After his mother died of cancer, Ryan Riley wanted to help others living with the disease rediscover the appetites, so, with Sue Perkins on board, he set up Life Kitchen
For Ryan Riley there was a sense of a circle closing at the February launch of Life Kitchen at River Cottage in Devon. Before she died of lung cancer four years ago, Krista Riley, Ryan’s mother, loved to watch food programmes, and her particular favourite was Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. It was a matter of chance that Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage team contacted Ryan to offer to help kick-start his project at their cookery school, after hearing him talk about it on the radio. Like several things about Life Kitchen it felt like the perfect fit straight away.
Riley is a 24-year-old food writer and food stylist originally from Sunderland. Before that first cooking school began he sat down with me at River Cottage and explained how it had come about. He had, he says, never perhaps “properly processed” his grief at his mother’s death, and one of the things that always nagged at him when he went over it in his mind was how his mum had struggled to find anything she wanted to eat in the months before she died. A keen home cook, Krista Riley always made, he says, perfect versions of four or five staple north-east dishes, including panacalty, the mackem hot pot. By the end, however, because of her treatment, the only things she wanted to taste were synthetic ice pops, mainly for their numbing cold. Thinking on that, and wanting to honour his mother’s memory in some way, about a year ago Riley wondered if there might be a way of using his cooking skills to help cancer patients find some flavour.
Related: What is the emotional impact of cancer? Discussion roundup
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