The Year in Eating: In 2025 we ought to be asking not just why ‘thin is in’, but more specifically why appetite should now be out
We only laughed a bit this October when a failed Italian-restaurant owner got sarcastic, thanking local residents in an online farewell for their total lack of support. The tone of Marco Valente’s thanks for ‘never visiting’ was definitely not not funny; the charge of ‘total indifference’ on the part of would-be customers, though, was less of a lol.
Not that every pizza restaurant is entitled to the love of its locals, but Don Ciccio did sound like a reasonably good time, and if anyone can afford one of those, it’s likely the people of Highgate Village, the restaurant’s affluent North London location. Yet in 2025, London’s bigger spenders have been focusing less on good times and more on immunising themselves to the lure of spaghetti and booze. This year, restaurateurs in the UK reported a need to adapt their menus for the Ozempic-withered appetite: canape meals, even smaller small plates and spectral slivers of tart.
This may sound obscure to the point of irrelevance, but sadly the wealthy are people too, and though their easy access to off-label meds may be niche, the desire for said medications isn’t. According to one survey, over half of those on appetite-suppressing GLP-1 injections struggle to actually afford them, and you don’t need to leave your laptop to hear the widespread call no longer to long for food.
For it is this, and less the prize of actual thinness, that distinguishes drugs like Ozempic, Mounjaro and Wegovy from the age-old practice of dieting. The mechanism of weight loss – eating less – remains the same. It is hunger, pleasure and interest in food, rather than weight, that these drugs offload with such novel success. So while the ‘Ozempic lifestyle’ discourse swirls without end around questions of weight, perhaps we ought to be asking not just why ‘thin is in’, but more specifically why desire should now be out. Why the ferocious vogue for indifference, the clamour to be freed from the ordinary enjoyment of breakfast?
Where the winding down of human appetite was once, for the most part, delayed until the onset of terminal illness, now you can pay a premium for the chance to take control – to ‘die’, just a bit, before you die. Fair enough. We are warned, in a culture of senseless austerity, not to want or expect too much from the end of the world. And we live in perpetual ‘endtimes’: fires, floods, wars, pandemics, the threat of violent struggles over resources – the UN estimates that in another 25 years, 200 million people will have been displaced by climate change. The food system struggles, people starve. Some respond to real-time crisis – such as in Gaza and Sudan – with efforts at aid, mutual aid and political action. Others may despair, disinvest from the world, go out for single-scoop sorbet.
Others on the individualist spectrum have been preparing for a well-stocked demise, at least for themselves and their households. Rather than dreaming of wanting nothing, the recreational prepper-type aspires at least to preserve whatever is left. As European nations publish booklets advising citizens to stockpile food, Americans go on courses in ‘apocalypse-proof cooking’, and ‘self-sufficient’ homesteaders make their own cheese. This summer, The Times ran a piece on ‘how to be a middle-class prepper’, proposing a stash of Perello olives, cans of seabass in salsa verde, gin and tonic and tubs of Maldon salt. ‘Bring on the apocalypse’, the author quipped. For much to the Times-reading public’s satisfaction, the most advanced food system in the world was never designed to be fair.
Indeed, the style of food produced in this spirit flourishes well beyond the zones of always-imminent disaster. A certain canned, frozen, fermented, even dehydrated energy could be felt right across the foodie landscape this year. Despite a succession of difficult harvests driving up prices, sales of olive oil have boomed. After the giddy TikTok success of last year’s ‘dense bean salad’, one of 2025’s bestselling cookbooks was a(nother) 192-page piece of PR on behalf of the Bold Bean company. It would not be strange to encounter a ‘recipe’ for opening tinned fish. Influencers make wreaths out of pickles.
Much of this is harmless, though it does raise the question of where we think we are going – with our luxe pantry products, our pimped pot noodles, our stores of dried beans, never soaked. Two paths emerge for those who are sensitive, whether consciously or not, to the social, ecological and political catastrophes around us: to fully embrace the endtimes, either hoarding the things we want or preemptively killing desire altogether; or to sustain some idea of a future in how we feed ourselves.
Yes, we will need to preserve – both food itself and our food traditions – but we will also have to find new ways to grow, prepare and distribute food. We will need to get food to those who have already met devastation, and feed ourselves with exemplary generosity. These are mostly political matters, yet the fantasies that contour home cooking are significant here too. Among the most buzzy pantry-staple cookbooks this year was Alison Roman’s Something from Nothing – an exercise in transforming mere pasta and beans into something subtly festive. While no Diet for a Small Planet, no blueprint for radical change, this kind of artefact at least reveals that some, amid the march towards nothing, still want the ‘something’. It is possible not just to hoard, but to love the kinds of food that could be grown without excessive destruction or violence. To look at them anew, and continue to think of ways to surprise and delight. We can still refuse the turn towards indifference, which, as Freud used to say, is the opposite of love.
