I See But Cannot Taste

Annmarie Throckmorton, M.A.
5 days ago
3 min read

In three months I will be seventy-seven years old, in three years I will be eighty. This is a somber thought. Today I checked the fit of some of my basic problems and their solutions. It seems best to do it now while I still can. People in their eighties appear to be dotty at best, strange and mentally off.

Problems I have with food and cooking

SNAP.

My SNAP Benefit of $174/month which is a lot of money but ... the cost of food has gone up by ¼ in the past few years. To Do: remain frugal.

Augusta Food Bank. (AFB)

The staff kindly "helps" me by encouraging me to take more food than I need and heavier than I can carry. They select food and put it in my basket for me. A lot of the food donated there is packaged for a family of five which is wasteful in my case as I cannot eat that much. And I have no room for so much frozen food in my tiny senior citizen poverty refrigerator. I get breathless and exhausted just wheeling a small cart around the one small room of AFB. Some of the AFB food is expired, dented, dirty, and/or spoiled food, which takes extra sorting and care to cook it so as to not get food poisoning. I cannot taste most food any more so I am never sure if food is safe to eat. I follow my safe cooking procedures developed over a lifetime of preparing nice meals and I hope for the best. A friend suggested I try smelling my food as I eat it, and this works very well but I feel a little like an animal doing this. Also my hand jitters sometimes and I dab a dot of food on my nose, which strikes me as hilarious. Can only hope it stays funny as my physical tremors are unlikely to improve. So I go to the AFB each month, and the staff is super kind to me, and I value the gifts of shrimp, steak, fruits, eggs, milk, butter, etc. This probably saves me fifty dollars or more a month, which is at least $600/year. I pass on the huge racks of expired baked goods but the mold it exudes stops up my nose. I wash my hands and rinse my face and nose as soon as I get home from "shopping" there. I remain grateful.

Most of my taste buds died of old age and/or COVID 2019.

I still enjoy sweet and sour and salty; textures and colors. I have zero interest in meals. I dislike fussing with it, I feel disappointment while eating, and I ache clean up afterward. Some ordinary food taste very bad to me, like potatoes which have always been a staple for me taste foul. I know that this is a sense perception failure.

My back hurts massively when I have to bend over my stove or sink, so that I do not want to cook.

For example AFB often gives me asparagus which I cannot afford otherwise. I very much enjoy the color, texture and vitamins of it a lot—but it takes 40 minutes to prepare, which is exhausting and asparagus which used to be a delicacy to me, now tastes like grass. The asparagus is always in such bad shape I have to pick through the withered stalks and then revive them in a glass jar for a day. Still, waste not, want not. But every second I am working in the kitchen I am dizzy, nauseous, and want very much to lie down.

I have a partial solution to avoid the pain of cooking in that I now buy half a dozen frozen meals each week. They all taste bland and have mushy texture. I have tried every brand, even the expensive ones, and I like none of them.

I am allowing myself to spend more money on fast food take-out. But pizza just tastes like simple tangy bread. Other fast foods are not anything like what I used to cook, they have bad appearance and are probably bad for me. I think I should try harder to find at least a couple meals of fast food that I like.

I am considering stopping all over-the-counter vitamins. Over the years doctors have pressured me to take many vitamins, over a dozen. I never took vitamins when I was young, my habit of exercising in the sunlight and maintaining a good diet sufficed. Now I feel like the quantity of vitamins that I take is more than the volume of food I eat. It is hard to swallow those dry, weird capsules and tablets. Yuck.

I See But Cannot Taste