Clearly appetite isn’t the only factor when it comes to choosing our food: we each have a whole vast web of beliefs, anxieties, morals and judgements that play into the decisions we make about what to eat.

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?

They lay their roots deeper with talk of women being prosecuted for what they eat and drink during pregnancy, and they pop open a thousand jubilant blossoms, like fireworks, with the onset of full, all-encompassing, diet culture.

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

The point is that when you eat during stress and upset, that psychological anxiety can manifest itself as physical malaise.

Common opinion has it that hunger is the physiological need to eat, whereas appetite is framed as just a desire to eat, driven by emotional or sensory pleasure rather than bodily need. We see this in the division between nutrition and gastronomy, or between food as fuel and food as pleasure.

But what’s really magical about chicken soup isn’t the nutrient quota or the fact it shifts your snot along: it’s that it is a delicious, precious metaphor for caring, and for nourishing. What feels really good about feeding yourself chicken soup – whether it’s a bone broth simmered for 12 hours or a microwaved bowl of Campbell’s Cream of Chicken –

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.

‘Society’s monomaniacal fixation on female thinness isn’t a distant abstraction, something to be pulled apart by academics in women’s studies classrooms or leveraged for traffic in shallow “body-positive” listicles … It is a constant, pervasive taint that warps every woman’s life.’