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

when I was unhappy about food, I thought I should eat salads precisely because they had almost nothing in them. I thought of nutrition as a form of absence. Fat-free, sugar-free. At the height of the low-fat craziness of the 1990s, my best friend C and I (she was a recovering anorexic) used to sit side by side chomping through salads containing little but dull iceberg lettuce, over-refrigerated tomatoes and possibly half of a pallid chicken breast. No dressing, no flavour, no joy.

      Now that my relationship with eating has changed, I see that what makes salads great is that you can fit so much nourishment and variety into a single easy plateful (or Tupperware box). A salad is a vehicle for good things like toasted nuts, bright herbs, juicy roasted vegetables and cheese. Depending on the time of year, it might be leftover charred peppers with aubergine purée and feta; or roasted pumpkin with sage, pearl barley, hazelnuts and watercress. Some torn-up chicken from yesterday’s roast dinner might make a welcome second appearance with black grapes, cucumber, mint and rice, rather tartly dressed. Whatever the time of year, I like carrot salads, both raw and cooked: great for when you feel broke but in need of zingy sustenance (even organic carrots are cheap). Canadian food writer Naomi Duguid makes an incredible Burmese carrot salad with peanuts, lime juice, fish sauce and fried shallots. Steamed sliced carrots dressed with oil, garlic, lemon and chopped coriander is another good way.

      But my new favourite involves toasted cumin seeds and currants and is loosely based on something I ate at a marvellous café in Portland, Oregon, called Maurice Luncheonette (the version there contained prunes). I’ve added torn chunks of garlicky toast, as a nod to the legendary chicken and bread salad in The Zuni Café Cookbook, and to make it filling enough for lunch.

      If the word salad has bad connotations for you, do as food writer Sally Butcher does and call it a ‘salmagundi’ instead (an old name for a mixture of many ingredients). In fact, call it whatever you like.

      Carrot and bread salad: a nourishing but cheap lunch

      Serves 3

      1 tablespoon currants

      2 teaspoons apple cider vinegar (I like the one made by Raw Health)

      2 tablespoons pumpkin seeds

      2 teaspoons cumin seeds

      2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

      4 spring onions, chopped

      750g carrots

      3 generous slices sourdough bread

      1 clove garlic

sea salt (preferably Maldon)*

      20g flat-leaf parsley, chopped

* I use Maldon sea salt, a teaspoon of which has half as much sodium as a teaspoon of free flowing fine salt, because it is less dense; in general, if you are using regular salt, you will only need half the amount.

      Put the currants in a small bowl and pour over the vinegar. Heat up a wide large pan or skillet and toast the pumpkin seeds until some of them pop. Tip into a bowl. Add the cumin seeds to the pan for a couple of seconds until fragrant. Set them aside with the pumpkin seeds. Heat 1 tablespoon of the oil and soften the spring onions for a minute or two. Peel the carrots and trim off the ends. Using a food processor, cut half the carrots into wafer-thin slices and grate the other half. If you don’t have a food processor, grate half the carrots on a box grater and slice the others as thinly as you can, with a peeler or a knife. Meanwhile, toast the bread in the toaster, rub the cut clove of garlic all over it and drizzle the second tablespoon of oil over the slices. Sprinkle the toast with salt and cut or tear into 2cm chunks. Now mix all the ingredients together and season again with salt, to taste. Add more vinegar or a squeeze of lemon if you think it needs it. I like this with fish; but it’s a good lunch all by itself.

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      Our lives would be more balanced if we spent less time worrying about our weight and more time planning what to cook for dinner. How much better we would eat if we took all those hours of unhappy weight-obsessing and diverted them to dreaming up different uses for herbs (you haven’t lived until you’ve tried a deep-fried sage leaf).

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      A word about guilty pleasures: there is no such thing (and don’t get me started on ‘guilt-free’ snacks). If it’s making you feel guilty, it isn’t a pleasure. And pleasure in eating is nothing to feel ashamed of, whatever your size. One of the saddest things about our eating today is the way we have been conditioned to sabotage our own joys. Shame never made a person eat better. When you think that eating cake is a cause for shame, you are likely to eat it in secret and in much larger quantities (I write from experience). Give yourself permission to eat such things in limited quantities but without guilt and you may discover, to your surprise, that one occasional slice, eaten with gusto and joy, is enough.

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      If you want to change your diet long-term – and lose weight, if you need to – change your tastes. I recently met someone who had lost nearly 100 pounds over the course of a year. ‘How has it been?’ I asked her, half expecting her to say, as so many dieters do, that it had been torture. ‘Oh, it’s been marvellous,’ she said. ‘I’m having a wonderful time changing my palate.’ This may be an extreme reaction (and you might not share it). But long-term studies confirm that people who successfully lose a lot of weight without regaining it – these people are known as ‘maintainers’ – tend to say their appetites have permanently changed. These people seem to actually enjoy their food more than the dieters who relapse. The relapsers feel that when ‘on a diet’ they should forbid themselves anything they enjoy. By contrast, the maintainers never completely restrict their old comfort foods, but as time went by, they changed the way they cook, making smaller portions and eating more vegetables and grains. But the real change is to themselves, because this is how they now want to eat.

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      We all start from a different place with food. You didn’t choose the genetic cards you were handed when it comes to the way you eat. Maybe you are a supertaster, someone for whom bitter flavours taste incredibly strong. Or maybe you were born with genes that predisposed you to anorexia or pickiness. There is a strong genetic component to many eating disorders; and also to obesity. Scientists working with twins have found that, eating a very similar diet, one twin may gain weight while the other doesn’t, purely due to differences in their gut microbes. Life is unfair. But wherever we start, it’s possible to develop new tastes and new habits.

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      You are not doomed to eat badly. The overall pattern of how we eat is governed more by environment than biology. This helps explain why we are in such a mess with our diets now because no one has ever had to learn how to eat in such a toxic food world as the one we now inhabit. Every day, we are bombarded with confusing messages that tell us it is normal to eat in dysfunctional ways. It sometimes feels as if our appetites were not our own. But the good news is that, if our tastes are largely formed by environment, then it’s also possible to change them, under the right circumstances. There is nothing innate in your physiology that says you will always prefer hamburgers to ratatouille.

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      If food habits are learned, they can also be relearned. Most of us have a firm belief that our likes and dislikes are part of our personality, something we are powerless to change. Social media only makes it worse, because we project our food tastes to the world. We announce: I am a chocoholic, a carnivore or a cheese-addict, and it becomes a badge of honour, a deep part of who we are. Entire relationships have been founded on a mutual loathing for liquorice. But imagine you were adopted at birth by liquorice-loving parents who lived in a remote village in a far-flung country. Your tastes would be quite different from the ones you ended up with. Even now, you can adjust your preferences. The only downside is that you may have to change your Facebook status.

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      Nothing tastes good when it’s eaten in a spirit of coercion. The secret is – as far as possible – to make healthy food