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Number of words: 609 But if you can’t re-gift, what are your other options? The obvious response is to stick the stuff someplace. But where? Our lofts, closets and garages are already chocker. The answer, increasingly, is to pay for more space to stash it all. Last year, the wife and I found ourselves in … Read more

Number of words: 413 His claims run smack in the face of evidence that the child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim gathered while living on Israeli kibbutzes, which themselves are the fruit of old socialist sharing ideals. Bettelheim found that the kibbutz kids were anything but born communists. They started life with a strong instinct for owning … Read more

Number of words: 142 Is your kitchen too cosy? Low lighting encourages us to overeat, because it makes us too relaxed. Making the kitchen the hub of the house can also cause problems because one of the main stimulants to overeating is the sight and smell of food. The more time you spend in the … Read more

Number of words: 312 Variety is one of the great promises of today’s food culture. After all, you wouldn’t want to get bored while nourishing yourself. The food options on supermarket shelves have increased exponentially in past decades, particularly where fat-rich, sugary, high-novelty, low-nutrition items are concerned. And while it is true that a spectrum … Read more

Number of words: 181 But eating while harried or preoccupied does us no good. Our natural response to stress is good old fight or flight, rather than fill-your-face. The body sends blood to our muscles so that we’re ready for action, rather than to the stomach in preparation for digestion. It’s hardly a recipe for … Read more

Number of words: 635 It’s like continually dining out with the infamous Pere Gaurier. a wealthy 18th century French land owner with a gargantuan appetite who murdered people for fun by persuading them to feast with him on vast, rich dishes until they died from over-undulgence. Each of le Diable Gourmand’s victims were taken to … Read more

Number of words: 561 We should now know enough about our ingestive instincts to treat them with extreme caution. In the 1990, scientists discovered why eating is such a compelling pleasure: when we scoff something sweet or fatty, the brain rewards itself with heroin-like chemicals called endogenous opioids. This means that snacks such as sweet … Read more

Number of words: 230. Step forward the Old Testament God who, as the Book of Numbers explains, got into a right biblical fury over the Israelites nagging food demands. His chosen people had just absconded en masse from bondage in Egypt and were holed up, under a kind of holy witness protection programme, somewhere in … Read more

Number of words: 114 As the twentieth century progressed and food became cheaper, the regal sport of binge-eating became steadily democratised, to the point where it wrote off the white trash king of rock’n’roll, Elvis Presley. The 25-stone Elvis ate himself to death by midnight-snacking on a pair of 42,000-calorie baguettes containing a jar of … Read more

Number of words: 230 Humans are born with hardly any pre-set taste preferences. But we don’t remain blank slates for long; our appetites are rapidly moulded by the flavours around us. Nowadays that can mean trouble because our taste-tastic culture radically amplifies our inbuilt urge to consume food whenever it appears before us. Experiments show … Read more