Bee Wilson Quotes

“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

“Unlike traditional food, which is remembered jointly within families or communities, mass-produced food and drink is remembered across continents.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Memory Food Anthropology

“Our olfactory bulbs have gathered endless sense patterns of foods high in sugar, fat and salt. These flavour memories have become part of the fabric of our sense of self and are not easily discarded, because the system, as we have seen, is designed ‘not to forget’.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Memory Food Anthropology Eating Disorder Recovery

“Candy bar nostalgia puts us all on the same page.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Nostalgia Candy Food Anthropology

“Love and travel are both powerful spurs to change.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Love Food Travel Food Writing Food Anthropology

“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

“From our first year of life, human tastes are astonishingly diverse. As omnivores, we have no inbuilt knowledge of which foods are good and safe. Each of us has to use our senses to figure out for ourselves what is edible, depending on what’s available. In many ways, this is a delightful opportunity. It’s the reason there are such fabulously varied ways of cooking in the world.”

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

“Traditional cuisines across the world were founded on a strong sense of balance, with norms about which foods go together, and how much one should eat at different times of the day.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Like children, many of us eat what we like and we only like what we know.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“What we forget is that, as omnivores, we are extremely gifted at changing the way we eat to accommodate different environments.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“My premise in First Bite is that the question of how we learn to eat - both individually and collectively - is the key to how food, for so many people, has gone so badly wrong. The greatest public health problem of modern times is how to persuade people to make better food choices.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Many people have absorbed the lesson from childhood that vegetables and pleasure - and more generally, healthy food and pleasure - can never go together.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“The way we eat is not a question of worthiness but of routine and preference, built over a lifespan.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“There are hundreds of millions of individuals who somehow swim against the tide of the dysfunctional modern food supply and feed themselves pretty well.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Dopamine is one of the chemical signals that passes information between neutrons to tell your brain that you are having fun.”

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

“There are three big things we would all benefit from learning to do: to follow structured mealtimes; to respond to our own internal cues for hunger and fullness rather than relying on external cues such as portion size; and to make ourselves open to trying a variety of foods.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Having a healthy relationship with food can act like a life jacket, protecting you from the worst excesses of obesogenic world we now inhabit. You see the greasy meatball sandwich and you no longer think it has much to say to you. This is not about being thin. It’s about reaching a state where food is something that nourishes and makes you happy rather than sickening or tormenting us. It’s about feeding ourselves as a good parent would: with love, with variety, but also with limits.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“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

“Our tastes are learned in the context of immense social influences, whether from our family, our friends, or the cheery font on a bottle of soda.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Taste Food Writing 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

“Eating is - or should be - a daily source of delight rather than something to fight against.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“We obsess about the properties of various ingredients: the protein, the omega oils, the vitamins. But this is getting ahead of ourselves. Nutrients only count when a person picks up food and eats it. How we eat - how we approach food - is what really matters.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Food Anthropology

“If we are going to change our diets, we first have to relearn the art of eating, which is a question of psychology as much as nutrition. We have to find a way to want to eat what’s good for us.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Contrary to the popular view, malnutrition is very seldom about an absolute lack of food.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Hunger Food Writing Food Anthropology

“After all, as omnivores, we were not born knowing what to eat. We all had to learn it, every one of us, as children sitting expectantly, waiting to be fed.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Writing Food Anthropology

“Our urge to avoid eating something that makes us feel sick is often at the root of disordered eating, as we swerve away from whole categories of foods that we imagine would make us feel uneasy.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Writing Food Anthropology

“But we haven’t paid anything like enough attention to another consequence of being omnivores, which is that eating is not something we are born instinctively knowing how to do, like breathing. It is something we learn.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Writing Food Anthropology