My First Popsicle by Zosia Mamet

If I had been asked to contribute a chapter to Zosia Mamet’s collection of essays about feelings and food, My First Popsicle, I would have written about my occasional sick-days as a child.

My Mum and Nan had a florist shop and if I was sick, I had to go to work with Mum. I would lie at the back of the shop on a plastic banana lounge, watching a tiny black and white TV. If I rallied by lunchtime (and let’s be honest, I mostly did), I would eat potato cakes from the fish and chip shop next door, and spend the afternoon misting the carnations (it was the seventies!) with my Nan’s special water bottle. Truly the best days, and the combined smell of flowers and the fish and chip shop oil is firmly and forever in my memory. Continue reading

Six Degrees of Separation – from Butter to Empire of Pain

It’s time for #6degrees. Start at the same place as other wonderful readers, add six books, and see where you end up. Continue reading

I’ll Have What She’s Having by Rebecca Harrington

In my late teens, my rowing crew decided to go lightweight. It was my introduction to the TJ Miracle Diet. Also known as the cabbage soup diet. Also known as the Dolly Parton diet. I don’t know how successful cabbage soup was for Dolly but for me, during regatta weeks, the diet worked alarmingly well (like 3-5kgs well). I’m quite sure that within twelve months I had done irreparable damage to my metabolism.My crew never had any success in the lightweight division.

Any time I see the details of diets that cut out whole food groups, or put foods in bizarre combinations, I’m taken back to the TJ Miracle Soup and the vile smell of overcooked cabbage. So it was with morbid curiosity that I read Rebecca Harrington’s I’ll Have What She’s Having. Harrington spent several months trialling celebrity diets, eating like Gwyneth, Beyoncé, Marilyn, Karl Lagerfield and more. Continue reading

The Cook by Maylis de Kerangal

When you’re young, and you’re making decisions about school subjects and careers, there are inevitably pressures. For some kids, their passions line-up with family or social expectations. Lucky them. For others, expectations can steer them away from what they’d really, really like to be doing. I think we all know of that person who desperately wanted to be a carpenter or an artist or in advertising, yet they come from a ‘family of doctors’ and suddenly find their Year 12 dominated by chemistry and biology rather than graphic design. Personally speaking, I traded a Forestry degree for Environmental Planning – I think I probably would have ended up in the same place regardless but I can’t deny that my mum’s concerns about my being posted as a park ranger somewhere remote, didn’t go unheard. Continue reading