Don’t cut up your carrots: Boiling them whole increases their anti-cancer benefits
Leaving the vegetable intact prevents valuable nutrients from being easily washed away into the water, claim scientists – and boost anti-cancer properties by a quarter.
Health Directory | Mail Online
Nigel Slater’s classic cream cheese and smoked salmon bagel recipe
Meet the sandwich that travels well…
Rarely do three elements come together in such perfect harmony as silky smoked salmon, soft cream cheese and a chewy bagel. Unlike most classic sandwiches, the bagel travels well and will emerge from your picnic basket relatively unscathed. (Or at any rate better than a cucumber or ham sandwich.) This is the sandwich to take on a plane or to the seaside. You don’t need a recipe: simply tear or slice open your bagel, then slather on soft cream cheese which you have seasoned very lightly with black pepper. Lower the smoked salmon in a generous fold and then squeeze over a very little lemon juice. Cucumber is possibly gilding the lily, but some like its refreshing crunch for a picnic or high-summer lunch box. Allow a good thick slice of salmon per person.
The trick Finding the perfect bagel is a lifelong quest. Whether yours comes crowned with poppy or sesame seeds or completely naked, the bagel itself should be dense and chewy – as far from the airy baguette or ciabatta as flour and yeast can get. This chewy quality is, along with the central hole, what separates a bagel from being just another roll. The hole allows the buns to be strung up or have a wooden rod threaded through them for display. There are endless rows over the way a true bagel is baked, but everyone seems to agree that the hole should go right through. A deep dent is not enough. This seems essential to me because it allows the cream cheese to peep tantalisingly through the hole. Ideally, the bun should be pulled apart for stuffing rather than sliced in order to give a better texture, but this is easier said than done.
The twist Traditionalists turning purple at the thought of a bagel scattered with sesame seeds might want to look away now. Modern introductions include everything from blueberries to wholemeal flour and even chocolate chips. The ubiquitous cinnamon gets a look in, as does the cherry. All of which we can probably file under sacrilege. The mini bagel fashionable for the kids’ lunchbox is invaluable for those who cannot get through an entire stuffed bun. Truth is that after the first bite I always think I won’t finish it, but somehow I always do.
Email Nigel at nigel.slater@observer.co.uk or visit guardian.co.uk/profile/nigelslater for all his recipes in one place
Restaurant review: Gauthier Soho | Allan Jenkins
The portions are small, but they can pack a punch at Michelin-starred Alexis Gauthier’s new venue
21 Romilly Street, London W1 (020 7494 3111). Meal for two, including wine and service, £138
I am standing outside a closed door in Soho, scene of some of the most debauched nights of my life. No, not the late lamented Sebastian Horsley’s home just around the corner but the Romilly Street site of the Lindsay House restaurant, where the lordly Richard Corrigan recently held court. You still have to ring the bell and wait to be let in, but there the similarities end. Corrigan’s in its pomp was a place of bold and brilliant innovative dishes, a home for serious food (and sometimes serious drinking). But Gauthier Soho, as it is now named, after chef-patron Alexis Gauthier who won a Michelin star at Roussillon in Pimlico, is an altogether more subdued and safer establishment.
Gone are the Irish chef’s gaudy paintings, gold leaf and stripped floorboards; in their place, quiet white walls with a dark carpet so thick it could suck your shoes off. But Gauthier’s Ducasse-trained pedigree and hunger for more stars shine through in the quality of the cooking, the relentless pre-starters, the good butters and breads.
Our fellow diners are mostly youngish men preening before their partners and a large table of happy Japanese getting cheerily pissed on small quantities of wine. From an assortment of courses (three for £27 to five for £45), we skip the “premier plat” of chilled broad bean soup or olive oil tart to head for fennel and crab with crustacean jelly and a summer truffle risotto with chicken jus reduction and brown butter. My companion’s crab is clean-tasting, fresh if not exciting and surprisingly small (a recurring theme of the evening, as if we were Alice trapped in Wonderland). The risotto is faultless, with a generous layer of finely sliced truffles that begs to be held close to the face and inhaled. “Marmite” is the verdict from the young man a couple of tables away, but then everyone’s an expert these days.
Our meal takes a turn for the worse with the fish dishes. My monkfish with girolles, baby turnips, cured ham and more chicken jus offers satisfying savoury mouthfuls. But John Dory with lime, leeks and lobster velouté is a dull piece of fish the size of an After Eight that isn’t saved by its slick of bisque.
The meat course sees a reversal of fortunes. “Every other course is just mean,” my companion smiles as my saddle of Welsh lamb is un-domed, exposing four miniature fingers of meat. This would be fine if I were seven years old – but it is not as good as my companion’s guinea fowl, which falls from the bone. The best she’s ever eaten, she says smugly. The star of her dish is the accompanying crunchy chard with mousseron. As his 12 years at Roussillon show, Gauthier is a man with a sure talent for doing refined, lovely things with vegetables.
Then, strangely, service disintegrates. The doe-eyed waiters who could as easily have been cast for a D&G underpants ad go walkabout. The fat on our plates congeals. Another 20 minutes pass. Slowly. Still hungry, I toy with starting again on the bread, but wipe cold fat off the plate with my finger instead.
Just before I am about to beg for more dinner, a dessert menu appears and service is back on.
We order the duck egg soufflé with chocolate curd and soldiers and Gauthier’s signature Golden Louis XV chocolate and praline. The soufflé is delightfully light and comes cleverly served in the shell, but the Louis XV steals the show. “Bloody hell, this is good – can I have the gold?” my companion swoons as she grabs herself a greedy slice of the chilled chocolate with gold leaf. My favourite of the petit fours that follows is a coconut marshmallow redolent of Hawaiian Tropic and the Greek islands in the 80s.
So three sublime plates of food out of eight with one world-beater for a hefty £70 a head with a bottle of crisp Saint Mont at £27 and a glass of red. Is Gauthier good enough to take pride of place among the likes of Bruno Loubet and Pierre Koffman, whose own restaurant opens this week? Nearly. I’ll return, though more likely for lunch.
The five-a-day tan: Forget the sunbed, fruit and veg give you a natural glow
The secret to a golden, healthy complexion doesn’t lie in sunbeds, sprays or sunbathing – but in eating plenty of fresh fruit and veg.
Health Directory | Mail Online
Leading doctors call for urgent crackdown on junk food
Presidents of two royal colleges of medicine urge government to restrict advertising and sponsorship by makers of unhealthy foods and introduce diet health warnings
Leading doctors today weigh in on the debate over the government’s role in promoting public health by demanding that ministers impose “fat taxes” on unhealthy food and introduce cigarette-style warnings to children about the dangers of a poor diet.
The demands follow comments last week by the health secretary, Andrew Lansley, who insisted the government could not force people to make healthy choices and promised to free businesses from public health regulations.
But senior medical figures want to stop fast-food outlets opening near schools, restrict advertising of products high in fat, salt or sugar, and limit sponsorship of sports events by fast-food producers such as McDonald’s.
They argue that government action is necessary to curb Britain’s addiction to unhealthy food and help halt spiralling rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. Professor Terence Stephenson, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said that the consumption of unhealthy food should be seen to be just as damaging as smoking or binge drinking.
“Thirty years ago, it would have been inconceivable to have imagined a ban on smoking in the workplace or in pubs, and yet that is what we have now. Are we willing to be just as courageous in respect of obesity? I would suggest that we should be,” said the leader of the UK’s children’s doctors.
Lansley has alarmed health campaigners by suggesting he wants industry rather than government to take the lead. He said that manufacturers of crisps and confectionery could play a central role in the Change4Life campaign, the centrepiece of government efforts to boost healthy eating and fitness. He has also criticised the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s high-profile attempt to improve school lunches in England as an example of how “lecturing” people was not the best way to change their behaviour.
Stephenson suggested potential restrictions could include banning TV advertisements for foods high in fat, salt or sugar before the 9pm watershed and limiting them on billboards or in cinemas. “If we were really bold, we might even begin to think of high-calorie fast food in the same way as cigarettes – by setting stringent limits on advertising, product placement and sponsorship of sports events,” he said.
Such a move could affect firms such as McDonald’s, which sponsors the youth coaching scheme run by the Football Association. Fast-food chains should also stop offering “inducements” such as toys, cuddly animals and mobile phone credit to lure young customers, Stephenson said.
Professor Dinesh Bhugra, president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said: “Some types of processed foods are harmful to the physical, and consequently mental, health of individuals. There ought to be serious consideration given to banning advertising of certain foods and certain processed foods and to levying tax on fatty, unhealthy foods, which would be ring-fenced for the NHS, which deals with the consequences of fatty foods.”
School pupils need to be told more about the effects of bad diet, said Bhugra: “If children are taught about the impact that food has on their growth, and that some things can harm, at least information is available up front.”
He also urged councils to impose “fast-food-free zones” around schools and hospitals – areas within which takeaways cannot open.
Stephenson and Professor Steve Field, chairman of the Royal College of General Practitioners, said that Lansley was right to stress the importance of personal responsibility, as well as government action, in ending the country’s dysfunctional relationship with food. Both strongly criticised parents for setting their children a bad example by overeating, serving poor quality food and exercising too little.
“Parents are role models for their children. It’s crucial that they set the tone for what the children eat and their physical activity,” said Stephenson. “The fact that one third of our children are now overweight?… must mean that their parents are allowing them to eat excessive amounts of food.”
Parents should exercise “portion control” in the amount they eat, and limit the amount of fast food and ready meals they feed their children, he added.
Field, a GP in Birmingham, said: “Too many parents show too little responsibility in passing on good eating and drinking habits to their children.”
A Department of Health spokesperson said: “We need to create a new vision for public health where all of society works together to get healthy and live longer. This includes creating a new ‘responsibility deal’ with business, built on social responsibility, not state regulation. Later this year, we will publish a white paper setting out exactly how we will achieve this.”
The food industry will be alarmed that such senior doctors back such radical moves, especially the call to use some of the tough tactics that have been deployed against smoking over the last decade. Last month the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence recommended a host of measures to make food healthier to reduce strokes and heart attacks, and save an estimated 40,000 lives a year. But the department of health dismissed its proposals as unrealistic.
A Basque banquet: the fishing trip that became a culinary adventure
It started out as a simple fishing trip in search of the elusive Basque trout, but this ancient corner of southwest France yielded up a far richer catch
There’s an old Basque saying: “To know how to eat is to know enough.” Pierre Oteiza, a Basque farmer and artisan producer in the verdant Vallée des Aldudes, 65km southeast of Biarritz, would appear to embody this philosophy. He smiled, and swept his hand over the fruits of his labour – this is all you need to know, he seemed to be saying – “Bon appétit.”
The table in his farm shop was laden with platters of sliced saucisson and jambon, blood sausage and chorizo. There were terrines of pig’s ear, tongue, and pots of pork pâté with baskets of freshly baked bread. The little bowl of cherries in vinegar and the plate of tomatoes with tiny gherkins seemed hopelessly outflanked.
It was one hell of a pigfest, and it was delicious – even the pig’s ear. It was also merely the appetiser for the hearty lunch that followed. There was fall-off-the-bone lamb stew, a selection of local cheeses with quince jelly and a tooth-achingly good ewe’s milk ice-cream spooned over frozen black cherry preserve. All this was helped down with a crisp white wine from the only vineyard in the region, a few kilometres away in Irouléguy.
We’d just returned from inspecting the source of much of this generous spread – the long-eared Basque pigs that Pierre has helped rescue from extinction (albeit to serve them up on a platter). Pierre was 22 when he took over his parents’ 15-hectare farm here in Les Aldudes, a one-road village that lies in the foothills of the Pyrénées near the border with Spain. It was the late 1980s, and there were just 25 of these animals left – from 150,000 in the 1920s. “After the war they relied on intensive pork production. With the Pie Noire, or Basque pig, it takes 18 months before they are ready for slaughter. Nobody could afford to wait that long,” he said.
But Pierre and a handful of local farmers banded together to prevent a part of Basque culture from dying out. Now one of 70 breeders in the valley, his pigs forage on acorns and chestnuts in enclosures on the mountainside, Pierre has 10 shops in France selling a range of Basque pork and cuisine – all of it produced within yards of where we were enjoying lunch. The sign outside his shop, next to the pens of newly born piglets, proudly proclaimed: “Renaissance d’une race”.
It would be a fitting slogan for the Basque people. Mark Kurlansky wrote in The Basque History of the World: “The singular remarkable fact about the Basques is that they still exist … [They] are determined to lose nothing that is theirs, while still embracing the times.”
I had come to this rugged corner of the French Basque country to fish. In the network of rivers that tumble down the narrow gorges and wide valleys of the Pyrénées Atlantiques, I was searching for adventure and for Basque trout – small, wild, and notoriously difficult to catch. I found both with the help of two excellent local guides. But what started out as a fishing trip ended up being more of a culinary and cultural adventure.
My guides led me into the untamed corners of the country. We scrambled down steep banks, beating a path through trees, bramble and undergrowth to gain access to the smooth aprons of water holding the fish. When the fish weren’t there, we moved on. We walked along disused railway lines, past abandoned mines and derelict sheepfolds.
In the course of four days, we criss-crossed the rolling green countryside dotted with whitewashed houses with red shutters and roofs – the landscape reflecting the colours of the Basque flag. We drove up into the mountains to the Irati, the river that Ernest Hemingway fished on the Spanish side and described in his 1927 novel The Sun Also Rises. We were forced to stop for herds of blonde Pyrénées cattle and horses sauntering along the spectacular mountain roads. And we watched vultures wheeling overhead while we fished. We fished around trees and rocks on the Irati, yet only managed to catch a small salamander – on camera. We stopped for a picnic at a riverside campsite, taking advantage of the early summer sunshine and eating baguettes, sheep’s cheese, pepper rillettes and chorizo. It ranks as one of my best fishing memories.
Yet I found myself getting more and more distracted by the food. At every turn was a farm sign offering up something local and tasty: sheep’s cheese, goat’s cheese, black cherry jam, fig jam, piperade, Basque gâteaux. And for those who have failed to bag a wild fish, there are no fewer than 12 small trout farms spread along the river Nive where you can cheat and buy yourself dinner. Apart from small supermarkets in the villages, nowhere did I see any signs of a convenience-food lifestyle.
I’ve read a little about Basque cuisine, mostly on the more developed Spanish side, but beyond Bayonne ham and chocolate I knew next to nothing about rural French Basque food. I was about to get a masterclass in the restaurant of the hotel in which I was staying. Hotel Arcé is a family-run affair in the preposterously pretty village of St Étienne de Baïgorry. It’s been in the Arcé family for five generations, more than 140 years, and was first a small hotel called the Franco-Espagnol, which was a stopping place for travellers en route to Spain, sometimes pilgrims on the increasingly popular pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.
The setting for the hotel is hard to beat. The rooms are elegantly spare and comfortable, and the dining room was converted from the old village pelota court (pelota is the popular ball game of the Basque country). But the food is exceptional. Traditional heavy rural dishes, such as stuffed rabbit, are served up by chef Pascal Arcé with a spring-light touch; coquilles St Jacques on a bed of leeks with a mushroom sauce melt in the mouth; and the ewe’s milk yoghurt with honey – a staple – gets a fresh spin in a brandy snap accompanied by pencil-thin meringues and vanilla ice-cream. If I was making the pilgrimage from nearby St Jean Pied de Port to Santiago de Compestela, I know where my first refuelling stop would be.
The restaurant has always had a reputation for fine food, and held a Michelin star for 50 years, according to Pascal’s wife Christine. “Then no Michelin star for 30 years – but we had an inspector in last night, so … we hope.”
All the food is sourced locally. “There is no need for me to go anywhere else,” said Pascal. “I can find everything I need from small producers within a few miles. People here don’t think of this as exceptional – it’s how it has always been and should be.”
On my final day, a Saturday, I was driving back along the road from St Étienne de Baïgorry to Les Aldudes to stock up on saucissons when I hit the first line of crawling traffic during my stay. I assumed that this was the weekend snag of living in such a beautiful place – daytrippers. Then I saw the trail of flattened cowpats down the road and remembered that Christine had mentioned it was the day of the annual transhumance, when all the Baïgorry farmers walk their blonde Pyrénées to Urepel, the next village on from Les Aldudes. There they pay their grazing fees, and the cattle are branded and taken to the summer pastures in the Erro valley in the Spanish Basque country. The transhumance is an ancient tradition, but this local arrangement has only been in place since 1858.
I parked up just outside Urepel, after eventually negotiating the chicanes of cattle en route. The village was already filling up with folk from the valley who had come to watch the procession, and stands had been erected above a pen so that they could watch the cows being branded. More than 150 years on, it’s still a big day in the local calendar.
You need to know…
EasyJet (easyjet.com) flies from Gatwick to Biarritz; Ryanair (ryanair.com) flies from Birmingham and Stansted to Biarritz
Hotel Arcé, 64430 St Étienne de Baïgorry (00 33 5 59 37 40 14; hotel-arce.com). Doubles from €125 per night
Pierre Oteiza, Route Urepel, Les Aldudes (00 33 5 59 37 56 11; pierreoteiza.com)
Fishing guides: Yvon Zill (basquecountry- fishing-guide.com); Benjamin Charron (pechesport-paysbasque.com)
Visit guardian.co.uk/travel for more advice and travel suggestions
Healthy lunch? The supermarket salads with more fat than a Big Mac
Those hoping to enjoy a summer salad as part of a healthy diet could be in for a shock.
Health Directory | Mail Online
Whelk ice cream never meant we stopped being a Pot Noodle nation | David Mitchell
Our taste for fancy food that made us look like fine diners during the good times is now exposed as a canard
When I look back on the economic boom years of the early 2000s – the sunshine in which we apparently failed to make any hay – I feel bitter that no one told me we were having a boom at the time. I might have enjoyed it more. But, like Sid James, the media only want to talk about busts.
Obviously, there were signs of prosperity – bankers coining it and stock markets rising – but no one was saying: “Hooray, what a lovely boom! Let’s be happy! Merry boom everyone!” At least we’d have known to have fun while it lasted. And it might have reduced the subsequent slump if more commentators had said: “Guys, this is a boom, right? As in ‘boom and bust’? So no prizes for guessing what’s going to happen next.” Unless you’re into short selling, that is, in which case the prizes were astronomical.
I expect one of the reasons the good years were played down is that so many people were still poor during them. When an actor says he’s out of work, it’s professional courtesy for his peers to commiserate: “Oh, but it’s so quiet at the moment. I heard that Michael Caine’s going up for Holby City.” They don’t crow about how busy they are. Maybe the boom was politely ignored to save the feelings of those not benefiting from it, when it would have been more honest to have said: “What, you’re poor now? You’re out of work at the moment? You’re really screwed!”
The boom only got expressed in terms of warning signs: house prices and consumer debt spiralling out of control. We disregarded these gathering clouds – and pretended that a period we retrospectively dub opulent and irresponsible was normal – when we might at least have been enjoying their silver linings. Loads of people were making a theoretical fortune on their houses and, by borrowing heavily against them, got to buy designer shoes and go to fancy restaurants. Whoopee!
And what a lot of fancy restaurants popped up! There was a revolution in British food, people said. We’d finally got the idea of cuisine and had the Michelin stars and whelk ice cream to prove it. And, with the restaurants, came the celebrity chefs and the proliferation of talking, writing and broadcasting about different ways of cooking. Books, newspapers and television bombarded us with recipes.
I think it made many of us proud. We’d had a national epiphany. For too long, we’d been shameful eaters of crap, too busy with vulgar commerce to savour our meals. From the Cornish pasty to the M&S sandwich, we were pioneers of the working lunch – a people too obedient, stressed and joyless to take time over the really important things: good food, good wine, good company.
But that had all changed – we’d finally got a national grip and now we were among the finest diners in Europe, while even French resistance to fast food was beginning to look like a cultural Maginot Line. For once, it seemed, we British had got our priorities right.
But we hadn’t – we were just affluent. We didn’t really prioritise food. Like drunks at a urinal, we were splashing out because we were loaded. The award-winning eateries, the bestselling cookery books, the distended Ramsay chain and London’s sainted Borough Market itself were just exceptions to the rule of microwave meals and an obesity epidemic. Most of us were still eating Pot Noodle in front of the telly while looking at Nigella Lawson’s tits. And failing to spot the economically prophetic visual pun.
Now that times are hard, our real priorities have re-emerged. As most of us settle back into the old habits of Scotch eggs nervously munched over keyboards full of bits of crisp, the posh restaurants are in crisis. So much so that they’ve launched a previously unthinkable scheme: they’re letting customers bring their own bottles.
Suddenly, it’s not just curry houses run by devout Muslims or kebab joints which lost their licences for serving paint-stripper that are welcoming customers who clink as they arrive. Some very chichi places have signed up to a BYO club, where diners pay £99 a year in exchange for little or no corkage if they arrive via Oddbins.
This sounds like another great opportunity for fans of overusing the word “democratisation” and good news for customers – everyone knows that restaurants fleece you on the drinks. But if that’s true in the good times, what happens when they’re struggling? Is the food reduced to a loss leader? If so, these establishments are drumming up custom by eliminating the only profitable part of their trade. Maybe they’re hoping that customers will drain their own bottles and get stuck into the expensive digestifs?
But it’s difficult to feel sorry for restaurateurs when the scheme is couched in terms like these: “We expect certain things from people bringing in their own wine. We expect them to buy something from us and to be generous to staff… it is really there for people who have fine wine with some bottle age. It is not going to be worth bringing a bottle of supermarket rioja.” Those are the words of Rowley Leigh, owner and head of cookery at Le Café Anglais in Whiteley’s shopping centre, and it took me several minutes of wall-punching, teeth-grinding and incoherent wailing before I could formulate a reasoned response.
Fuck off, Rowley Leigh. If, for a fee, you’re letting people bring their own bottles, you will open and pour, and chill if requested, whatever they arrive with, be it Piat d’Or, pre-mixed buck’s fizz or a four-pack of Special Brew. If you think some wines are too poor to accompany your food, then don’t drink them with it. But the food you serve in your restaurant is your customers’ food which you have sold to them and if they want to wash it down with a 50-50 mix of lambrusco and Guinness and chew gum while they do it, then you should take their money with a smile and keep your opinions to yourself.
There was no British food revolution. It was just another way of being snobbish and judgmental during a boom. No one will turn up at Le Café Anglais with a bottle of plonk – they’ll nervously bring expensive wine and try to fit in with an environment that is fashion-led, not food-led, where the taste of the dishes is secondary to that exhibited by the customers. I really hope more such places close than schools.
The Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit | Book review
Food science has never sounded so poetic in this exquisite guide to combining flavours
Here is a marvellous idea for a book: a “thesaurus” of different flavour combinations. Former marketing executive Niki Segnit has taken 99 flavours (from potato and cucumber to black pudding and washed-rind cheese) and grouped them into hundreds of pairings, each accompanied by an elegant, and often highly witty, mini-essay. In one sense Segnit is telling us nothing new, since flavour combinations are something we all know about: why else would we chose to eat cheese and onion crisps, or mustard with ham? But she fleshes out our understanding of such classic pairings, informing us, for instance, that “the most English combination” of beef and horseradish actually originated in Germany. At the same time she enlarges our sense of the possibilities of flavour-combining. Coffee and goat’s cheese? Who would have thought it, but apparently Norwegians eat a cheese called ekte gjetost on crispbread with coffee.
The field of flavour analysis suffers from a fundamental ambiguity: is it primarily a scientific or aesthetic enterprise? One of the delights of Segnit’s book is the way it combines an air of empirical exactitude with something more loose-limbed and poetic. Here she is on chocolate and cardamom: “Like a puppeteer’s black velvet curtain, dark chocolate is the perfect smooth background for cardamom to show off its colours.” No doubt there are more rigorous ways to explain the compatibility of these ingredients, but I doubt they’d be half as satisfying. Ultimately, discussions of flavour (as opposed to taste, which is a much narrower thing) have to rely on metaphor, since the main way we identify flavours is by comparing them with other things. Happily, Segnit is blessed with an ear for figurative language. “All citrus fruit,” she writes, “lead double lives, the flavour of their juices being quite different from that of their peel.” She describes the taste of grapefruit as “standoffish”, which perfectly captures its zingy astringency.
At the same time, she doesn’t stint on the science. She is quite prepared to get into the nitty-gritty of the chemical basis of grapefruit’s oddness (all to do with mercaptan and nootkatone, apparently) and throughout the book displays impressive learning. But her enterprise is scientific in another sense, too. As she writes in her introduction: “As a naturally untidy person, I’m always looking for patterns, some means of imposing order on unruly reality.” She admits that she had envisaged the book turning into something resembling a “grand unifying flavour theory”. There is a touch of the Casaubon about Segnit, a maniacal desire to totalise, reflected in the very fact that this is a “thesaurus”. Fortunately, she is simultaneously aware of the ridiculousness of all such quests, which accounts for the pervasive tone of irony that undercuts her loftier ambitions and winningly brings the book back down to earth.
Teenage girls are starving bodies of essential nutrients, warns food watchdog
Teenage girls are wrecking their bodies with ‘size zero’ diets, shunning protein and dairy in an apparent effort to be as thin as their celebrity role models.
Health Directory | Mail Online
