Please stop asking about my figure

“How do you ladies stay so slim?”

That was the question put to us, three of the four authors from the Monday Morning Cooking Club (MMCC), during a Sydney Writers’ Festival session. We had just released our third book, collecting, documenting and preserving recipes and stories from our Jewish community.

It was a huge moment for us, but the question we were being asked was not about our recipes or our cooking techniques. It was about our bodies.

Though we all cook and eat with enthusiasm, some of the four women who make up the Cooking Club and wrote the book are slim, some are not. Jacqui Israel and I consider ourselves the potatoes of the group. Merelyn Frank Chalmers and Natanya Eskin are the carrots.

On the one hand I was freaking out because I didn’t know how or if I should answer the question. What if I answered it and the audience thought that I thought I was slim but – as they could see – I was not? This is what went through my mind. Can you imagine, in the middle of an interview?

On the other hand, what sort of a question was it to ask a group of serious cookbook authors who had dedicated the past 10 years to their project? A project which has everything to do with our Jewish community’s recipes, traditions and stories and the importance of the family table and absolutely nothing to do with body image and weight.

On the other hand (just call me Tevye), maybe – just maybe – it is not an unreasonable idea of a question, but it was just asked in the wrong way? Maybe people just want to know whether we actually eat all the food when we test recipes. Maybe they want to know how, when we are testing cakes, we manage to eat so much sweet stuff in one sitting. Perhaps they really wanted to ask whether or not we gained weight during the writing and testing process. Would that be an acceptable question? Or maybe I am overthinking it all?