Arborea, cooking as therapy: this is how Marcella Frau, a cancer patient, faced her ordeal

Cooking as therapy. To feel less pain, to not think too much. For Marcella Frau, a cook, food was her salvation, an enormous strength when “a black shadow”, as she says, suddenly appeared . But also when her hair was just a memory due to the chemotherapy needed to treat breast cancer.

The chef, owner of the restaurant “Era Ora”, in Arborea, a town where she has worked and lived for many years, is one of the many Sardinian women who decided to seek treatment far from the island, in Milan, at the European Institute of Oncology . A hospital to which the chef has long been donating funds for research thanks to “special” lunches. Marcella Frau had a great desire to help those who had managed to cure her, which is why for two years the chef from Arborea has been organizing a charity event.

" We organize, with friends who are chefs and waiters, special lunches useful for raising funds to be allocated to the Ieo for research and prevention ," she says. "The last one took place a few days ago: we managed to raise 4,350 euros. The chefs cooked for free, and the waiters didn't take a single euro. To support the cause of the fight against female tumors, all the products used were donated by local companies. A gesture that filled me with joy, a gesture that can make a difference."

Also present for the occasion was Dr. Viviana Galimberti, author of the discovery of the so-called "sentinel lymph node" and director of the breast cancer division at Ieo . But also Dr. Daniele Farci, head of the oncology department of the Piccola casa di cura di Decimomannu where the cook performed the first therapies.