Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want

But the food narratives we create when we shop, cook and eat don’t need to be exotic, expensive or rarefied. They shouldn’t be estranged from the humdrum, ugly, familiar mess of everyday life. They don’t even have to taste good. The important thing is giving yourself time to imagine your food, to touch, taste and smell the ingredients, and to reall

Try out speaking your mind when you’re alone – talk to yourself in the mirror, saying things like ‘I would like you to go down on me, and I want the last slice of the strudel.’ No doubt some people, probably guys, will be thrown off balance by your forthrightness. Who cares. Eat their leftovers. If they carry on judging you, eat them, too.

We accept the lie that there’s a perfect way of eating that will save your soul and send you careering blithely through your eighties, into your nineties and beyond. Do what you want, we’re told – but you’ll die if you get it wrong.

But the thing about the seasons is that they are cyclical, and the ‘new you’ this January will be the same ‘new you’ of next January, and of every January until you die. You’ll drift from Creme Egg spring to Red Stripe summer and Pumpkin Spice autumn and right back to the fugue state you started in, dizzy from all the brandy butter, nursing a hango

Make the most beautiful pie, and fill it with love, or bitterness, or jealousy, or whatever thoughts and feelings are flooding your mind.

What’s more, when, in another study conducted by the scientists, participants were fed the foods they knew and liked, first in the format they enjoyed, and then in a less appetising, but nutritionally identical, puréed format, the researchers discovered an even greater disparity in nutritional absorption. The women absorbed on average 70% less iron

Sometimes we lose all of this magic in the margins. Even though food is everywhere in our social fabric and in our culture, it’s still squeezed into one thing or another. Diet gurus make food the sum of calories and carbs. Self-avowed foodies use food as a code for class. Restaurant critics polish food into a smooth, substance-less thing, while foo

These foods might not be packed with precisely the vitamins and minerals and macronutrients that your body really needs right then and there, but they will make your soul soar, and sometimes – when the very fabric of your life is one big snotty tissue – that’s all you really need.

When we offer someone food, we’re saying we care, and certain foods carry that cultural weight more than others. A cup of tea can mean everything, especially after a long day’s work, after a tiff, or when the person you love has got up five minutes early to make it, and bring it to you in bed.

This quasi-religious impulse comes through tellingly in the rituals of wellness. The church walls carry the stations of the cross, and the sermons fall into well-worn ruts of the sermon, prayer and scripture. There is a considered deliberation to everything that happens, and even the smallest act is cloaked in ceremony, from the altar cloth to the