Born in Southend in 1992, Ruby Tandoh is the author of two cookbooks, Crumb: The Baking Book and Flavour: Eat What You Love. She studied philosophy at UCL and was a runner-up on The Great British Bake Off in 2013. Since then she has written a baking column for the Guardian, reviewed fast-food outlets for Vice and co-founded a zine about mental health called Do What You Want. Her new book, Eat Up! Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want (Serpent’s Tail, £12.99), deals with eating disorders (Tandoh had something “akin to bulimia” for several years in her teens), the wellness craze and food snobbery, arguing for a more relaxed and pleasurable approach to food. She lives with her partner Leah, a musician and trainee counsellor, in Sheffield.
What compelled you to write Eat Up?
There are so many food books out there – but I couldn’t find any that dealt in an accessible way with cultures of eating and our relationship with food. The books in this area were either really academic or food memoirs; there wasn’t really a middle ground. In a sense I’m writing this book for my younger self and anyone coming up through their teens now who wants to enter adulthood with a good relationship with food.
You suggest that we’ve forgotten how to take pleasure in food. Why?
I think there’s too much focus on hardcore foodie stuff – being preoccupied with provenance and so on. Or else focusing on nutrition. These things are actually pretty interesting and useful in themselves, but what we’ve lost is the focus on just enjoying food. I want to remind people that it’s actually fine to enjoy a ready meal. We live in a time when you can get a macaroni cheese and it’s done in four minutes – that’s pretty amazing.
Do you have a favourite food scene in a novel?
It’s incredible how often food comes up in the Harry Potter series. There’s the start-of-term feasts [at Hogwarts] where the food appears magically on the table and keeps replenishing itself – that’s more interesting to me than the dragons and so forth. By and large, JK Rowling describes food that’s very familiar to us – toast with butter or a roast dinner – but she allows these very normal foods to be imbued with the same kind of magic that permeates the whole novel. I really like that.
What books are on your bedside table?
One book I’m really enjoying – I’m halfway through – is The Word for Woman Is Wilderness by Abi Andrews. It’s about a girl in her late teens who decides she wants to go on a Bear Grylls-style adventure, but finds that, as a woman, her experience is very different.
I’m also reading Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat. It’s about the basic elements of good cooking, but I’ve been reading it like a novel. Everything I’ve been doing so far in the kitchen has been wrong, it turns out, but I’m fine with Samin telling me I’m a fool. I would put my life in her hands.
What’s the last really great book you read?
It’s not new, but I read On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan recently and loved it. It’s about a newlywed couple staying at a seafront hotel in Dorset on the first night of their honeymoon. They get brought this dreadful meal and the waiters are at the door watching them eat – it’s so uncomfortable. The husband is a working-class guy, his wife is from a middle-class family, and there are little details in their backstory that describe the food they ate growing up and how weird he feels when he goes round to her house. I thought it was fantastic.
Which genres do you particularly enjoy reading?
I’ve slowly come to realise that my favourite kind of novel is one in which nothing happens. It turns out this is my niche. I like books that are about just the way people think and the mundane details of their lives. For example, I really enjoyed How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti. For the life of me I couldn’t tell you what it was about, but I know I liked it. I’m certainly not a fantasy-epic type of person. I don’t have the attention span to keep loads of characters in my head.
How do you organise your books?
I’ve got lots of cookbooks, as you can imagine – I keep them downstairs – and then there’s a jumble of novels, nonfiction and poetry on the shelves upstairs. I didn’t think my cookbook habit was that bad, but we had a friend around the other day and he was like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe how many you’ve got”. There are definitely too many in the sense that I do not cook from all of them and there are some I’ve never opened.
In Eat Up!, you say you’ve never read Elizabeth David or Jane Grigson, which is a brave thing for an English food writer to admit.
It is my personal theory that no one has read Elizabeth David.
What book did you expect to like and didn’t?
There are a few books by the American psychiatrist Irvin D Yalom that I hated. I usually love books with all the juicy goss from the therapist’s chair. Susie Orbach did one recently [In Therapy] and Stephen Grosz did one as well [The Examined Life]. I loved those but Yalom’s work left me cold. He said some terrible things about how a woman sitting across from him disgusted him sexually and therefore he found it hard to counsel her. So that was one I found disappointing.
What’s the best book you have ever received as a present?
I went to visit a friend who lives in Oslo. She recommended [the American author] Lydia Davis and took me to a bookshop to buy her Collected Stories. There’s one story called Happiest Moment, about a man who says his happiest moment was the time that his wife ate duck in Beijing. I just thought it was wonderful.
Who is your favourite literary hero or heroine? Antihero or villain?
This is terrible and deeply childish, but Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker in James and the Giant Peach. They’re so cruel and awful and I kind of love them. They feed James burnt crumbs from the oven and make him run around after them all day and chop wood. They’re always bickering between themselves – you’re too thin, you’re too fat, you’re too lazy – I think they’re really quite funny. Merged together, I see something of myself in them.
Are you done with writing cookbooks?
At the moment I think I am, not because I don’t love them – I really enjoy the process – but I don’t know what more I can really contribute in terms of recipes. There are plenty of far better cooks out there who I’ll leave to the recipe-making.
The thing that’s always interested me most about food is how it figures in popular culture. I love food when I see it in films, or hear about it in music, or read about it in books. Writing this book, I was allowed to talk about My Big Fat Greek Wedding and all these pop-culture references. That was fantastic.
• Eat Up! is published by Serpent’s Tail (£12.99). To order a copy for £9.99 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846
