Bee Wilson Quotes

“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 first step in recovering from an eating disorder is recognising that there is a problem.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Eating Disorder Food Writing

“Structured meals, at which a wide range of foods is offered in a firm but loving way, are a key part of the cure for any eating disorder.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Eating Disorder Food Writing

“For people with eating disorders, food is both a poison and the remedy, but this is true for the rest of us as well. Food is an inescapable fact of life and the task for each of us is to find a way to make out peace with it.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Eating Disorder Food Writing

“The art of feeding, it turns out, is not about pushing ‘one more bite’ into someone’s mouth, however healthy the food. Nor is it about authoritarian demands to abstain from all treats. It is about creating a mealtime environment where those eating are free to develop their own tastes, because all the choices on the table are real, whole food.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Feeding Food Writing

“The power siblings have over our eating habits is no small thing. yet we hardly ever talk about these familial influences.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Family Food Eating Siblings

“A treat cannot possibly have the same meaning in an era where white-flour cakes are everywhere and candy canes are sold by the dozen for less than the price of a loaf of bread.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Cake Treat

“We urgently need to invent new models of generosity. We need to find a way for a small portion to feel as much like love as a large one.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“The true objective is independence: for a child to reach the point where they can regulate their own intake of food and to choose the things that will do them good while giving them pleasure. Weaning them off milk is one thing. But the real task for a parent is to wean children off needing you.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Feeding Food Writing

“Each bite that you see the other person take reinforces your liking. Or not: it is hard to sit calmly by and carry on eating if you share a table with someone who is grumbling that peas are ‘gross’ and pinging them at you with a knife.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“The social pressure to eat according to your sex matters more than it seems. For one thing, it undermines our pleasure in eating, which is seldom a good idea. women often deny themselves the dish they might really want pn the menu because they feel it isn’t “appropriate”.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“What is so damaging about our gendered approach to food is that it encourages both boys and girls to feed themselves in ways that go against what their bodies require. We have got things the wrong way round. It is girls more than boys who need the most haemoglobin-boosting foods. And boys more than girls are lacking in salad and vegetables. Girl food and boy food are dangerous nonsense that prevents us from seeing the real problems of feeding boys and girls.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Gender Feeding Food Writing

“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

“Too many overweight teenage girls are being pressurised by their families to lose weight when what they in fact need is better nourishment (which would almost certainly help them lose weight along the way).”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Teenagers Food Writing

“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

“Foodies trumpet their love of the hated vegetables of childhood: cauliflower and Brussel sprouts join beetroot as dinner party favourites.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Vegetables Food Writing Foodie

“Our sense of taste is something that anchors us to the person we have always known ourselves to be.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Taste Eating

“One of the reasons that we do not usually think of our tastes as learned is that most of the learning tends to happen in the very early years of life; and then it stops.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Flavours - these memories generated backwards through our nose - are all learned.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Food Writing Flavour

“Registering different flavours is one of the main ways that our bodies interact with the world around us. Amazingly enough, the human olfactory bulb is the only part of the central nervous system that is directly exposed to our environment, through the nasal cavity. Our other senses - sight, sound and touch - need to travel on a complicated journey via nerves along the spinal cord up to the brain. Smell and flavour, by contrast, surge direct from plate to nose.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Food Writing Flavour

“Flavour is not actually in food, any more than redness is in a rose or yellow in the sun. It is a fabrication of our brains and for each taste we create a mental ‘flavour image’, in the same way that we develop a memory bank of the faces of people we know. The difference is that whereas faces fade when you haven’t seen them in a while, flavours and smells have a way of lodging themselves in indelibly.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Food Writing Flavour

“What you taste as a child is still there in your adult brain, even if you haven’t thought of it for years.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Childhood Food Eating Memory Food Writing

“To eat these foods again in the new country was a way of holding on to the grandmothers and mothers who had first cooked with them. Often, however, the remembering through food is bittersweet, because even when you have tracked down every last herb and spice, the missing ingredient is the cook. You find you don’t want pasta ‘just like Mama used to make’; you actually want Mama herself.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Memory Food Writing Food Anthropology

“What makes junk food so dangerous is not that it is unhealthy - though it is. It’s that it is entwined in our minds with so many other memories that are good and true and pure. memory has always been an important part of how we learn to eat, but never before have so many of us been stamped with reinforcing food memories that mostly come not from a cuisine but from a series of cartons and packets. When we hear someone suggesting that we stop eating our favourite brand of ice cream or potato crisps or sliced white bread, we feel a knee-jerk hostility. It’s hard to let go of these foods and find a better way of eating without a sense of loss. The thing you are losing is your own childhood.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Childhood Food Eating Food Writing

“The flavour of sweet milk is perhaps the most firmly imprinted of all food memories in Western culture.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Milk Food Writing Flavour

“With good cooking and a patient but persistent approach at mealtimes, it could be food that was both good for the children and enjoyable.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“The main reason to be suspicious of fruit as a food for children was that it was just so delicious.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Childhood Food Eating Fruit

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

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Food Eating

“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

Children Food Eating

“Flavour has a remarkable ability to imprint itself on our memories and therefore to drive our future food choices.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Memory Flavour

“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

“To give a child the things they love to eat bestows a heroic glow. Seeing a child fed reassures you that you have done your duty as a parent, like a mother bird ferrying worms to the nest.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Childhood Food Eating

“Much of what we learn about eating comes from the way our parents feed us.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Childhood Food Eating Parents Feeding

“Almost every parent wants the best for their child, but they are frequently too hung up on the indignities of the past to see the real problems in front of them or to separate a child’s needs from their own urges.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Kids Childhood Food Eating Parents 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

“All the foods you regularly eat are the ones that you learned to eat. Everyone starts life drinking milk. After that, it’s all up for grabs.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“We create our own pattern of eating, as distinctive as a signature.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Every bite is a memory and the most powerful memories are the first ones.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Memory Food Writing Food Anthropology

“Wherever you start, the first step to eating better is to recognise that our tastes and habits are not fixed but changeable.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“When the flavour of white bread and processed meat are linked in your memory with the warmth and authority of a parent and the camaraderie of siblings, it can feel like a betrayal to stop eating them.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Memory Food Writing Food Anthropology Flavour

“If we want to relearn how to eat, we need to become children again. Bad food habits can only change by making ‘healthy food’ something pleasure-giving. If we experience healthy food as a coercion - something requiring willpower - it can never taste delicious.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“It’s seldom easy to change habits, particularly those so bound up with memories of family and childhood, but, whatever our age, it looks as if eating well is surprisingly teachable skill.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“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

“Anything eaten just before a bout of stomach bug may be hated for life.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Stomach

“Likes and dislikes cannot be reduced to molecules and genes. It means that our food habits are not final and fixed but adaptable and open, if only we will give ourselves half a chance. We did not come into the world disliking bitter greens; we were taught to dislike them by our environment. Taste may be identity but it is not destiny. The hope is that while we are stuck with our genes, the environment is something that can change.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Identity Food Taste Eating Food Writing

“It’s a truism that we know what we like and we like what we know. If you ask young children which foods they most detest, they tend to be the ones they have never actually tasted, often vegetables.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Kids Food Eating Food Writing Food Anthropology

“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

“It is a lonely occupation, being someone who wrestles to control their responses to food, given that modern life is steeped with things to eat, both real and imaginary.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Food Writing Food Anthropology First Bite

“Learning how to eat better - which is quite different from going on a diet - is within anyone’s grasp.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat