Ruby Tandoh onThe
Great British Bake
Owith co-host
Sue Perkins.relationship with it,” she says. “But
most of it is about books and films,
and meals that exist in the world, and
all of these wonderful things that I’ve
plucked from around the globe. I’ve
tried to take lessons from what it
means to eat and what it means
to nourish ourselves.”
Tandoh is less concerned with
chasing authentic food than she is
withunpacking the politics of how the concept of authenticity
upholds certain power structures, and why we think authenticity
matters. She’s against food snobbery (the book contains
loving odes to Burger King, chip butties and supermarket
ready meals) and rejects the idea that there’s some sort of
objective standard of good taste.
“I’ve seen people write about Ghanaian food and say
things like, ‘Oh, that stuff’s bad, it’s bland, it’s carb-heavy –
it’s the French who really know how to cook’,” says Tandoh.
“Those kinds of ideas are racist, xenophobic and useless.”
This is a book that thinks about food in its broadest sense:
how it intersects with the politics of race, class and gender; how
food is wrapped up with lust, desire and bodies; and how our
appetites are unruly and personal, and more policed than ever.
“Food is so often used as a tool for control, whether it’s
controlling the appetites of women, or policing the appetites of
people whose bodies don’t look the way that they’re ‘supposed’
to,” says Tandoh. “We police people’s food intake all the time.
Reclaiming your right to eat whatever you want, and to nourish
yourself in the way you see fit, is a really powerful thing.”
There are plenty of books on the market that offer a food-
as-salvation approach.Eat Up!is not one of them.
“Food is not medicine,” says Tandoh. “Food cannot give
you a glow. Food cannot solve all your ailments. Food is food;
it’s there to nourish you and give you pleasure. It can help you
with some things to a degree, but it’s not a cure-all.”
Tandoh sees the current wellness trend as nothing more than
the diet industry pivoting to a more socially acceptable stance.
“They don’t talk explicitly about weight loss anymore, but it’s
always there as a concept,” she says. “Every 10 years or so, the
emphasis will switch – fats will be bad for you, and then it will
be carbs. I think the diet industry’s latest rebrand coincided
with the rise of an understanding about mental health, self-care
and body positivity. Now these wellness blogs have co-opted
the language of self-care. They might say things like, ‘We want
you to thrive, we want you to have the glow, we want you to
live your best life’, but it’s implicit within that – within the
pictures on the blog, within the foods that are featured, within
the language that’s used around nutrition – that your best self
is meant to be yourthinbest self.”
She worries that people will swallow these covert messages,
all the while telling themselves that they’re getting healthier andlighter, and eating – or not eating –
their way to purity. And Tandoh’s interest
in eating disorders is more than just
academic. She had her own experience
with an eating disorder when she was
younger, and recovering from it shaped
her attitude towards how she eats into
something gentler than it had been.
“Suffering from an eating disorder
was obviously dreadful, but now it’s given
me this new perspective on food that I’m
quite grateful for,” she says. “I love eating,
but I don’t feel any pressure to be positive
about food all the time. It gave me this
reality check that sometimes you’ll eat too
much, and sometimes you’ll eat a bit too
little; sometimes you’re not going to really
love food, and sometimes you’re going
to be fascinated by it. That ebb and flow
is just what it is to be a person with an
appetite that’s always changing.”
IfEat Up!has a through-line, it’s
the idea that food has value beyond the
sum of its parts – something that Tandoh
likes to think of as its magic.
“There’s so much in food culture
about technique, or about nutrition
and numbers and science, and I think
I kept coming back to this idea of ‘magic’
because it sums up a feeling that food can
bring that isn’t really quantifiable,” she
says. “It’s about remembering that food
isn’t a ‘two plus two equals four’ thing –
it’s just so much more exciting than that.”
The distinction makes sense. It
explains why baking a spinach and feta
pie can evoke the joy of summer, why
eating a Creme Egg feels like an act of
self-care, how the simplest meal made by
someone who loves you can taste better
than fine dining. But Tandoh wants
people to find their own way through the
complex business of eating what they want.
“It’s about giving them confidence
to follow their own appetite,” she says.
“There are no right or wrong answers.
All I’m doing is starting a conversation
that I want people to have in their own
lives. Everyone has the tools to do it
themselves. I just want to give them
that little push.”●84 GOURMET TRAVELLER