Yesterday, after my usual to-die-for breakfast and a few leftovers for lunch (lentil salad, fennel, cabbage), I went out to dinner. Now mostly eating in a restaurant, it is reasonably easy to be restrained: you take your pet duck to feed your bread – look, my grandmother used to keep one in a London bathroom during the war; it can’t be that difficult – you order the fish – or whatever has the least cream and pastry and the most vegetables – and you’re slimming pretty.

But then the waitress turns up and enquires if you would like to look at the dessert menu. Yes please, you yell, trying not to bounce up and down with excitement, and hoping you won’t let yourself down by ordering two puddings and one spoon.  And if you manage to squeeze out a ‘no thank you’, you feel smug – and miserable – for the rest of the evening.  

So why can we so readily tuck into a bowl of cream and sugar, when if the same waitress enquired if we would like another steak – or even another bowl of chips – we would look at her as if she had taken leave of her senses.  

According to Giles Yeo, the genius geneticist at Cambridge University, it’s a bit of our cave-dwelling behaviour  – part of our ancient, death-defying need to build up fat reserves.

The idea goes something like this: in order to get fatter you need to eat more than you can burn throwing spears at a woolly mammoth.   A brilliant way of doing that, is at the point you think you can’t eat another thing, you eat another thing. But as you are full, it needs to be small in volume but high in calories, and easy to convert immediately into fat. Ta-da: pudding.

And before you think this is all rather far-fetched, we are not the only creatures to do this: bears do it too.  When they are getting themselves fat, ready for the winter hibernation, if they gorge themselves on salmon, the last few they eat only the skin and the fat; i.e. the densely calorific part. Personally, I’d rather Panna Cotta, but then I am not a bear.

The tragedy is that at the time when humans needed their pudding stomach, there was no pudding. And now that the last thing we need is a pudding stomach, the world is awash with puddings, and people paid to urge us to eat them.

So next time the waitress turns up waving fudge sauce and chocolate mousse and spotted dick under your nose, challenge your inner-caveperson to a duel.

N.b. Do not get confused and challenge the waitress to a duel, no matter how much you’ve had to drink.

For the record, I had a whole plaice, lots of vegetables, and no pudding. I didn’t especially want one, but the waitress didn’t offer one either. So I don’t know if I would have virtuously looked as if I never touched the things, or dived headfirst into the nearest pavlova.        

‍

‍