Photograph: Petri Oeschger/Getty Images
“How many of these cookies can I eat?” my older son texts (he is downstairs; I am up). “They’re really good.” My fingertips tingle with satisfaction.
Both boys are home from university briefly and I have a new identity: I’m an intermittent feeder. My husband and I don’t exactly eat like birds in our empty nest – well, I eat like one of those gulls that shoplifts Doritos – but we shop like middle-aged people trying not to die, our cupboards boring and barren, our freezer packed with pulse-based, batch-cooked dinners.
Come the holidays, though, I run an all-you-can-eat buffet of high-value snacking delights, asking what my sons fancy, then stocking up. I won’t let this become the kind of “ingredient household” exasperated teens and twentysomethings of TikTok describe, with pantries full of raw materials for nutritionally balanced meals, but no easy-to-eat treats. Treats are my love language.
We both enjoy being providers again (“Someone got hungry after dinner,” my husband notes with quiet satisfaction, wiping up peanut butter and cereal and stacking an armoury of dirty knives in the dishwasher), but, for me, it feels physical. There is a visceral, full-body joy in the way that they eat as if it’s their job and I feed as if it’s mine.
It was ever thus. I remember realising my mouth opened automatically when I tried to get my newly weaned sons to eat something. It was a completely animal instinct, a reminder that we used to be one body. They are all grown now (if you have seen pictures of baffled tiny birds feeding huge cuckoo babies, that is sometimes how it feels), but the compulsion to feed is stronger than ever. I suppose because I can only indulge it occasionally.
It reminds me how painful it must be when you can’t feed your kids, big or small, what they enjoy. Many families are denied a primal pleasure as well as a need. Demand for food banks peaks in the school holidays, as families find themselves catapulted into crisis.
“Have them all!” I text back. “I’ll get more.” But before I do, I bung the Trussell Trust some cookie money.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
