Her mother had studied her quizzically one morning and said, “You don’t look feminine at all.” Alice had laughed and said, “It’s 1997, Mom. I don’t need to look feminine.”

Clearly women’s relationships with food are particularly conflicted, and the expectations heaped upon us – by a media saturated with images of idealised bodies, and by a pervasive culture of female guilt around food – only reinforce that confusion. When it comes to food, it’s our gender that sets the standard, and most of the time it is women who p