4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2016
Copyright © Bee Wilson 2016
Bee Wilson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008225766
Ebook Edition © December 2016 ISBN: 9780008225773
Version: 2016-11-10
For David, who first taught me that balanced eating is less about health food and more about joy
CONTENTS
Tahini and black sesame porridge
Spiced chicken livers for a girl
There isn’t time in the world to examine all the food fads.
Logan Clendening, The Balanced Diet, 1936
Most people hate diets, and who can blame us? Diets are generally the opposite of a good time. They leave you famished and force you to eat weird things that you don’t enjoy. Diets dangle the promise of a new life – or a new body – only to make you feel like a failure when you can’t stick to their insanely restrictive rules. Lose 6 pounds in six days on kale juice and walnuts and never feel hungry again! But you do feel hungry and, worse, you now feel guilty too.
Considering how unpleasant diets are – not to mention the fact that they generally leave us worse off than when we started – it’s surprising how many of them we go on. Consumer research from 2013 suggested that more than half of all adults in Britain had tried to lose weight over the past year. The sad fact is that, much as we dislike dieting, we dislike our own bodies even more. Many of us are trapped in destructive eating habits. Given the broken food environment that now surrounds us, it’s no wonder. It’s hard to eat in a balanced way, when you have to walk a gauntlet of pink glazed doughnuts every time you go to the shops for milk. Yes, we are lucky to have access to abundant calories, something that many of our fellow citizens, in this country or elsewhere, still cannot rely on. But the distress of overeating – or believing that you are overeating – is also real.
As an overweight and self-loathing teenager, I was a sucker for diets. The Rotation diet, the F-plan diet, the ‘don’t eat anything except for celery and low-fat cream cheese until you nearly pass out’ diet (this my own special invention). Each time I embarked on one, I felt I was slimming my way into a brave new dawn.