If your Instagram feed is anything like mine, you currently can’t scroll past two posts before you’re advertised weight-loss medication. Women slimmer than me show me how big their old pair of jeans are and promise me that I can be happier and healthier for just £65 a month. On the red carpets, actors’ bones jut out from their clavicles and their cheeks are hollow. Skinny culture is everywhere, and if you don’t fit the mould, it can be oppressive.
But for the next few weeks, on Tuesday nights, there is a much welcome reprieve: Nigella Lawson on The Great British Bake Off.
On this week’s episode, Nigella continued her reign as Bake Off’s new queen with the same zeal she started. Namely, hoofing huge hunks of biscuit into her mouth – fingers and all – as if they were about to run away from her. “I don’t think you need the mango. It’s quite leathery,” she told one contestant while her fingers were still in her mouth, tussling with said mango.
The way Nigella eats has caused quite a stir online; mainly because it’s quite funny, but also because it’s quietly revolutionary. It might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but in a world that wants me to count the macros of every crumb that passes my lips, it’s beyond refreshing to watch a woman unashamedly, brazenly enjoying 15 different cookies.
Then she took it even further, when her fellow judge Paul Hollywood (whose eating style has not been picked apart by the internet, it should be noted) told a baker that his cookies should be “naughty”. “I don’t approve of talking about food as naughty,” Nigella interjected. “We need to take our pleasures where we can in life.”
Nigella told Paul Hollywood that she doesn’t ‘approve’ of talking about food as ‘naughty’ (Photo: Channel 4)I almost jumped up from my sofa with delight. Was a well-respected chef really telling me that it’s OK to find joy in food – cookies, specifically – on a mainstream television programme? Hallelujah! The world hasn’t gone skinny jab mad, after all!
Nigella’s attitude towards judging Bake Off is eons away from her predecessor Dame Prue Leith. She was old school, taking dainty bites of the contestant’s bakes and often judging a cake on whether it was or wasn’t “worth the calories”. While the comment drew criticism from viewers and eating disorder charities, I can sympathise with Prue’s thinking – whether a sweet treat is worth the work it will take to offset those precious calories is an almost automatic response to food from most women these days.
But with Nigella, calories aren’t even considered. She makes sumptuous, filling, delicious meals – her roast chicken is soaked in buttermilk; her ham is braised in sugary Coca-Cola. And then there are her cakes: the famous Chocolate Guinness cake, so rich that it would give Bruce Bogtrotter a run for his money, her Nutella cheesecake that uses up a whole jar of the stuff, her “emergency” brownies, because yes, brownies can be an emergency.
Bringing this attitude to Bake Off has made Nigella a vital respite from the tyranny of being told I need to be skinnier. I’ve always admired her unapologetic love for food and the process of making it, but to see it out of the context of one of her dimly lit, rather sexy cooking shows and in the bright daylight of the Bake Off tent gives it a new perspective. In Nigella’s world, cookies and cakes are made to be enjoyed, not worried over and shunned as “naughty”. Now that’s a world I want to live in.
‘The Great British Bake Off’ continues next Tuesday at 8pm on Channel 4
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