Snapshot, by Linda Barnes

Barnes has created a character named Carlotta Carlyle, who is a 6'-2" redhead, early thirties (I think), private investigator with a mouth. Barnes reveals some food prejudices here:

One character, a large woman, asks Carlyle to pick her up some snacks. Junk food - twinkies, chips, chocolate, sodas. When Carlyle has lunch with this woman Carlyle hardly eats anything, a kind of reaction to the shoveling of food by her friend.

It is not uncommon in novels for fat people to be represented in this way, as addicted to junk food, never far from a candy bar, always eating. I would so love it if some of these writers would look at their own actual experiences with fat people. I think they'd realize very few of them are eating all the time, often they have no more of a fixation on junk food than their skinny friends (even less at times) and that in fact they may not eat as much total as their skinny friends. But then that might break the long-held beliefs of so many.

Later in the book Carlyle fixes herself dinner of spaghetti with a jar of marinara sauce laced with a bit of red wine. She figures she has to spend so much time eating why spend time cooking.

Lunch at home by herself, Carlotta fixes a soup with boiling water and a dried soup packet. We don't get to know what kind of soup.

Seder: Carlotta celebrates seder in her own way. The food includes potato kugel (made by the fatty mentioned above), gefilte fish with horseradish, chicken soup with matzo balls - this made by Carlotta, who lets us know she uses water, salt, dill, along with chicken, and that it includes a "debate" over the merits of parsnips over sweet potatoes. And wine. This bit, about the soup, is as far as Barnes takes us into Carlotta's skills as a chef, and of course she's a natural.