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not touch my knife and fork before the arrival of my food, that this was rude, a sign of greed, of bad attitude, of bad breeding. Picking up the knife and fork before the food arrives is a sign that you are greedy, that you will be fat. Premature cutlery pick-up, she believed, was a model of what was wrong with society in general. Knives and forks exist to promote civilised eating. You sit at a table, upon which your food is placed. As an activity, eating is conducted in the open, transparently. Everything is upright, decent, 'on the table'. Nothing is furtive. Nothing is 'under the table'. Everybody can see what everybody else is eating. Everybody's food is distinct from everybody else's. When the food arrives, and only when the food arrives, do you touch your cutlery.
    Right now, if it were up to me, I'd chuck the fork away and eat with my fingers. I'm feeling medieval, pre-fork. According
    to John Beckmann, the historian of inventions, people in England in the Middle Ages regarded the fork as 'an effeminate piece of finery'. I'd go along with that. Who used forks? The French, that's who. I mean, in the Stone Age, people would use knives made out of bits of flint. They would hack away at meat when they needed to. But mostly they ate with their fingers. People didn't really use forks until the eighteenth century, the age of frock coats and powdered wigs. The fork says, 'Look at me! I'm not particularly hungry!'
    I am.
    When my food arrives, the first thing I want to eat is the toast. So I pick up a slice of the toast, and I start buttering it. My resolve is crumbling already. I know that, to kill it off completely, all I have to do is put this piece of toast in my mouth. Then I'll feel better. I can interview Dr Atkins, write about him in a knowing, cynical way, go home, and forget about him. As I'm contemplating this, the waiter takes the order from the next table.
    `What sort of toast do you want?'
    The guy at the next table says, 'No toast. We're doing a little Atkins thing here.'
    I put my toast down. I don't touch it again. I eat the egg-white omelette, fast, as if I am trying to kill it and eat it at the same time. I brandish my cutlery with cruel, slashing precision.
    I am d'Artagnan. I am Errol Flynn.
    And then I walk through the diner, away from the fried potatoes and the stacked loaves, the English and American muffins, the Danish pastries, the Belgian waffles; away from my religion and out into the cold, carb-scented air of Manhattan.

An Historic Moment
    Five minutes later I'm standing on Lower Broadway, looking in the window of a newsagent, and the news is bad for fat people. There's a display of magazines as high as my head, and they're all telling me the same thing.
    Breaking news: be slim. Slim is good. If you're not slim, you won't get what you want. If you're not slim, you will not be happy.
    This just in: if you're not slim, you don't exist.
    I'm looking at pictures of women with slim bodies, the sort of pictures I've been looking at for years, decades, images designed to make women dislike themselves. But I'm also looking at men. Men, stripped to the waist, arms toned, shoulders flexed, pectorals coiled torsos knuckled like fists. Mostly I'm looking at stomachs. These are magazines about stomachs. LOSE YOUR GUT. SHRINK YOUR GUT. FIRMER ABS IN 28 DAYS. GET BETTER SEX. GET MORE SEX. GET HER TO AGREE TO ANYTHING.
    I don't believe this, of course. But that's not quite true. The truth is: I don't want to believe it. But part of me believes it. Part of me thinks that, if I had a stomach like these stomachs, I could get women to agree to anything. With a stomach like this, I would have no fear. I would be ... a real guy. These stomachs they are awesome. These stomachs are smooth, shiny, polished. They are sectioned. They are like the bellies of reptiles. They are protective carapaces. Each stomach is a shield, a prophylactic against male vulnerability. They are ripped. They are cut. They are six-packs. Hell, some