Ex-models take on new careers in the kitchen

Food and models are not an obvious pairing. Rather than going together like crispy duck and plum sauce, the modelling industry is likelier to make you think of fad diets or eating disorders. Yet these rarefied sylphs are moving from the catwalk to the kitchen.

British supermodel Jourdan Dunn regularly tweets pictures of dishes she's cooked. Proving she has good (food) taste, Dunn also recently posted a picture of fried chicken she was about to tuck into at Yardbird in Hong Kong. And the model has her own YouTube food show, Well Dunn, on which she cooks gutsy recipes such as jerk chicken with rice and peas.

Karlie Kloss, the US supermodel, is a biscuit-baking fanatic who learned to read by following recipes with her grandmother and bought a food processor with her first pay cheque. She sells Karlie's Kookies for charity.

Helena Rizzo, the world's best female chef, according to Restaurant magazine, started out in modelling. Rizzo - of Mani restaurant in Sao Paulo, Brazil, number 36 on the world's best restaurants list - became a model after leaving school. She is surprisingly modest about her catwalk credentials, saying in an interview last year: "I wasn't a supermodel; I was a mediocre model. I decided to go to Europe to learn more about cookery."

Modelling also led to a career in nutrition and food for Jasmine Hemsley, who's half British, half Filipino. Once half of the Hemsley & Hemsley duo with her sister Melissa, she has produced the popular Art of Eating Well cookbook as well as the spiraliser (a utensil that turns vegetables into noodle or pasta-like ribbons).