In his incredibly entertaining book The Body: A Guide for Occupants, Bill Bryson opens the chapter Food, Glorious Food, with a quote from Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s 1825 treatise on the mouth and ingestion The Physiology of Taste: “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are”. Overweight.
I have my reasons. Being passionately curious about food and enjoying the experience of eating, sharing, celebrating, and using food to reconcile the conflicts of the day, are some of them. And when I pick up Nathan H. Lents’ latest book Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, From Pointless Bones to Broken Genes, and read that as humans, we have a tendency to gain weight easily and to lose it with great difficulty because this is what made sense in the Pleistocene savannas, I am consoled.