The Special Loneliness of Food Exclusion

Judaism considers food a visible manifestation of the covenant between man and God. ~ Rachel Naomi Remen, Kitchen Table Wisdom

There is a special loneliness—a deep, vast, aching grief—that arises from being unable to share food with other people. I didn’t understand the magnitude of this grief till I experienced it for myself.

In my first few months with ulcerative colitis, as I embarked on first one restrictive diet and then another, I quickly realized just how much my previous sense of social inclusion had been tied up in food and drink. I could still go to gatherings—if my bowels and energy cooperated, which was a big “if” —but I could no longer fully participate in them anymore.

I’d often been fighting despair since diagnosis. And now, in the midst of the Specific Carbohydrate Diet and all its restrictions, I happened to read Andrew Weil’s Eating Well for Optimum Health. The book finally articulated why my restrictive diets were making me so acutely lonely, lonelier than any other aspect of my isolating disease.

Weil’s book is not geared towards ill people, but rather towards healthy people who want to stay well. That meant that as I read it, I often felt now-familiar pangs of isolation whenever he recommended foods that were off limits to me, such as whole-grain carbs.

But along with giving general nutritional advice, Weil also writes of the social and cultural importance of food. Food, he says, is central to how we bond with each other:

Coming together to share food is a behavioral pattern we have in common with many other creatures. The word companion derives from the Latin word for bread, panis. Breaking bread together both establishes and symbolizes a fundamental social bond. A Japanese phrase for an intimate companion is “one who eats rice from the same bowl.”

…Consider the communal feasts that punctuate the calendars of the world’s religions. In fact, the words festive, festival, and feast have a common Latin root, suggesting that occasions merry, joyous, and significant are all distinguished by eating in company.

These passages rang very true for me now, in a way they never would have resonated before being cut off. Now that I was so conscious of what I could and couldn’t eat, I couldn’t help noticing how every invitation I received involved food—and thus, invariably, food I couldn’t eat.

There were coffee dates, fish fries, brunches. There were hikes that ended in picnics or at restaurants. Ron’s frisbee team went out for drinks and dinner after their games. If I attended any of these, I was subjected not only to the sights and smells of everyone else’s food, but also to their endless conversations about it: how good it was, and how good other food was that they had recently had or were planning to have, and that I also couldn’t have eaten.

Until you’re on a restricted diet, you have no idea just how much time people spend talking about food.

I would pick at my own plate of bland, meaty food and remain silent, trying to wear a mask of neutrality and not to draw attention to my deep despair. The whole process made socializing almost unbearable.

Weil says eating well is not only about nutrition, but also about community:

The social importance of food and eating…must be honored by anyone advocating eating well. Too often people who follow rigid diets in the name of health isolate themselves from the social interaction that is itself an important factor in optimum health.

This passage triggered a jumble of sad questions for me. How was I supposed to be healthy, socially? How could I keep from “isolating myself” when my own rigid diet was not a choice but a necessity? Was I doomed to miss out on a crucial part of social interaction for the foreseeable future?

I knew Weil was right, though. I had initially thought I might be able to take eating out of the social equation, eating separately from everyone else while still enjoying their companionship, but that was proving much harder than I’d pictured. After all, as Weil said, food is right there in the word companionship.

Without the physical act of eating together, and eating the same foods as each other, something vital was lost. Maybe my friends couldn’t feel it, but I could.

I thought often of the many others I knew with dietary restrictions. Suddenly I longed to talk to them and hang out with them, because they alone would understand. Now I remembered friends’ anxious queries to restaurant servers about gluten or corn or other ingredients, and the way, when the servers had turned to me, I had secretly felt a little proud of my own lack of restrictions. My pride had been unconscious, but now I could definitely remember the subtle sense that my own healthy gut was something to be proud of, as if it was a personal achievement and not dumb luck!

I now felt indignant at my former bigotry, however unconscious. My friends’ isolation had been more or less invisible to me. I glumly sensed that my own loneliness was invisible to healthy people, too.

Trying to carve hope out of despair, I decided I’d have to just do my best with what remained within my reach. Whenever the dust settled and I learned what my long-term diet would have to be, I vowed to find ways to “break bread” with friends in the future. Maybe it would have to be almond bread. But if I could regain enough energy, maybe I could cook my special food for my friends, so they could share it with me, or I could invite them to bring only foods that I could eat. Or I could try to connect with new friends who were on similar diets.

Whatever the case, I needed to find my way back to a sense of belonging.