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Famous Bee Wilson Quotes

“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.”

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Book:First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
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“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.”

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Book:First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
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“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.”

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Book:First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
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“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.”

FoodEatingFood WritingFlavour
Book:First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
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“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.”

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Book:First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
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“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.”

FoodEatingMemoryFood WritingFood Anthropology
Book:First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
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“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.”

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Book:First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
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“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.”

ChildhoodFoodEatingFood Writing
Book:First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
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