Bee Wilson Quotes

“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

“From childhood onwards, our idea of fullness is heavily influenced by how much food we are offered.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Childhood Food 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

Food Eating Diet Food Writing

“Part of eating well is making friends with hunger.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Hunger Food Writing

“Cereal is a medium through which we learn to confuse hunger with marketing.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Breakfast Food Writing Cereal

“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

“Siblings have always marked out territory through food.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Family Food Siblings Food Writing

“We are all descended from survivors, and survivors were the chubby ones.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Evolution Food Writing Chubby

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Inequality among siblings goes all the way to the gut: we are born with different microbes inside us, outnumbering our cells ten to one. Some of them affect our chances of becoming obese in later life and others affect how well we digest our dinner. What we eat is constantly changing the composition of our microbiota, but, equally, the nature of the microbes inside us determines how well we respond to the food we eat.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Siblings Food Writing

“When fairy-tale children seek their fortune, food is the main thing they’re after.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Fortune Fairytale Food Writing

“Our childhood experiences with food can trap us in destructive patterns for the rest of our lives.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Childhood Food Memory Food Writing

“Like so many of the things parents do out of loving solicitude, putting pressure on girls to lose weight has no good outcomes and a lot of bad ones.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Childhood Food Parents Food Writing

“We tend to automatically associate hearty meat dishes with men and lighter salads and sweets with women, and these stereotypes are replicated in cultures as different as France and Japan.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Japan Stereotypes Food Writing

“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

“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

“Women have a special relationship with chocolate mostly because our culture tells them to. It goes back to the old claptrap about sweet treats being for ‘ladies’, while savoury tastes for men.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Culture Women Food Chocolate Food Writing

“Once the pattern of not being hungry in the morning is set, it modifies the way you eat for life.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Morning Food Food Writing

“Prolonged chronic malnutrition affects children for the rest of their lives because it affects both brain development and growth.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Food Writing Malnutrition

“It’s not just that people learn to tolerate beetroot: they switch from dislike to adoration.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Food Writing Beetroot

“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

“Memory is the single most powerful driving force in how we learn to eat; it shapes all our yearnings.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Memory Food Writing

“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

“When we talk of memory of food, we generally assume that nostalgia is a phenomenon that occurs late in life - like Proust being transported to his youth by a madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea. But food memory is there from the start. Even babies have nostalgia!”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Memory Nostalgia Food Writing

“We are all born with echoes of our mother’s diet, which means that no one is a totally blank slate when it comes to flavour.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Mother Food Food Writing Food Memory

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

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Eating Food Writing Flavour

“Already, by thirteen weeks, the taste buds are mature. A thirteen-week-old foetus weighs maybe an ounce, with no fat under the skin, no air in the lungs. Yet already they can not only swallow but taste, and these sips of fluid leave memories.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Motherhood Food Writing

“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

“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

“Molecules that look near-identical to a specialist chemist lab will be easily distinguished by an ordinary person who smells them.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Smell Food Writing

“The experience of tasting food is far more multi-sensory than is the case with hearing, sight or touch, which is why it requires the most sophisticated part of our brain to process it. In fact, eating is influenced by hearing, sight or touch, as well as flavour: we prefer apples that crunch loudly, steaks that look blood-red, sauces so smooth they seem to caress the inside of our throats.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Taste Senses Food Writing Flavour

“Neuroscience confirms that chocolate means more to some people than others.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Chocolate Food Writing