Bee Wilson Quotes

“Girls eat better when food stops being something forbidden.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Girls

“Boys eat better when their parents continue to expect them to eat vegetables and include them in home-cooked meals as they get older. Or - better still - get them to prepare the home-cooked meals themselves.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Boys Food Eating

“The main way that anyone learns to like new foods is through repeated exposure.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Learning Food Eating Food Writing

“Feeding, like eating, is a learned behaviour and the methods that most parents absorb for doing it are based on the values of former times when a child needed to be protected from scarcity rather than plenty.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Learning Food Eating Feeding

“Japan has somehow managed to achieve the ideal attitude to eating: an obsession with culinary pleasure that is actually conductive to health.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Japan Food Writing

“When eating goes wrong, the antidote is not a life without food, but figuring out how we can bring ourselves to eat new food in new ways.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“If you can improve the eating, the rest of life gets a little better too.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“The needs of the eating disorder sufferer are like a warped version of the travails we all face when learning to eat.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Eating Disorder Food Writing

“Before addressing what to eat, the most urgent matter is how to eat.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“When you are eating all the time, food curiously loses much of its joy, along with its sense of ceremony and sociability.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Before we can resolve our endless quandaries about food - such as ‘where the zucchini came from and how far it had to travel’ - we should first establish the basic paradigm that at certain times, every day, we stop, we sit and we eat.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Eating is about food.”

“What all of us need is to find a way to eat regular meals, to take pleasure in a variety of foods, and to be able to eat them without being consumed by negative emotions.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Emotions Food Writing

“As society, we haven’t quite figured out what a new structure for meals would look like that isn’t just a hasty sandwich in the car on the way to something more important.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Culture Food Eating

“With our own personal diets, we often convince ourselves that there is something vital within us that prevents us from ever eating differently.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“There is a deep resistance to the idea of dietary change, at both a cultural and an individual level. And yet, you accept the premise that eating is a learned behaviour, it follows that changing eating habits must be - if not likely and certainly not easy - at least possible.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Change Food Eating Diet Food Writing

“Soldiers, like footballers, are famously resistant to new foods.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Change Food Football Eating Soldiers Food Writing

“Flavour principles change. Diets change. And the people eating these diets also change.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Change Food Eating Diet Food Writing

“It turns out that wherever we are from, people are capable of altering not just what they eat but what they want to eat and their behaviour when eating.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“You are unlikely to eat something if you don’t know what it is.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“It is not about learning to like this or that vegetable; but developing an overall attitude to eating that is more open to variety and less governed by the simple sugar-salt-fat palate of junk food.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“We are stuck in habits and attitudes that seem impossible to break. We are stuck thinking food is love. We are stuck with guilt about food because we are female; or stuck not liking vegetables because we are male. We are stuck feeding hungers that often exist more in our brain than our stomach. We are stuck in our happy childhood memories of unhealthy foods. But the biggest way we are stuck is in our belief that our eating habits are something we can do very little about. In fact, we can do plenty. The first step is seeing that eating is a skill that each of us learns and that we retain the capacity for learning it, no matter how old we are.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Change Food Eating Habits Food Writing

“Dietary change comes not from forcing someone to eat what they do not like, but in helping them to discover their own passions.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Change Food Eating Diet

“A sensory education seems to have the potential to free up a child from many of the old barriers to trying new food.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Education Food Eating Sensory Education

“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

“In contrast to all the other things we work on in life that are far less likely to increase our wellbeing - including dieting - it is astonishing how little effort we put into changing our eating preferences for the better.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“You were a child once, too. When you arrived in the world, your only food preferences were milk and buried memories from your mother’s diet. Those early weeks were dominated by meals - the stab of hunger, the sweet contentment of being sated - but you could not yet tell dinner from breakfast. You didn’t yet know - lucky you! - what a trans fat was; or a frappuccino. No one had taught you to worry whether you were getting enough protein, or to feel guilt when your stomach was full. You had never watched a fast-food commercial, and on the relative merits of quinoa and macarons you had no opinion. Food was a wide open for you. The great garden of ingredients - from bitter greens to sweet dates - was all equally unknown: all new, all strange, all waiting to be discovered.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“It may not feel like it, but you never lost your potential to change how you eat. The wonderful secret of being an omnivore is that we can adjust our desires, even late in the game. It won’t happen on the first bite.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Change Food Eating Diet First Bite

“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

Children Food Eating

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Eat soup.”

Food Eating Soup

“If it’s not a mealtime and you are wondering which of two ‘healthy snacks’ you should buy, the answer is probably neither.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Snacks

“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

Children Food Eating

“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

“It is genuinely possible to reach the point where you desire broccoli more than fries and wholemeal sourdough more than sliced white bread.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Health Eating Food Writing

“Changing the way you eat is hard, but it can be done. Look at Japan.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Change Food Eating Japan

“The rise of vast portions - particularly in fast-food restaurants - means that if we eat only the calories we need, we should often stop at half of something; or even a quarter. And no one - child or adult - seems to like the feeling of the glass- - or plate - half empty.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Portions Food Writing

“Being able to regulate the amount of food we eat according to our needs is perhaps the single most important skill when it comes to eating, and the one that we leat often master.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Very little of the eating that happens in the modern world is as simple as: feel hungry, eat food. The great challenge for most people is learning how to recognise when we have had enough.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“One of the commonest ways our eating goes wrong is that we consistently choose foods that offer immediate satiation in the belly rather than longer lasting satiety.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Food Writing Satiety

“Very little about the way we eat is, in fact, logical.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“It’s easy to confuse hunger with other emotional states.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Emotions Hunger

“We eat so often and so much because we have more or less lost touch with the signals our body is sending us about hunger.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Hunger Food Writing

“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

“The loss of hunger regulation after the age of four is a phenomenon that transcends cultures and continents.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Hunger Food Writing

“We need new eating methods to take account of the new ways we are being supplied with food.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“It’s a chancy business, taking our cues about how much to consume from our surroundings.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Avoid ‘distracting’ meals such as TV dinners and computer lunches. replace the biscuit jar with a fruit bowl. Repackage food into smaller containers. Order half-size portions in restaurants. Replace short wide glasses with tall narrow ones. And get smaller plates.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Many parents, especially those who themselves struggle with their weight, believe that a child is incapable of self-control when it comes to eating.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Childhood Food Eating Parents