
Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want

In order to eat well, we need to eat with every part of ourselves. We see, feel, sense, taste, touch, predict and imagine food long before it ever arrives on our fork.
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.
Ruby Tandoh • Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want
This culture snowballs into a distrust of doctors, and a belief that if you eat, drink, exercise, live just so, you can ward off disease. The subtext is, of course, that if you try hard enough, you can stave off death.
Ruby Tandoh • Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want
But at its heart it was, of course, about women’s bodies, and what we do with those bodies. More specifically, it was about what claim others have to those bodies when we dare to live, eat and breathe in a public space. The man at the helm of the group, whom I won’t name for fear of feeding his ego, shrugged the whole thing off in an interview with
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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.
Ruby Tandoh • Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want
And yet in spite of all this data, we have some decidedly magical ways of conceptualising food. ‘Clean’ diets lead to a trouble-free life, ‘pure’ foods give the eater a clarity of thinking, a wellness-driven lifestyle will smooth out the snags in your world. This belief system centres on the idea that a perfect diet – clear rules, no muddying of
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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
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Consider what’s frequently brushed off as greedy, hedonistic appetite, for instance – namely, the desire to eat things that taste good and make us happy,
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.