Medically Fasting in Rome
A line from The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King keeps coming to mind when I am one month into a medically supervised fast at the Tor Vergata Hospital in Rome. Samwise Gamgee asks a parched, physically destroyed Frodo whether he remembers the Shire. It is an attempt to remind him of the reason he is on the mission to destroy the ring: to save the Shire. Frodo replies to Sam, “No, Sam, I cannot recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass.”
I haven’t had food or a beverage in a month, but food is ever-present. I am not hungry, but I hunger. My days pass in the future tense: what I am going to eat and when I can eat again. As I write this, no food or drink has passed through my mouth in a month. I have an obstructed bowel, along with other complications of Crohn’s disease. I wonder whether it is not a metaphor for the last few years of my life: I haven’t been living, not fully, and I fell deep into diet, nutrition, and wellness culture, believing diet would cure the incurable.
I am currently fueled by steroids and a portal that nourishes me intravenously. I am told I can survive like this indefinitely; I can live on a liquid white bag if the treatments or surgery do not work. My life feels alien; I am detached from human life. My source of life is in a two-liter bag.
The alienation is particularly potent when living in Italy, where life seems to revolve around food. I learned the language through food and wine, sometimes formally, and often just while eavesdropping in public spaces.
Conversations about food aren’t limited to the table in Italy. They are between colleagues on a coffee break, talking to a vegetable vendor about how to cook a particular vegetable, between old ladies on trains, and in my WhatsApp conversations. I know I can convince my friend Sergio to come out if I mention pizza. Arguments about the correct pasta shape for a particular sauce are normal. I want to talk about food and the meals we share, but I can feel my visitors' hesitation; they don’t want to talk about food around me, because they think it hurts me. But by not speaking to me about what we would naturally talk about, I’m further isolated. The nurses are perfectly happy to tell me about the twenty-course meal they had on Christmas Eve, to the minutest detail. It doesn’t feel hurtful; it feels normal.
From my hospital bed, in a white room with harsh fluorescent lights, all I think about is food in the future tense. In my texts with friends and family, I ask for details about what they are eating and cooking, and I mention how I plan to make the same thing when I get home. I won’t be able to eat until after surgery, which will end with me losing a significant part of my large intestine and having an ostomy bag. I find myself salivating over boiled potatoes, apparently one of the foods I can eat afterwards as long as they're mashed.
I spend about ten hours a day locked into food media. Each day, I pore over recipes on Substack and watch food Instagram with ASMR crunch sounds. I used to hate myself for doomscrolling; now, foodscrolling has replaced it. Every day, I watch video after video of recipes, thinking I will make them when I get home. I save these videos and repeat the process the next day. I imagine the texture, the aromas, the taste, the acid, the salt, the residual sugars. I watch content creators use almost no oil, then brush their chef’s knife across the top of a vegan schnitzel made from Turkey Tail mushrooms and take their first bite, which has the crunch of a Lay’s potato chip. I fall for it—hook, line, and sinker, even though I have tried these viral recipes and they always fall flat. I don’t care. My future will be salty and crunchy!
When I am not lying to myself about making crunchy food with a saved photo roll that will take years to get through, I plan. I plan trips to towns or cities: I look up restaurant menus, decide with whom I want to go, what we will order, and which natural wine we will drink. But I know that alcohol is inflammatory and a trigger, and that with so many tests and surgeries coming up this year, neither drinking nor traveling will be part of my life for some time. So I swear this is the year I will finally start my sourdough journey. I watch hours of YouTube videos to prepare for all the loaves, rolls, and pizzas I am going to make. I have never wanted to be a bread baker, but I bought a vintage cast-iron Dutch oven from Sweden. Without travel to look forward to once I am out of here, I may think too much about the pain and my fear of death, so instead, I think about what I’ll cook.
Once I am post-surgery, my diet will be restricted to things like homogenized baby food, mashed potatoes, broth, and saltine crackers. I don’t know which direction I’ll go after leaving the hospital: Will I become terrified of another blockage and anorexic, as I was 25 years ago? Back then, food became a source of pain, and I only ate the bare minimum in front of others so they wouldn’t suspect. Or will I respond in the opposite way, wanting to eat constantly and never feeling satisfied? I’ll also have a colostomy bag, which complicates what and how I will eat going forward. I don’t watch videos about life with an ostomy bag; I watch videos about what I can eat with one.
Many limitations lie ahead for me, but I escape into a fantasy food future to avoid my reality. I hope the mental clarity gained from fasting will last when I leave. From my hospital bed, I imagine becoming a magical domestic goddess who cooks, gardens, tends bees, and bakes sourdough, like the content creators I watch for hours. Thoughts of future food rather than the future itself keep me sane.
Sarah May Grunwald has been writing about the food and wine of Lazio, Rome, and Georgia for nearly 20 years. She practices permaculture and beekeeping in the Castelli Romani, Italy, where she lives with her senior dogs and cats and makes olive oil in good years. Find her work in The Feiring Line, Rough Guides, Business Insider, Fodor’s, Curiosity Magazine, Be a Better Traveler, Wine Chronicles, Wine Sofa, Culture Trip, USA Today, Veg News, Pipette, Jancis Robinson, and more.
