Freshly baked chocolate brownies. Barbecued chicken with rosemary and lemon. A courgette gratin. As he lay in his windowless, artificially ventilated hospital room, he started smelling and tasting things he’d never eaten before. He was only 18 and had been living at home: all he’d ever cooked for himself was a fried egg, and even that he’d managed to burn on the bottom. But now that he was staring at the white ceiling, post-op, all he could think of was that sudden urge to cook and blend those rich flavours together.
Leukaemia and the bone marrow transplant
Ben Pacey, from Doncaster, was destined for the Olympics when he was diagnosed with leukaemia. He played in the Great British water polo team in his age group and the one above - he’d been predicted a grand future in swimming. But everything fell apart the day he missed his friend’s 18th birthday party because he felt too exhausted. His parents, knowing his party-loving character, took him to a doctor for a routine blood test.
“I thought it might be glandular fever, or sumfin’. But that same night my dad came home crying after he got a phone call from the doctor and told me that I had leukaemia. I, I… I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I knew I were ill but I didn’t know it were that serious,” he says, his voice cracking.
Ben spent two weeks in hospital and was prescribed some tablets to level his blood counts. Ten months later, the Anthony Nolan Trust found him not one but five bone marrow matches on European registers. They weren’t perfect matches, but they were closer than that of his sister and parents.
The morning he woke from his transplant, he had this inexplicable urge to cook. He’d never in his life had such an urge, and like many transplant recipients, now puts it down to his donor.
“He must have been a chef,” he says, wolfing down a couple of Jaffa cakes.
Cellular memory
Ben is a firm believer in cellular memory, or body memory. It is the speculative belief, led by a handful of scientists, that every human body cell contains clues to our personalities, tastes and memories, independently from our genetic codes or brain.
