Mutiny At The Table

Our quirks and preferences tend to weigh heavier at Christmas and what is easily accommodated year-round becomes the hill upon which your family sends you to die- whilst wearing a paper hat and a mutinous expression you thought you'd left behind in 1975.

.If this is you, Irina Dumitrescu's piece on picky eating is worth reading then printing out to be handed around in the manner of a carol song sheet to anyone who questions the eating choices of you, or your children. (You're already on your hill, might as well dig a big ole trench while you're there.) Because Christmas is the time to reeducate the palate of a child, said no therapist ever.

Something else that I hear often about picky eating is the trope that in countries where there is famine, food shortage or other dietary restriction, 'people eat everything on their plates.' Can I just say that this is not true? Dumitrescu grew up in 80s Romania where despite 'hunger shadowing the entire country,' she still would not eat. Another good friend of mine grew up in a country where war and corruption severely limited everyday access to food yet no matter how hungry she was, she would not touch anything made with cornmeal. To fail to acknowledge that people in poorer countries have the same food likes and dislikes as we do is to deny them full personhood.

More comforting and non-judgemental words on the topic of how we learn to eat is First Bite, by Bee Wilson and this is a good review. Wilson has another book due out this Spring called The Way We Eat Now which I imagine will be written in the same compassionate style that imbues everything she does. In a world where people with eating difficulties and diet-related ill health can become mere collateral in dogma wars between experts (and some of the debates appear to be little more than intellectual masturbation). Wilson keeps humans in all their messiness at the heart of her writing.

The pickle we can get ourselves into when we try to eat ethically is beautifully captured by Erica Strauss here. 'You learn that basically if you ignore civilization and Mark Knopfler music, the last 10,000 years of human development has been one big societal and nutritional cock-up,' she writes.

One Bite Won't Kill You by Ann Hodgman is a very witty book about the hell that weaning and feeding children can be. Is there any reason why leftover lasagna is unsuitable for breakfast, she asks?

Never present me with curry,

cornbread, rye, barley or wheat,

but Mother I’d like you to hurry,

I’m starving and I want to eat!

(Alys Jackson)

The master, Jeffrey Steingarten asks a question I have asked myself in his introduction to The Man Who Ate Everything. How can food writers be objective when we suffer from a set of 'powerful, arbitrary, and debilitating attractions and aversions at mealtime?' He sets out to confront his, I, however, am done with porridge, wet-bread anything, and tapioca.

Whilst we're on the subject of food aversions, fruitcake seems to divide Americans more than it does Brits.Mayukh Sen asks why did fruitcake become so maligned? I have a special fondness for boiled fruitcake because I helped my grandmother bake one every ten days. It was the only cake my grandfather ate; it lived in a bakelite tin on top of the fifties primrose-yellow cupboard, and cutting a slice always, always involved a sense of ceremony. Dried fruit had been so scarce during the Second World War that anything made with it from then on retained its status.

'My nine-year-old son has been exhibiting signs of food snobbery for a while now,' writes Sara Deseran in Kids These Days.whilst Eric Le May gets in there even earlier in Baby Foodie with an ingenious, witty (but exhausting-sounding) plan to educate the palate of his unborn child.

It's harder to find good writing on the subject of overeating. I particularly adore Big Appetite: my southern-fried search for the meaning of life by San McLeod. Despite 'lacking the emotional intelligence of a stink bug'' as his wife says, McLeod sets off on a cross-country odyssey after a warning by his doctor regarding his size, and the diet that causes this.Every mouthful of food has a story to tell and we hear them all, from 'portly forebears, misspent adolescence, and an unfortunate love affair with fried chicken.'

Yemisi Aribisala is such a mellifluous writer. Here she is on hunger and appetite, the ways in which satiation, parenting, and health are gauged through appetite and intake as we move across continents and cultures.

Merry Christmas all. May your time at the table be happy.