Food, Glorious Food

We spend the day walking through beautiful countryside, having begun the day eating papaya freshly picked by our mountains host for us as we walked through his plantation! Here everyone has a plantation. A plot of land in a strip down the mountainside, stepped into the slope with papaya and coffee trees, fruit and herbs. And probably a wild dog or two, just passing through.

We walk. And we talk. And today's subject is food.

M and I just cannot quite get our heads round each other when it comes to food.

I can always eat more, even quite shortly after a large meal, which amazes and rather disgusts him.

I am at least vaguely peckish most of the time and not, would you credit it, only at mealtimes. M is dumbfounded by this, I am dumbfounded by the apparently iron qualities of his stomach, which appears to admit food only if 1) it is mealtime or 2) it is good food and it's being offered for free.

I am perfectly capable of eating, no, of actually, salivatingly, really wanting, a packet of crisps. He is bewildered as to why I want this when, clearly, it is going to be bad for me, and possibly unsatisfying. Why do I not just eat a piece of fruit, or a salad? I am utterly stumped as to how he can possibly even ask that question.

But he, in turn, asks, perfectly logically, why it is that so often I make a decision to eat some food which I know will defeat my current attempt to be thin and beautiful, with such little thought? He is happy, he assures me, with the shape of my body, but if I am so unimpressed by it, why don't I stick more doggedly to my various diet plans? Wouldn't that make me happier than eating a flavorless bag of corn chips and a chocolate bar in quick succession?

I tell him that Kate Moss said that nothing tastes better than thin feels, but that Jennifer Lawrence pointed out that lots of things taste better than thin feels. Burgers, for example. Chocolate. Chips.

There is a pause.

"I didn't think you read those kind if magazines" says M, even more confused.

I don't. I don't even know how I know that. And I am aware that I sound like a cliché.

The fact is, there are cliches upon cliches in respect of women and their relationship with food. I don't believe I am the first woman to continually break her diet, to refer to certain foods as 'naughty' and then go on to eat them with apparently, even greater gusto, to feel grumpy after doing so, to medicate the grumpiness with further food....etc etc. I don't think I am the first woman to overfill her plate, or to buy three chocolate bars when one would do, then eat them all to get rid of them so I can't eat them tomorrow. And I don't believe I am the first woman to reach for a nice comforting slab of junk food at the first signs of the going getting even vaguely tough, to use food as a reward, a celebration, a comforter or a punishment.

Insane? Yes, absolutely certifiable. Completely illogical. Deeply disturbed.

But it really isn't just the women. I know men who struggle with their weight, I know men who have intolerances to certain types of junk good but still eat them and go on to suffer the result. I know men who start new 'regimes' which they can't follow, and who fill their plate gravity defyingly high at buffets, and feel sick afterwards. I have worked with high flying men who are perfectly capable of stopping a high intensity board meeting to demand more chocolate biscuits, or who in fact can cause a near riot immediately following a high pressure business encounter and ahead of going back to tackle the resultant urgent workloads - because the lunch provided was not of the correct quantity or quality.

We all do it. Food is a distraction, a softener, a social olive branch, a breath in our hectic schedules, a symbol of release. In fact, in our opulent western society we are very rarely genuinely hungry when we eat. And so it is hardly ever, simply fuel.

Which is shameful, when you think about it. But the shamefulness is rather more in respect of the fact that others are starving and we do little about it than it is about the actual food consumption itself. I appreciate that gluttony is considered wrong in isolation of any societal inequality, but I have tried diets before in which, for every bit of unnecessary junk I consumed, I had to donate twice the cost of it to a relevant charity. I consumed the junk and gave glady. And I felt good about it.

Possibly there was something flawed in the system.

 But there is still a perception that gluttony is wrong. It's just I only notice it applied to women. If I go out with people I don't know and its a carvery or buffet, when we come back to the table there are plenty of people whose plates are piled high. But the men, plates oozing gravy over the side of their three Yorkshire puddings, don't get any scrutiny.

"Yorkshire pudding AND mashed potato?!" Someone will say, peering at my food, "K? Really? Have you got quite enough there?"

And I find myself laughing a little hollowly as I feel my cheeks colour and I wish, fervently, that I was either a man or the kind of woman who takes bird sized portions and likes it. The food becomes just a little less enjoyable, even if the scrutiny ends there (which often it doesn't ('wow! That went fast K! Where did you stash it all?!')) and I find myself eating fast and trying to rearrange things on my plate so it doesn't look so much. While the men trawl through theirs, order dessert and are either ignored or congratulated. People still dish up larger portions for the boys at the table, instinctively, regardless of their sedentary professions or their weight.

Now before I get all women's lib about this, may I point out that greed is not something I am condoning here. I am mindful of the episode in the Capitol of    Hunger Games, in which the guests drink a potion to make them sick in order to eat more while everyone else is starving. Greed is off putting and certainly not right when you happen to be doing nothing about other's urgent lack. And may I also point out that yes, I am aware that men do, technically need to take on more calories, on average, than women.

But is some of this strange attitude to eating not arising out of this very stricture? If women did not perceive food as something which they are not supposed to like much, and if men did not perceive it as some kind of muscle test, might not both sexes have a healthier attitude to it? Might we get closer to seeing it as a pleasurable but necessary fuel for our bodies? If we didn't demonize chocolate would we all be less crazed about getting it? Something that is 'naughty' is immediately tempting. I'm sorry, but it is. We're all children really.

I went through a phase once of being a little obsessed with a vending machine at work. Eventually the only way I could successfully curb it was by standing in front of it and literally saying to myself,

"Go on then. Have one. Have a Mars Bar. It's perfectly allowable. In fact you probably should. It will taste sweet and stodgy and the chocolate on top will probably flake as you bite it. You'll feel a tiny bit sick afterwards so you should probably get crisps too. To take that sweet taste away. Get them now while you're here. Saves another trip...hey where are you going?"

Because surprise surprise it just isn't that compelling when it isn't a transgression. Gradually the idea of the Mars Bar would shrink back to its natural size. It would take on its actual natural attributes. And I would come to a conclusion close to what I think goes through M's mind - that it just isn't that worth it.

Except M doesn't have to spend half an hour discussing it with himself so that he has to stay later to finish his work.

(And yes I did have to avoid the people whose desks were close to the vendor. I don't know what they thought I was doing.)

Our discussion rolled round to its natural conclusion, which was that I would probably want crisps less if M didn't disapprove, women would be less obsessed with chocolate if there wasn't so much focus on their bodies and the things they put into them, that the same goes for men, that M is just especially ruled by his will power and sense of logic and that we are both sick of talking about it.

And a little bit peckish.