Just Enjoy The Darn Biscuits

Eating should be a simple exchange. So why do even the smartest brains overcomplicate it? Alix Walker reports.

- Alix Walker

I have always had an intense relationship with food. I think about it all day. Porridge ver-sus bagel for breakfast. Then what’s for lunch? Will a 4pm donut tip me into a cycle of ‘bad’ food for the rest of the week? Or will donut resistance have me clean eating and munching on bee pollen until my Sunday ‘f**k it’ day, when I invite friends for a homemade roast, safe in the knowledge I’ll ‘be good’ again come Monday.

I’d even go as far as to say that food is like a family member. Sometimes I love it furiously. Sometimes I’m simply furious at it for making me eat it when I really don’t want to. I never, ever forget to eat because that would suggest that food doesn’t pop into my head roughly every seven minutes.

You see, food is, and always will be, an emotion to me. It’s guilt. It’s happiness. It’s companionship, celebration, sadness, fun, comfort and sacrifice. It’s a million, billion more things than what it actually is: a straightforward transaction of calories in versus energy out. A physiological urge caused by the release of a hormone called ghrelin in your stomach which gives your brain the signal to find food in order to provide your organs with energy. Something which fundamentally keeps you alive.

Yet food means more than sating an urge. For so many of us – I’m talking rational, smart, busy women – food is feeling. And as much as we love and gain comfort from eating our favourite foods, and from talking about when and where we’ll be eating next, our relationship with this basic human function remains complex, nuanced and often irrational.