Life & Wisdom Quote by Jilly Cooper

A line like this is less about diet than about status: the casual dismissal of food as a topic worthy of thought. Jilly Cooper, chronicler of Britain’s racy upper-middle-class mythologies, knows exactly what she’s doing when she shrugs at the great modern obsession. In an era where identity is routinely performed through what we consume (clean eating, carnivore, vegan, gluten-free, artisanal, biohacked), “I’m not terribly interested” lands as a tiny act of social defiance.

The phrasing matters. “But really” signals a gentle pushing-back against an implied interrogation: someone has asked, or the culture has demanded, a confession. “Not terribly” is classic English understatement, the soft glove over a sharp point: I refuse the performance, and I’m polite enough to make it sound like a minor preference. The subtext is confidence bordering on privilege. To be uninterested in food is, for many people, a luxury; for Cooper’s milieu, it can also be a way of telegraphing that you’re above the fads, the anxieties, the earnest self-optimization.

It also reads as a quiet refusal of moralization. Food talk now carries virtue and vice, discipline and indulgence, wellness and shame. Cooper’s line sidesteps all of it with a flick of the wrist. That’s her trademark: deflate the sanctimony, keep the tone light, let the social machinery show through. The joke isn’t that she doesn’t eat; it’s that everyone else is so busy turning lunch into a personality.