Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want
It’s what makes women ‘power-hungry’ or ‘manipulative’ where men are ‘ambitious’ and ‘shrewd’.
Ruby Tandoh • Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want
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.
Ruby Tandoh • Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want
All of these things that are silly, and tasty, and completely unnecessary: we live in the age of these things. What a shame it would be if we didn’t try our best to taste every last weird and wonderful product on the supermarket shelves, and take a moment every now and again to step away from sensibility, necessity, nutrition, and just taste someth
... See moreRuby Tandoh • Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want
We don’t really think of food as political. It feels wrong to talk about something so enmeshed with home, comfort and nostalgia as belonging in the realm of politics. We’re used to relegating food to the domestic sphere: the kitchen and the place of women, a warm, familiar space far from the steeliness of legislation, government and war. So much of
... See moreRuby Tandoh • Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want
The magic lay in how the show eschewed the melodrama of American-style contests, with their set menu of competitiveness, sabotage and self-centredness. Instead, it was polite and neurotically perfectionist.
Ruby Tandoh • Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want
This is why we find our tastes turned to warm, familiar foods when we’re in need of solace. We want things that thread effortlessly through the fabric of our lives: flavours that remind us of another time or, if they are new, at the very least run with the grain of our established tastes and preferences.
Ruby Tandoh • Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want
Most of the time, though, food is more complicated than that. We are human, and we have sharp edges, aches and pains, heavy burdens to carry. We don’t just drift through the world like some kind of beneficent peace-and-love plasma – life snags on us like thorns.
Ruby Tandoh • Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want
Because food exists at the interface between us and everything else, eating can be particularly troublesome when we’re not at peace with the world around us. When we don’t know exactly what we want from life, food can be difficult.
Ruby Tandoh • Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want
The flash of life that is you, your life – it coincides with the age of books and waffles. What a time to be alive.