Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want

We’re told, in countless different ways, that we ought to be content with what we have, ask for less, take up less space.

The whole point of it is that nothing hinges on your baking success or failure. You won’t go hungry if it all goes wrong, because cake was never going to form the backbone of your diet in the first place. And whatever happens, you’ll still get to lick the bowl.

We’ve taken the rhetoric of our oppressors into our own mouths, and it’s leaving a bitter taste.

The strangest thing about all these moral judgements is the aura of scientific certainty in which they are cloaked.

What wellness culture asserts, in essence, is that there is some higher state we can achieve, but only if we’re willing to put in the work. Our natural impulses, the ones that draw us to the buzz of sugar, the sting of salt, bright sweets and festive feasts, are all wrong according to the wellness mantra. The way to upper-middle-class white-girl he

For some, that’s completely different from the hunger that rattles our stomachs in uncomfortable pangs when we’ve been working so hard we’ve skipped lunch. And yet, experience attests to the fact that our primary criterion in choosing food is not how it will satisfy our hunger at all, but how it tastes.

‘Overwhelmed by choice, by the dim threat of mortality that lurks beneath any wrong choice, people crave rules from outside themselves, and successful heroes to guide them to safety.’ We are all scared, and want nothing more than to be swaddled tight in the grasp of a diet industry that tells us that a pea-protein shake is the one true way to save

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

Food has the power to patch up the ragged edges of our souls – the frayed tempers and unravelled dreams – and make the world seem OK again, if only for a few moments.

Another facet of this enforced shrinking is that those with fat bodies are deemed somehow incapable of knowing what is best for them.