parenting and pregnant, and this small gathering of my oldest friends was no different: one expecting, one breastfeeding, one temporarily freed from her usual responsibilities. All had sent their oldest child off with their dad for two days.

As the louche, relatively unencumbered one of us, I offered to do the cooking. This is not an offer that’s without ego: I know from experience that if you get a group of parents together, briefly without their children, and serve them a home cooked meal specifically tailored to adult tastes, they will lose their shit—regardless of the actual quality of this meal. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve spent ten hours slow cooking a hundred-quid cut of meat or simmered some chickpeas in stock then stirred in a spoonful of jar pesto. It hasn’t been smushed all over someone’s face? It has spice or booze or garlic in it? It wasn’t lovingly prepared then eaten in a hurry over the sink while cold because its intended recipient only wanted avocado and ice cream? That’s magic, to these women.

Despite the mockery when I showed up with a pasta maker under my arm, or when I was forced to use a clothes maiden to hang four portions of fresh linguine, the meal was simple and good: fresh pasta made with eggs from my friend’s chickens, a tomato sauce made by roasting cherry tomatoes on the vine and whole-roasting a head of garlic, adding in capers and red wine near the end. The whole thing topped with a mountain of parmesan. But it’s not really the food, is it? It’s having someone make a meal for you when you spend your entire life thinking about what a tiny whirlwind will or will not eat, pushing your own sensory pleasure to the margins. It’s sitting down and having a glass of wine while someone else rushes around the kitchen, only needing to pick up your knife and fork when a steaming plate of love is placed in front of you. It’s my body, feeding your body, and shortening the distance between us.

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I have spent a lot of the last few years thinking about the word ‘labour’, not least because many of my friends have delighted in telling me all the details of theirs (which, of course, I have adored). Google tells me that labour, as a term to describe the period directly before childbirth, has been used for centuries, and comes from the Latin meaning toil or exertion: so far, so on the nose. I think about Olga Ravn’s book My Work, about the experience of early motherhood, and how the term ‘labour’ is used in all its contexts, and wonder whether it really means to give something from the body.

All work, really, involves giving something from the body—or, rather, it involves someone, somewhere, taking from the body, often for their own profit. Whether you do manual labour or sit at a desk eight hours a day, all of it costs you something, bodily speaking (as my ruined shoulders will happily attest to). Even brain work is still physically demanding; ask any writer how exhausted they are after an entire day working on a novel, or a theoretical physicist how well they sleep after ten straight hours wrangling with the universe. The physical effects of some jobs might be more visible, or more catastrophic than others, but no worker can escape them entirely.

The labour of cooking feels, to me, particularly physical; my hands and forearms are covered in scars, burns, divots from my many hours in the kitchen. On my left palm, a neat but deep line where my beloved Japanese santoku knife sliced right into the muscle, and I ran round to the doctors with a tea towel soaked in blood. On the underside of my arm, a permanent discolouration from where my skin stayed too long on the hot metal of an oven. You labour to create, and what you’re creating with your body is intended to feed someone else’s. You give something so that they might be sustained.

I think of the difference between something being taken and being given. I think of how different it feels to cook when you have to, compared to when you want to—how, for me, the kitchen is a place of pleasure, and for others, it so quickly becomes a place of stress and joylessness. Being forced to contend with the problem of a meal three or four times a day, to meet both the physical needs and capricious whims of children, is almost guaranteed to turn you against cooking. I think of how much easier it is to give when you have more time to replenish yourself, how joyful it is to receive when usually you are the one being taken from.

I have always bristled against the gendered nature of the term ‘caregiving’. So often it is implied that women are natural caregivers, so the labour of this is not really labour; it is how all women like to spend their time, on a biological level. The sacrificial implications are baked in; of course women give their energies, their space, their bodies to care for another, often at their own expense. What else would they be doing?

Still, giving care is what cooking is. On some level I hate how much I love it, particularly because I don’t want to be put in that particular box. But there I am, again and again, chopping and sautéing and roasting and rolling and icing, for nothing more than the pleasure of putting a plate of food in front of someone I love—or even someone I don’t know all that well, so that I might give a little bit of myself for their benefit, a little bit of my labour to create something we both might enjoy.

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This week I had cause to dig out my almost-two-decades-old copy of Being and Nothingness, the huge Sartrean tome that took up an entire term of my university learning (its subtitle is An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology; you can see why it took a whole twelve weeks). At the time, this was the most challenging book I had ever read; I remember spending 45 minutes trying to make sense of the first page, with months of deep study ahead of me, and thinking: I’m fucked. Even though it ended up kind of changing my life, there’s good reason I haven’t felt compelled to pick it up much between now and then. It’s a bit of a slog.

What drove me back to its pages this week was the fact that a philosophy professor had done a talk for my partner’s workplace, a counselling charity, on existentialism as it relates to the practice of therapy. The conversation was about how the nature of therapy might be confronting for some patients, because being perceived is existentially unsettling, and this brings about shame. What did this mean, my partner asked? I remembered: it is all about nothingness.

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre give us an example: I, myself, make an “awkward or vulgar gesture”. I barely judge the action as such, because I am alone. But then: I raise my head, and see that someone is watching. Immediately I realise the vulgarity of what I have done, and am flooded with shame. It is precisely the gaze of another that makes me feel shame. As Sartre puts it, “no one can be vulgar alone!”

The gaze of the person—the very existence of another person—has forced on me an objectivity that I did not previously identify. Alone, I was only a subject. As Sartre says: “By mere appearance of the Other, I am put in the position of passing judgement on myself as on an object, for it is as an object that I appear to the Other.” This is what the professor meant, when talking about therapy: in revealing themselves, their pains, their trauma, a person is existentially unsettled. They are turned from subject to object, or perhaps subject-object. In the terms of Being and Nothingness, they are turned from a being-for-Itself into a being-for-Others.

If Sartre’s conception of being is tough, his conception of nothingness is even more turgid. Being, he says, implies its opposite. If I am being, everything that is not me, everything that is not being, is nothingness. It is in this state of perpetual nothingness that we have to exist, and it is the nothingness that causes us existential pain, especially when it comes to other people. Wade through this if you can:

My body as a thing in the world and the Other’s body are the necessary intermediaries between the Other’s consciousness and mine. The Other’s soul is therefore separated from mine by all the Other’s body, and finally the Other’s body from his soul… the relation of my body to the Other’s body is a relation of pure, indifferent exteriority.

You can see why people accuse Sartre of being bleak. But he is not really trying to be bleak; he is saying that between you and me there is everything, and the everything is a nothingness. I am being and you are being, and our being is separate from the world, and everything else lies between us, keeping us apart. Sex might seem to bring us closer together, he will go on to say, but as the orgasmic hysteria fades, we will see that we are still, and always will be, alone. I am paraphrasing furiously, and simplifying excessively, but think of it like this: you and I, we are two separate beings, because of the relentless nothingness around us.

My body and your body, kept apart, kept separate. This is the state that we exist in. Your gaze brings me shame, because you see me as an object. You make me realise that I am not a being-for-Itself but a being-for-Others; you rob me of my simple subjectivity, and surround me with nothingness. This is anguishing, yes. But I think all this gives rise to another possibility: everything we do, as separate people, bound by nothingness, is an attempt to minimise the distance. Whether it’s sex, or laughter, or creating something for your consumption, it is all a way of reaching across that insurmountable aisle. Labouring physically so I might feed you, taking something from my body and giving it to yours; it is, I think, a way of reducing the nothingness.

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I’ve written before about how I’ve learned to love making chicken soup over the last couple of years, despite not having eaten meat for about a decade and a half. Long Sunday afternoons making a pot of hot lunch for my partner to take to university through a long Glasgow winter fed both of us, in different ways. But now my partner has graduated, and still I find myself making this chicken soup—for anyone who even hints that they might like it. In February, we went away for almost a month, and a lovely pal came to catsit for us: knowing her food intolerances, her fondness for the soup and her lukewarm relationship to cooking, I filled our freezer with gallons of the stuff. Feast yourself, Nat, while you look after my cats. If I see a high quality chicken close to its throw-away date, I buy it, cook it, soup it, throw it in the freezer. Someone will want it. Someone will come over, heartbroken or stressed, and need something that warms them from toes to soul. Someone will need feeding, and I want to be the one to do it.

There is a way of seeing cooking: a self-sacrifice, a caregiving, a taking from the body. But for me it is not this; it is a giving from the body, in the hopes that a shared pleasure can draw our physicalities together, to bring our souls together too, however briefly. I sip soup from a spoon and so do you; we experience the same warmth, the same flavour, the same physical sensations. I am being and you are being and around us and between is there is a nothingness that keeps us forever separate. But in a small moment, I make a pasta or a tiramisu or a soup made from chicken bones and you eat it, and that continuity—from me to you—feeds your soul, and so, in a nothingness-defying way, feeds mine.