Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want

‘When people are tired and hungry, which in adult life is much of the time, they do not want to be confronted by an intellectually challenging meal: they want to be consoled.’

‘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

Perhaps the cleverest thing our patriarchal society ever achieved was to rehash this bricks-and-mortar anti-woman rhetoric with something a hundred times more vague and harder to shoot down: now, instead of women’s compliance being enforced as an imperative from above, it trickles down as a kind of pervasive doubt, finding a voice in the very women

And in spite of all of this, ‘fat’ has become shorthand for ‘bad’. And with the shrinking of that word, so fat people are expected to shrink themselves.

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.

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

These foods might not be packed with precisely the vitamins and minerals and macronutrients that your body really needs right then and there, but they will make your soul soar, and sometimes – when the very fabric of your life is one big snotty tissue – that’s all you really need.

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

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.