Sara

Dietitian Ellyn Satter has a quote on the front page of her website: ‘When the joy goes out of eating, nutrition suffers.’ It’s a thought that captures what should be a self-evident truth of eating: that it does us good to feel good.

Food is both fuel and medicine, but this doesn’t mean we have to strip it bare of its magic and reframe it as a power source for some robot-like, maximally efficient human body. Yes, the reality is that food is a basic, physical human need. It is fuel, in a sense, and by extension, we are machines that need fuelling. But we’re also thoughtful

But the food narratives we create when we shop, cook and eat don’t need to be exotic, expensive or rarefied. They shouldn’t be estranged from the humdrum, ugly, familiar mess of everyday life. They don’t even have to taste good. The important thing is giving yourself time to imagine your food, to touch, taste and smell the ingredients, and to

What is clear, when the enormity of life and death is reduced to a question of thinness and fatness, is that it’s not really about health at all.

You will also notice that there are relatively healthy fat people in the safe zone. There are also very unhealthy slim people in the dangerous zone. This illustrates a hugely important fact: it is not your body weight that dictates your fate.