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Cook your way through the coronavirus crisis
EAT YOUR WAY THROUGH THE CORONAVIRUS CRISIS WITH MARC MAZOYER
MARC Mazoyer is getting ready for the week ahead. He’s made soup, and a loaf of bread, and roasted a chicken and he’s thinking about what he’ll do with the food over the next few days. Some of the chicken can go into a dahl, and maybe a risotto, and he might make some quesadillas with it too. And the leftovers can go into a caesar salad. This is how Marc keeps physically well. But it’s how he keeps mentally well too.
Marc, who lives in Glasgow, discovered the positive influence food and cooking could have on his mental health when he was a student. It was a stressful time. He was living on his own for the first time. The exams were looming.
There was a lot of work to do and he was feeling anxious. And then he discovered the power of the kitchen. He chopped, and stirred, and tasted, and felt better. And a few years on, he still does. Feeling stressed? Head for the fridge and the hob.
Of course, in recent weeks Marc, who’s
35, has been spending even more time than usual at home in his kitchen because of the lockdown and it’s got him thinking more deeply about the effect that cooking can have on stress.
Marc has worked as both a chef and a therapist – for a time he was the dessert chef at The Butterfly and Pig restaurant in Glasgow and he’s now an NHS therapist specialising in cognitive behavioural therapy – and both disciplines, cooking and therapy, have helped form his theories on the power of cooking on mental health.
“When you look at it from a mental health perspective,” he says, “there’s a lot about grounding people. So if you’re anxious, do something that grounds you. If people are depressed, what you’re looking to get into their lives is things that gives them a sense of fun, achievement and connection. And cooking does all of that.”
SOME of the positive effects come from the act of preparing and getting close to food, says Marc. “Loads of people talk about mindfulness and it’s very much on trend,” he says. “But the thing about doing something that involves your senses, using your hands, or zoning in on smells, sights, sounds, that in itself is mindful.”
For Marc, a lot of his cooking comes from the mix of influences in his upbringing: his mum is Scottish and his dad is French and growing up in Bearsden, his mum would make him a lot of the Scottish classics that he still loves.
But he also cooked with his granny on his dad’s side, who’s English but learned to cook in Algiers when she lived there with her French husband.
Her speciality was sponge cake and it was in her kitchen that Marc really learned how to cook.
So, in stressful times, how can we apply Marc’s lessons to our own lives, and our own cooking? Well, you could start by trying some of the recipes Marc has given The Herald Magazine, but if you have no cooking skills at all or very few, Marc recommends starting with Delia Smith’s website, deliaonline.com, where there are easy-to-follow, and free online courses.
He also recommends avoiding the type of cooking that’s more likely to stress you out than calm you down – a complicated recipe you’ve never tried before for example.
“Make something that you grew up loving,” says Marc.
“Make it for yourself, it’s tasting something that activates nice memories. Stuff you had as a kid can make you feel better. For me, it’s roast chicken and crumble.
“If you want to learn to enjoy cooking, you need to learn to cook to your own tastes and it’s important to think about what you want to eat.”
Marc also says it’s the act of cooking itself which can be good for your mental health rather than certain ingredients – in other words, don’t think in terms of so-called superfoods.
“When you start to bring that element into it, it becomes a pressure in itself,” he says. “You think, I should be eating this, or that, and that can remove any sense of being creative or fun.”
And part of being creative is making mistakes, says Marc – he’s made loads of things he hasn’t liked, but the key is not to get stressed about it. His emphasis isn’t on learning to cook as such, it’s about learning to enjoy cooking.
“The nice thing is people will go to the gym or a yoga class to relax, all of that we can’t do because of the lockdown,” he says. “But if you have a kitchen and you change your attitude towards it, it’s a space where you can unwind and relax.
“It’s something you feel in control of and that’s probably what we’re all struggling with right now.”