Arianna Huffington: ‘No one should have phones on the table at a meal'

The co-founder of the Huffington Post on her Greek mother’s cooking and modern eating etiquette

I grew up in a one-bedroom apartment in Athens with my mother and sister. Life centred on food for Mother. If we didn’t like what she offered, she’d make something else, there and then. She thought if we didn’t eat every 20 minutes something terrible would happen to us.

When I was 17 I went for three months to do a course in comparative religion at Chandernagore College, outside Calcutta, and one of the great things I learnt was that drinking hot tea acts as air conditioning when you’re hot. Then I fell in love with Indian food. One of the reasons I love visiting London is its great Indian restaurants.