Preface to the New Edition

How to Eat was born four years after my daughter, two years after my son: my third child. Although, the truth is the book had been gestating long before either of its elder siblings. It’s hard to believe now that this huge book was written in just six weeks. But it’s almost as if I had spent so long not writing it that the words were ready to rush out onto the page. And if I have had the opportunity now to revise some of the exuberant outpourings, I haven’t wished to. How to Eat is what it is: of a particular time and place in my life and, as I have learnt over the ensuing years, like a child, it has become its own thing, and for me to start revising and fiddling now would be a dishonest enterprise.