A little of what you fancy – the French way of eating

When did you last eat with enjoyment, for pure pleasure? When last did you eat something without obsessing about every calorie and micro-nutrient going into your body? There’s so much nutritional information in circulation, and often such a judgmental culture around what everyone’s eating, that most people struggle to eat without some element of guilt or anxiety.

Most people struggle to eat without some element of guilt or anxiety. But eating for pleasure is entirely possible.

And then there’s the phenomenon of comfort eating – which, as Nigella Lawson has pointed out in one of her cookbooks, is really discomfort eating. We use food as a form of self-medication, to swallow our feelings, often binging on foods that we mindlessly gulp down without pausing to check whether we’re really enjoying them.

Food is fuel, of course, but it’s also one of life’s greatest pleasures!

Can you even...