Woman's Hour - Taming of the Shrew; Rare diseases; Cook the Perfect... with Meera Sodha

Episode Date: November 13, 2019

In the RSC’s ‘Taming of the Shrew’, currently on stage at the Barbican in London, 1590’s England is a matriarchy. With a radical take on Shakespeare’s comedy of gender, the audience witnesses an explosive courtship and a fast-moving portrayal of hierarchy and coercive control between the female Petruchia, played by Claire Price, and her male opposite still known as Katherine. Claire and Jane are joined by Dr Emma Whipday, lecturer in Renaissance literature at Newcastle University. Why has this gender swap proved necessary and what effect does it have?My Best Day: we asked you, our listeners, to get in touch and send us a picture that somehow captured you at your best. Not just looking your best, but feeling your best. Today we hear from Sara Tidesel.3.5 million people in the UK have a rare disease according to Rare Diseases UK – meaning that 1 in 17 people will have a condition that most GPs have never seen before and may struggle to diagnose. In her graphic memoir 'A Puff of Smoke', Sarah Lippet recounts her childhood battles with a mysterious debilitating illness. It begins with headaches and culminates in a loss of mobility and later brain surgery – and tells of the impact on her family and development into adulthood. She joins Jane alongside Dr Lucy McKay, CEO at Medics4RareDiseases, to talk about raising awareness of rare diseases and encouraging the medical profession to #DareToThinkRare.Food writer Meera Sodha’s new plant-based cookbook ‘East: 120 Vegetarian and Vegan recipes from Bangalore to Beijing’ uses British ingredients to create Eastern inspired recipes. She joins Jane in the studio to Cook the Perfect…Chilli Tofu.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme, peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. This is the Woman's Hour podcast. Today on the programme, a gender-flipped taming of the shrew. Does it work for you when Catherine is a trembling, nervy young man who's being hotly pursued by a suitor called Petrusha? That's the taming of the shrew on the programme today. We'll also discuss rare diseases. That's what we'll start with this morning.

So if this is something that is relevant to you, make sure you're listening in the next couple of minutes because this is going to be really interesting for you. And live on the programme, chilli tofu, prepared for us by Mira Soda. Mira, good morning to you. Morning. Now, I am sounding a little resistant,

but you're going to change my way of thinking about tofu, aren't you? Certainly hoping on doing so. by Mira Soda. Mira, good morning to you. Morning. Now, I am sounding a little resistant, but you're going to change my way of thinking about tofu, aren't you? Certainly hoping I'm doing so. This is going to be spicy and delicious. Hot, sour and sweet. Hot, sour, sweet. Filling? Filling.

Brazenly addictive, hopefully. All right. Brazenly addictive. Right. Now you're talking. Okay, that's later in the programme. Thank you very much. Stand by for that. And also, interesting reaction from you yesterday to the conversation we had about RuPaul's Drag Race. So

I'll just read out some of the emails on the subject of drag a little later in Woman's Hour today. Now, did you know that over 3 million people in the UK have got a rare disease? This is according to the charity Rare Diseases UK. And that actually means that one in 17 people in Britain have a medical condition that most GPs have never seen before and may of course struggle to diagnose and you can't really blame them. In her graphic memoir A Puff of Smoke Sarah Lippitt who's from Staffordshire recounts her childhood battles with a mysterious debilitating illness and Sarah we're going to talk in some detail, but briefly, how did it start for you?

You were seven when you started getting symptoms of assault, but what were they? So it started out where I would be falling over quite a lot, dropping things in my left hand. And also I started having headaches, quite severe headaches. But at the time, my little sister had just been born and I think my parents sort of dismissed it at the start as attention-seeking. And so I kind of dismissed it myself for a bit until it got a lot worse and I was taken to the GP and it went from there.

Also with us is Dr Lucy Mackay, who's CEO of Medics for Rare Diseases. Lucy, you come at this from aics for Rare Diseases and Lucy you come at this from a very particular family experience don't you? Yes I do I walk two sides of this line so prior to becoming a doctor my life was spent growing up alongside a patient group that my mother and father started and my mum took to great success because my eldest brother had a rare disease and died at the age of seven before I was born. But it defined our family for the rest of our lives.

And when I then went to medical school, I found that actually with over 7,000 rare diseases, you can't pack them all into a medical curriculum. And this is one of the reasons that makes it very hard for doctors to diagnose rare diseases. Right. There's a real danger of this sounding fatuous. But what we've got to bear in mind here is that a rare disease is actually not uncommon. That's true, isn't it? I mean, it sounds stupid, but it is actually true.

Yes. So with 3.5 or estimated 3.5 million people in the UK suffering from a rare disease, they might be individually rare, but rare disease is collectively common. And this is what Medics for Rare Diseases is trying to ask the medical professionals to understand. Yeah, got you. Okay, Sarah, let's go back to you then. Your parents thought you might be attention-seeking. What happened after that? So I went to the GP.

My symptoms were getting worse. And then I was admitted to my local hospital who, the complications with my symptoms, they couldn't diagnose. My left side of my body by this point was moving around involuntarily. And I was rushed to Birmingham Children's Hospital where I spent six weeks in hospital. They diagnosed me with something called chorea, but with no known cause.

And long story short, they discovered later that actually the chore career had been caused by a stroke but they didn't know why the stroke had caused the career. My symptoms progressed involved in that which was sort of through the doctors. I ended up having quite a lot of urine infections and then they diagnosed me with my first rare disease, which is FSGS, which affects the kidneys filtering systems and affects one in 17,000 in the UK. My neurological symptoms continued after that

with migraine and tingling down the side of my body. They started thinking that maybe they were TIAs, which is like a mini stroke. Then still getting sort of stuck at Birmingham Children's Hospital on numerous amounts of medication. They were all clashing with one another. Were you isolated or were you on wards? What happened? Well, initially I was isolated and they thought I was contagious. And originally when I was seven years old, which is very, very isolating.

But as the illness progressed over the years, I was isolated in many different ways. So in school, with friends, I felt very isolated from everyone because I was experiencing something that no one I knew was experiencing. In a way, I felt more at home in hospital when I was surrounded by others who were experiencing similar things

than I did at my own school or at home. Right. And your parents' attitude to all this and your siblings, because it was quite a busy household. Yes. What was it, if you could generalise that? They kept everything together. And I can't thank my family enough for being so fantastic. I'm one of five and the dynamic of my family unit really helped me through

because I didn't have any friends really and they were the life of the family and my parents' persistence to try and find an answer to my illness. Were you able to go to school at all? Yes, I did, sporadically. I managed to pass my GCSE somehow but then that's where I found my love of art as well because I was spending so much time in hospital

I was drawing all the time and my brother was a real big influence on my own home education in that he showed me this other world of film and books and literature and music as well Well we should say of course your graphic novel memoir Puffer Smoke it's an experience that actually say, of course, your graphic novel memoir, Puffer Smoke, it's an experience that actually does really lend itself to a graphic novel, this. I mean, your drawing is brilliant.

And what really comes across is that isolation, is that feeling that you were so different and made to be and made to feel very different. Was it? To be perfectly honest, it sounds a bit of a miserable childhood. I've got to be completely frank with you. I mean, I think if you, when you, it I've got to be completely frank with you I think if you

it sounds like it doesn't it but I think when you read the book you realise there's all this joy and there's this laughter that is throughout your parents will be horrified but yeah it's sporadic I think and you know with those

sad moments in hospital becomes these real characters and these real wonderful people that become part of your life. There's so many moments like that. There's a volunteer that turns up that me and my mum don't know who she is and she doesn't tell me who she is. And then eventually it's revealed that underneath her tag, she's a volunteer. There's kids at the hospital school who are quite eccentric there was a kid who dressed up as austin powers yes who'd run around saying oh yeah baby and groovy and the teacher would always be saying sit down peter all right i get it it wasn't without

its moments of liberty i'm glad very glad to hear it and everybody else will be as well you mentioned that you have two or two diagnoses of rare diseases. The other condition is Moyer-Moyer. Now that is what exactly? So Moyer-Moyer is a progressive disease that affects the narrowing of the arteries

in the brain so basically it stops the blood flowing as it should causing stroke, causing the similar symptoms that I was explaining. And when did you get that diagnosis? So, I mean, that's the sort of the main story really of the book and the importance of the book. My father demanded a referral after eight years of misdiagnosis or undiagnosis. And we went to Great Ormond Street.

And within two years um they diagnosed me with moya moya um which affects one in one million people in the uk um and uh we were talking about this earlier because you didn't know anyone with Moya Moya did you until you did the book and now you do I yes I I keep the keep the coming out of the woodwork that's why the book is so important but carry on it's incredible I gave a talk at Waterstones last week and um a family brought along their 13 year old daughter and I really wanted to and it's more common in females isn't it? Yes, yes. More common in Japan but

it was wonderful to actually see the book resonate with her and her family and all the story was really effective for her and just to see that in front of my eyes a young girl who feels less alone because

she has that story to share. Lucy, Sarah's story is a very dramatic one. A poor woman has got two rare diseases. I mean, that cannot be common. And it illustrates really what doctors are up against because what on earth do you do? I know that Sarah probably would argue that perhaps she wasn't always 100% brilliantly treated by the medical profession.

But on the other hand, doctors really are going to struggle. Yeah, absolutely. And what we say is you can't know 7,000 rare diseases, but you can appreciate that even two of the most seemingly disparate diseases, often have a very, the patients often have a very similar story to Sarah's with these long paths to diagnosis, which in the field of rare diseases is known as the diagnostic odyssey because there's often lots of twists and turns and dead ends where there's a misdiagnosis

or people are seeing multiple specialists and there hasn't really been any joined up thinking right or in sarah's exhibit you see a list of her symptomology which has sort of has eight features on it and that's not a diagnosis that's a list and uh and i think what then happened for sarah is that a team decided to revisit all of this and then came to her final diagnosis. Right. I mean, what you really want to do as an organisation is simply to encourage the medical profession to think rare, to think about the possibility that this might well be something you have never encountered. And I think you've expressed that brilliantly. Thank you very much, Lucy. And thanks to you, Sarah, too, for being on the programme today. And Sarah's graphic memoir

is called A Puff of Smoke. Thank you both very much. Now, so yesterday for being on the programme today. And Sarah's graphic memoir is called A Puff of Smoke. Thank you both very much. Thank you very much. Now, so yesterday we talked towards the end of the programme and we actually ran out of time, which is definitely my fault, so I apologise for that, about drag and particularly about what feminists might think of RuPaul's Drag Race. And there turned out to be quite a variety of views out there,

so let me just read a couple of emails. Your presenter yesterday did not seem to have watched it, says Caroline. Your guest commentators clearly weren't regular viewers or fans. It was a joyless and unintelligent piece, she says. Get off the fence, Caroline. The main thrust seemed to be that drag in this form is misogynistic and demeaning to women. Yet the interviewees appeared to be aware that the audience is largely women, but nobody had researched that or asked why, if it was indeed so demeaning to women. Well, says Caroline, I think it's creative, funny and life affirming. So Caroline, thank you for that. And another view from a listener who says, I love this,

one Christmas, my very woke 20-something son and his partner introduced me to RuPaul's American Drag Race. I was confused. Had I not spent much of the previous few days being gently rebuked for my unconscious biases about just about everything? Well, I tried to like it, but I couldn't get past flashbacks to Les Dawson impersonating mothers-in-law. It was shrill, catty and to my mind un-aesthetic. Meanwhile my teenage daughter became hooked and watched every single series online. Just before she left for university she said I had to watch it too, the new UK version because she'd phone me after every episode and we could talk about it. So I did watch it and struggled through the first couple of episodes

and then actually became genuinely fascinated, even though my daughter didn't once phone me actually to talk about it. Yes, I can understand that. I'm still not sure why I like it. It is more soothing than Newsnight. I think it's because I'm charmed by the vulnerability of the contestants and their various coping mechanisms. I appreciate the artistry of their transformations and their downright silliness and humour.

I don't think it is misogynistic. And from one more listener who says, My daughters, who describe themselves as feminist, enjoy RuPaul's Drag Race, so I've seen chunks of it. I've asked them what the appeal is, and they give answers involving phrases like self-expression. But I genuinely see it as demeaning and insulting to women in the way that blackface is to people of colour. If the BBC brought back the black and white minstrel show, they would be outraged and rightly so.

Just thought that was interesting. There really is no clear view about drag and what women think about it. But you can keep those emails coming because I do think it's fertile territory this at BBC Women's Hour on Twitter or Instagram. Or you can email the programme via the website. And not entirely unconnected is a new RSC production. Well, it's relatively new of The Taming of the Shrew. It's currently on stage at the Barbican in London. And in this version of the play, 1590s England is a matriarchy.

The cast do wear sumptuous Elizabethan costumes, but the audience see something a bit different. A society that is matriarchal and where Patricia, played by Clare Price, who's here, good morning to you, and Catherine is your romantic interest. Catherine is a male played by Joseph Arklay in this version of The Taming of the Shrew. So Dr Emma Whipday is here too, lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Newcastle University. Welcome.

Thank you. Before we talk to Clare in great detail, can you set this play into historical context for us? When did Shakespeare write this? So he wrote it in the early 1590s, which is when Elizabeth I is on the throne. But in general, there's quite a lot of anxiety about female power, because the ideal of the society in this period is one of top-down power, organised vertically, where men are ruling over women. So the master of the household should be ruling over his servants, his wife, his children.

So the idea that there's a woman at the top of this structure and then God above her kind of provokes cultural anxiety about what's happening to that hierarchy and particularly around the figures of powerful women. And that includes powerful outspoken women who speak in public places and who are often referred to colloquially as shrews. Yeah, what is a shrew? So a shrew is just a woman who refuses to abide by the gender norms of the period. So often that's taken to mean a woman who speaks publicly, who expresses her emotions strongly.

But it could also mean someone who spends her husband's money, or who goes out drinking with her female friends or who is promiscuous. So other kinds of female bad behavior can be sort of folded in to that general label of shrewishness. But in this particular play, it seems to mean refusing to bow to the authority of men and also sort of, I suppose, pushing downwards. So Catherine is violent towards her younger sister. She's violent towards tutors and the employee of the family. So in this play, shrewishness is not just about rebelling against authority. It's also a powerless woman kind of fighting downwards because she doesn't have much power upwards. Okay, Claire, over to you then. This version of the play, the costumes are

traditional Elizabethan ruffles and great big... Farthingales and corsets. And corsets, yeah. So the women look like women, but they're very much in charge. Yes, I think that was a very deliberate choice on the part of designer and Hannah Clarke and director Justin Audubere, that the play should open with this fantastic kind of number that portrays the world that we have created.

And the women look like women and they're incredible and the wigs are huge and the marvellous jewels. You really take up space. We take up space. And the men also look very beautiful, very sumptuous in brocades. And then that number stops and people start speaking and the world is turned on its head because it's the women doing the talking and holding the centre of the stage. It's the men waiting for them to stop speaking

so they can say something. It's the women who make decisions. It's the women who set agendas and the men have to respond. So it's the world absolutely as you would expect it if you bought a ticket to go and see a Royal Shakespeare production. Stunning, lavish. And then it goes awry and it's the women at the centre of it. Let's hear you as Patricia.

Thus in plain terms, your mother hath consented that you shall be my husband, your dowry, greedon. And will you, nill you, I will marry you. Now, Kate, I am a wife for your turn. For by this light whereby I see thy beauty, thy beauty that doth make me like thee well, thou must be married to no woman but me. For I am she, I'm born to tame you, Kate, and bring you from a wild Kate to a Kate conformable as other household Kate.

So here comes your mother. Never make denial. I must and will have Catherine to my husband. It is faintly unsettling. I don't know. It shouldn't be. What do you think of it, Emma? I mean, as a play, I've always found it. It's a horrible play. Yeah, I've always struggled with it. I saw the Zeffirelli version when I was quite young with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. And they play it as a rom-com where they roll around in feathers and it's very sexy. And the idea is they've got this mutual attraction. They're both strong and outspoken. But I always struggled with that because a lot of the scenes seem to come close to what we'd now call kind of coercive control or gaslighting. And it has such darkness at the heart of it. And I think I thought seeing a gender flip production might remove that darkness because of the way it wouldn't map onto society's power dynamics. And it would sort of mix things up.

But actually, what I found interesting was it was very funny. It was very lively. I was hugely enjoying it. But then the darkness is still there. It's still a deeply uncomfortable relationship where Catherine becomes a male victim of domestic violence. And what I loved about the production is the way it made me look at it differently because it was making it strange but it didn't shy away from the darkness at the heart of that that exists whichever way around the genders are the men are they're nervy virgins aren't they yes I that was that's difficult well

I don't know why though why am I well that's the I think that a great question, and that's what we wanted to do with this production, was throw up lots of questions. And these were... When we started rehearsals, it was the most dizzying few weeks of rehearsals I've ever had, because we had to... Once you make the initial flip, you then have to explore the meaning of all the words you use.

So what now does it mean to be a husband? So instead of husband being the head of the household, he is the person who is being husbanded. That was something we had to do. So wife of husband being the head of the household, he is the person who is being husbanded. That was something we had to do. So wife is the most powerful thing you can be within your home. Masculine, feminine, what do those now mean in this world? And we made certain choices. We had rules. That's what we called it, the rules of this world. And one of those rules was that women could look wherever they wanted to, but men had to lower their gaze. Another one, which I find very useful in the play,

is that whenever a woman extends her hand to a man, he has to take it. He's indoctrinated, he's trained to take it. He may hate himself for taking it, but he has to. He's biddable. He's been raised to do it. And again, one of the things we talked about was virginity, female virginity, which has been this massive commodity in Western culture for thousands of years, was dismissed in one conversation in a Clapham rehearsal room. And suddenly the commodity was male virginity.

These boys have to be innocent. That's why they are so desirable to us. We want to have a line with them. We want to create a family with them. A listener has tweeted to say, I've seen this live broadcast earlier, you can see it can't you at cinemas I think, and this listener obviously has, it was brilliant. The pre-show event had a talk from the movement

director which I thought was fascinating, it made me think about how we judge women when we see them. I know movement in the play is important isn't it and it's done in a very particular and rather brilliant way. Movement in the play is very important, there's one particular character as well, Sophie Stanton, who plays Gremia,

who's one of the kind of competitors for Bianco, the very desired young man in Padua, who's created this glide. But for all of us, movement was very important. We had to really talk about holding the space, not rushing in the way that we've been trained to as actresses.

We've been apprenticed to be in the background while the men do the talking particularly in classical theaters not across the board but here we had to flip that around um along with the flipping of the gender have you ever played in a traditional version of taming of the shrew i haven't and i have to say would you yes i love this play and i know this is. This is massively controversial when I say this. I hear all the things that are true about it. It's darkness. I absolutely don't dispute that.

And I would never want that to be taken away. I don't want the play to be solved. And I don't think we ever set out to solve it with this production. A lot of people came over to me after they saw it in Stratford, a man and a woman at different occasions, and said, yeah, I really, really enjoyed it, but doing it this way, does it make it right? And I said, no, no, it's not supposed to make it right.

It's a play about power. Whichever way round you do it in the end, it's about power, who holds power and who doesn't. What the power holder asks of the one who is not in power and what that person who's not in power has to decide to do, given the limitations of the world in which they live. It isn't new to do a gender flip version. I think there was a relatively recent one somewhere else in the UK.

And, Emma, we do see a lot now of women playing kings. I've seen Glenda, I mean, I'll never forget, Glenda Jackson as Leah was just remarkable. One of those things I will always remember. Is all this stuff, is it important to keep Shakespeare alive, Linda Jackson as Leah was just remarkable. One of those things I will always remember. Absolutely. Is all this stuff, is it important to keep Shakespeare alive, but in slightly different forms, do you think? I think it's extremely important.

And I think one of the reasons it's important is because of the power, the sheer power of going to a theatre like the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, which was where I saw this production, and watching all these women stride onto the stage and seeing the costumes that I'm used to seeing as symbols of oppression, of women's lack of ability to move, of the fact that women are kind of circumscribed by these literal circles of their dresses, and see it become a symbol of their dominance. And just, as Claire was saying, see the women kind of wheeling and dealing, being tricksters, playing tricks on each other, having the money, making the decisions. I feel like even

outside of the world of Shakespeare, it's still relatively rare to see a majority cast of women doing that on any stage today, to see it in a Shakespearean context. And I mean, there have obviously been other really exciting productions doing this sort of thing. So the production of Richard II at the Globe recently, which was all women of colour, Phyllida Lloyd's Shakespeare trilogy at the Donmar, which was set in an all-female prison to kind of allow that strong female cast. But I think what's particularly interesting about this production is the way it's actually drawing on features that are in the original Taming of the Shrew, because the original Taming of the Shrew has what's known as the induction, which is essentially setting up the narrative of Petruchio and Caterina as a play

within the play. And the outside play is the story of a drunken kind of Warwickshire man called Sly, who is ejected from a tavern because he's broken some glasses. He then watches the play of the Taming of the Shrew. And in some versions of texts at the end, he then says, oh, now I know how to tame a shrew, which essentially is a joke because he's a drunken man who can't tell what he's seeing. So the idea is that Shakespeare is already calling into question the kind of power relations we're about to see. And doing something like gender flipping it is another way of framing that and forcing us to look at these power relations anew, which I think Shakespeare is doing and we can also do today.

Brilliant. Thank you very much, Emma. Great to see you, Claire. You're both absolutely fantastic. And you're in measure for measure this afternoon, actually, aren't you? Yes, I am. Full of cold. You're a trooper. Onwards.

No, it's fantastic. Thank you both very much indeed. Thank you very much. But Taming of the Shrew is back at the Barbican next week. Next week, yes. Okay, great. Thank you both very much. Thank you.

Now, tomorrow, what are we doing tomorrow? Oh, all sorts of fascinating things. On Friday, I'm going to be talking to Jessica Gleeser. To Jessica Gleeser, she's written a play called Queens of Sheba, based on four women, this is a terrible story, turned away from a London nightclub in 2015 for being too black. She's written a play about that. That will be on Women's Hour on Friday.

Now, a while ago, we asked you to send us an image of you at your very best. Loads of you did it and we're very grateful. You can hear the image or see the image we're talking about today on Twitter, on Instagram and on the website, bbc.co.uk forward slash Woman's Hour. And today's image is a good

one. It's of Sarah. She's 33. She's from London and she wrote to tell good one it's of sarah she's 33 she's from london and she wrote to tell us about a photo of her and her baby son who sat on her lap throughout the interview i brought in this photo it's of myself and my little boy, my son Amit. And it's taken in our kitchen when Amit was two days old. So I'm still very much in that kind of post-labour high. And I'm wearing Amit in a ring sling, a leopard print ring sling. And it was incredibly special, this sling, because apart

from a stuffed octopus, it was the only thing that I bought for Remy before he was born. I kind of had that superstitious not wanting to jinx anything. And always having loved leopard print, I'm wearing him in the famous sling. I think it would have been maybe the first time I put him in it. I was never like, oh, I definitely, definitely, definitely want children totally for always and forever. But it happened. And we were quite surprised it happened because I have polycystic ovaries and we were told it kind of might be difficult. I found out I was pregnant 12 days after we got married. So it really was kind of quite a surprise. And I think that element of surprise and spontaneity, it somehow comes through in the picture for me.

I sort of said to myself, if I don't't become pregnant if I don't become a mother that's all right you know I don't have that sort of very deep-rooted maternal instinct but I think looking at this photo there's a sense of the maternal instinct that I that I do have that is mine that I'd kind of worked on and developed for so many months going on the back of my own mum's story my mum had postpartum psychosis after I was born and my mum's postpartum psychosis wasn't diagnosed until I was about eight months old. So I've always been, curious is a very mild word for it, I suppose I was obsessed for some years as to why certain issues that I had in terms of abandonment and anxiety, why they were as they were.

And once I started to really deeply explore what those first eight months might have been like for me before my mum was sectioned, I started to really come to terms with what it means to not have that deep connection and understanding with the person who's taking care of you. I'm a psychotherapist and I had a lot of therapy in the course of my pregnancy and I very much wanted to, on the one hand, do some kind of reparation

in terms of the motherhood that I didn't experience myself, but on the other hand to make a completely different story, a completely different journey and to not kind of project onto a meat anything of, you know, what is mine and what is my mum's and my grandmother's and my great-grandmother's and all these kind of very difficult strands, I think, that came down the generations. I just see so much promise. And I see, it sounds like such an odd thing to say but I see myself I see really my true self yeah you know anxious but ultimately kind of on it and with it and confident looking back now

kind of almost three months later I just feel very proud and I feel now that it's a photo of separation and very deep connection. Very cute baby noises during that. That was Sarah and our thanks to her. If you want to take part, of course, you can send us. Why not? Just do it. Send us an image of you at your very best and we'll feature the very best of those images over the course of the next couple of months because they're always really interesting insights into lives now the food writer mira soda is here good morning again um your new book is called east 120 vegetarian and vegan recipes

from bangalore to beijing that's right tempting stuff. Now, I was slightly mocking of tofu earlier. I take it almost all back. But what is tofu? So tofu is bean curd. And you make it by making milk out of soybeans and then curdling it in a similar fashion to the way that we make cheese. Okay.

And no beans are harmed in the... Beans may be harmed. Right. Slightly. But for delicious harmed. Right. Slightly. But for delicious purposes. Yes, all right. Now, you are not actually, you're not vegan, are you, yourself? I'm not vegan, no, but 90% of the food that I eat comes from plants.

Has it always been that way? It has always been that way. I come from a Gujarati family. Gujarati is on the west coast of India, and Gujarati is a famously vegetarian, and the Gujarati family. Gujarati is on the west coast of India. And Gujarati is a famously vegetarian. And the Gujarati cuisine is thousands of years old. And so I'm used to eating vegetables and loving them. I love vegetables.

But I think there's a small amount of room in my diet for ethically responsibly sourced meat. Yeah. Okay. So you would eat the occasional bit of chicken or something. I do. Yeah. Okay. But there are some really intriguing recipes in this book.

And I know that you can you could make this recipe just as easily with paneer. You could actually use that, could you? Yes. So this is chili tofu and it's a spin on chili paneer. Right. Which is a much beloved dish both in India and within Indian communities in the UK. And it's essentially tofu that's crisped and then it's doused in a sauce of tomatoes soy chilies and garlic there's some amazing smells in here right now i have to say go on um it's it's everything i want in a dish it's sort of sweet sour salty it's addictive is this because tofu presumably as a substance is good at soaking up other flavors because it doesn't

actually have any taste well that is that is the joy of it really and this this is the one dish that converted me because i wasn't too sure about tofu um but i had never had tofu like this you know it was really crispy and it's kind of porous so it does absorb any flavor that you want to throw at it and that's the joy of tofu it's, you know, it doesn't have its own voice. You can give it a voice with any other ingredient. Now, the recipe is on the website right now, or we'll tweet it out as well, and it'll be on Instagram too. Is it a main course, this, or is it a side dish?

I mean, we eat it like a chat, like a sort of snack. And so I just eat platefuls of it in one go but if you're not indian you might want to have it with some chapatis which i've brought for you well it's interesting you mentioned if you're not indian i suppose the truth is that that some of us might be resistant to the idea of vegetarians if we're not vegetarians ourselves we don't understand the idea of vegetarians as the big thing as the as the star of the show we think think of, I mean, if I have a curry, I'll always have a saga loo or Bombay loo. But I won't think of it, I'll think of it as an additional extra. Well, I think that's why I started to look east for inspiration, because I had just written, you know, I was asked to head up the new vegan column at The Guardian.

So I wasn't essentially, I wasn't looking to write this book it happened by chance that um an editor of the guardian weekend magazine called and asked me if i'd be interested in heading it up and i think you just had a baby hadn't you i had just had a baby and so i was planning on taking time off to get to know her um when i had this call and i should have said no um but i said yes because at the time you know hundreds of thousands of people were looking to eat less meat and more vegetables and i'd just written a book an indian vegetarian book um and so i knew how easy it was to tempt a beetroot hater into eating a plateful and so i suspected that if i looked east to you know to india and beyond that i would find much more inspiration for the home cook of communities and

cooks that put vegetables in the centre of the plate with creativity and ease and I discovered just that extraordinary ramen dishes from Japan incredible kimchi pancakes from Korea yeah pillow soft bao from Taiwan say that again pillow soft bao bao Taiwan. Say that again. Pillow soft... Bao? Bao buns? Those balls. I don't know. What's a bao bun? I keep seeing them advertised, but I don't know what they are.

They're like white, soft, gorgeous buns that fit perfectly in the nook of your hand. Right. And they're steamed and then filled. Now, is that a snack or is that a meal? Depends on how many you eat. Good answer. But a snack, really. I mean,

it's street food. I mean, I know that, heavens above, I mean, there's brilliant food all over Britain these days, thank goodness. But you have used London as your inspiration, haven't you, largely just because the abundance of choice here is just incredible. Yes, because my daughter was, she was still only weeks old when I started writing the column, I couldn't travel because I didn't want to leave her. And that opened my eyes to how many incredible cooks

and communities that we have in our own city and in our country. So I was taking the tube to Thailand via Kiln in Soho, this incredible Thai restaurant. A friend of mine's Sri Lankan and we traveled on the train to Margate the Riz which is another great restaurant um my accountant is Malaysian Ben and so I asked him to Ben um asked him if he could take me to go and eat incredible

laksa in London and I realized that if if my family are cooking authentic Gujarati food here in Lincolnshire, in Leicester, then I could find other communities and certainly I did. Yeah, well that's good to hear and I'm listening to the sound. Is that sizzling tofu I can hear in the distance? It is sizzling tofu. Now, it's a regular joke here about the speed at which the Woman's Hour heater thing heats, she said, not especially eloquently.

It can be quite slow. So what stage are you at now, Mira? So I'm crisping up some tofu in cornflour in a pan and that gives it a really crisp on the outside and sort of soft and yielding on the inside. So that's happening in one pan. In the other pan, have just i'm just frying the holy trinity of indian ingredients um onions ginger and garlic i'm throwing in some

chilies to add a bit of spice and the the onions are looking like soft little golden jewels and all i'm going to do now is add some tomatoes and soy um sugar salt pepper and then um and then i'm ready to put the tofu and some peppers in and just toss it all together and she did um mira did exactly that and then i tasted it towards the end of the program and my goodness me that was it really was interesting and really really tasty um we have had a tofu fan, at least one, get in touch. Geraldine on Twitter. Tofu has a long history. It's available in varying forms.

Silken, fermented, bamboo, as well as the firm tofu used here. It is highly digestible and not to be sneered at. Radio 4 today sounded patronising. Shame on Woman's Hour. Well, not shame on Woman's Hour, Geraldine. Shame on me. The responsibility was mine. I was the person casting doubt on tofu. Don't blame Woman's Hour and don't blame

Radio 4. It was me. And I am a chastened woman because it really wasn't all that bad. And the other ingredients in the dish were spectacular and I can tell you now that Mira is a cook well worth following. Mira Soda was the name of the woman involved there. Now to your thoughts on the rest of the programme today.

The first conversation about rare diseases. Helen said years ago, Moorfields Eye Hospital diagnosed my rare in speech marks eye condition. When I next went to my GP, he reached for a book telling me that I would soon know more about the condition than he did. This gained my instant respect. When I moved house and I was forced to change GP, I was asked why I didn't wear glasses. Such an ignorant and thoughtless question. I didn't stay with that GP for very long, says Helen. And Joe says, I have a rare cancer, pseudomyxoma potoni, also known as PMP

or jelly belly cancer. Audrey Hepburn died from this nasty disease and her son is the patron of the PMP survivors group. I'm a practice sister with nearly 40 years of nursing experience and none of the GPs that I work for had ever heard of PMP prior to my diagnosis. I'm currently having chemotherapy treatment and so I'm not at work. Well, Jo, our very best wishes to you. I hope things get a little better for you. It doesn't sound easy at the moment. And if you need help and support about a rare disease,

if it's something you're going through or somebody in your life, the organisation you need is raredisease.org.uk. Raredisease, all one word,.org.uk. Go there and you'll get help and support and information, I hope. The subject of taming of the shrew, I thought our guests on that subject were brilliant today. My daughter, says a listener, teaches drama and dance in Sheffield and she put on a performance of Taming of the Shrew in a local theatre in the town and because she was uncomfortable with the gender issues she decided to change the gender roles. Could her idea have been copied, says our listener. The performance was part of a drama competition for the area in which many schools took part.

Well, I can't be certain. We certainly don't know whether that was where the RSC got it from. And as I said in the conversation, I don't think it's entirely original. Somebody somewhere probably did this a long, long time ago. But your daughter was obviously on to something. That listener is Barbara, who rather glamorously tells us she's on a sailing yacht in southern Spain. Well, if the weather here is anything to go by, Barbara, you'd be best placed staying exactly where you are. Because trust me, winter has set in here.

From Hayley, I saw this three times in Stratford. It is a brilliant version of The Taming of the Shrew that really gives everybody a lot to think about. Really strong performances from everybody involved. I particularly love the way the gender flip doesn't diminish the difficulties within it and how powerful a stage full of women actually looks. Yes, that's a good point. It is quite a thing when you realise, I suppose, how male-dominated most Shakespeare plays actually are. Now, you might remember a couple of days ago, we featured Pregnant Teens, a new BBC podcast that follows three girls through their pregnancies in Middlesbrough,

the town which does have the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in England and Wales. Although, as you know, actually, Britain's teenage pregnancy rate has really fallen over the last decade or so. But we've been thinking about this and we really would like to hear from you if you were a teenage mum back, I don't know, 20, 30 or even 40 years ago. How were you treated? How were you made to feel about your experience? What happened to the baby? Perhaps things actually turned out brilliantly and of course often it can.

Let us know what happened to you. We'd love to read those emails and we can include some of those experiences on the programme over the coming weeks and months. Next week on Monday we're doing a phone-in about relationships at work and I suppose this is in the light of Me Too and also the recent story

about the boss at McDonald's having to go because he'd had a consensual relationship with a colleague not allowed at McDonald's. I know there are other British workplaces and global workplaces where it wouldn't be tolerated either in 2019. What do you think about this? Have you met somebody at work? How did you handle it? What did other people think about it? We really want to get you on the air on Monday. We're really focusing on what used to happen, what used to be considered completely normal,

and asking whether the rules in practice really have changed and whether there actually might be a downside to all this. Let us know. Email the programme via the website bbc.co.uk forward slash woman's hour and join Andrea Catherwood for the podcast tomorrow. I'm Sarah Treleaven, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started, like, warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake.

No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.