Until recently, I didn’t think much about food. Since my 20s, I had eaten everything in moderation, stuck mostly to a few basics, and didn’t get particularly excited about meals.
And then … an autoimmune condition I was carrying got worse. One drug sent me into liver failure (“I’ve never seen this before!” said my specialist, in one of the Top Ten Phrases You Don’t Want to Hear Your Doctor Say.) Another gave me a rash and had to be discontinued. A third didn’t help at all.
My new doctor endorsed an anti-inflammatory eating plan, but I was very cynical about “wellness” diets. I remembered Pete Evans flogging bone broth to babies, and Belle Gibson spruiking vegetables to cancer patients, and neither exactly filled me with confidence. Still, I was desperate. And I was in a lot of pain.
I would like to have my carrot cake and occasionally eat it too.Credit: William Meppem
And so, for the first time in decades, I drastically changed my eating habits. I eliminated all the foods that most experts agree are inflammatory, and there are many experts, and many foods. I cut out nightshades, processed foods, refined sugars, artificial sweeteners, gluten, red meat, dairy, refined grains and all alcohol but organic red wine. Honestly, there wasn’t much left.
In good news, the diet helped, and my symptoms noticeably decreased. In bad news, overnight I became a woman obsessed. After years of food not being a priority, suddenly it was all I could think of.
Restriction leads to deprivation, and deprivation creates desire. And my god, was I desirous. I longed for potato, especially hot chips dipped in aioli. I lay awake at night fantasising about cheese. I thought of hot chocolate at 10 in the morning and gin and tonic at five. I daydreamed relentlessly about Coke Zero, in tall cold glasses with huge ice cubes and slices of lemon. And I thought about sugar – lollies, biscuits, chocolates, ice cream and, my personal favourite, carrot cake with cream cheese icing – in pretty much every other waking moment.
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In the throes of these constant cravings, I turned to the internet for sugar-free dairy-free gluten-free dessert recipes. It was, without a doubt, my saddest ever Google search since “why has my skin turned yellow?“. I scrolled through one recipe for vegan brownies, and suddenly my Instagram feed was full of wellness influencers, gleefully singing the praises of faux desserts that promised to taste “just like the real thing!“. They taught me how to make a “chocolate mousse” out of mashed banana and peanut butter and cacao, which tasted precisely like mashed banana mixed with peanut butter and cacao. They taught me how to make a “carrot cake” out of carrots and hope, which looked like congealed vegetable soup, and tasted of despair.
One influencer offered a recipe for “chocolate pudding” made with unsweetened dark chocolate and aquafaba. This sounded promising, until I discovered that aquafaba is that stuff that goes down the drain when you open a can of chickpeas. No, I thought. If I get desperate enough, I’ll just eat a bit of dark chocolate. I couldn’t imagine a scenario in which diluting chocolate with chickpea water would improve the flavour or the texture, or my emotional wellbeing.
