Why we love (and hate)

food
by JUSTINE PICARDIE, Daily Mail
January: the dark days of dieting, of self-loathing, of promising
yourself you'll go to the gym, but eating chocolate instead. Is it only
me or does everyone (or Everywoman) think about food constantly at
this time of year? Let me re-phrase that: I think about food often, all
year round, but even more so in January.
And the really weird thing is that I see myself as someone with a
healthy attitude to food. I don't diet - not much, anyway. I have never
suffered from eating disorders; I neither binge nor purge; I am not
overweight. So what's the problem?
My thoughts about food are tangled up with my thoughts about life,
emotion and morality; and what has gone before, and what might lurk
ahead.
Most of my female friends perform the same set of equations every
day: chocolate after lunch (bad) equals steamed fish and spinach for
dinner (good).
If men think in a similar way they're not talking about it. And they're
certainly not arranging a night out with the boys in the way women do
lunch - no-carb sushi with green tea rather than double helpings of
curry and six rounds of beer.
This time last year, I'd just delivered a first draft of my novel to my
agent and he said to me: 'There's a lot about food in this book.' I
thought I'd written about life and love and death, and yet here he was
telling me it was full of episodes about roast chicken. So I re-read the
book and, much to my surprise, he was right.
Not only did roast chicken make several appearances, there were
cakes and pies, and home-made peppermint creams and coconut ice,
and spaghetti mixed up with pesto, and peas for extra nutrition.

I'd revealed the workings of my mind. But I don't think a woman would
have noticed anything out of the ordinary.
Since then, I've been worrying about whether my relationship with
food is normal. It is some comfort, therefore, to discover that on the
basis of an entirely unscientific survey of my female friends, most of
us admit to similar neuroses.
About 80 per cent of us said friends are on diets at any one time
(exactly the figure quoted in more rigorous research); and all of them
(including me) could cite the specifics of successively popular diets
(Atkins, Blood Type, Cabbage Soup) as easily as they could recount a
day's calorie intake.
Food is always an integral part of my childhood memories: making
sweets for Christmas presents; learning how to bake scones with my
mother on Sunday afternoons; coming home from school to discover
she'd prepared a Halloween feast: a hollowed pumpkin, with a grim
smile, watching us as we ate scooped-out oranges filled with lemon
jelly.
But I don't remember my mother eating anything: she was a tall, thin,
elegant Sixties girl - longlimbed in a stripy Biba mini skirt.
These days, food remains a mined territory between us - is she eating
properly now that she lives alone? - but there are simple pleasures,
too.
Last weekend, she taught my son how to make scones, just as she
had done all those years ago for me, and I felt a sense of peace
descend over the house.
Where does it come from, I wonder, this characteristically female
blending of food with emotion; its transmogrification into reward or
punishment?
As as a mother I obsess about green vegetables. I cook broccoli
endlessly, as if it will protect my sons against the dangers of the
outside world.

And when I'm not cooking broccoli, I'm reading articles about the
rising rates of obesity. One in five adults in Britain is overweight, and 9
pc of boys and 13 pc of girls aged five to 16 are obese.
The strange thing is that it does not seem so long ago that I was
reading equally alarming articles about the rising rates of anorexia in
teenage girls; which might suggest that something more complicated
is happening here, a more confusing narrative than straightforward
statistics reveal.
The one time in my life I became very thin turned my body into public
property.
In the months that led up to my sister's death from breast cancer in
September 1997, I ate constantly, but shrank alarmingly, apparently
wasting away. Afterwards, it was almost as if my grief for Ruth was
eating me up, so that I would vanish, as she did.
When I think back to that time, what surprises me is that food
continued to take centre stage, even as death edged its way in.
Ruth ate a lot: partly because the steroids she was prescribed gave
her an enormous appetite and also as if in rebellion against the
stereotype of the sickly, wan Pre-Raphaelite heroine.
Ruth died, but not before eating up as much of life as she could. And
afterwards, there was I, dressed in black, three stone underweight,
looking terminally ill. Even then, there were a great many women some of whom worked in the fashion industry; many still in obeisance
to the age-old cult of thinness being close to godliness - who told me,
with genuine approval, that I was looking fabulous.
My mother, consumed by her own terrible grief, made no comment on
my vanishing act - which was as it should be. There was nothing she
could say and, in our silence, we understood each other perfectly.
As for the men in my life who observed this: well, it must have been
perplexing, improbable, infuriating.
My husband asked no questions, just kept filling the fridge with food
('You need to look after yourself,' he said, trying to look after me).
One day at The Observer, where I was editor of the magazine, I had a
short, tense conversation with a writer - a fattish man - who said,
when I told him that his article for the magazine was overdue: 'Oh,
why don't you just leave me alone and go and eat something instead.'

He made it sound so simple, but he was angry, too; and in that

exchange - which felt somehow shocking at the time - I realised that
food could be a weapon.
Men might not entirely understand its female code but its threatening
potential was there. ('Tart' or 'trout' or 'cold fish'? A man can still
reduce a woman to nothing more than a foodstuff, to be eaten up or
thrown away.)
Now, I'm not thin any more. I survived, stronger than before, perhaps.
And the years keep turning, and it is January again and my waistline
is thickening. I fight to stop myself feeling sickened; to remember that
life goes on, as it must; that food is just a beginning, and not an end in
itself.
A version of this article first appeared in The Observer. Wish I May by
Justine Picardie (Picador, 15.99).