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

“When you get three or more adults with nothing in common together, surprisingly often the conversation will turn to the junk foods we knew and enjoyed as children. There is a communal comfort to be had in reciting the names out loud, together, like a liturgy. In Britain, the catechism of nostalgia includes such sweets as Spangles, Jelly Tots, Rolos, Fry’s Chocolate Creams, Space Dust. These are common reference points that take us back to some joyous pre-pubertal age when life was free and easy.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Memory Britain Food Writing

“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

“Modern meals marketed at children send the message that if you are a kid, you cannot be expected to find enjoyment in anything so boring as real, whole food.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Marketing Food Writing Meal

“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

Food Eating Food Writing

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“From the perspective of almost everyone else in the world, the Japanese have an enviable relationship with food. Japanese cuisine - with its focus on fresh vegetables, even fresher fish, delicate soups and exquisitely presented rice dishes - has a global reputation for healthiness.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Writing

“Noodles arrived in Japan with Buddhist monks from China in the Middle Ages, but until the twentieth century they tended to be made from buckwheat, or a mix of wheat and rice.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

China Japan Food Writing Food History Noodles

“Chocolate’s status as food for girls and women - something to be yearned for and then regretted - is so ingrained that it would be easy to assume that there is something deep within females that makes them crave chocolate.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Eating Chocolate Food Writing

“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

“Could I really be so childish that my brain would be fooled by the smaller plate? Yes, I could.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Eating Food Writing Food Writig

“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