Former Bake-Off winner is all about food bringing comfort
John Whaite may have won the third series of the Great British Bake Off while it was still on the BBC, but he really doesn’t go in for impartiality. Get him started on the likes of ‘superfoods’ (“It’s a marketing ploy”), the word ‘glow’ (“What does this mean? It’s a load of BS. You’re only going to glow if you’re sunburnt!”), the demonisation of sugar (“A bit of sugar never killed my 93-year-old grandma, who’d have a slice of cake a day and three whiskies a night”), or celebrity cookbooks (“So many are absolute crap...”) and you’ll find him both frank and witty.
He saves the bulk of his ire, however, for “the clean-eating brigade, the Lycra-clad clan of selfflagellation”, who he says have “taken over” the food world in recent years. ‘Food should not be about guilt’ In his fourth cookbook, Comfort, the Chorley-born food writer, cookery-school owner and telly chef, now 28, is hoping to provide an alternative to the deprivation of clean eating, which he sees as “a very insidious and stealthy way of making people feel guilty about food”.
“I want to get people back onto food that’s hearty and wholesome. You don’t have to spiralize vegetables – it’s nonsense,” he says, incensed. “I’d rather die clutching a bag of Haribo and a family-sized Galaxy than a stick of carrot and hummus!” While the idea of comfort food might make you think of so-called ‘guilty pleasures’ (John’s one and only concession is loving a Domino’s pizza “on a hangover at 11 o’clock in the morning”), he doesn’t relate the two. “Guilt isn’t something I associate with food. I’ve been in a situation where I’ve had an eating disorder - I was almost too thin to function at one point in my life – and that’s because I was so obsessed with my body image.” The key, he says – to eating, cooking and to life – is to find a way to “be happy with who you are, and be comfortable in your own skin – I mean, don’t be a fat slob and sit on the couch all day eating buckets full of fried chicken, because you will get fat! “You’ve got to look after your body; I do yoga, I go to the gym, but that’s not say I deprive myself of the things I need to eat if I’m feeling sad or ill or just in need of comfort,” he explains.