RUBYCOLOURED GLASSES
Ruby Tandoh has stepped up as a gutsy advocate for eating whatever you want.
The Great British Bake Off is a strange sort of reality TV show, trading in nostalgia at its most twee and food porn at its most sugar-coated.
The contestants are earnest. The hosts hover. What little rivalry there is has about as much bite as a Bakewell tart. In other words, Bake Off is an escapist fantasy – and an unlikely launching pad, perhaps, for a young, queer, mixed-race woman who’s concerned with putting her politics firmly centre-plate.
Ruby Tandoh was, by her own account, “a nervous and shy and insecure person” when she competed on series four of
The Great British Bake Off in 2013. Then 21, she applied for the show simply because she was bored and needed a project.
“Even applying for Bake Off was out of character for me,” she says. “I know this is a really backwards way of doing it, but I thought, ‘If I apply for this competition, then I’ll learn to bake’.”
In the tent, Tandoh distinguished herself as a talented baker and a brutal perfectionist. She exhibited a dislike of fussiness and an emotional, rather than technical, approach to cooking. Other contestants measured their bakes against the criteria set by judges Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood; Tandoh seemed to set herself against an impossibly high internal standard that she could never hope to reach. She was prone to crying in frustration when a bake went sideways, or when she received anything less than glowing feedback. This, along with her long limbs and telegenic looks, rubbed many viewers of the show the wrong way. Bake Off may trade in old-fashioned British civility, but the same can’t be said of its audience.
“It forced me to learn lots of life lessons very quickly,” says Tandoh of dealing with the pitfalls of sudden fame. She came to terms with the fact that people would see her – a young woman with the nerve to express her emotions – and they would pass judgement. She got all the way through to the finals, where she baked a passable three-tier Victoria sponge wedding cake (“Quite often a wedding is just an exercise in narcissism,” she observed on camera at the time. “I can’t be bothered”) – but lost to the contestant who created edible floral confetti out of dehydrated fruit.
These days, away from the fuss and bunting of Bake Off, Tandoh is free to cook – and eat – exactly as she pleases. She lives in Sheffield with her fiancée, Leah Pritchard, and now tends to lean away from complicated recipes and specialist ingredients in favour of food that nourishes her on a different level.
“I made some Greek food last night,” she says. “I’d been all the way down to London and I was exhausted, but we had this fillo pastry in the fridge, so I made a spinach and feta pie, and butter beans cooked with garlic and tomato for the side.” Outside it was snowing, but what they ate tasted like summer. It was, she says, utterly wonderful.
This meal encapsulates much of what Tandoh’s way of cooking has come to represent: expressive, flavour-focused, nourishing in the sense that it feeds an emotional need as well as a bodily one. After Bake Off was over, she began writing columns for
The Guardian, Elle UK and other publications, which forced her to define what kind of food person she wanted to be.
“It was a very quick evolution, trying to figure out what
I stood for in the kitchen,” she says. “When you’re writing a recipe column for a newspaper, you have to be working towards originality and doing something that’s not going to be overfamiliar to a ‘foodie’ readership. So sometimes I had to use techniques or ingredients that were more obscure or more expensive than what I’d employ in my day-to-day.”
She wrote columns in defence of cheap white bread, celebrity cookbooks and high-street Christmas drinks. She reviewed fast-food chains with the serious attention and rapt enjoyment food critics typically reserve for fine-dining establishments. She wrote deeply researched essays skewering clean eating and its advocates ( Deliciously Ella, the Hemsley sisters et al). Two cookbooks followed:
Crumb: A Baking Book, about the joys of simple baking, and Flavour: Eat What You Love, which encouraged readers to stop thinking in terms of calories, prestige, health or fashion, and to focus on the pleasures of how food tastes.
Her third book, an uncategorisable memoir/ polemic/cookbook, is the culmination of everything she’s learned. In Eat Up! Food,
Appetite And Eating What You Want, Tandoh favours accessible ingredients and practical outcomes; she’s interested in heartiness over lightness, comfort over virtue, emotional pay-off over finicky aesthetics. Her tastes run towards recipes that deliver a sense of abundance: a Ghanaian groundnut soup, a nod to her heritage, is nutty, substantial and loaded with Scotch bonnet chilli. Gingerbread cake is infused with whiskey over three days until it transforms into a squishy, boozy joy. Dumplings occur often.
The book elucidates, across 11 freewheeling chapters, what she stands for in the kitchen. It covers topics as broad as the Black Panther Party’s social outreach and why she adores model Chrissy Teigen. The topic of colonialism comes up the same number of times as Cadbury Creme Eggs. It’s also deeply personal, touching on love and identity, bodies and sexuality. Rather than it fitting into a neat category, Tandoh characterises the book as a series of essays about how she relates to food.
“Some of them are about my relationship with food, because I can’t talk about food without delving into my personal
relationship with it,” she says. “But most of it is about books and films, and meals that exist in the world, and all of these wonderful things that I’ve plucked from around the globe. I’ve tried to take lessons from what it means to eat and what it means to nourish ourselves.”
Tandoh is less concerned with chasing authentic food than she is with unpacking the politics of how the concept of authenticity upholds certain power structures, and why we think authenticity matters. She’s against food snobbery (the book contains loving odes to Burger King, chip butties and supermarket ready meals) and rejects the idea that there’s some sort of objective standard of good taste.
“I’ve seen people write about Ghanaian food and say things like, ‘Oh, that stuff’s bad, it’s bland, it’s carb-heavy – it’s the French who really know how to cook’,” says Tandoh. “Those kinds of ideas are racist, xenophobic and useless.”
This is a book that thinks about food in its broadest sense: how it intersects with the politics of race, class and gender; how food is wrapped up with lust, desire and bodies; and how our appetites are unruly and personal, and more policed than ever.
“Food is so often used as a tool for control, whether it’s controlling the appetites of women, or policing the appetites of people whose bodies don’t look the way that they’re ‘supposed’ to,” says Tandoh. “We police people’s food intake all the time. Reclaiming your right to eat whatever you want, and to nourish yourself in the way you see fit, is a really powerful thing.”
There are plenty of books on the market that offer a foodas-salvation approach. Eat Up! is not one of them.
“Food is not medicine,” says Tandoh. “Food cannot give you a glow. Food cannot solve all your ailments. Food is food; it’s there to nourish you and give you pleasure. It can help you with some things to a degree, but it’s not a cure-all.”
Tandoh sees the current wellness trend as nothing more than the diet industry pivoting to a more socially acceptable stance. “They don’t talk explicitly about weight loss anymore, but it’s always there as a concept,” she says. “Every 10 years or so, the emphasis will switch – fats will be bad for you, and then it will be carbs. I think the diet industry’s latest rebrand coincided with the rise of an understanding about mental health, self-care and body positivity. Now these wellness blogs have co-opted the language of self-care. They might say things like, ‘We want you to thrive, we want you to have the glow, we want you to live your best life’, but it’s implicit within that – within the pictures on the blog, within the foods that are featured, within the language that’s used around nutrition – that your best self is meant to be your thin best self.”
She worries that people will swallow these covert messages, all the while telling themselves that they’re getting healthier and lighter, and eating – or not eating – their way to purity. And Tandoh’s interest in eating disorders is more than just academic. She had her own experience with an eating disorder when she was younger, and recovering from it shaped her attitude towards how she eats into something gentler than it had been.
“Suffering from an eating disorder was obviously dreadful, but now it’s given me this new perspective on food that I’m quite grateful for,” she says. “I love eating, but I don’t feel any pressure to be positive about food all the time. It gave me this reality check that sometimes you’ll eat too much, and sometimes you’ll eat a bit too little; sometimes you’re not going to really love food, and sometimes you’re going to be fascinated by it. That ebb and flow is just what it is to be a person with an appetite that’s always changing.”
If Eat Up! has a through-line, it’s the idea that food has value beyond the sum of its parts – something that Tandoh likes to think of as its magic.
“There’s so much in food culture about technique, or about nutrition and numbers and science, and I think I kept coming back to this idea of ‘magic’ because it sums up a feeling that food can bring that isn’t really quantifiable,” she says. “It’s about remembering that food isn’t a ‘two plus two equals four’ thing – it’s just so much more exciting than that.”
The distinction makes sense. It explains why baking a spinach and feta pie can evoke the joy of summer, why eating a Creme Egg feels like an act of self-care, how the simplest meal made by someone who loves you can taste better than fine dining. But Tandoh wants people to find their own way through the complex business of eating what they want.
“It’s about giving them confidence to follow their own appetite,” she says. “There are no right or wrong answers.
All I’m doing is starting a conversation that I want people to have in their own lives. Everyone has the tools to do it themselves. I just want to give them that little push.”