The one lesson I’ve learned from life
Thomasina Miers
The 43-year-old won the BBC TV cookery competition masterChef in 2005, before co-founding Wahaca, the mexican street food restaurant chain. This year, she was made an oBe. miers lives in London with her fund manager husband, mark Williams, and their three daughters.
LOSE THE GUILT AND ENJOY YOUR FOOD
One way or another, my life has always revolved around food. As a little girl, I preferred hanging out with my mother in the kitchen to playing with dolls.
I’m naturally quite a greedy person. But, in my teens, I was surrounded by over‑achieving pupils at an all‑girls’ school. I felt the pressure to keep up and was careful about what I ate.
Meanwhile, my grandmother, who was a model, ate cream and butter with everything, but walked for an hour a day and loved her calisthenics exercises — which made me feel less guilty about eating a bit of what I fancied.
When I decided that my career lay in cooking, I was forced to confront those tricky issues.
Today, it’s perfectly obvious to me that you shouldn’t deny yourself the odd treat, or even a daily one — I eat chocolate every day. So long as you’re not mainlining crisps and doughnuts and never touching a green vegetable, you shouldn’t feel guilty about it.
Food should always be a source of pleasure. I do my best to encourage that attitude in my three young daughters. I’ll never tut at them for eating cake.
Yes, I’m militant about green veg — but, if you toss it in a bit of extra‑virgin olive oil and lime juice and let them season it themselves, in my experience they’ll eat it happily enough.
After being made an OBe [for services to the food industry] at Buckingham Palace, we went out for a posh lunch, and my eldest daughter ate an entire bowl of spring greens. It was my proudest moment of the day.
If we all go vegetarian once a week and eat higher‑quality meat (such as organic) when we do, we can have a positive impact on climate change through our eating habits. By choosing organic, you’re protecting the insect populations so at risk from pesticide and herbicide use. I don’t want my girls to grow up in a world without bees.
Thomasina is the Boombassador for the soil association and its organic Boom awards. To find out more, visit soilassociation.org