Nigella Lawson.

Nigella Bites, Nigella Lawson's food program on the Style Network, is truly concerned with the joy of cooking, with Lawson herself a sort of cutinary embodiment of Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame, Already a superstar in England, Lawson is titillating Americans with a style that's the antithesis of the current national craze for carbfree living. In her kitchen, life really is a banquet, and no one's allowed to starve.

In the United States you're not an object of the tabloids, but in England they're snapping pictures of you without makeup, right? They have, but my laziness is greater than my vanity. I was photographed once--I won't say I was jogging, because I don't do anything that energetic--but I was walking around the park in an effort to take a bit of exercise, and the photograph of that moment convinced me that where I'd gone wrong was to go out doing that sort of thing in the first place.

Besides the chocolate eggs, which I think I need right now, what's the one item in your Living Kitchen product line that I should buy immediately? I would say the mezzaluna [two-handled chopping knife], because a sharp blade is always useful to have around. It's both beautiful and lethal.

Campbell's soup versus Campbell's Select soup? Why do we need this sort of thing? When did we all become food snobs?

When people say to me, "What is the new hip ingredient?" I always say, "Who cares? What do you want to eat?"

I have a friend who cuts around the fat strips in the bacon at breakfast. What would you say to gay men who are that obsessed with their bodies?

I would not want to sleep with someone who are like that. People think watching what you eat and having a good figure makes you attractive, but you're either attractive or you're not. It's not about your figure. How you eat says everything about you, and to eat that way means your life doesn't have enough pleasure in it.

There's a perspective you don't often hear in West Hollywood.

I think men, straight or gay, tend to have a real weakness in thinking that surface beauty is somehow meaningful. But after

10 minutes, mind-numbing boringness and stupidity will make you forget that beauty. It takes a woman 10 minutes to learn what it can take a man two years to see.