The Season of Grief Bacon
Tags: Gingersnaps, Expat Life, Abu Dhabi, Pandemic Life, Grief

Early in Pandemic Time — so early that it almost seems like the Before Time — I was talking to a friend about the Covid Kilos. I’d been baking bread (weren’t we all baking bread in early March, tralala, this will be over soon) and the carbs were dangerously comforting. In Abu Dhabi, where I live, the country was in deep lockdown: not only was there a curfew but all the gyms were closed, all the swimming pools, the beaches, even the public parks. My response to enforced sedentary-ness probably should have been kale-eating, not bread-baking.

“Covid kilos,” my friend said. “The Germans have a word for that. Kummerspeck. Grief bacon.”

Grief bacon. The food we eat when we’re sad. Another translation is “sorrow fat.”

That conversation was in March, now it’s December; the things that were strange then now feel normal: temperature checks, regular nasal swabs, mandatory face-masks. (The upside of living in an absolute monarchy: when the government says “mask up,” people mask the hell up).

As a long-term expat who lives fourteen hours from the US, I long ago gave up on Thanksgiving with my family, but we usually manage a winter holiday visit. This year, though, the pandemic made it all too difficult: the risk of visiting aging parents outweighed the reward of visiting aging parents.

My desire to visit my mom is exacerbated by the fact that we canceled our summer trip to the States as well. Again the pandemic prevailed and we stayed in Abu Dhabi, where the daily temperature hovers around 120F. And no, it is not a dry heat: the air in July is so thick with moisture you can almost scoop it with your hands. The heat is enough to drive a person to more kummerspeck. Sealed in our air-conditioned spaces, what else to do but eat?

When I told my mom, over Zoom, of course, that we wouldn’t be visiting, she said she absolutely understood, while tears rolled down her cheeks. After our call, in search of comfort food, I went to the grocery store — the only legal outing available in Abu Dhabi, back in July.

I love that there is a specific word for eating-while-depressed, but bacon is not a food I’d usually associate with “comfort.” Isn’t comfort food supposed to be soft? Banana pudding, mashed potatoes, grilled cheese, grits: the food of childhood.

One of the ways in which Abu Dhabi makes room for the vast array of expats who live here is to allow some grocery stores to have pork rooms: separate areas entirely devoted to the pig. In these rooms, you’ll find a dazzling array of haram products, from the obvious — frozen pork loin, ham, pork chops — to the more surprising: brown-sugar cinnamon Pop-Tarts, squid balls, certain flavors of potato chips. And, of course, bacon. Streaky English bacon, prosciutto, pancetta, even good old-fashioned Oscar Mayer.

When we first moved to Abu Dhabi, in 2011, I tiptoed into the pork room like I was sidling into the porn section of a video store. Now? I’m a pig-porn expert: march in, grab my merch, get on with my shopping. But that day last summer, the packages of Oscar Mayer hit me like Proust’s madeleines. The bright yellow package gleamed with the memories of summers past and reminders of what wouldn’t happen: grilling outside with a happy scrum of relatives, eating BLTs with tomatoes still warm from the garden.

Grief bacon, indeed. I bought three packages of bacon that day.

I spent the summer inside, zooming with my mom and baking. A friend gave me a recipe for gingersnaps that provided a surprising use for all that bacon: instead of butter, the recipe calls for ½ cup of strained bacon grease.

The precise calibration of the recipe was itself comforting. The ritual of measuring, mixing, and sifting, punctuated by the quiet creak of the oven door, offered some small solace, as rituals always do.

We have all missed ritual moments this year, whether small things like a child’s birthday party or an anniversary dinner, or big milestones, like weddings and funerals — and there have been far too many of those. Everyone is enmeshed in sticky webs of loss.

Eat your grief. Consume it, so that it becomes a part of you, stitched into the very fabric of the body, a gentle quilting of sorrow.

I won’t see my mom this winter, which means it will have been almost two years since our last visit. As the holidays drew closer, I found myself wondering if I could somehow send her a box of bacon-grease ginger snaps. It’s what we all need right now, I think, as we head into a new year, hoping for peace and vaccines: the comforting gift of grief bacon and the reminder that transformation is at the root of hope.