Since the earliest times, the making and sharing of food has been one of the main ways humans have connected with each other. As well as sustaining our bodies, food brings us together. Most of us have a favourite food. And when someone offers to make us a meal, we take it as a sign that they wish to welcome us. In short, food matters.
But we know that when alcohol comes to dominate someone’s life, food can be relegated to a very minor role. People who are alcohol-dependent are often underfed, underweight, malnourished, and socially isolated. We wanted to understand more about this, and what we could do about it. That’s why we started the Feeding Recovery Project.
We began in 2019, when we commissioned researchers from Swansea University to interview people who were accessing support for alcohol issues about their relationship with food. Interviewees gave a range of reasons for eating less (or not eating at all) during periods of heavy drinking. Some said they lacked any real desire for food; often because drinking left them feeling too full, too ill, or too lethargic to eat. Others said that the chaos of their drinking life had left them without any kind of eating routine. And some could see clearly that their lack of enthusiasm for food was just one part of a more general lack of self-esteem: a sense that they did not deserve to be fed and looked after.
But as well as talking about the reduced role of food in their lives, interviewees often expressed a real longing to eat more and better food, and in particular to enjoy the social aspects of eating. As one person put it, “Giving somebody a meal is more than just feeding them; it’s a way of connecting with somebody”.
We wanted to work out how best to bring these latent desires for connection through food to life. And in April last year we received a small Welsh Government grant that enabled us to do just that. From July to December 2024, we spent time with people who were attending cooking and food-sharing sessions at two centres in south Wales – one run by Barod and one by the Nelson Trust – to learn from their experiences.
What we heard from them was both unsurprising and profound. People told us that they want connection: they enjoyed eating, but the thing they enjoyed most was eating with others, talking with others, and making friends. They appreciated having opportunities to make positive choices about what they wanted to eat, and found that to be a stepping stone to retaking control of other aspects of their lives.
Just like anyone else would, they told us that they wanted to eat in a dignified environment – one that felt like a restaurant or a home, not like a soup kitchen. Above all, people told us that food was filling more than one gap in their lives. As well as filling their stomachs, cooking and eating sessions were filling up gaps in their day when they might otherwise be bored and unoccupied or using alcohol to pass the time.
It’s clear from the Feeding Recovery Project that hosting sessions where people experiencing serious alcohol issues can make and share food offers real opportunities for positive engagement and harm reduction. In the Feeding Recovery Handbook, we’ve set out how such sessions can be successfully run. Our hope now is that agencies across the UK will pick up the Feeding Recovery Handbook and start implementing their own projects to help more people to make and enjoy food as part of their recovery.
The Feeding Recovery Handbook can be downloaded in English or Welsh from the Alcohol Change UK website.
Written by Andrew Misell, Director for Wales, Alcohol Change UK.
All IAS Blogposts are published with the permission of the author. The views expressed are solely the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Institute of Alcohol Studies.