Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want
The whole of the rest of the year is, of course, just a count-down to Christmas.
Ruby Tandoh • Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want
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 he
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The concept of waffles is that you can pile indulgence on top of decadence and finish it with a drizzle of hedonism, and that this constitutes a real and valid meal. The concept of waffles is that a waffle will never, ever be a staple food, or a convenience food, or a health food, and that it is all the more special for this uselessness. They are j
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Our bodies are magical things. We go through our lives taking little bits of the world into us, bite by bite, and turning all of that matter into us. We get bigger, stronger, brighter, bolder, taking up more space – asserting the primacy of our existence – with every morsel we eat.
Ruby Tandoh • Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want
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.
Ruby Tandoh • Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want
Our appetite is only human, but that’s just the thing: unless you’re a man, those hungry, smelly, normal human things are taboo. Somehow, as women, we’re expected to be superhuman – perfectly engineered, low-maintenance, minimalist machines for life – in exchange for the ‘privilege’ of being declared less-than by the society that spawned us.
Ruby Tandoh • Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want
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 –
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Although all women’s bodies are seen as public property, my slimness allows me to say ‘follow your appetite’ without someone hurling back at me: ‘Look where that got you.’
Ruby Tandoh • 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.’