One meal at a time

How do significant life events or the passage of time influence your perspective on life?

When things get difficult, you don’t philosophise your way out of it. You do what you know how to do. For me, that meant going back to food. I’m a chef by trade, and in a rough period of my life I found myself relying on the practical rhythms of cooking more than anything else. Shopping, prepping, cooking, feeding people these were things I could still control when other parts of life felt uncertain.

As the noise fell away, my cooking did too. I wasn’t interested in trends or complexity. I wanted food that made sense: ingredients I recognised, techniques that had a purpose, meals that sustained rather than impressed. Without really planning it, I started paying more attention to seasonality, preservation, and simplicity. It wasn’t about nostalgia. It was about stability.

That process led me towards Celtic food traditions. Not as an identity project, but as a practical one. Celtic cuisines are shaped by constraint: poor soils, harsh weather, long winters, and the need to make things last. They’re cuisines built on oats, roots, fish, dairy, and shared meals. As a chef, that honesty resonated with me. The food doesn’t pretend to be anything it isn’t. It feeds people and it carries memory.

Learning about these foodways also opened the door to a wider cultural understanding. Celticism, as I’ve come to see it, isn’t about romantic myths or a frozen past. It’s about continuity how communities survive, adapt, and pass knowledge down quietly, often through the kitchen. Recipes, like language, are a form of inheritance. They tell you what mattered, what was available, and how people looked after one another when times were hard.

Working with this food changed how I thought about my own difficulties. It reframed hardship as something shared rather than isolating. Generations before me cooked through uncertainty without naming it as a crisis. They adjusted, simplified, and carried on. That perspective brought a sense of proportion and grounding I hadn’t found elsewhere.

Going back to basics didn’t mean stepping backwards in my career or my thinking. It meant reconnecting with why I became a chef in the first place. Food isn’t just about creativity or skill; it’s about care, continuity, and resilience. Discovering Celticism through the kitchen gave me a way to rebuild slowly and honestly one meal at a time.