About "Cooking for Chemo"

We are among the luckiest people who have ever lived. Until about 100 years ago, all medicine was food. Period! Cooking was "doctoring". Some foods reduced suffering, (or abstention from some foods reduced suffering), but until very recently, the role of cooking was largely pleasurable or palliative, not curative. Sick people just died, in appalling numbers, typically at very young ages. 100 years ago, 7 out of 10 children died before reaching adulthood and the ones that survived childhood diseases had a life expectancy of 37 years.

Cooking, food and medicine have come a long way in 100 short years! We can now cook almost anything we can imagine, food items are becoming increasingly diverse and inexpensive and medicines are curing diseases at a breathtaking velocity. What an amazing world we live in. Yes, we are the luckiest people to have lived on this good earth thus far.

At the same time, unfortunately, some medicine can make you well in some ways and feel "sick" at the same time. Almost all of them make you feel "different". These are called side effects. In extreme cases, they are targeted poisons, with inescapable miseries: dizziness, loss of concentration, tiredness and in many, many cases nausea.

This cookbook was written to assist with nausea, the most common side effect of chemotherapy, because eating is what the sick must do, (along with taking the medicine), to restore health and wellness. In most cases, food must be eaten more frequently and purposefully than ever before. And in most cases, eating is about the last thing a sick person wants to do. Here, obviously, is The Big Problem! And what follows, I hope, is part of The Big Solution!

Medicines, be they natural or man-made, can cure you, but while you are waiting, impatiently, hopefully, prayerfully to be well again, cooking and eating are what you must do for yourself, and your family, to get you through to the other side of your adversity. Since this is the only part of your "doctoring" you can do on your own, pick up your reading glasses, talk to your tummy and let's cook something that tastes good to you and makes you feel better! And if you do the cooking ...maybe someone else will wash the dishes!

All these recipes were designed for easy creation in 15 minutes, or less, from ingredients widely available, using techniques already mastered by anyone who owns a stove, a refrigerator, a blender and a cheap hand mixer!