It was a sunny Saturday and my first experience of calories on menus. I can now tell you that prawns are low in calories, chorizo is high , and salt and pepper squid is surprisingly energy-rich – though this is not surprising to me because I am a woman of a certain vintage, and we can all tell you how many calories are in absolutely everything, so long as it was in common usage by 1985, in other words, not seitan.
The calories in/calories out model – the fitness industry now calls calorie counting “If It Fits Your Macros”, which conveys something huge about modern life – tyrannised my youth. Even if you pretended not to care, or actually didn’t care, you could still rate any given food item at 50 paces. You could name everything that looked healthy but was highly calorific, everything that was more or less calorie neutral, all the miracle foods that did high satiety for low energy load, all the foods that were discreetly low calorie (cottage cheese was so obvious). There were so many numbers and properties all neatly filed away in millions of brains.
