On Sep 29, 1:54*pm, Ubiquitous > wrote:
> By Benji Wilson
>
> For someone whose gorgeous, pouting face once graced a book called How to Be a
> Domestic Goddess, Nigella Lawson has a lot of very mortal hang-ups. She is
> clumsy and she can be bad-tempered, she says. She doesn’t like her bum (“I
> tell my cameraman Neville that he’s not allowed to film my bottom”) or her
> hair (“In real life I don’t even have a hairdryer… as you can see”).
>
> TV conceals all of these things and she even feels bad about that. “When you
> do TV you’ve got a hair and make-up artist and nothing’s out of place.. So I do
> slightly worry that I disappoint in real life.”
>
> The point about the whole “Domestic Goddess” thing, of course, is that it was
> tongue-in-cheek. No one is a domestic goddess, not Nigella, not any of us, and
> if there is a line that runs through both her books and TV series, including
> her new one, Nigella Kitchen, it’s a self-deprecating “know thyself”. In the
> kitchen, that means best results from least effort and, crucially, with
> minimum guilt. And it’s for that acceptance of fallibility that the
> 50-year-old Nigella has risen to the plane of one-named deity.
>
> Her new series is, she says, about “how we all cook… in reality”. That sets it
> against some of the more recent fads in food. It is a decade since Nigella
> Bites, her first programme, was broadcast, and in that time sustainable,
> organic and locally sourced produce have all come into vogue. Supermarkets are
> the enemy, farmers’ market the cure-all. Typically, Lawson’s take is that this
> is all well and good – if you have the time.
>
> “To get local, to get organic and to get in season is obviously good in and of
> itself. However, there’s a snobbery about it. In the old days rich men built
> glasshouses so they could have pineapples: it was all about getting things out
> of season. Only the peasants would have root vegetables and things that were
> local and seasonal. It’s interesting that now what was rare is easily
> attainable, suddenly there’s an elitism that’s created about food… Would I
> like to have my own vegetable plot and all that? Yes I really, really would
> but I wouldn’t get any work done. This ideal way of shopping is great but I
> don’t know how you do it.”
>
> This leaves us in the rather bizarre situation where it is Nigella Lawson,
> multi-millionaire wife of multi-multi-millionaire art dealer Charles Saatchi,
> heiress, daughter of a Life Peer, someone to whom having it all on a plate
> could not be a more apt metaphor, who finds herself the champion of ordinary
> folk.
>
> If that seems ironic, Lawson’s approach resonates because she encourages
> people not to feel bad about themselves: she doesn’t.
>
> “I think that it’s misinterpreted always to mean that I believe in absolute
> untrammelled gluttony. I don’t. No one feels good if they overeat non-stop but
> I do think that you shouldn’t be frightened of food – as if it’s always
> something that’s got to be feared, not enjoyed.”
>
> It is a credo drawn from her relationship with her late mother, the heiress
> and socialite Vanessa Salmon, who died in 1985 when Lawson was 25. In a recent
> article, she said that the memory of “my perpetually dieting, self-denying
> mother saying – once she knew she had only a few weeks to live – that this was
> the first time she had eaten what she wanted and could enjoy it, is still
> shocking to me.”
>
> Lawson is candid about her mother, whose “Praised Chicken” recipe has featured
> in both her book and series.
>
> “She had a variety of eating disorders. I kind of knew that she was anorexic
> but I didn’t really twig that she was bulimic until after she died. I think I
> really felt, ‘I do not want to be like that.’ As a consequence, my act of teen
> rebellion was not being skinny. It doesn’t mean to say I want to get as fat as
> I can: like any woman, you have a comfortable area and you don’t want to
> extend beyond that. But in my experience enjoying food is probably a good way
> of not getting into that binge mentality.”
>
> Her mother, her sister and her first husband, the journalist John Diamond, all
> died of cancer, and this also informs her outlook. “People think thin is
> healthy and fat isn’t. I’ve seen a lot of people die from cancer. Believe me,
> for me, thinness is not equated to health.
>
> So I think there’s something in me that feels life has to be seized and food
> is part of that. I feel that appetites are transferable – an appetite for life
> has to translate into an appetite for food as well. If you restrain your
> hunger for food I think it slightly detaches you from life.”

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