Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want

This book should be a required reading for my nutrition clients on building appreciation towards food and a more compassionate outlook towards themselves. How could one nitpick about food the way that she does is beyond me. It's not meant to tell you what to or not to eat, rather provides nuance to the way we eat and the way we see food. Food unites and divides.

Ruby talks about food from various angles; she writes about food with such granularity that pulls you into the moment and just as fast, she takes you away from those moments and towards the contrast of seeing food in a bigger picture. She dedicated a whole essay on eggs, which I agree, is a magical creation. Oh, and the way she writes recipe is so immersive, she takes you right into it. Yes, I find myself disengaged in some parts but all in all, it's a yummy read.

(Just very few) quotes to remember:

“To cook is to give, to eat together is to combine the fabric of yourself with someone else. We worm our way into the hearts of the people we love, and we get there through their stomachs.”

“Hold an egg in the palm of your hand and remember that it is a capsule of pure potential: if you have eggs in the house, you have dinner, no matter how bare your kitchen cupboards. ”

“Any cookbook worth its salt isn’t just a dry how-to, it’s an immersive, bossy, companionable, seductive thing. A good cookbook is a friend in the kitchen.”

“Of course, there is no physiological need for baking, but that’s precisely its appeal: in a world where so much of what we do is in the name of achieving some end, baking is just pleasure in and of itself. (...) The whole point of it is that nothing hinges on your baking success or failure. You won’t go hungry if it all goes wrong, because cake was never going to form the backbone of your diet in the first place. And whatever happens, you’ll still get to lick the bowl.”

“Overwhelmed by choice, by the dim threat of mortality that lurks beneath any wrong choice, people crave rules from outside themselves, and successful heroes to guide them to safety.’ We are all scared, and want nothing more than to be swaddled tight in the grasp of a diet industry that tells us that a pea-protein shake is the one true way to save your soul.”

“When the time comes for us to be mums ourselves, we give and give and give, lending all of ourselves in order to create new life. This is the ultimate act of sharing: we share our food, nutrients, and even our bodies with this tiny fledgling human being. We give every scrap of love we have.”

“Practise ordering greedily on dates. Be the only person at the table to get a dessert. When it arrives, don’t share it. Try out speaking your mind when you’re alone – talk to yourself in the mirror, saying things like ‘I would like you to go down on me, and I want the last slice of the strudel.’ No doubt some people, probably guys, will be thrown off balance by your forthrightness. Who cares. Eat their leftovers. If they carry on judging you, eat them, too.”