Mariella Frostrup wants to make your mid-life delicious

Mariella Frostrup could probably assemble the country’s most exciting dinner party. As a writer, broadcaster and campaigner, she has forged friendships with rock stars and political giants. But she is now on a mission to get women excited once again about the food on the table. Together with Belles Berry – the daughter of culinary legend Mary Berry – she has created Menolicious, a cookbook the authors describe as a “call to arms” which will give women the “Grade-A fuel” needed to embrace “newfound freedom”.

She encountered the power of healthy food to transform daily life when she went on a health retreat in North Devon.

“I ate like a horse,” she remembers. “The food was utterly delicious. I thought, ‘This is a disaster. I’m going to leave here even fatter than when I got here.’

“And in fact, about four days after I got home my whole body felt like it was just working – I had energy, and I had energy in the afternoons when normally I’d be slumping in a stupor... My stomach was like the flattest it’s ever been.”

She had discovered the difference it makes when you give your body “fuel” rather than “stuff to fill it”.

In the “force of nature” Belles Berry she found a friend and chef who shared both her passion for changing attitudes to the menopause and her delight in creating life-enhancing meals.

This is not meant to be “another rod for women to beat themselves across the back with,” Ms Frostrup insists.

Most of the recipes can be made in 30 minutes or less and range from breakfasts to cocktails.

She remembers how the pandemic and the experience of having “four people trapped in the house all wanting different kinds of food” left her thinking: “ I never want to cook again.”

But as an empty nester, the 62-year-old has rediscovered the thrill of kitchen experimentation. And she wants people to enjoy the magic that can happen when friends and family gather around a table to feast together.

“People end up volunteering things you wouldn’t get on a phone call, definitely wouldn’t get on a text,” she says.

In recent years she has worked to get the nation talking about the menopause. In October she was named the Government’s “menopause employment ambassador”. This followed research showing just over half of women aged 40 to 60 are unable to go to work at some point due to menopause symptoms.

She is also an ambassador for the Royal Osteoporosis Society which is campaigning with the Sunday Express to end a postcode lottery which means many people who suffer a fracture are not checked for the potentially fatal bone disease. Half of NHS Trusts lack basic “fracture liaison services”.

Ms Frostrup says: “Not only would I like to see the fracture clinics that have been promised by this Government but have yet to materialise rolled out, but equally important is the fact you only get to go to those fracture clinics when you’ve had a fracture. Wouldn’t it be an amazing thing if at the 40-plus health check which we’re all offered [you] were told about perimenopause, you were told about how you can support and protect yourself from the most insidious symptoms and conditions.”

The Irish-Norwegian campaigner is a passionate believer that the task of changing the world for the better should not be left to professional politicians.

She remembers boarding the ferry from Dún Laoghaire with her carrier bags and heading for London at the age of 16. Her adventures led her to a job in PR at Phonogram records, and an Irish musician who wanted to launch a charity record started working at her desk.

Bob Geldof, she is quick to point out, was not a huge celebrity as he pleaded with people to get behind Band Aid and Live Aid.

“This was not some privileged person just easily facilitating something because of their status at all, and I think we often forget that actually,” she says.

She says she is “devastated” that four decades on from working with him to make these projects a reality “we’re still seeing children dying of hunger” and that “food poverty is a really serious issue here”. But she wants the spirit of Live Aid reawoken so people confront the great challenges of this time.

“I think the way it galvanised people and the way it made people feel like their voice was important and they could participate in change was really important and is something we could do with now,” she says. “Because I think a lot of people feel like their voices are insignificant, that the cogs of the world go on turning without any input from them and they feel redundant in terms of making change.

“I think we really need to remind the electorate [that] democracy is a living thing, you have to keep it alive, you have to participate, you have to object, you have to protest.”

Ms Frostrup “really objects” to claims the musicians who put the spotlight on famine were guilty of acting as “white saviours”, and she remembers the power of the Band Aid single.

“This spoke to me,” she says. “I suddenly understood what these people were living through.”

As one of the country’s most successful arts presenters and a former Booker Prize judge, she remains excited by the power of creativity to fuel empathy.

“Everything I’ve learned, everything I’ve understood, the way I’ve felt empowered... Everything has come from what I’ve read in books,” she says, adding: “When it comes to empathy, there’s no better place to uncover an understanding of people or an individual completely unlike you than through the eyes of the brilliant novelist who’s talking you into that world.”

She points to David Grossman, an “Israeli writer who writes with the most incredible empathy and understanding,” and describes how “war is the easiest option” but “peace is the challenge”.

Mr Grossman’s son, Uri, was killed while serving with the Israeli military in 2006.

“The size of his heart is something magnificent to witness,” Ms Frostrup says. “I think for anyone wondering what to think about what’s happening at the moment, he’s an incredibly important go-to.”

She also recommends Adania Shibli, the author of Minor Detail.

“Her book is the most extraordinary, poignant evocation of what it feels like to be a Palestinian today,” she says.

Art, she argues, “make us see a bigger picture, understand how somebody else thinks” – and she craves a society where people embrace debate.

“There’s no point in just listening to people who think the same way as you,” she says.

Her faith in people’s capacity to change harrowing situations is strengthened by witnessing the transformation of Ireland in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement.

“Just to see something you thought could never end, where the hate was so deeply entrenched, where the battle lines were so deeply driven in, to see Northern Ireland emerge out of that terrible thing, I think does give you hope.”

In her years as an agony aunt, people across the country have turned to Ms Frostrup for advice on their personal crises.

When asked for advice for a young couple who are starting their lives together, she notes that “love is a learning curve,” adding: “I think it’s about making a commitment that you mean to stick by.”

“For an awful lot of us,” she says, “we live in a world now where we see endless and sustained happiness as the normal state of being and anything that gets in the way of that needs to be disposed with. I think for couples young or old, for all of us – whether we are in a relationship or not – I think the most important thing we have to remember is happiness is a transitory thing which is why it is so fabulous when it manifests and the rest of the time we’re all just negotiating life, compromising, trying to find ways forward, and that applies to relationships as much as it applies to work-life, children or anything.

“Happiness is not your right – it’s something which is fleeting and delightful and the rest can be hard work at times but that doesn’t mean you should ditch the baby with the bathwater.”

With her cookbook, she hopes to bring happiness to people with food which will fuel and inspire new adventures. And would she like to open a restaurant of her own?

“No,” she says, without hesitation. “I’m very, very realistic about the difference between whipping up a meal for a few friends and family and having to do 100 covers a day under pressure in a hot kitchen. That’s not my idea of my perfect job.”