Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want

any association between consumption of dairy and coughs has been shown to be negligible.)

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

In a culture where displays of emotional vulnerability are often seen as desperate and sad, we sometimes have no choice but to self-soothe rather than look outwards for help.

our attitudes to food in general are so messed up that we muddle vegetables with salvation, and emptiness with virtue, what does that mean for the ways we treat the less fortunate among us?

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

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

By the ‘you are what you eat’ logic, junk food makes for junk people, and unfamiliar food makes for strange, ‘different’ people. It’s worth questioning the assumptions we make about what’s normal, plain, right or good in food, and what’s not. Often, these judgements we make about food and identity say much more about the person airing them than the

This basket says: ‘I am a functioning adult; I am good at food and therefore good at life.’ This is the person I want to appear to be.

When diet is such an integral part of our identity, it’s easy to succumb to the tempting idea that you can reinvent, resurrect and evolve simply by going on a diet. But it just doesn’t work that way.