Bee Wilson Quotes

“It is possible to educate children in the pleasures of food; and that doing so will set the children up for a lifetime of healthy eating. Feeding is learning.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Education Food Feeding Food Writing

“It is possible for children to learn and improve their eating skills in ways that will automatically lead them to a healthier diet.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Food Eating Diet

“Learning to eat a good and varied diet is a key part of every child’s education.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Education Food Eating

“The fact that millions of children every year can learn to like chilli offers hope to us all; that our next bite can be different from the first.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“If you want your children to eat better, don’t tell them what to do; eat better yourself.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Most of our approaches to feeding children are too short term. We worry about the next five minutes when we should worry about the next five years.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Food Eating Feeding

“Up until the age of three, children have a remarkable ability to stop eating when they are full.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Food Eating Food Writing

“Of all the foods that we could give a child a free rein over, cereal makes the least sense. Parents let children choose cereal but dictate which vegetables they eat; it should be the other way around.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Food Eating Food Writing

“The cereals marketed for children are consistently the most sugary and highly processed in the whole cereal aisle.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Food Breakfast Cereal

“Feeding children too often can make them forget what their own hunger feels like. Large portions lead to overeating. And giving food to calm a distressed child teaches them that unhappiness is a reason to eat.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Force-feeding is a crime of passion, driven by a parent’s desire to see a child eat; as with other crimes of passion, the perpetrator has lost sight of the loved one’s autonomy.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Indulgence makes a child fat. Restriction makes a child fat and unhappy.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Next time you sit down to eat, imagine you are an ideal parent feeding a beloved child. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could offer yourself food in a warm, structured, no-fuss kind of way? You wouldn’t punish yourself with crash diets nor would you allow yourself too much junk. Your priority when choosing food would be to see yourself well nourished and you’d choose meals to keep your mood on an even keel. You’d want yourself to enjoy eating. The pantry would be stocked with good food and you would trust yourself to choose wisely from its contents.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“The problem with lunchboxes is the problem with the way we feed children in general. Parents trust that anything they place in this magical box will be good for the child, because it comes with their love.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Food Lunch Lunchbox

“Contrary to the impression given by the health pages of newspapers, the greatest single nutritional shortfall in our diets right now is not our failure to eat enough ‘superfoods’, whatever those might be. It is the iron deficiency of girls.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Food Eating Gender Nutrition Feeding

“Every culture seems to have certain challenging vegetables that children find hard to love at first bite.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Culture Food Eating Vegetables Food Anthropology

“When children are exposed through ‘sensory education’ to a wider range of flavours they start to love complexity and be bored by simplicity.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Food Sensory Education

“It is curious that we talk so little about the flavour of formula, given that it is the main food many babies taste for that crucial first year.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Kids Food Food Writing Formula

“In most places, for most of history, children’s food has not existed as a separate category after the age of weaning.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Childhood Food Food Writing Kids Food

“We know that letting our children eat too many sweets makes us a bad parent, hence the pointless ritual at Halloween when parents allow their children to go from house to house accumulating a big haul of treats, only to confiscate them at the end of the night, because they don’t want their child to get cavities. Yes despite their anxiety about sweets, parents will happily feed their children highly sweetened sports bars, fruit snacks and cereals which are sweets in all but name.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Childhood Food Food Writing

“While the form of ‘kid food’ is more varied than ever, however, the content is far less so. Foods marketed specifically at children tend to be higher than average in salt, sugar and fat.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Childhood Food

“How can wholesome nursery food compete with hundreds of new and heavily advertised concoctions, calculated to appeal to a child’s sense of novelty?”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Childhood Food Nursery Food

“The sense that children need their own special foods that are uniquely appealing and altogether different from a mainstream human diet - like pet food - starts early, with commercial baby food.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Food Baby Food

“What children need is to develop the skills to navigate the environment for themselves.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Have you noticed that when someone wants to express that something tastes extra specially wonderful, they will often invoke childhood?”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Childhood Food

“Large numbers of adults as well as children have now become habituated to eating a version of ‘kid food’ over a whole lifetime: sweet, salty, undemanding to chew and swallow and heavily processed.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“When parents as well as children are eating ‘kid food’, perhaps it’s time to call not something else. ‘Kid food’ started off as something separate and different from normal food. Now it is close to being the new normal for all age groups. The danger is that when adults have childish tastes too, it becomes very difficult for anyone to break the cycle and learn the pleasures of real food.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Food Eating Kids Food

“Feeding children is an immense responsibility.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Responsibility Food Feeding

“The way we reward children with food is based on folk memories of a food supply that has not existed in the West for decades, when white sugar was so rare it seemed to sparkle like snow.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Food Eating Feeding Kids Food

“Parents and children resemble each other no more in the foods they like than couples do, suggesting that nurture - who you eat with - is more powerful than nature in determining our food habits. Whatever our innate dispositions, our experience with food can override them.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Food Eating Parents

“Every day, children are exposed to messages - whether on giant hoardings and TV ads or from looking in friends’ lunchboxes - telling them that they should like the very foods that will do them the most harm.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Food Eating Food Anthropology