Nigella's New Dawn :‘I Had To Start My Life Again'

The Domestic Goddess Has A Complicated History With Eating And Drinking

- Tessa Paige

It’s hard to imagine, but Nigella Lawson hasn’t always had an easy relationship with food. “My whole childhood was spent with people trying to force me to eat when I didn’t want to,” she says. “I never ate. I just read and talked to myself – anything else I found inhibiting. My mother thought I was autistic.”

She pauses and shakes her head. “I come from a food-obsessed background.”

The cook and author has, of course, made a global career from her enjoyment of cooking and eating, shared in a series of books and TV shows, as well as the occasional live talk.

The latest of these, An Evening with Nigella Lawson, will take place in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch in January – and Nigella (58) already has an idea of the questions she’ll be asked.

Naturally, many will centre on food. Her uneasy relationship with eating – perhaps a reaction to her mother’s determination to stay ultra-slim – is firmly behind her and she has no truck with dietary fads.

“You should not have any guilt about pleasure. You should only ever feel guilt if you don’t take pleasure,” she says firmly.

“I’m a great believer in fat. My view is, it’s a moisturiser from the inside. I don’t like this habit of demonising some foodstuffs and venerating others, but I do think on the whole your skin and your body and your mind are happier with real food and not processed bits of cardboard.