The Great British Bake Off alumnus has a new book that's all about eating what you want.

As a mixed race queer woman, Ruby Tandoh isn't exactly a common sight in the food world.

And instead of pushing an agenda of dieting, restriction and other regimental fads, Tandoh is doing something almost unheard of in 2018 with her new book Eat Up! - encouraging people to eat exactly what they want.

Food and mental health

It's a shocking concept in the age of juice cleanses and turmeric tonics, but for Tandoh, eating what you want is necessary for your mental health.

"Food and mental health is hugely intertwined," she explains. "A huge part of feeding yourself is about how you treat yourself. It's about whether you want to be nourished and grow strong - or not."

For someone who has the confidence to take on the giants of so-called 'clean eating', like Deliciously Ella and the Hemsley sisters, Tandoh is surprisingly shy and softly spoken in person.

She rose to fame in 2013 after reaching the semi-final of The Great British Bake Off. Since then, she's made a name for herself with two cookbooks and now her latest offering, Eat Up! which isn't a traditional cookbook, but more a love letter to food. It also picks apart everything that's wrong with the food and eating industry. There are recipes occasionally interspersed throughout, but they serve more of a storytelling function than anything else.

The book is highly personal, and she shares her own struggles with eating disorders in the past. This makes Tandoh well-placed to discuss the relationship between food and mental health. "I know from personal experience that the times I've not been feeling well are the times when my approach to food has been all over the place," she explains.

Many of us can relate to having a hard day at work and this directly affecting our diet - we tend to overcompensate by either bingeing or restricting what we eat. This kind of attitude is what Tandoh is resisting - she wants people to find their own balance and eat what's right for them, rather than their diets being affected by the stresses of daily life and the influence of clean eating gurus.

The overwhelming whiteness of food

If you thought it was just wellness bloggers Tandoh is coming for, you'd be sorely mistaken. In her book she also focusses on the white imperialism of food. "What I've found is that the gatekeepers of food are overwhelmingly white," she says. "That was something that became clearer and clearer the longer I worked in food, so I just wanted to be frank about it. People ignoring the issue is what perpetuates the problem."

Statistics back up her experience. Only four cookbooks cracked the top 100 best sellers last year, and they all came from white foodies: Jamie Oliver, Mary Berry, Tom Kerridge and Nigella Lawson.

It shows how diversity is lacking in the food industry, which is a problem for people of colour trying to crack the market, but it also speaks of a wider issue: That of appropriation.

Tandoh is concerned by cuisines being adopted as a fad, and then swiftly discarded for the next trend. "This is people's culture, and people's life," she says. "The people that make money from it are seldom the people whose culture it is."

"It's a tricky line between appreciation and appropriation," Tandoh adds. "I don't claim to have the answers. So many of the problems come about because it is a monologue, when actually people should be having conversations."

Queerness in food

To succeed in food, it would seem as though you have to fit neatly into one of its prescribed categories: shouty male chef (a la Gordon Ramsay), or a homemaker cooking for her family and friends (like Nigella).

Of course, this is an over-generalisation, but these stereotypes do show there isn't a space currently within the world of cooking and food writing being filled or driven by the queer community.

"The restaurant kitchen isn't traditionally the most queer-friendly of places," Tandoh says, "and food TV is largely about family-friendly, domestic environments, so you don't really see many queer people on TV just being themselves."

This is what makes Tandoh so refreshing, because there's no doubt she's being herself, and tackling topics people have previously shied away from.

Finding her own groove

Amidst these barriers, you could understand if Tandoh felt a bit downtrodden by it all. But on the contrary, she's still incredibly excited by food.

"I used to be a really staunch recipe follower, I used to be so worried about getting it wrong" she says. "I don't really do that so much any more, I just find myself freestyling, which is nice. It tells me I've become more confident."

Eat Up!: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want by Ruby Tandoh is published by Serpent's Tail, priced £12.99. Available now.