This is Life and Art from FT Weekend. I'm Lila Raptopoulos. My colleague Tim Hayward writes about food professionally. He's been our restaurant critic here at the FT for 12 years. Tim also makes food very successfully. He owns a bakery in Cambridge, and he's put out eight books about cooking and making food from scratch. So he was pretty surprised recently when somebody called him a glutton.

He thought, of course I'm a glutton.

Do people still think that that's a bad thing?

Today we've invited Tim to join us from London to defend gluttony,

or at least to encourage us to embrace the pleasure of eating.

Tim, welcome to the show.

It's always such a pleasure to have you on. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. Okay, so to start, can you tell me what happened? This was a few months ago, right? Who called you a glutton? It sort of came up in conversation. I was chatting to a chef friend. And he just said, you know, well, you're a professional glutton. I thought, well, yeah, but, you know, what do you mean?

Why say it in that negative? I was chatting to a chef friend. And he just said, you know, well, you're a professional glutton.

I thought, well, yeah, but, you know, what do you mean?

Why say it in that negative way?

Right.

Did you think, does this person know what I do?

Well, exactly.

But it's not just that, because it made me go away and think about it.

Because I run a bakery in Cambridge, and we've got three or four branches and we make cakes and sweet things that are all very delightful and I realize that of course

none of those are they're what you call in marketing discretionary purchases people aren't coming in

to buy them because they're starving you know they don't need it for sustenance they need it because

it's a pleasure and a joy and I realized then that if gluttony is bad, I'm a drug dealer. But I'm not. And so we've got to find some way of repositioning gluttony is it's not really a terrible mortal sin. Yeah, yeah. Let's just make, I would love to like linger on the definition. So the

Oxford English Dictionary defines gluttony as the habit of eating and drinking too much. Yeah.

But it feels sort of like the thing that you're pushing back against is the excessive enjoyment of

food. It's not really just about the excessive eating of food. I think for me, it's when people get moral about it.

I mean, when they first started listing sins, I think Song of Solomon or some of the earliest

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