This Is Not A Diet Book: A User’s Guide to Eating Well. Bee Wilson

thing I wanted to eat was whatever the particular diet was advising. It didn’t have much to do with the food itself. It was a state of mind.

      I overheard a woman in a café chatting to a friend over weekend lattes and eggs Benedict about her attempts to adopt a healthier lifestyle. She announced that, on Monday, she was going to buy kale and make green juice. ‘The trouble is, I buy the kale, it sits in the fridge, I throw it away. I buy it again, throw it away again.’ I related to what she was saying. When you think that kale is something you need to swallow as a form of self-improvement, it tastes vile.

      But what if you properly liked kale? Then, it would be easy to eat. After buying the kale, the next step is to try the kale. Offer it kindly. Coax yourself with small morsels. Pair it with other foods that you like (the dark mineral taste goes well with chorizo, or as a purée stirred through pasta). Or crisp it in the oven with oil and salt, as if it were chips. One day, you may find yourself eating a plate of kale with bright oil and garlic and two poached eggs, not because you feel you should, or that it will make you a better person, but because you positively crave it, especially black kale (cavolo nero) which is not as scratchy as curly kale. Then again, you may never warm up to kale and its stalky charms. No matter. There are always other foods.

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      Try to start thinking of feeding yourself as a good parent feeds a child: with love, with variety, but also with limits.

      As adults, so many of us feed ourselves in ways that are alternately neglectful and overly strict: first, we let ourselves eat a whole family-size bag of crisps with a bucket-sized glass of wine but then we deny ourselves lunch. Next time you sit down to eat, imagine you are an ideal parent feeding a beloved child. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could offer yourself food in a warm, structured, no-fuss kind of way? You wouldn’t punish yourself with crash diets but nor would you allow yourself too much junk. Your priority when choosing food would be to see yourself well nourished and you’d choose meals to keep your mood on an even keel. You’d want yourself to enjoy eating. The fridge would be stocked with good food and you would trust yourself to choose wisely from its contents.

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      Stop being cruel to yourself about eating. You are not ‘naughty’ because you broke your stupid diet and ate some pasta. You are a human body needing to be fed. We should be far less judgemental about ourselves and our eating habits and far more judgemental about the diets that make us feel like losers for preferring a bowlful of comforting tagliatelle to one of spiralized courgette.

      ‘Courgetti’ – an approximation of spaghetti made from raw ribbons of courgette – is an example of how crazy and extreme our ideas of diet have become. If you want to spiralize vegetables, be my guest. The telephone-wire texture of spiralized vegetables has its appeal, and it’s fun to watch the strands tumble from the spiralizer. But pasta it is not. Replacing your usual plate of refined white pasta with a pile of vegetable mush will not make you ‘glow’. It will make you hungry, and then you start to feel like a failure when you crave a huge bowl of cereal an hour after dinner. Instead of giving you the absurd choice of courgettes or pasta, a kinder diet might lead you towards courgettes and pasta, but with more vegetables and fewer noodles.

      Diet books are always nagging you to eat wholewheat pasta, which is OK once in a while (there’s a Nigella recipe for spelt pasta with anchovies that I love) but if you have it too often it can feel like chewing on cardboard. Do as the Italians do and enjoy refined white durum-wheat pasta but in smaller quantities. We are doing pasta a disservice when we dismiss it as a beige ‘carb’ with no redeeming features. An 85g serving of De Cecco egg pappardelle contains 11g of protein. Even non-egg dried pasta contains at least 8g of protein per portion, depending on portion size and brand.

      When I cook pasta and vegetables now, I measure the pasta sparingly and add quantities of greens that I would once have thought excessive. I’ve come to prefer it that way, assuming the vegetables are well-seasoned and treated with care. Sometimes, at home, we eat two whole heads of cauliflower between five, broken up and sautéed in oil with shallots until brown and crispy, then tossed with farfalle, olives and toasted breadcrumbs. Other times, I make penne with overcooked broccoli, a deeply comforting recipe borrowed from Jacob Kenedy’s The Geometry of Pasta