Hair and makeup: Juliana Sergot using Dermalogica and Tigi. Photograph: Alex Lake/The Observer
“Food isn’t just food,” says Becky Excell, 31-year-old blogger, author and winner of the readers’ vote for Best Food Personality. “It’s socialising, identity, special occasions, comfort – it’s everything.”
Excell’s blog, Gluten Free Cuppa Tea – and four subsequent books – have been built from recipes she most missed after being told by a doctor to remove gluten from her diet in 2013, to cope with the symptoms of what appeared to be irritable bowel syndrome. She was later told that to test for coeliac disease, she would have to reintroduce gluten to her diet for six weeks, by which point her symptoms were too severe to do so. “So I live as an undiagnosed coeliac,” she tells me, “and will do so for life unless an easier way of testing is discovered – in which case I would love to get tested again.”
