The Kitchen Shrink: How the food we eat is the key to how we love

A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEARDid you know that the food we eat says a lot about how we love?Psychologist Dr Andrea Oskis shows us how we connect with each other and how we can change our personal ‘recipes’ to have better relationships.Along the way, she also reveals her own food story about love and loss. Inviting us into her therapy room with her patients, she tells us: the real reason why comfort food comforts why dessert isn’t a good idea when you’re stressed why you should never give a bottle of hot sauce to someone who has been rejectedBe prepared to never look at your plate in the same way again.

Andrea Oskis is a psychologist, a food writer and a professional cook. She is interested in the two things that are crucial for human survival: relationships and food. Her academic expertise is human relationships; how we connect, love and attach in couples and communities, and she has researched, taught and written about this for more than twenty years. Andrea is Greek Cypriot and so, perhaps not unsurprisingly, the kitchen has always had a natural pull. In 2018 she took an intensive course in classic cookery at Leiths School of Food and Wine. Andrea’s food writing has been published in Vittles, Pit Magazine and Gastronomica, The Journal for Food Studies. She is a member of the Guild of Food Writers. In 2022, Andrea was shortlisted for Moniack Mohr’s Emerging Writer of the Year and a Guild of Food Writers Award. In 2023, she won the MFK Fisher Last House Writing Contest. She is also a Fellow of the British Psychological Society.