Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want

I retreated into fantasy novels, movies, computer games and, eventually, comedy – places where I could feel safe, assume any personality, fit into any space.

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.

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.

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,

‘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

The whole of the rest of the year is, of course, just a count-down to Christmas.

Eating doesn’t seem to have the same magnetism as the symbolic potency of the foods themselves.

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.

The whole point of it is that nothing hinges on your baking success or failure. You won’t go hungry if it all goes wrong, because cake was never going to form the backbone of your diet in the first place. And whatever happens, you’ll still get to lick the bowl.