Delicious in Dungeon and Dysphagia: Finding Comfort in a Show About My Personal Hell
A few years ago, I took a bite out of a chicken sandwich and realized that I couldn’t swallow it.
The sandwich itself was fine. I had gotten some fast food (maybe some Wendy’s?) after I was let out of a stressful college class, and I thought it tasted pretty good. Earlier that day, I had had zero problems eating my breakfast, and I’m sure that I was probably looking forward to dinner later on.
For whatever reason though, I couldn’t swallow this piece of fried chicken. At this point, I was now endlessly chewing it. I would will my body to swallow it, to begin working this piece of food down my esophagus and into my stomach, only for my body to say “No, not today. Maybe some other time.”
This should have alarmed me, but it didn’t. A few years before, when I was in high school, I had this quirk where I would have trouble swallowing my food only during lunchtime at school, never at home. You know how when you’re rushed to finish a meal, you can sometimes get self-conscious of how fast or slowly you’re eating, which leads to you overthinking the process of swallowing it? That was how I felt during high school for no reason at all. The feeling faded eventually - I hadn’t felt that way for a few years at this point - but while eating that sandwich I probably thought to myself “Oh, it’s just this again. That’s fine. This’ll pass pretty quickly, I’m sure.”
It didn’t pass. By the time I sat down to watch the first episode of Delicious in Dungeon - an anime adaptation of Ryoko Kui’s manga of the same name - I was a month away from celebrating the three-year anniversary of trying and failing to eat that sandwich. It had been a ride, to say the least. In the years that had followed, I’d gone through a lot. Having such a hard time getting food down had caused me to lose a considerable amount of weight - in the year after it, I lost over forty pounds and looked unhealthier than I ever had. The only way I was able to mostly regain that weight was by washing down every bit of food with a swig of water, allowing me to eat at a pace that, while still far from normal, was better than I where I was before. I’d had four endoscopies by then - procedures where a doctor knocks you unconscious and then puts a camera in your throat - and had just scheduled a bunch of tests to see if people could figure out what my deal was.
At this point, my relationship with food had soured, to say the least. Eating with friends no longer felt like a fun activity but something I dreaded. I hated how it felt to choke down food, to agonize about the possibility of it going down the wrong pipe. I used to hate how it felt to wash down every morsel with a gulp of water, but now I instead despised the fact that I had grown used to it. I always felt so self-conscious while I was eating with other people; watching people finish their meals, only to look down at my plate and see that I had barely made a dent in my own.
And yet, despite how poor my relationship with food has grown, Delicious in Dungeon has made me feel the coziest I’ve felt while watching anything in a long time. It’s a show with a pretty simple premise: a Dungeons and Dragons-esque party consisting of some familiar archetypes (there’s a halfling rogue, an elf wizard, etc.) journey through a long dungeon to recover the remains of a dead party member so that they can bring her back to life. Because the party’s flat broke, out of supplies, and racing against time to retrieve their friend’s remains before the dragon that ate her digests her, they decide to only eat meals prepared using monsters found in the dungeon - slimes, basilisks, even reanimated suits of metal armor.
Much of why the show works is because of its insanely likable cast. Laios, the party’s de-facto leader and the brother of the currently-being-digested Falin, has a good head on his shoulders but is a little too excited by the prospect of eating monsters. The same goes for Senshi, a dwarf who joins the party early on and who knows just about every way to prepare the many creatures of the dungeon. Also in the party is Marcille, an elf wizard who’s totally disgusted by the idea of eating monster, and Chilchuck, a no-nonsense half-foot (Delicious in Dungeon’s halfling equivalent) lockpick who’s really just here for a paycheck.
Generally speaking, an episode of Delicious in Dungeon (14 episodes in, at least) goes something like this: as the party goes further into the dungeon, they encounter some new sort of monster which they have to work together to defeat. After slaying it, they turn it into a meal, using its meat as well as resources found around the dungeon; after slaying the part-chicken part-snake basilisk, for example, Senshi uses some oil found in a nearby fire trap to deep-fry its meat and essentially make fried chicken. Senshi does not miss - he has yet to make a meal that any of the party dislikes, including Marcille, who’s always shocked by how good monster can taste. Throughout each episode, the party member’s personalities might clash, but there’s always a sense that these characters are growing closer to each other, trusting each other more and more with every meal.
I used to be an insanely picky eater. I was that one kid who ate nothing but chicken strips, french fries, and hot dogs - familiarity felt comfortable to me, so eating the same foods over and over felt nice, in a strange way. As I grew, my taste in food didn’t - I remember telling a classmate in middle school that I had never had a cheeseburger before, to which he responded with complete shock. I wouldn’t eat a cheeseburger for the first time until I was 21 years old.
For me, trying new foods felt like trying to jump off of an impossibly high diving board. I’d try not to show it, but whenever I was offered some new, strange food, I’d have to psyche myself up before taking a bite. Grilled chicken, mashed potatoes, burgers, even mac and cheese - the prospect of eating these foods that are almost staples of American diets filled me with a sense of dread that was almost incomparable.
This turned the idea of eating unfamiliar things into something I feared, especially if it was with other people. If we went to grab Mexican, for example, I couldn’t not order something - I didn’t want to look weird in front of my friends. But at the same time, eating one of these strange foods, even taking just a single bite, felt like something I just wasn’t up to the task of. As a result, eating new foods with friends felt more like a chore to be avoided than an activity to look forward to, an opportunity to grow closer to people you care about.
My diet only started to get better in college. I still stuck to the same foods I always ate when getting food from the dining hall - fried chicken, french fries, hot dogs, you name it - but for reasons that I’m not sure of, I became more willing to try new things. At home, I’d get offered food and wouldn’t say no. I grew willing to try things I never would have otherwise - I found out that I love cheeseburgers and shrimp, but I hate pickles so much it’s unreal. These were small steps, but they made me feel a little better about my relationship with eating; the prospect of being a normal eater was something that had felt out of reach for my whole childhood, and here I was eating a cheeseburger. You can’t get more normal than that.
The fact that my dysphagia hit when it did feels a little funny, then. Dysphagia is a word that I had never heard of four years ago, but it’s come up most days since. In short, dysphagia refers to difficulty swallowing. It’s a bit of an umbrella term with a few subcategories - my brand of dysphagia, for instance, is oropharyngeal dysphagia, which involves being unable to initiate the process of swallowing. I can chew food just fine (or else I’d have oral dysphagia) and it goes down my esophagus well enough (if not, esophageal dysphagia), but the step of actually getting it to go down my throat is where I really struggle. Before I started relying on water to assist in the swallowing process, I used to just swallow food crumb by crumb. There was one time, maybe about six months in, where I ordered some pizza and sat down to watch The Truman Show, a film that’s just under an hour and 45 minutes long. When I started, I had three slices of pizza; by the time Truman’s boat hit that wall at the very end, I still had the same three slices. The feeling of looking down at my still-full plate as the credits rolled, realizing that I hadn’t even made a dent in it, realizing that the activity of treating myself to my favorite food had now become this isn’t a feeling I’d wish on anyone.
Watching Delicious in Dungeon then should make me feel like I’m watching a bunch of my friends play outside while I’m stuck indoors, sick. It’s a show where an activity I generally dread happens once or twice per episode, depicted with a vibrancy and joy that should make me jealous of its main characters. I can barely eat my favorite foods anymore, so why does watching Laios and Senshi bond over cooking a giant frog fill me with this intense sense of coziness?
It’s a show that has an energy that I find hard to describe. The premise of eating a new monster every week sounds gimmick-y on paper, and the DnD-esque fantasy setting should feel a little played out. But there’s just something there! I love watching these characters bond and grow with every new meal - I swear, Marcille barely even complains or questions Senshi’s cooking anymore, she just goes for it! I adore how excited Laios gets when he realizes there’s some new monster lurking in the dungeon for Senshi to chop up and cook, a process which in itself is just comforting.
I’m not just indifferent to Delicious in Dungeon’s meals - I actively look forward to them. That’s the contradiction that’s been on my mind as I’ve been watching it these past few weeks. I have Delicious in Dungeon Thursdays locked down, I am there for every new episode - how can a show about an activity that’s brought me so much discomfort and embarrassment and pain make me so consistently happy?
It’s a question that I’m not sure I have a concrete answer for. It could be, of course, that the rest of the show is so good that I just don’t mind the scenes where the main cast eats together. There are plenty of character-building moments outside of the meal scenes, for sure. It could also be that I just turn my brain off during the scenes where they prepare food without really realizing it, or that I get so engrossed while watching that I just forget that my body has this weird quirk.
I think all of those reasons are true, on some level. The show is insanely good all the time, not just when they’re eating food. I’d be lying if I said I haven’t turned my brain off a few times while watching it, either, and I think it’s only natural to get so immersed in a show that you forget about your real-life problems for a bit.
I don’t think these reasons paint the whole picture, though. I think, to some degree, Delicious in Dungeon shows me where things could go if I just hold on a while longer.
The other week, I underwent a barium swallowing test. It’s a test commonly used for dysphagia patients, and for some reason I had never had it done before in the nearly three years I’ve had this disease. The test itself was difficult, to say the least. To start off with, a speech pathologist had me swallow some thin liquids, which went down easily, and some graham crackers, which practically dissolved in my mouth. Eventually though, the food and drink graduated to things outside my realm of swallow-ability: a paint-like liquid so thick it practically stuck to itself, a pill the size of a penny, some other kind of liquid that burnt my throat on the way down. As I swallowed each of these things, a few other doctors watched an x-ray machine provide a live feed of all of the muscles involved in the swallowing process, from the top of my throat all the way down towards my stomach.
I failed those last few tests. The paint-like liquid was too thick for me to chug the way they wanted me to, and I just barely avoided choking on the pill, having to spit it out in the end. I did well enough on the first few tests, though, for my doctors to recommend a plan of action: speech therapy, in the hopes that it retrains the muscles in my mouth and throat to swallow the way I used to. The way everybody does.
As of right now, I don’t have an appointment with a speech therapist on the books, although it’s something I’d like to get scheduled soon. It’s a complicated feeling. I know that speech therapy can only help me, and that this is the right way forward. At the same time though, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous. I’ve had a few close calls over the past few years, but I’ve never actually choked on a piece of food - I have this worry that I’ll try some new technique in therapy or at home and end up in a bad spot after a failed swallow. But then I look back on how much weight I lost in that first year, or how hungry I was all the time, or how many meals I’ve avoided since that first day, and suddenly the idea of trying to change, to try something new, doesn’t feel all that bad.
Watching Delicious in Dungeon should feel like I’m watching people have fun doing something I can never do, but instead it feels like watching people do something that I’ll be doing too, someday. I just have a lot of catching up to do.
