Food is so much more than what is on our plates. For me, cooking, food, and eating serve as a profound gateway into the inner world. They create a bridge of communication—a universal language that we can both recognise and speak in our own unique way.
The primatologist Richard Wrangham wrote that “cooking makes us human.” Learning to make and manipulate fire changed our relationship with nature. Returning to the kitchen hearth, or the primal campfire, takes us home to who we are—both as a species and as individual people.
When Three Classrooms Converged
The framework for kitchen therapy landed during the term I began training as a psychotherapist. At the time, I swapped my position as Head of Drama at a boarding school for neurodiverse teenagers for a job teaching cooking in the community.
These three distinct classrooms came together, blending with my personal experience of growing up in the 1970s, to create a profoundly relational approach to cooking. My initial community course was titled “Learn to Love Cooking,” because I knew that bringing a sense of pleasure, play, and fun into the kitchen was the secret ingredient to a good meal.
However, what I truly learned in that initial term was that the way we cook has something vital to tell us about the way we are in the world. The kitchen acts as a container, a barometer, and a narrator—one that is always open to change with just a hint of consciousness, and with the spice of conversation that stirs a fresh perspective.
Our Earliest Stories Around the Table
Our earliest memories of food and mealtimes can be a helpful, evocative, and gentle way to understand ourselves. They help us discover the hidden patterns and core ideas that shape our adult lives, compassionately.
For me, that story begins at seven years old. Wanting to reclaim my great-grandmother’s attention from her own friendship group, I decided to host a tea party for her knitting circle. With my grandma’s support, I held what I would later recognise as my very first kitchen therapy event. I solved my childhood sense of loss by becoming an essential part of the gathering, providing a beautiful tea while the ladies’ knitting needles chatted away. We were all pleased.
Our relationship with food, particularly the act of making meals for ourselves, naturally involves others. It coordinates ingredients to the table, but it also creates something meant to be shared. Indeed, our word company is derived from the Latin con-panis—meaning “with bread.” This etymology perfectly explains my approach: bringing food alive with our memories, reflections, and meaningful connection.
Listening to the Ingredients
From my very first students to my clients today, I encourage people to look into the pot and fall in love. I ask them to listen to and enjoy the ingredients as they come together, one by one. Each element forms a relationship with the other members of the recipe, requiring your intentional, attuned presence to bring the dish to life.
By giving each ingredient a unique character and a role to play, we can invite imagination, humour, and empathy back into the process of meal making. Giving a recipe a story to tell elicits our natural creative intuition, teaching us how to cook well—and cook with love. We are literally born to associate being fed with being loved; Nature doesn’t make mistakes in Her menu plans. Kitchen therapy brings us back into a natural rhythm, rewilding the human spirit. Reinstating Mother Nature as divine. Coming home where we belong.
Celery: The Quiet Teacher
In the kitchen, celery has always been an exceptionally interesting teaching assistant. While Bonnie Garmus gave us Lessons in Chemistry, my kitchen counter prefers lessons in celery. For me, she represents a lovely, supportive maternal presence.
Many people claim they don’t like celery, but once she is cooked, they rarely know she is even there. Celery is the ultimate flavour enhancer. In the alchemical chemistry of cooking, she melts into the background and holds the entire meal together, allowing every other ingredient to shine that bit brighter within the whole dish. Magic.
This way of working is profoundly collaborative; I am constantly learning from my students and clients while bringing my own lived experience into the mix. Years ago, an early cooking student full of anxiety gingerly held a wooden spoon, perfectly reflecting her fear of taking up space in the world. Her somatic hesitation—the way she held back from the pot—actually gave me the spark for this entire practice.
Like that student, celery reminds us of the power of yin—yielding, of holding space without demanding from or dominating it. More recently, a participant on a kitchen therapy workshop reminded me of a beautiful trick: taking the celery root, once all the sticks have been used, and placing it in a saucer of water. Within a few days, fresh green leaves will appear. Like the maternal presence, her gifts are ongoing. It is a process of eternal evolution, reminding us that we always hold the internal power of regrowth and regeneration. We retain the everlasting, evolving, everyday ability to begin again from our base.
An Invitation to the Kitchen
By listening to food, engaging deeply in the human process of cooking, and bringing a sense of playful wonder into our kitchens, clinics, and dreamtime meanderings, we can learn many lessons from celery.
Our relationship with food stretches like dreams across the time and space of ourselves—just one pathway, a visceral portal into your inner world. Each month, I plan to share a reflection from the Therapy Kitchen exploration into understanding ourselves, and the world we share, a little better.
I would love to invite you along for this edible journey. If you would like to explore these spaces with me, you can pull up a chair in a few ways:
Step into the Therapy Kitchen: You can dive deeper into the psycho-spiritual dimensions of food in my book, Kitchen Therapy: How to Become a Conscious Cook, which explores how to reclaim your creative intuition at the stove.
Pull Up a Chair: If you are looking for a safe, collaborative, and somatic space to process anxiety, trauma, or disconnection, you can learn more about my one-to-one psychotherapy sessions based in Brighton and online.