What is love? I love food. I love making it and savouring it, every taste and texture. A bite of perfect peach has me moaning with pleasure. The cinnamonny smell of sweet biscuits baking sets me swooning with - oops, I´ve run out of S's!

About the only thing I don´t love about food, is the inevitable mess after my toddler used ALL her senses to explore it! And yet, how I love to watch her do it. The utter glee with which she squishes a banana in her little fingers - that has to be love...

There is something decadent about spending hours on a meal. Slow food. Slow to make, and slow to eat, with all the rich flavours that only time and love can infuse. Like an orchestra playing good classical music. By comparison, the average fastfood hamburger has all the complexity of sawdust.

I feel sorry for people who are allergic or intolerant of certain foods. To me, that would be a type of hell on earth: foregoing the sensuality of milk products, or the teeth-sinkingness supplied by a patisserie. Quite the opposite of love. Or at least, it´s one-way love, loving the food, but it does not love you back!

What would a true hedonist do? How can you maximise the net pleasure of food that bites you back? Then again, some people like food that bites back. Some Thai or Indian food can probably better be used to strip paint off old chairs! I am not a fan of electrocuting my tastebuds, I prefer more subtle tastes. By FAR!

Do I feel I miss out because I don´t burn my insides to a crisp every so often? No, I can be perfectly hedonistically happy without that. As long as I can have my profiteroles!