Sacred Food

Much as it pains me to admit it, perhaps Gillian McKeith’s got one thing right: we are what we eat – or even, what we don’t eat.

I was reminded of this by a brilliant article in the Sunday Observer, ‘Let’s End Our Obsession With Making Food Sexy‘, by Steven Poole.  The piece was inspired in part by the furore surrounding Nigella Lawson’s cover shoot on ‘Stylist’ (pictured), where she’s covered in toffee sauce.

Poole writes;

‘The fact that food-talk slips so easily these days into sex-talk, might be interpreted as part of the more generalised pornification of everything: but I think it represents a different trend: the foodification of everything.  Food is the vehicle through which we are now invited to take not only our erotic thrills but also our spiritual nourishment (count the number of cookbook ‘bibles’ and purple paeans to the personal-growth aspects of stuffing yourself in memoirs such as Eat, Pray, Love) and even our education in history (food archaeology) or science…

..Cooks are the only public figures left that we trust.  They are both ‘artists’ and gurus.  Politicians and priests are irredeemably tainted by avarice and scandal, so we now expect cooks to perform both their functions – saving our souls and making the world a better place’.

Food for thought.