The Cancer Kitchen

As you know if you read this blog, I am kinda all about the food. I love cooking, and I love growing food to cook. Cancer and food, or more specifically chemo and food, is a huge challenge. The challenge is mental and physical. You can drive yourself insane with it. I sometimes drive myself insane with it. If I have a meltdown during treatment it is very likely to be related to food.

First, there’s the very basic question: What should I eat? Most medical folks will tell you to eat what sounds good to you, eat what you can, drink a lot of water and don’t lose weight. Plenty of other folks will tell you all sorts of things about what to eat. Here’s a good little list:

1. No sugar, because sugar feeds cancer. (Okay, but what about carbohydrates? What about potatoes and pasta? Noodles and potatoes are my good friends when nothing else tastes good.)
2. Fruits and vegetables. (Not raw veggies much of the time because your immunity is compromised. But dark leafy greens, cooked. All the colors. All your veggies well cooked. Or maybe not– maybe raw and organic and well washed. Not fruit juice because, sugar, but fruit yes, but maybe not fruit with veggies.)
3. Garlic, ginger, turmeric. (But maybe not– do those things actually interfere with the chemo? Naaah.)
4. Lots of water. Keep those tissues healthy, move that chemo out of the kidneys.
5. Good proteins.  Lean, skinless chicken cooked to the right temperature, cottage cheese, yogurt, eggs. Eat early and often to keep your body going.

I grew up in a household where food was seen as medicine. We ate to prevent high blood pressure (Pritikin Program, no salt). There was a time when the closest you could find to a sweet snack was a carob-covered raisin. If it didn’t taste good, it was probably what you should be eating. When anyone got sick, they had to change their diet. So detox tea came to our house early, and different supplements, and different diets (including Atkins, which lowered cholesterol through ketosis, but I never participated in that). It was a form of control, to think you can cure things or remain healthy by just carefully calibrating what you eat.

Cancer probably should prove this idea is wrong, or at least has its limits. But for me, I’ve found myself continually cycling back to wondering and feeling helpless or stymied about what I should eat. I’m just beating myself up about pasta! Cause some days what I really want is (homemade) mac and cheese! Isn’t that silly? I’m pushing myself to make my steel cut oats and quinoa and freeze portions for the week, make those chicken thighs ahead and get those portioned out for when I won’t want to cook, and always keep an eye on the veggies and force myself to have some spinach even if it doesn’t sound good.

I can’t stop thinking about the guy who eats the super cancer-fighting salad every day. Oh man. This guy. Chris Walk. He’s a miracle, of course, having lived some long number of years with cancer. Having beaten cancer. Because of the salad. It has everything in it, every color of good vegetable, plus fermented sauerkraut, plus nuts, grains, and a little good oil… That salad looks like such a chore to me! And I’ve tried it a few times, it’s a good salad. But I can’t keep up with that plan. And of course, if you’re the type of person to beat yourself up and feel responsible, the question is: So now do I have to die because I don’t make the salad??

OK. So I’m going to really work on quitting that kind of thinking.

The other main issue with the cancer kitchen is contamination. The issue with everything, but particularly the bathroom and kitchen, is contamination. My immunity is compromised, so I need to watch out more than normally for food-borne illnesses. I need to make sure the food I eat is fresh. We’re the kind of house where leftovers sit around for a week until we get to them. I’ve never had a problem with that, but now I need to watch it.

Also, I might have to be on chemotherapy longer than four cycles. What I’m reading and seeing is that after the first recurrence, chemo can become a longer term process. I’m quite happy to report that I’m tolerating this treatment really well. But I kind of planned to just tough it out for 12 weeks and go back to my other life. If chemo becomes part of the “normal,” I gotta think that through. I have to think through my kitchen.

It feels like what I need is a version of a kosher kitchen. I’m going to look at my fridge, particularly, and make some changes.

The other day I opened up a Tupperware container and inside it were two raw chicken thighs. I freaked out. My husband had made us a great chicken dish several days before, but he only used 4 of the 6 thighs (don’t ask me why, something about a recipe). The other two had just been sitting there. Raw chicken! My husband is an absolute sweetheart, and having him home during treatment (last time was entirely during his landscaping season) has been a real blessing. But he doesn’t seem to realize what’s going on in this fridge!

Poor guy is scolded when he eats the fresh hummus I just made, because why isn’t he eating that cheese I can’t eat that is going bad? Why is he eating yesterday’s leftovers when there is some soup in there that it too old for me to eat, but I can eat yesterday’s leftovers. I made sprouts all winter, and I took to marking “Eat First” on ones that were past their prime, while I focused on the fresher ones. (Sprouts are a challenge.) Now I see I need to do this in an even more deliberate way.

I cook for us. I grocery shop. That isn’t going to change, nor would I want it to change. It’s going to be a little more difficult, as I figure out what I eat and how my husband fits into that. There are going to be more “eat first” signs. He’s going to have to accept that some things are going into the compost (those two tomatoes in a jar that have just been sitting there waiting for a recipe to come along to use them), which feels like food waste to him but is going back in the ground/garden. I might have to shop more often, buying lower quantities, to make sure the food is more fresh. I can do that.

But most of all, I’m going to try to give myself a break, and all cancer patients should do the same. I talked to a friend recently who said, “Susan, all this is just tweaking around the edges. You’re not drinking alcohol or eating processed sugar. You’re eating foods you canned from your garden. You’re eating well.” The super salad is not going to be the difference between killing cancer and not killing cancer. It’s not about the exact measure of turmeric.

All of this will be easier when it’s not February and my garden is up and running. I planted leek and onion seeds today, so the 2019 season begins. Meanwhile, there are cans of tomatoes and frozen green beans and Brussel’s sprouts, cans of tomatillo sauce, too. And red and purple potatoes that I’ve been loving eating roasted with some Everything-but-the-bagel seasoning from Trader Joe’s on top!