Poh Ling Yeow On Navigating Grief While Filming MasterChef Australia

Grief is a funny thing. One day, you're fine. The next, it envelops you entirely and leaves you unable to breathe. It often hits when we least suspect it — while listening to a song that reminds you of your loved one, or when you see an elderly couple crossing the street hand in hand. For MasterChef judge Poh Ling Yeow, grief tends to surface when she's driving.

"I find that it visits at the most unexpected of times," Yeow tells Refinery29 Australia in an emotional interview. "I find that it's when your mind is not active; like when you're doing something quite mundane, like driving. It's almost like when you're busy and you're doing things, it's a way of keeping [grief] under wraps, but when you're least unaware, it kind of pops out to say hi."

The MasterChef Australia alumnus and now judge tragically lost her mother, Christina, in November 2022. Grief is a long and neverending journey, and for the television presenter, author and artist, the hurt is still raw. "It winds me," she shares. "It will be the most dramatic inhale and sometimes I can't muster tears. It's just this winding feeling. Sometimes I cry and sometimes it's over before I can even figure it out. It comes in many different forms."

For Yeow, the grief journey is not linear, like everyone else. "It sometimes gets easier but it really visits whenever it wants, grief," she says.

This year, the MasterChef Australia great entered the kitchen again — but this time, as a judge. For the Malaysian-Australian cook, the first thing she thought of when she scored her new gig was her mother.

"Being offered the position of [MasterChef Australia] judge, the first thing I thought of was Mum," Yeow says. "I didn't think about anything else. I was like, even if I decide not to do this, my mum would get so much of a kick out of this."

But her mum's passing hasn't meant that she's gone from Yeow's life. If anything, the judge shares that can feel her mum in the MasterChef kitchen with her. "Every day when I'm in the kitchen, she is so there," Yeow says. "She's so at the top of my mind."

For Yeow, grief often surfaces when she hears stories from contestants about what their dishes mean to them — which often includes an element of family. "Because the food that people talk about, the recipe that they cook that reminds them of their mum — it's just right in my face every day on the show," she says.

While grief can be all-consuming at times, anyone who's experienced it can attest to the ways it can help connect us with our loved ones through the most ordinary of moments. One of these instances of connection is, of course, through food. Whether it's recreating soup recipes that are intertwined with our memories of loved ones, or reconnecting with them through a cup of tea (made exactly as they used to like it), food has such a profound impact on connecting us with those we've lost. For Yeow, the food that connects her most to her mum lies in the humble sponge cake.

"The smell when I'm baking is totally the smell of my mum," Yeow explains. "So every Saturday, once a week, I am just transported to times with her baking together, which was from my early childhood moments."

"They're my greatest memories of Mum," she says.

Grief can sometimes make us feel like there's no light at the end, no way to escape it without being enveloped by all of its darkness. But for Yeow, her understanding of grief is that it's merely a representation of her love for her mum.

"One of the best descriptions of grief I've heard is this phrase," Yeow says. "Grief is love with nowhere to go."