A Gourmand Award!

My memoir: Tasteless-Following the loss and rebuilding of my sense of smell and taste- (in manuscript form) wins a coveted award.

From 2-5th of June, the Gourmand Awards (food and drink books, manuscripts, various media awards) will take place in Umea, in the North of Sweden, near the Arctic Circle (the lights you see in the above photo is the Aurora Borealis). The Gourmand gathering is part of a conference on food culture, the Umea Food Symposium, focusing on sustainability, indigineous peoples and their foodways. Local Sami will be there, as well as a Choctaw delegation from the USA.

To say that I am thrilled about the award doesn’t even come close. I must be honest here, it is a manuscript, I do not yet have a publisher who understands the project and can turn it into a book. So having the manuscript read, considered, and then judged to be of value, is…so very very very very very encouraging. Uplifting. I feel like my message: the one I want to send out, I need to send out, to those who have suffered, are suffering, has been heard.

How I wrote wrote wrote my way through those rough…no, lets be honest…totally miserable hopeless times. I was told by experts that nothing would help, but I couldn’t accept that. I tried this and that, just thinking: why not—and indeed I found much that did help, it helped so much it powered me to keep on. It was amazing.

Trying not to become despondent when it didn’t, I plodded on. When with the pandemic, one of the symptoms being (usually temporary) loss of smell and taste, and I began to see the online postings of so many desperate, suffering, people—I thought: I’ve learned a lot. It will save them time and suffering if I share.

But also, also, the more I learned to sense smell and the myriad of tasting possibilities, the more enriched, and rich, my life became. It began to dawn on me, the absolute importance of flavour, both spiritually as well as sensually. Emotionally as well as simply enjoying. AND: enjoyment in life: so very important. Life saving even.

Edouard Cointreau, founder of Gourmand and many other groups and organizations, was beyond encouraging (above above of Edouard father, and Edouard son, both working together for these events). He offered to be my first reader; he was the first person I showed the work in progress to. Thats how much I trusted him, I trusted them; and thats also how my manuscript came to the attention of the awards body.

An excerpt from the manuscript

It was beyond miserable. Even though I had absolutely no sign or encouragement it would get better, I began to push push push myself and follow the smells and tastes as they returned, doing everything I could to understand, and coax out more, more detail as from a memory.

My manuscript is my memoir/non-fiction narrative of those times, tracing it to now. Today. And what I discovered along the way:

1. How incredibly important our smell and taste sense is both physically and emotionally.

2. How appreciating it, ie gastronomy, is so life-enhancing, in ways I had never even considered.

3. Smell/taste doesn't depend on fancy restaurants or luxury ingredients. In fact, in the most difficult circumstances it is often the most powerful.

4. The experience convinced me that paying joyful attention to what we eat and drink makes us, individually and as a whole culturally, better people, more whole people, happier people.

At the time of my accident and for a long while afterwards, for years, I felt that there was nothing good about any of my new situation; and certainly losing my career (at the time) was heartbreaking. But I had no way of knowing, that not only would smell and taste return (albeit in different ways, at times) but that my understanding of flavour (and indeed of being alive) would be huge, massive, in ways I could not even hope to understand at the time yet fascinate and accompany me through my every day now. Its not easy, but it is…life amplified. Weird as it sounds, am I grateful that my soft body met the speeding metal of a Mercedes SUV? The way things have (finally) worked out, the fact that I survived, and my life is amplified in someways, I guess I am.

And that is something I never ever thought I’d say. But then, who would? And yet: everything I have learned, has amplified and enriched nearly every aspect of my life. And for that I am grateful. And for that: I want to encourage others. I want to tell my story, parts of which could well be yours too.

PS: it also has recipes! Unique recipes, and I hope you feel that same: joyful recipes.

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I’ve been invited to visit a completely sustainable local farm—I’ll take photos and share them with you in the newsletter— and once again I will spend time with the reindeer herders who are so inspirational—connected to the earth, to life itself; I always learn so much in their presence. Here is a Paris Gourmand Summit selfie of myself with Anders Oskal, Secretary General of the (Norway based) Association of World Reindeer Herders