Ready for more? Because part 2 is here people!
Last week, I shared the first part of my conversation with Emiko Davies, Australian-Japanese food writer, photographer and cook-book author, so if you missed that then go back and have a listen before you jump into this one. This week I’m bringing you the second part of that conversation. This time, we talked about;
- Emiko’s experience of parenting a child in a bigger body.
- Emiko’s experience of having a bigger body as a child.
- What the science really says about sugar and why we all need to chill out about giving sugar to kids
This was such a great conversation – Emiko is a dream. If you enjoy this episode then please don’t forget to share and keep the conversation going over on our socials!
Show Notes:
- Follow Laura on Instagram | Twitter
- Follow Emiko on Instagram
- Follow Don’t Salt My Game on Instagram
- Laura’s Website
- Check out Emiko’s blog
- Buy a copy of Just Eat It | How to Just Eat It
- Sign up for a Learn with LCIE Course
- Buy an Intuitive Eating friendly guide to managing different health concerns
- Edited by Joeli Kelly
Transcript:
Emiko Davies
But I grew up with a bigger body for whatever reason it was, I think I’m just human and had a different shape body from my brother who was stick thin and is still stick thin and his body shape has never changed his whole life. I, as soon as I went through puberty, my body like morphed it was like, do you call them a shape shifter? My body completely changed. And all I did was go through puberty. And I became a thin teenager. And, you know, I was thin until I had a baby. And then my body changed again. Like, you know, I just think I’m just a human female, and my body is going to change whenever there’s like a huge hormonal shift. And I really, I trust my body, I’m going to trust my children’s bodies,
Laura Thomas
Hey team welcome back to Don’t Salt My Game where we are having conversations with game changers who are flipping diet culture on its head. I’m Laura Thomas, I’m a registered nutritionist who specialises in intuitive eating and anti-diet nutrition and I’m the author of Just Eat It and How to Just Eat It.
Today I’m sharing part 2 of my conversation with the joyous Emiko Davies. Emilko is an Australian Japanese food writer, photographer, and cookbook author based in Italy. This is such a wonderful conversation that invites us to imagine another way to feed kids that isn’t so caught up in ideas of perfection, or worrying about nutrition or getting everything “right”.
All right, so let me tell you a little bit about this workshop. We know that kids are born with embodied wisdom about what, when and how much to eat. They have strong and trustworthy instincts around what feels good in their body. They don’t sit there in their high chairs, calculating macros or judging themselves for how much bread they’ve eaten. And they certainly don’t feel shame about their bodies, and as stewards to these tiny humans it’s kind of our job to help protect these eating instincts. But feeding kids is hard, really hard. And between kiddie food Instagram, body and food shaming public health rhetoric, and celebrity chef comm nutrition saviour is telling us that there’s a right and a wrong way to feed our kids. It’s a lot. So how can we navigate the inferno that is feeding kids in diet, culture, and protect our own sense of self too?
Well, that’s where I’m hoping that my Raising Intuitive Eaters workshop will come in. In this 90 minute workshop, I’m offering you a little bit of background about the ways our kids embodiment gets disrupted by diet culture, and what this has to do with feeding. We’re going to explore why we need to throw the rulebook out the window and let them have ice cream before broccoli if that’s what they want to do, and how we can build trust in our kids to get what they need. I’m going to offer you a framework that can help you feel a bit more relaxed about mealtimes whilst encouraging kids to have a bit more autonomy. And we’re going to explore how we can provide supportive structure and how that can encourage children to remain in touch with their internal cues for hunger, satisfaction, pleasure and fullness. We’ll talk about how so called fussy eating develops and get tools to help move through it. We’ll look at why cutting out sugar and saying things like just take another bite can undermine kids instincts around food. And we’ll talk about how to talk about food and bodies without causing harm. And lastly, and I think probably most importantly, I’ll hold space to chat with other parents and carers about how hard all of this is. If you sign up for this workshop, you’ll be asked to fill out a short questionnaire about your specific situation. And what I’m going to try and do is look for common threads in your responses and try to address some of the specific concerns that are coming up. And so I’m kind of going to try and cater it to the audience as much as possible. I would say that this workshop is suitable for grownups of kids of all ages, but it’s probably best if your kids are sort of 12 or under. And everyone is welcome. Whether you’re a parent, whatever that means for your family, a grandparent, a teacher, a nutrition professional, anyone else working with kids, yeah, you’re more than welcome to come along. And here’s the lowdown. It’s going to be on Tuesday the 28th of June, seven o’clock British Summer Time, we’re going to be doing all on zoom. So hopefully if you’re not in the UK you can still attend or if you’re not in London, and you will be sent the link to join when you sign up. It costs 15 pounds. But if for any reason you can’t afford to pay that right now please email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk and we will comp your ticket, no questions asked. I trust that if you can afford to pay that you will. And if not, we’ve got your back. You get a 90 minute interactive workshop with time at the end to ask questions to connect with other parents or caregivers. You’ll get a copy of my raising and body teasers PDF booklet to share with friends and family to help support you on your journey to raise an intuitive eater. The session will also be recorded. So if you can’t watch it live, you can access the recording and play it back afterwards. So I’ve put a link to that all of that information in the show notes as well as where you can sign up and complete the registration form. So I really hope to see some of you there.
Alright so you met Emiko in last week’s episode where we talked about her family’s food culture, the Italian way of feeding kids, and how a no pressure approach to food helped her eldest who had some significant eating challenges fully become more adventurous. So if you missed that then go back and listen to that episode before you jump into this one.
In this week’s episode, we talk about Emiko’s experience of parenting a child in a bigger body, her own experiences of having a bigger body as a child, and why we all need to chill out about giving our kids sugar. I really love this episode. I love following Emiko on Instagram and just seeing the joy and pleasure she gets from food and her kids get from food. And I’m just living vicariously through her. So if you don’t already then give her a follow and I’ve also linked to all of her cookbooks in the show notes so check them out too. As always let me know what you think of this episode over on Instagram, I’m @laurathomasnutrition and @dontsaltmygame for the podcast. I love hearing your feedback and if you got anything from any of these episodes I’d really appreciate if you left a review over on iTunes or even just dropped five stars. It really helps more people find these episodes and let’s us spread the word about anti-diet parenting. Already, here’s part 2 of my conversation with Emkio.
Laura Thomas
I want to talk a little bit more about, about your girls a little bit. Because, you know, you talk about, you know, very publicly on the internet, how you feed your kids, and you show them eating a wide variety of different foods, and you show them getting stuck in with helping you in the kitchen making different foods. And I’m curious to hear from you, you know, how you deal with comments or judgments even from, I don’t know, non-Italian friends and family or just random people on the internet, about how you feed your kids. And especially as a parent of a child with a larger body.
Emiko Davies
Yeah, I do get all the above comments from you know, really caring family members who are worried and comments from total utter strangers who don’t know anything about me. It’s kind of interesting. I try to, to share if I get the opportunity to share, you know, information with, with people who comment, and whether or not they, whether or not they choose to, you know, accept what I’m telling them or not is up to them, I guess in the end, yeah, I feel like I’m offering you that this is the information here. And this is the approach that I’m taking. And that’s what I do. The other thing is that I also feel like because I have, my oldest daughter is thin and always has been thin. And my youngest daughter is in a bigger body. And they kind of they actually eat the same things. We eat the same things and actually, Luna eats a lot less than then Mariù does. You know, I just I feel like if I were to restrict one but let the other one eat, you know, gummy bears or whatever. They both love gummy bears.
Laura Thomas
You’re like, horrified.
Emiko Davies
Yes. I’ve never, not even as a child, I never liked those kinds of candies. So for whatever reason they both think they’re the best thing ever. And I’m just gonna use them as an example. Yeah, if, let’s say, and it’s usually the older one and she’ll be like “oh mama can we please get some gummy bears?” You know, and the little one wants one too. I’m like how could I say no to her? What if I said no to Luna because she’s in a bigger body? What kind of message am I going to give her – that she doesn’t deserve them? that she’s not worthy of them? that she can’t have them just because she has a different body shape? I just feel like that sounds like rubbish to me, that sounds so wrong. And I just I can’t do that to her. So yeah, if there, if you know my thin daughter has requested gummy bears, I just tell her you need to share them with the daughter who has a bigger body you need to, you know, just be fair and you’re gonna I want to treat them the same and make sure that they both you know get the thing that is their favourite thing, that they want to have, and that they can share them together. I also was a bigger body child and so I, and I never ate gummy bears or anything else so I know that…
Laura Thomas
Like it’s not the gummy bears that’s what’s causing it you know?
Emiko Davies
And I mean let’s talk about like the cookies for breakfast and gelato, but Italian kids don’t have an [censored] problem so I just don’t think it’s, it is you know, we can’t like blame one you know one type of food here. But I grew up with a bigger body for whatever reason it was, I think I’m just human and had a different shape body from my brother who was stick thin and is still stick thin and his body shape has never changed his whole life. I, as soon as I went through puberty, my body like morphed it was like I was lik, do you call them a shape shifter? My body completely changed. And all I did was go through puberty. And I became a thin teenager. And, you know, I was thin until I had a baby. And then my body changed again. Like, you know, I just think I’m just a human female, and my body is going to change whenever there’s like a huge hormonal shift. And I really, I trust my body, I’m going to trust my children’s bodies, you know, I just, my daughter is still three, she’s gonna turn four soon. I just I’m not going to put her on a diet, I think that would be horrific, and awful. And I think also, my older daughter would, if she were to witness that, like, what kind of message am I gonna send her as well, you know, I think there are so many complications, when, if we, you know, when it comes to trying to control a child’s body. I mean, I’m not an expert. But I know from my own experience that I had a bigger body, and I loved eating, but I was really eating my mom’s home cooked Japanese food. Lots and lots of fruit and vegetables. You know, I was one of those, like, really good eaters, I would eat any vegetable that you put in front of me, and I just really enjoyed eating each and every kind of ingredient. I’ve always appreciated good food, but I didn’t really, I didn’t eat junk food, I didn’t eat those gummy bears, or whatever else. I just don’t think that, I don’t think that my daughter is going to be that different from me. I’m going to, like, let her enjoy food, have a good relationship with it, and treat her the same as her thin sister. And I’m going to trust that she’s, you know, eating according to her, how she feels how, her body feels. Her using her body intuition, that’s something that I don’t think I was ever taught, I was taught to clear the plate. And I still tend to do that, and I have trouble not doing it. Whereas I see both of my girls are really good at just like Mum, I’ve had enough and, and, you know, leaving their fruit.
Laura Thomas
And I think what you’re speaking to is that, you know, if you were to put one on a diet, as well as it being a complete double standard, it’s also teaching well, is breaking the trust that they have in their bodies. And it’s teaching them not to be attuned to what their body is telling them. It’s teaching them well, no, you need to be attuned to what my brain is telling you to do, not your body. And it’s interesting that you said, you know, you said you’re not an expert, but that it dah dah dah. And what popped into my mind there was how well, thank fuck you’re not a so called expert, because the expert advice in inverted commas is to restrict children, is to put them on diets is to, to try and manage or control their weight. And that only ultimately ends up backfiring and causing them to have a disordered relationship with food and their body. And we know, especially for kids going, coming up to that point around puberty, when they’re really vulnerable to the development of an eating disorder that’s like, Luna is obviously a lot younger than that, but even for your other daughter to be exposed to that would, could have, you know, potentially really, really damaging consequences.
Emiko Davies
Yeah, exactly. I mean, even my daughter is in the, the older one is in year four. And she’s already told me that a number of her friends in her class are on diets. And that really shocked me, especially because well one there they’re nine, you know, so that there’s still a lot of growing and body changing that is happening. And, and two none of them look to me like they are, that they need to go on a diet. That’s the main shocking thing that worries me is that you know, my, my daughters are going to, you know, going into this world where at nine they’re expected to go on a diet when to me they look completely not, like they’ve got completely normal, normal bodies. I would be really worried what would happen in you know, when they’re teenagers or when they hit puberty if they’re already thinking they need to go on a diet now.
Laura Thomas
It’s really, really scary. Yeah, I think it’s why having conversations like this are important and normalising body diversity, and, you know, the fact that we all exist on a continuum in terms of our body shape and size. And there is no right or wrong way to have a body and I think people like understand that intellectually, but they don’t understand that in a really deep, embodied way that oh, yeah, all bodies deserve to exist, like it should be sort of the fundamental place that we’re we’re operating from? And yeah, it’s absolutely, I mean, when you said that there were nine year old olds on diest, so I was, I was like, Yeah, there’s kids a lot younger than that on diets. I believe some of them, some of them are put on their, on diets by their parents, and some of them are doing it themselves. Because they, they, that’s what they believe it is to especially be a girl or be a woman in this world, or, because they feel like their body isn’t right. And they have to control it. And that’s how they think that they’re going to, you know, fit in or be liked, or whatever it is. It’s, it’s so messed up.
Emiko Davies
I’m also seeing this phase, like at nine years old some days, my daughter is ravenous, and she will come home and she will eat like, literally, you know, more than what my husband would eat. And she’ll just, like, pack it away. And I let her have I mean, what I couldn’t imagine. We had a playdate with one of her classmates who was on a diet and her mom pulled me aside and said, only give her half a portion of pasta, please because she’s on a diet. I was so shocked. And you know, when she said to me, could I have some more I was like, heartbroken. Because these kids are hungry. And if she’s hungry, she’s listening to her body, like my daughter would, she’ll go through days where she doesn’t eat anything, she will barely eat, you know, she’ll just nibble two things. And then like, I’ll see her like later in the week and she’ll have like, you know, a meal for two. I just think that it’s not, we don’t need to like control them you know, each meal by meal what if we were to look at it on you know, a bigger scale like over a few days or over the week. And for her mom, when she pulled me aside and said only serve her half a portion of pasta, I just thought this poor thing. You know, she’s gonna have this like tiny bowl of pasta and, and it’s going to, you know, it’s going to be awkward. I felt so, like I couldn’t. I didn’t feel comfortable doing that at all. It was really, that was really hard.
Laura Thomas
I would have a hard time navigating that as a parent who wants to respect other parent’s wishes around how they want to parent but also as a nutritionist and someone who advocates for body autonomy. I would be like here’s some more pasta. Yeah, yeah, that’s such a tricky one. That’s such a tricky one. Oh, playdates are a whole other world that I’m yet to encounter.
Emiko Davies
No, I let them have a nice snack afterwards. I was like she didn’t say anything about a snack.
Laura Thomas
Oh, look at these cookies that I just happened to bake. So you’ve written a lot about sugar and some of the sort of moral panic and alarm around giving kids sugar. When, as you’ve talked about, that sort of hysteria it doesn’t really exist in Italian culture, although maybe it does around pasta and putting kids on a diet but in general it seems like that’s not such a thing you know, you’ve spoken about kids having gelato for a snack or having these cookies for breakfast. And so from your research can you tell us a little bit about why sugar became so heavily vilified and why you know we actually don’t really need to panic about sugar, why we can all just sort of take a breath and relax a little.
Emiko Davies
Yeah, so definitely sweet for breakfast is the preference here in Italy and before having kids and really before understanding Italian culture that was one of the things that I was really shocked by when I first realised that wow Italian kids are just eating like cookies dipped in milk for breakfast and that’s like and then going to school and or you know, having gelato you know after dinner and then going to bed and that was so different to what I had been brought up you know, to think in you know, in Australia and but then when you look around there are no problems that come that seem to come out of sugar in Italian culture. So obviously, there’s something going on here that Italians don’t think that eating cookies for breakfast, that there’s anything wrong with that, or eating ice cream, you know, or gelato after dinner that that’s and then putting you to bed, they don’t think that there’s something wrong with that either. So I had this I went into this, like rabbit hole, looking into this sugar myth. Like why is it that we demonise sugar and think that it is so, so bad, and, and so restricted, you know, something that needs to be restricted. This, this came about, by the way, I should say it was Easter, and so we were given many, many, many, many easter eggs. And the kids were just surrounded by easter eggs and you know, and enjoying getting these gifts and wanting to eat them. And I was letting them, you know, open them and eat them. And I was enjoying them with them as well. You know, and this is how this conversation came up with a family member about, you know, being worried that the sugar would cause them to be hyperactive. And because I’d already studied this, I mean, this is just out of my own curiosity, I knew that the hyperactivity was just, was a myth. The thing is, it’s like it was something that was mentioned about 100 years ago, in connection with a boy, a young boy who had eaten some sugar. And then it was observed that he was then like, very excited. It came out that he was like at a birthday party, you know. So now, you know, after people have, you know, many, many, many, many, many scientists have studied this over and over and over again, they’ve done really, really in-depth studies, you know, where they were like, testing children with, you know, who had consumed sugar testing them at like five second intervals, like really in depth analysis. And no one has actually been able to prove that sugar causes hyperactivity at all. And yet, it’s like, but why are they still doing these? Why does nobody believe that? Or why are they still doing these studies, and these are things that were debunked, like in the 80s, and then again, in the 90s. So this isn’t like new news or anything. And, you know, I grew up in the 80s and 90s, when these were debunked already, but people my age are still like, Oh, sugar causes hyperactivity. You know, we’ve been, we’ve been told this for so long. So I just found that really interesting. I was like, why is it that we still, we’re still, like not believe, why are we not believing this. And it’s because, you know, parents seem to feel that they observe it in their children. And so there was a really interesting study that that that was done about why that is as well. It’s a psychological thing. When you believe it, you see it and you see what you think you’re seeing so parents see their children and they think they’re seeing sugar hyperactivity. And that’s it, they’re convinced they’ve seen it with their own eyes and they know that that’s what it is, you know, so it’s something that is really has been really hard to, I guess for the public to believe in and for therefore for it to be debunked. But what is really refreshing for me is that witnessing you know how sugar is treated in Italy. It’s not seen as like this evil thing. Italians are all eating something sweet for breakfast. They are, you know, mortified that my children want to eat an egg for breakfast. That’s disgusting, and why would anyone want to eat a hard boiled egg for breakfast when you can eat a corneto or like dip your biscuits dip your biscuits in some milk and go to school? So that’s been really refreshing and even like, you know, birthday parties are full of all the treats that kids love. And then they’re given a little bag of lollies to take home. You know, nobody, nobody is you know, getting upset about that. Yeah.
Laura Thomas
It’s yeah, it’s really interesting to hear you talk about these, these cultural differences. And there is this really pervasive narrative that sugar causes kids to, and I’m not sure how I feel about the word hyperactive, but let’s just go on with it. But that, yeah, that it causes them to just like bounce off the walls. And it’s there is that sort of confirmation bias that they, you know, they’ve seen it with their own eyes. So it must be true and, and I don’t mean to sort of undermine, intuition, but I don’t think that we can stress how much diet culture has played into our perceptions around sugar and we want to vilify it, we want to look, we want to find evidence that there’s something wrong with it, that it’s bad that we should cut it out of our kids’ diets like, and so we see these connections that don’t exist. And like you said, what we know is that birthday parties are exciting. Like there’s balloons, there’s music, there’s games, like your friends are there, there’s presents, if it’s your birthday, like there’s a bouncy castle or a child’s entertainer, like all of that stimulation, we don’t stop to think, are we going overboard with the kids’ parties? No, it must be the sugar. So so thank you for just I’m going to link to your article that you wrote about sugar because you go much more into like the history and how it used to be considered to be medicinal. And you speak just so beautifully about how people in Italy see food and sweet foods. And yeah, there are a couple of your pieces that I’m going to link to in the show notes. I hope that people will go and check that out. I’ve really, I feel like I could just keep going and ask lots more questions for the rest of the afternoon. But I realise you have kids probably coming home from school soon, I have to go pick someone up from school. So I think we’ll wrap it up here, but I’ve just really enjoyed yeah, this has felt like a very cathartic kind of nurturing conversation about food. And I love coming at it from the more foodie perspective rather than the nutrition side of things for a change.
Emiko Davies
Thank you. It’s been such a pleasure, I feel too, like we could just keep talking all afternoon.
Laura Thomas
But before you go, I do want to hear what your jam is. So at the end of every episode, we pick something that we’ve been really vibing on lately, really excited about. And I know we were talking off mic before we started recording that neither of us could think oh what are thing was, but I’m wondering if you’ve had time, or if you want me to go first.
Emiko Davies
Oh, you can go first.
Laura Thomas
I go first. Okay, so I oh my god, I can’t. I can’t even begin to articulate the feelings I have about this book. I need to like just sit and process it and digest a little while but I’ve been reading Essential Labour by Angela, I think it’s actually Garbs. Have you read it?
Emiko Davies
I haven’t read it. But I heard about it. I read it on Virginia Sole-Smith’s, her newsletter which would also be my jam, but I’m gonna mention somebody else as well. But yeah. I did read about I read her like she had an interview.
Laura Thomas
Yeah, I think she was on the Burnt Toast podcast which is Virginia’s podcast. And yeah, it’s just, it’s absolutely blowing my mind. I’m going to link to it in the show notes. I found it hard to get a hold of in the UK, but I found it through booktopia which you can get free shipping worldwide. I think it’s booktopia. Anyway, I’ll link to it. But this book is about kind of how care work particularly the work of mothering is devalued, decentered, made invisible. And how we get you know how that is, is basically causing all of the problems in, in our society and how it’s a kind of a, a fallout from, you know, basically white male-dominated patriarchal standards and bullshit. She articulates it so much better than but effectively, she weaves together this amazing narrative of like personal essay plus kind of a socio political take on the world. And yeah, it’s like, I’ve cried, I’m only halfway through but I’ve cried like, at least a dozen times, just reading this book. It’s so so powerful and yeah, I’ll link to it in the show notes. But I feel like everyone has to go listen to it, or read it sorry, or listen to it on audiobook, whatever, however you get your books,
Emiko Davies
When I read about it in Virginia’s newsletter I thought this sounds, this sounds really, really interesting.
Laura Thomas
It’s really good and I’m about to start reading the chapter basically she’s advocating for mothering and she uses mothering as a kind of all-encompassing term but mothering as a tool for social change. And, you know, how we mother how we take care, of not just our children, but our communities and our, you know, everyone around us as yeah, these really potent tools for social change. And she has a whole chapter dedicated to food and appetites, which I’m just about to start reading and I’m so excited to get to that part. Okay, what’s your jam? Have you thought of something?
Emiko Davies
So yeah, I’ve actually got, I got like, two. Well, I mean I’ve got one I’ll do,
Laura Thomas
You can have two, you can have as many as you like.
Emiko Davies
I was I am researching a new, a new book that I’m about to start writing. And it is a cookbook about the food that I grew up with, which is very simple Japanese home cooking very seasonal. For me, it’s that’s the comfort food that I always tend to like if I’m tired and rushed, I’m gonna make Japanese food or if the kids are really tired, and they’re cranky, and I need something quickly at that’s the food I ended up turning to because it’s, it’s quick. And it’s easy, I think because it reminds me of my, of my mom. And it’s the food I feel most nurtured by. That’s anyway, that’s sort of the topic of the new book. And I had heard about this book called Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner. And she’s half Korean. And so before buying the book, I read her article, which is of the same name. So she’s got an article, and I think that the article came first. And then she ended up writing this memoir, which is Crying in H Mart. So I haven’t read the memoir yet. I’ve just, it’s just arrived. And so I bought it and I have it here and kind of every time I open it, I actually like burst into tears. So I haven’t yet had the courage to read it all. But the article, which I think is in the New Yorker, is really, really beautiful. And basically, the, her memoir, and this article are about dealing with her mother’s death. And her mother was Korean. So, you know, that is something that I can resonate with, because she is in, H Mart is a Korean grocery store. And so she’s standing in the grocery store and sort of questioning herself and her identity. You know, because her Korean mother who was her Asian side of her you know, is, has now passed away and is she, still she’s asking herself if she’s still Asian without this part of her in her life, and she’s in the grocery store, in the Korean grocery store, the food is what is like very familiar and her connection to her mother. It’s really, really beautiful. I found myself like screenshotting every single paragraph and then I realised I’m just gonna buy the book. But what I found thitat really interesting because I realised that over the pandemic, I was cooking a lot more Japanese food. And luckily my girls love it, it is their most requested meals when I’m like, What should we make for dinner tonight? You know, Luna might be like, we need to have like noodles. Or Mariù will be like I want you know, like rice and some other these other little Japanese things that we put on the rice. And I was personally cooking a lot more Japanese food over the pandemic and I think it’s because for me, it was like an instant connection to my mum who I had, you know, I hadn’t seen for like, nearly three years over the pandemic. So yeah, this book is really it’s really beautiful and I think even if you just read the article that just this like connection to food, you know, food and our family and our identity and you know, food memories and like knowing what to do with certain ingredients or how certain ingredients or certain smells remind you of somebody. I really love that kind of writing and sort of exploring those connections.
Laura Thomas
I love it too. Yeah, I’m really excited to read that article in the book. It sounds amazing, and I’ll link to both of them. Did you have another one that you wanted to share?
Emiko Davies
Oh, the other one was actually another article and it’s, you can easily find it. It’s an article written by Nigella Lawson. And I think it’s a piece from her, if I’m not mistaken it is from how to eat, I think or one of her, it’s from it’s a piece from one of her books. And it’s, it’s available online at literary hub, I think it is. And it’s about guilty pleasures. So if you look up guilty pleasures, Nigella Lawson, you should find it. And I linked to it, in the article on sugar, because I just, I just love this whole the whole piece. But I love how she describes how we like, that those words together guilty pleasures, like it shouldn’t be, you shouldn’t feel guilt for something that brings you pleasure. And more than anything, she kind of turns it around to say it just starts about like the guilty pleasure. And it’s not necessarily even something sweet, we often use that phrase for something like a piece of cake, or, you know, something sweet Oh, we shouldn’t be having this. And, and it’s, we should be feeling guilty because it’s so good and sweet or whatever else. But she also talks about, you know, feeling guilty about other foods or about you know, just taking a break and having like a cup of tea and sitting down and, you know, but she sort of turns it around to say, you should actually be feeling like deep gratitude, not guilt for these things. And that is what she tries to do. Anyway, it’s a beautiful, beautiful article, and I read it every now and then I just go back to it. And I just read, it is really so lovely.
Laura Thomas
Just as a reminder, there’s, there’s, I think, you know, in my work that I do with, with adults around intuitive eating and kind of helping them repair a ruptured relationship with food, I find that it’s not for everyone, not everyone is you know, has a little foodie inside of them waiting to get out. But for some people connecting to the kind of, yeah, just the pleasure that food can bring and the joy and, you know, whether that’s through I don’t know, starting like a sourdough experiment in your kitchen or watching some, you know, food programmes or reading about food and the joy and the connection to our culture and our heritage and all of those things that really there’s something so healing about that when we can kind of put down all of the shit, all the baggage that diet culture has dumped onto us and kind of get back to the roots of food and it being about you know, family or connection or our
Emiko Davies
A placer? Like when you want to be transported to a place I kind of think like cooking that food that reminds you of a place. The quickest way there.
Laura Thomas
Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. That’s it. There’s just so much that food can offer us aside from you know, food as fuel. I hate that. I hate that so much. But yeah, so thank you for sharing those articles. I think I bookmarked the Nigella one, but I hadn’t gone back to it from your article. So I’m gonna go check that out. Okay, Emiko, can you before we go? Can you just let everyone know where they can find out more about you and your books? Yeah, where can they find you on the internet?
Emiko Davies
Great. So I have a website, which is emikodavies.com. And that’s my old blog. There’s like 11 years of blogging on that website. So there’s lots of recipes, Italian regional recipes, usually, and there’s lots of travel articles. So if you’re coming to Florence and you want to know where to eat, or you’re going to Tuscany or let’s say Puglia or Sicily, Venice. there’s articles from all these different places there, things, you know, places where I like to eat, or just experiences that I’ve had that I wanted to share. You can find those on, on the blog. And then I’m on Instagram @emikodavies. And I have a newsletter, which is just called Emiko’s newsletter, that’s on substack.
Laura Thomas
Well, perfect, I will link to all of them. And you’ve got how many cookbooks out or?
Emiko Davies
The fifth one just came out last month. And that’s called Cinnamon and Salt. And that is about eating the Venetian way, which is this tradition of cicchetti which is like little small bite that you have, really any time of the day you can eat cicchetti at like 830 in the morning with a little glass of wine and that’s totally normal in Venice.
Laura Thomas
It’s like a great way to start your day. Move aside Weetabix.
Emiko Davies
Actually, you’d be better off I mean, it’s easy to find them earlier in the day than later. Like Good places closed by about seven o’clock, which might sound like crazy, but yeah, go do it for like lunchtime or something.
Laura Thomas
Yeah, that sounds so good. And yeah, so I’ll link to your books as well in the show notes. Emiko this has been such a joy, such a delight. I’m so happy that we could have this conversation and thank you for coming on.
Emiko Davies
Thanks so much for having me.
Laura Thomas
All right, team. That’s this week’s show. If you’d like to learn more about today’s guest, then check out the show notes in your podcast player, or head to laurathomasphd.co.uk for more details or the full transcript from today’s episode. Big thanks to Joeli Kelly for editorial and transcription support. And if you need to get in touch with me then you can email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk or find me on Instagram @bub.appetit. And if you enjoyed today’s episode, then you can help the show reach more people by subscribing on your podcast player and sharing it with a friend. Alright team. I will catch you next Friday with a brand new episode.
See you there.
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