It’s a life journey that almost defies belief.
A working-class boy barely out of his teens who suffered huge personal loss before embarking on an adventure that’s seen him learn how to cook, create recipes for cancer-sufferers, write best-selling books, make friends with TV celebrity chefs and, most recently, awarded a British Empire Medal.
His name is Ryan Riley, he lives in Barnard Castle, and this is his story.
“I’m originally from Washington, I’m 32 and when I was 18 years old, my mother Krista was diagnosed with small cell lung cancer.
At the time my dad had to work, my sister was at uni and so I became my mother’s carer.
I didn’t really know what I was doing but it was more about being there with her over the two years she was really ill.
It was stage four cancer, we knew she was always going to die, but it was about trying to make the most of that time we had together.
Eventually, she lost her hair and her eyebrows but the one thing that really impacted her the most was she lost her sense of taste.
So, we were going out trying to do what everyone does, trying to make memories, going to restaurants and pubs and bars but she couldn’t taste anything and that meant she was disconnected what should have been precious moments.
She died when I was 20 and towards the end she couldn’t taste food at all. That kept playing on my mind.
Then, three weeks after she died, I had this extraordinary stroke of luck.
My best friend Kimberley Duke, who lost her mother as well to cancer at 15, said, ‘come to the casino, let’s go out, you’ve been in the house three weeks, you can’t mope forever’.
I didn’t have much money, I had £20 to my name, but we went to Genting Casino, in Newcastle, and with my first bet I won £28,000! It changed my life.
Kimberley was living in a council flat and I called her and said, ‘pack up, we’re moving to London’.
I did the exact opposite of what you’re supposed to do when you’re grieving, you’re not supposed to make any big decisions.
I ran off to London, I used that money to rent a flat for a year and Kim and I were quite comfortable, we weren’t living hand-to-mouth.
We just decided to do whatever we wanted to do so we taught ourselves to cook and that was the moment when everything started to come together.
I’d never had a skill before so learning to cook, I was like ‘okay, I’ve got something now’ and I began to work for food magazines as an intern.
What happened to my mother kept playing over and over in my head. I was thinking ‘it would have been nice if I could have done something for her’.
So, one night in 2018, I Tweeted saying ‘I want to do a cookery class for people living with cancer, can anyone help?’.
It went viral! Over the next few days, Radio Four’s Today programme picked up on the Tweet and my first radio appearance ever was to 10m people. I talked about the idea live on air.
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall called the BBC and said, ‘I want a long chat with Ryan’.
Sue Perkins tweeted me saying ‘If you need a speccy-eyed tw*t’ – her very words – ‘to help, I’m in’. And then I was introduced to Nigella Lawson and they all quickly agreed to support me.
I then had to figure out how I was going to do what I set out to do. So, I went to find a man called Prof Barry Smith who’s a sensory scientist, he’s the founder of the Centre for the Study of the Senses at the University of London and is one of the world’s leading sensory scientists so he understands taste and flavour more than anybody.
I said to him, ‘Hi, I’ve just gone viral online, I’ve just been on Radio Four, can you help me?’ And he’s now been part of it for eight years.
Our first cookery class was at River Cottage, in London, for 40 guests.
I’d never taught anyone to cook in my life, but the BBC, the Guardian and the Observer were all there – it was a baptism of fire.
My second cookery class was with Jamie Oliver, he paid for it, and my third was with Lady Bamford of Daylesford of the Cotsworlds.
We ended up travelling all over the UK doing pop-up cookery classes for free which then resulted in me winning the Best Ethical Food Project at the Observer Food Monthly awards.
That is the Oscars of the food world.
That put me in such a position that the next day I was offered a book deal by six different publishers.
At 24 years old, I signed a six-figure book deal for Life Kitchen. I signed the deal in 2018 and it took two years to write.
We travelled up and down the country to the Maggie’s Centres – which offer support for anyone with cancer and their families – and did ten different classes where we rocked up, cooked the recipes and got real world feedback from cancer patients.
We then wrote Life Kitchen – Recipes to Revive the Joy of Taste and Flavour, which features 80 recipes and Nigella called it a “life-changer”, she’s been my biggest supporter.
It came out in March 2020 and it was a No4 best-selling book in Britain.
I launched it live on the Lorraine TV show and I did Saturday Kitchen, the One Show, you name it.
The next week it was the global pandemic and Britain went into lockdown!
But, suddenly, I was an expert in taste loss and what happened to people who had Covid? They lost their sense of taste.
So I wrote Taste & Flavour, the world’s first cookbook for Covid taste loss and we gave it away for free. The recipes were scientifically developed with Prof Barry Smith.
It got 2.8bn media hits worldwide. I appeared on everything from Fox News in America, Canadian TV, Rachael Ray, who’s the Nigella of America on CBS, I did her cookery show, I cooked internationally across the world.
Then I hit a hard patch mentally. Working with cancer patients every day, it’s a tough gig, so I take my hat off to nurses and doctors because I was a boy who lost his mother and Kimberley was a girl who lost her mother and we were helping tens of thousands of people with cancer.
It took its toll and I kind of fell out of love with Life Kitchen and fell out of love with cooking for a while.
I had been living in the celebrity world, my friends were famous and rich and it’s hard to keep up.
That world is very intense, you can get very wrapped up in it and burnt out. I’m not as rich as my friends, people assume I must be a millionaire.
I’m a boy from a council estate with no family wealth and no family connections. Staying in that sphere is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
I was living back with my dad in Blaydon two years ago when a celebrity friend of mine gave me a loan saying, ‘you deserve to be back on your feet’.
I said to my dad, ‘why don’t you come to London with me?’ So, we moved to London and I was thinking it was a chance to rebuild everything.
Then I got really ill so I thought, ‘I can’t afford to stay in London if I can’t work’. Also, my dad didn’t want me living in London and that’s how I ended up in Teesdale.
In 2020, during the pandemic, I’d moved to Greta Bridge and I lived in The Square.
My dad said that time was the happiest he’d seen me and so he rented me a house in Barnard Castle and I’ve been here since June.
I love it here. I know people here from my time at Greta Bridge. I’m not too far from my sister and it’s the perfect place to recover.
Last year I brought out Small Pleasures, Joyful Recipes for Difficult Times, it’s a riff on Life Kitchen but it’s about how I cooked myself back to feeling happy.
Then, in December, waiting for me at the front door was a really thick letter.
I turned it over and saw printed on it ‘On His Majesty’s Service’. I opened it up and it said I’d been awarded a BEM ‘for services to sufferers of loss of taste’.
I went to Downing Street in December and had a private tour with my dad, which was amazing.
I wish they had also given Kimberley a BEM but I was always the face of Life Kitchen and hopefully she’ll get one next year.
After being ill and my life being so up and then so down, I thought, ‘what an opportunity this is to celebrate my mother’s legacy again and to rebuild something for myself, but older and wiser’.
The BEM has changed everything again.
Kimberley and I are relaunching Life Kitchen. There’s going to be classes, hopefully one in Barnard Castle.
I’ve got a monthly contributor’s slot on Radio Newcastle, where I join Gilly Hope on the Breakfast Show to do a recipe clinic.
My whole career has been about meeting people and connecting with them, that’s what’s got me to where I am now.
My path has been extraordinary and it continues to be so. Everything I’ve done has been done with Kimberley by my side.
We’re two kids from a council estate in Washington and we’ve done everything together since we were two years old.
We’ve changed the world in a way neither of us set out to do.”
