One of the greatest delights of lockdown was my purchase of a milk frother. Creamy, full fat milk is warmed and whipped up into smooth and airy froth in the time it takes my coffee to brew. And not just any coffee, today it was Monsoon Malibar, one of my favourite beans. I grind the beans as I need them so the smell of freshly ground coffee permeates the air. I finish my milky coffee off with a sprinkle of cinnamon and cocoa. Today, I enjoyed my coffee with a three day old croissant I warmed in the oven, and ate in the way my Dad taught me, by pulling it into bite size pieces and then spreading butter and apricot jam on to each mouthful. My fingers got pleasantly greasy with the butter, and after I had licked them I used my index finger to scoop the last of my milk froth from the bottom of my cup.
How many calories in a croissant with butter and jam? How many calories in a large cappuccino made with full fat milk?
This week my blog has been inspired by a podcast by Rebel Eaters. It was an interview with a dietician, and she had some incredibly important words of wisdom to share. A healthy diet is a varied diet, and that includes cookies, cake and cream. Listen to your hunger cues and eat until your tummy is full. She argued that dieticians, and the whole diet industry, has caused untold misery and damage to millions of us by dividing food into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ food.
Was my croissant ‘bad’? Should I feel guilty for eating it? Would it have been less evil if I had left out the jam and replaced the butter with low fat spread? Should I castigate myself for using full fat milk instead of skimmed? To me, if I thought like that I would not have a healthy relationship with food. If we allow it to be, food is an incredible source of sensuous pleasure. It feeds all the senses. I feel genuine joy looking at my full cup of frothy, milky coffee even before I have had a mouthful. The feel of butter on my fingers is another genuine pleasure. Even the sounds of the coffee beans grinding and the kettle boiling produce a lovely sense of wellbeing. Why would I get in the way of all that pleasure by denying myself the creaminess of full fat milk or the delicious sweetness of the jam.
Food should be a source of pleasure, and nothing else. Diets have been proven not to work. It is time to stop beating ourselves up for having a pastry as a snack or for not hitting an arbitrary number on the weighing scale. We should be teaching our young people that food is an integral part of life, that it is an easily accessible source of daily pleasure and that it is at the heart of making connections with others. We should teach them about the importance of a varied diet, and how to listen to their own body. We should not be teaching them to feel really bad about what they enjoy eating or to hate their bodies for being too fat. We act as if it is a crime to be a fat teenager, but to me the crime is making a teenager feel like a lesser person because of the shape of their bodies.
Eating for many of us is inextricably linked to how we are feeling. We turn to food for comfort or escape, and we are taught that is this wrong and we are damaging ourselves. But of course delicious food cheers us up and makes us feel better! If we were accepting of our own bodies and gave ourselves permission to enjoy all types of food, maybe we wouldn’t need so much comforting, maybe we wouldn’t feel the same need to escape.
The next time you are indulging in something delicious, be that a magnum ice-cream, a plate of chips, or your third doughnut in row, throw the guilt away and revel in your sticky, greasy sensual pleasure. Here is some inspiration:
The Apple’s Song
Tap me with your finger, rub me with your sleeve, hold me, sniff me, peel me curling round and round till I burst out white and cold from my tight red coat and tingle in your palm
as if I’d melt and breathe a living pomander waiting for the minute of joy when you lift me to your mouth and crush me and in taste and fragrance I race through your head in my dizzy dissolve.
I sit in the bowl in my cool corner and watch you as you pass smoothing your apron. Are you thirsty yet? My eyes are shining.
Edwin Morgan
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