Ruby Tandoh’s Messy Manifesto

In Eat Up!, the British Writer Urges Us to Find Joy in Our Imperfect Appetites

To American eyes, bloodshot before the streaming spectacle of home-grown competition food TV, The Great British Bake Off has been as Visine: relief from the zero-sum gladiatorial slamfests playing out in kitchen arenas with the names Cutthroat or Hell’s. In the British baking tent, lashed to spikes sunk in lawns as smooth as green buttercream, all is collegiality and Victoria Sponge—at least in the Anglophile gaze of many U.S. fans. (The recent Mexican Week fiasco, however, has tarnished the brand, possibly fatally.) Ruby Tandoh, a finalist in Bake Off’s Series Four, has much to say about seeing beyond the comforting surface of food, and about the complicated, frequently messy truths of cooking and eating.

 

Tandoh’s book of loose, essay-like thoughts (with recipes) Eat Up!: Food, Appetite, and Eating What You Want, originally published in the UK in 2018, has been updated in a U.S. edition, released by Vintage Books. Tandoh was a 20-year-old first-year art and history student in 2013, when The Great British Bake Off was taped. The show launched Tandoh’s writing career. In addition to Eat Up!, she’s authored three cookbooks: Crumb: The Baking Book (U.S. edition 2015); Flavour: Eat What You Love (U.S. edition 2016); and Cook As You Are: Recipes for Real Life, Hungry Cooks, and Messy Kitchens, forthcoming later this fall in the U.S. She’s written for The Guardian, The New Yorker, and the newsletter Vittles.

Eat Up! is part of a tradition of anti-anxiety in food: an antidote to the standard of impeccability infecting food literature and TV cook shows. In a distinctive British way, Tandoh is in line with Peg Bracken, who framed mealtime shortcuts as a feminist issue; or Julia Child, who gave permission to flub at the stove and shrug it off; or Pioneer Woman Ree Drummond, who constantly reassures her audience that it’s okay to be a less than perfect cook. Tandoh updates the trope through the experience of a queer Millennial who’s biracial (her grandfather is Ghanaian)—it’s okay, Tandoh argues again and again in Eat Up!, to love what you love.

And it’s okay to push back against what you’re being served, or to look beyond the kitchen walls. Of The Great British Bake Off, Tandoh writes of the pastel vision of comfort baking that defines the series. “When the state of the world requires us to be more political and proactive than ever…we closed our eyes to the vibrancy of the outside world and reframed British identity in shades of pastel.” Sooner or later, Tandoh says, “we need to look out into the world, be active, and use our hunger for a good cause.” But, she suggests, there’s no such thing as perfect eating, politically or aesthetically. Sometimes you just have to eat outside the lines you’ve drawn for yourself.

“Food shouldn’t be a bad friend, dragging you down or holding you to ransom,” Tandoh writes. “Part of making peace with your appetite is acknowledging that it’s not always pretty, and sometimes you will enter a fugue state halfway through a packet of biscuits and eat the lot and feel ill, and that’s OK. Not every meal will be in some sunlight-dappled orange grove; sometimes what you need is a gas station snack haul eaten on the move, and there’s no harm in that.” Tandoh wants you to accept enjoyment where you find it. To forgive yourself for what you like, to embrace your body as you listen to it. She wants you to accept.

She has a sharper edge—a willingness to talk about social equity, racism, gender, and queerness in food—than the late food essayist and fiction writer Laurie Colwin, to whom she’s been compared. Above all Tandoh, in Eat Up!, rejects the elitism so often steeped in the literature of taking pleasure in eating.

In the best parts of Eat Up!, Tandoh beams a searing side-eye through the culture of food and how we live in it. She’s at her best when pointing out the guilty lies some of us lean on when straying too far from socially acceptable middle class eating. She urges you to at least consider the uncomfortable realities behind the foods you’ve become numb to. “Tea with sugar is a blood sport,” she writes, with deep resonance for British readers. “It is a cup of colonialism brewed strong with the labor of other people, in other places, drowned out by the sound of our tea morning chatter.” 

Tandoh doesn’t expect you to give up your morning mug, though. She doesn’t demand you decolonize your breakfast so much as she wants you to acknowledge the tainted legacies lurking in your cupboards. “The real question isn’t about what we eat but how we eat. Eating well is about eating with deference. It means giving credit to those who deserve it, and not just sweeping blithely through the world on a kitchen tablecloth magic carpet.” In other words, borrow food from other cultures, but acknowledge your sources. Show some awareness. Have some respect.

This is really the heart of Eat Up!: Tandoh’s non-polemical approach to the ethics of pleasure, a sort of, No shame liking what you like, but do think about the consequences of what you consume. While a lot of dialog around food issues in the U.S. can feel absolute and unyielding, Tandoh’s mind is more forgiving, more understanding of the ways we fall short of our ideals, given the accessibility of so many guilt-drenched pleasures: Cadbury eggs, Krispy Kremes, McDonald’s milkshakes. I see in Tandoh the British food-writing tradition of reform through pragmatism, flashes of Jane Grigson, an earlier British food writer with a literary-historical bent she applied to thinking sensibly about expressing delight in the kitchen.

What makes Tandoh such an appealing voice in food is her contagious joy in cooking and its literature. She calls recipes “psalms for the ungodly, little doses of goodness in the most bite-sized chunks.” A cookbook is “a glance into a coveted life, and a literal instruction manual on how to seize a bit of that joy for yourself. Any cookbook worth its salt…[is] an immersive, bossy companionable, seductive thing. A good cookbook is a friend in the kitchen.” By the time you’ve finished Eat Up!, you might well think that’s the best description of Tandoh.#