Eating Habits

Questions and model answers

1. How do you usually decide what to eat?

   The same four dinners on rotation, which sounds joyless and has been the single most useful thing I have done about food. I am not a person who decides well at seven in the evening. Left to that hour I will stand in front of an open fridge for six minutes and then order something instead. So the decision now happens on Sunday, once, when I am calm and not hungry, and Thursday just executes it. What I gave up is variety, and I do genuinely miss it, particularly in about week three of any given rotation. In exchange I no longer eat badly on the days when everything else has gone wrong, and those were exactly the days it used to happen.

2. Would you rather cook at home or eat out?

   Cook, though not for the reason I would have given five years ago. It is not that restaurant food is unhealthy, because a fair amount of what I make at home is worse. It is that cooking is the only part of my day where the task is finite and actually finishes. Work does not finish. A meal does. Forty minutes in and there is a plate, and the plate is the end of it, which is a rarer feeling than it ought to be. Eating out is better company and worse for that particular thing, because somebody else does the finishing. I would still choose a restaurant on a Friday. I would not want five of them.

3. Tell me about a time you changed something about the way you eat.

   I gave up sugar in my coffee for a year, which is the smallest possible change and taught me the most. The first two weeks were genuinely unpleasant, more than the size of the thing warranted. By the third week the coffee tasted normal, and by the second month the sweetened version tasted wrong to me, which is the part nobody warns you about. What I did not expect is that it did not generalise at all. I assumed one success would make the next thing easier, and it made no difference whatsoever to how I ate at eight in the evening. A year later I still eat badly at eight in the evening. I just do it with unsweetened coffee.

4. Should schools teach students how to eat well?

   Teach it, yes, and I would be careful about what gets taught. A course on nutrition produces children who can name food groups and eat exactly as they did before, because knowing was never the missing piece. What is missing is the practical half. Twenty people leave home at eighteen able to discuss macronutrients and unable to produce four meals cheaply, and the second one is what actually determines how they eat for a decade. So I would put it in the kitchen rather than the classroom, and I would judge it on whether they can shop and cook, not on whether they pass anything. My mother taught me six dishes and I have eaten them for twenty years.

The Korean translation, the expression breakdowns, the reusable frames and the common-mistake notes for these four questions are in the book. The recording and this transcript are free, here and on YouTube.