At university though, I learned another meaning of food – as something unruly and wild that a person needed to develop a firm hold over. I was 18 and studying among people far more affluent than me who, tellingly, were also all very slim. Here’s the other prejudicial thing about Oxford and Cambridge that goes unreported in accounts of their dire track record for admitting working class people and POC: There are barely any fat people. Paunchy rugby-type lads occasionally but never obese people, and certainly, very few overweight women. You’ll hear fascistic arguments about fat people simply being less intelligent as evidenced in their eating habits, which are so flawed I can’t even begin to start correcting them here. Truth is, the middle to upper classes are a cult of slimness and a lithe, sinewy, erect body is one way of being able to pick each other out of a crowded room. Whether conscious or not, for the time I was studying at Oxford there was no escaping the fact that a certain vetting of ‘unhealthy’ or ‘overweight’ people had occurred, and the sheer level of neuroses that used to swirl around every dinnertime seemed to also explain why.