Sublime

says a great deal about us in Britain that, in the face of an increasingly scary world, we found comfort in shows like The Great British Bake Off.

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.

Of course, there is no physiological need for baking, but that’s precisely its appeal: in a world where so much of what we do is in the name of achieving some end, baking is just pleasure in and of itself. It’s special because we don’t need it, but we want it, and we allow ourselves to indulge that appetite nonetheless.