Article: Not Everyone Diets

Well here's one for the FA advocates. A gorgeous, sexy woman who frowns
on diets ( but doesn't appear to need one)

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British cooking goddess Nigella Lawson speaks the language of food.

It's a lusty language, where terms like duck fat, deep fryer and
chocolate cake are spoken with animated reverence while terms like
diet, vegetarian and low-carb bring bemused crinkles to her flawless
face.

Nigella is an admitted "chatterbox," but it's really her body language
that speaks loudest to fans who would rather feast with fellow food
lovers than famish with the size zeroes.

She dresses her much-discussed body in a form-fitting yet demure red
top and a long black skirt that celebrates her curves. Very glam and
viciously pointed black Celine pumps with silver studs ‹ her one
obvious nod to luxury ‹ are noticeable only to those whose eyes wander
down to foot level.

Nigella ‹ who's known by her first name ‹ moves from TV appearance to
interview to book signing with the voluptuous grace of a 44-year-old
woman who's comfortable in her own skin.

"Men love you ‹ you know that, you sexy broad," TV host Marilyn Denis
tells Nigella on her interactive talk show.

"Women think they have to be skinny and I don't think men want that,"
Nigella shoots back, before belatedly and somewhat awkwardly thanking
Denis for the compliment.

When she reveals that her husband, advertising mogul Charles Saatchi,
hates the gaunt look and orders her to "bulk up" if she skips meals,
the women in the audience sigh in appreciative wonder.

The audience ‹ mostly women above 30 who've signed up online to be part
of the show ‹ is full of food lovers.

"We just love to cook," says Brenda Neuman of Mississauga, who is with
daughters Nicole and Crystal. "Take a look," she says with a grin,
unabashedly motioning to her Nigellaesque figure.

Food, it turns out, isn't the only language that Nigella speaks. She
earned a degree in medieval and modern languages at Oxford University
before leapfrogging through the publishing world into the deputy
literary editor post at The Sunday Times (when she was 26 years old)
and the restaurant critic gig for The Spectator, a weekly newsmagazine.
Once she became food editor for British Vogue, her career took off.

Since 2000, Nigella has penned five cookbooks and hosted two television
cooking series while promoting her cooking motto: "To achieve maxium
pleasure through minimum effort."

Funny then, that Nigella's brains don't get nearly as much attention as
her body.

"If you go on television, people automatically think that can't
co-exist with other things," she laments during an interview yesterday
at the offices of Random House of Canada to promote her newest
offering, Feast: Food That Celebrates Life ($55). "I always feel my
readers get a very good measure of who I am. The trivial and the
important co-exist together. What's more important than food? It's the
story of life."

Food, Nigella proposes, is a strange mixture of disciplines.

"It's intellectual in that it's historical ... It's quite evidently
social. It's about human culture. I like the way it's so rooted in the
here and now. I like the completeness of food."

She also adores how food "overcomes a lack of speaking, literally, the
same language."

The first time Nigella visited Russia was years ago to write about
anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. The second time was 10 years ago for
a holiday. The third time, figuratively speaking, was when she
discoverd a Georgian woman in London and got to watch her make
cheesebread (the recipe and photos are spread over four pages in
Feast).

Nigella dips into various cultures to make meals in Feast. Christmas,
Thanksgiving, Easter and Valentine's Day get lavish attention, as do
Passover, Rosh Hashanah and Eid, not to mention wedding and funeral
feasts, "kiddiefeasts" and even Halloween.

And here's a little-known fact ‹ the woman who adores Christmas is
actually Jewish. So is her current husband Saatchi and so was her first
husband, journalist John Diamond who died of cancer in 2001.

"Although I am Jewish, actually I'm not observant at all," allows
Nigella. "Unless you are really religious, I think England is a place
where everyone is very secular. Christmas is just something you do."

This culturally flexible attitude is echoed in a Feast chapter where
Nigella catalogues her extensive cookie cutter collection that ranges
from Father Christmas and broomsticks to the Hebrew alphabet and an
Easter chick.

This fun-loving collection seems a perfect fit with a woman who goes
barefoot when she has people over for dinner, who hates the formality
of the term "dinner party," and who eats so much in bed that she keeps
her "salt pig" on the bedside table and gleefully admits to having
filthy sheets.

Behind this star is, of course, a real woman. A CityLine audience
member asks Nigella what her kids think about her fame.

"The funny thing with children is that whatever you are is normal to
them ... (but I tell them) all it means is that I do my job in public.
Other people work much harder than I do, but don't have the camera on
them on television."

The audience nods in agreement. They like this woman. They like her
even more when she reveals that greed inspires her to create recipes.
"You can love eating without being able to cook," says Nigella, "but
you cannot cook without loving to eat."

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Diva
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There is no substitute for the right food