by JULIET WATERS

I once interviewed Ruth Reichl, the editor of Gourmet magazine, who revealed in her autobiography, Tender Is the Bone, that she suffered from obesity during most of her teenage and young-adult years. It was a book about her love of food, not her struggle with weight, so I was surprised to be introduced to a svelte woman who was five minutes away from ordering a full-fat smoked meat for lunch. Of course I asked the obvious question. Reichl told me one day she made a life decision: she was going to stop worrying about her weight, start getting really in touch with her appetite and eat whatever she wanted for the rest of her life. The weight, she claims, just melted off.

This is a very different anecdote from the one told by Caroline Knapp in her quasi-sociological, mostly autobiographical Appetites: Why Women Want. Naturally thin all her life, Knapp remembers a pivotal November night when she bought a small tub of Hood's cottage cheese. "Picture it on a plate… wet, bitter little curds… marketed honestly, it would appear in dairy cases with warning labels: THIS SUBSTANCE IS SELF-PUNITIVE; INGEST WITH CAUTION."

Compelled by forces she didn't understand then, and still doesn't entirely understand by the end of her book, she made a decision to eat nothing but cottage cheese and rice cakes for three consecutive days. Three days became six years of anorexia. At 21, this woman of average height weighed 83 lbs.

Knapp is best known for her bestselling first memoir Drinking: A Love Story. After tackling her food disorder, Knapp, a lifetime smoker, might have been more than half way towards completing an excellent trilogy on modern day compulsions. She died, however, of lung cancer, at age 42, just before Appetite was published.

Many women, myself included, will be forced to admit while reading this painful but interesting exploration of the distorted relationship women have with their appetite that they have more in common with Knapp than Reichl. With all the freedom women enjoy, the freedom to eat whatever and whenever you want is arguably the one they're least likely to allow themselves. The sad, tiresome truth is that most continue to live in a psychic snake pit surrounded by slithering images of skinny models. A prison largely self-created, since men are not the prime consumers of Vogue, Shape etc. Even if you paid them, most women would not be able to maintain a decision to eat whatever they wanted for the rest of their lives.

"Granted…," as Knapp points out early on, "…these are not (or not always) life-and-death issues; to an extent, the brands of unease I'm interested in can be seen as colossal luxury problems, the edgy blatherings of women who have the time, energy and resources to actually worry about their thighs or their wardrobes or their relative levels of personal fulfillment. And to an extent, that view is entirely correct."

The whole body image-cultural conditioning debate often does feel trivial and embarrassing. The most uncomfortable passages in Knapp's memoir are those where she trots out this old, increasingly lame discourse. Even if it were 100 per cent true that appetite were culturally conditioned, so what? While many freedoms have been, and could only have been obtained by a community of activism, in the end how we fulfill our appetite is going to be a personal decision. The magazine industry is only going to change one woman, and one decision at a time.

What Knapp's book so eloquently conveys, however, is that too few women ever take the time to think this through and make that life decision. Whether they are anorexic or not, their days are still too full of trivial preoccupations with carbs, calories, abs, thighs etc. Preoccupations that sap them of authentic power in so many ways. But insightful, honest books like Knapp's (and Reichl's too) are at least part of the solution.

Appetites: Why Women Want, by Caroline Knapp, Counterpoint, hc, 210pp, $37