Shriver exposed as miserabilist food hater

A new day, some new recipe porn....ok, ok: technically this new recipe porn of which I write came to my attention last Thursday when I first saw The Table, The Times' new food & drink supplement.

My first reaction was: "Joy. More yummy food writing to gorge on."

So it's to be hoped that the coming weeks are an improvement on their first effort.

On the front page we have an interview with Mary McCartney, whose mum invented horrid frozen veggie sausages and burgers.

Inside she shared recipes for Aubergine Layered Bake (aubs, tomatoes and cheese) and Sauteed Leeks which are leeks, sauteed, in a pan, with some lemon juice.

Later on there's some better stuff: a column from Heston, and Alex Renton, one of my favourite food writers.

The layout looks a bit squashed up, but I think they had about five minutes to design the whole thing so I'll forgive this for now.

The real crime, and the reason I've taken so long to post this (I needed a substantial cooling off period), comes on page 9 by way of an interview with writer Lionel Shriver called "What I ate yesterday?"

And what, folks, do you imagine Shriver ate the day before she did this interview?

Absolutely diddly squat.

I wondered why she always looked so miserable. And now I know: she doesn't eat.

That's her bag, but The Times shouldn't be recommending this sort of food-hating behaviour (and a hatred of anyone who does actually eat) to its readers.

Here are a few of the nastier bits:

"Breakfast. One enormous cup of coffee. I have no desires past this highly evolved cup of coffee, which powers me through the whole day."

"Lunch. Nothing. I don't have any understanding of people who can eat three meals a day. How do they ever get anything else done?"

And here's the full piece.

Which is odd, because almost exactly a year earlier, on 6 March 2009, here's Shriver in The Guardian talking about her passion for strong flavours in food (the same food she doesn't really eat, I imagine).

Her description of food and writing here makes me quite warm to her -

"I'm not a subtle person, and I cook the way I write. In the kitchen or at a keyboard, I push flavour towards an absolute limit. Food, like fiction, should leave an after-burn. As a good novel should make you cry, so a good main dish should make your eyes water and your nose run."

And then here she is again moaning about how she has been criticised for accepting a free holiday, when actually she utterly detests holidays, although she did happen to take this particular one.

Whatevs Shriver, just stay away from our food porn in the future.