The drive home from school would always feature two key questions. Mama asking how my day had been, and me asking what’s for dinner that evening. My inability to connect the contents of the shopping trolley we had filled up the night before with the meals she would cook throughout the week is laughable now, and whilst the connections have naturally been made as I’ve grown up, it wasn’t until university that I had to really immerse myself in that process. Nowadays, I can’t just tag along to the supermarket for the sheer sake of emptying the shelves of Cadbury’s caramel nibbles, and speeding down the aisles on the back of the trolley. I’ve also got to push that trolley with an air of intentionality now.

“I was entrusted with the much more senior task of putting together her lunches for work”

Mama’s planning abilities and general prescience when it came to buying groceries and deciding what she was going to cook that week has fostered in me a long-lasting admiration for her methodical approach to food and cooking. I’d always help, in my own childish way, scrawling her shopping list in my own notebook, or measuring out flour for her to make rotis, but it wasn’t really until lockdown that I grew more involved. I was entrusted with the much more senior task of putting together her lunches for work. However, I was still lacking experience in the planning department, as she’d laid out all the ingredients, and told me exactly how to put it all together. Even when delegating such a task to me, it was still underpinned by her precision and organisational skills, so whilst she’s always had my admiration, it was living without her at university that evoked a deep-found appreciation and respect for her expertise.

Whilst I can’t whip up a thoughtfully planned shopping list with the same speed that she can, nor can I recall the shelf life of everything I buy, as proved by the half-used box of passata I had to throw away at the end of term, I enjoy imagining myself in Mama’s mind every time I need to think about what I’ll be cooking. The excitement I would feel when she’d tell me she’d be cooking a dish I was especially fond of is now relocated. It finds its home in the trolley I push, or the basket I carry, as I fill it with everything necessary to create a meal I can’t wait to prepare. This stage of meal preparation, a stage I never gave much thought to, is now what evokes so much excitement. It’s a commitment to the fact that I will have to take the time to put together these ingredients to create something to nourish myself and, more often than not, my friends.

It is that relationship between my present and future self that becomes foregrounded in these moments of intentionality felt in the aisles of Sainsbury’s. I know, hours down the line, in the throes of an essay crisis, or a moment of melancholy, when there isn’t a great deal of things that resolve stress or upset, I’ll be grateful for having picked up a dual pack of garlic bread as part of the weekly shop. Or, it’ll be the random pack of dough balls someone’s picked up, forgotten until the moment they’re desperately needed to force everyone to take a break and have their spirits lifted by doughy goodness.

I may not have inherited Mama’s skills entirely, but I’ve cultivated my own version of them, whereby I’m able to provide myself and those around me that comfort and excitement elicited by the knowledge that something delicious is on the horizon.