Nigella Lawson explains why she'll never apologize for eating on The Great British Baking Show

Nigella Lawson took over from Prue Leith this season — announced in January, on screens since September — and the first viral discourse of her tenure wasn't about her judging. It was about her eating: clips mocking how eagerly and how much she tastes the bakers' work spread across social media, down to the size of her bites.

Her answer, in an interview covered by The Tab on October 15, was that she tried Paul Hollywood's advice of taking smaller mouthfuls and gave up: "I realized no, I couldn't." On the show itself she went further, pushing back when Hollywood called a contestant's chocolate hazelnut cookie "naughty":

"I don't approve of talking about food as naughty. We need to take our pleasures where we can in life."

— Nigella Lawson, on The Great British Baking Show

Reddit, to its credit, mostly found the controversy itself ridiculous. The top reactions in r/entertainment's thread were "Breaking news: Judge on a baking show eats cake" and, more pointedly, "You forgot to consider, she's a woman! How dare she eat!"

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Where her refusal comes from

The reason this isn't just a fun catchphrase is Lawson's biography, and she has never hidden it. Her mother, Vanessa, died of liver cancer in 1985 at 48. Her sister Thomasina died of breast cancer in 1993 at 32. Her first husband, the journalist John Diamond, was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1997, lost his tongue and his ability to swallow, and died in 2001 at 47.

Lawson wrote her first book, How to Eat, while Diamond was ill — he was the one who urged her to write about food — and she has said cooking through those years was "part of holding onto my sanity." She watched three people she loved lose the ability to eat. Her refusal to perform guilt about a cookie isn't a quirk; it's a position she arrived at the hard way, and she put it in writing back in her 2020 book Cook Eat Repeat: "No one should feel guilty about what they eat or the pleasure they get from eating."

Prue Leith spent nine seasons judging whether a bake was "worth the calories." Nigella Lawson doesn't accept the premise of the question.

What the show gets out of it

For Bake Off, this is a trade worth making. Leith's calorie catchphrase was of a different era, and commentators have already started arguing that Lawson's open pleasure in food is the most refreshing thing to happen to the format in years — a judge who treats eating as the point of baking rather than its price. The mockery will fade; the bites, by her own account, will not.

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