Bee Wilson Quotes

“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

“While the form of ‘kid food’ is more varied than ever, however, the content is far less so. Foods marketed specifically at children tend to be higher than average in salt, sugar and fat.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Childhood Food

“How can wholesome nursery food compete with hundreds of new and heavily advertised concoctions, calculated to appeal to a child’s sense of novelty?”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Childhood Food Nursery Food

“The sense that children need their own special foods that are uniquely appealing and altogether different from a mainstream human diet - like pet food - starts early, with commercial baby food.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Food Baby Food

“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

“In India, children’s food is just food.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food India Children Food

“Have you noticed that when someone wants to express that something tastes extra specially wonderful, they will often invoke childhood?”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Childhood Food

“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

“It’s not birthday cake in itself that is the problem. It’s the surrounding culture of food, where sweet treats are ever-present, consumed without ceremony.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Culture Food Birthday Cake

“Healthy eating should not preclude the odd cake. But it’s good to be able to wait: if not for a while year, at least for an hour or two.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Cake Healthy Eating

“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

“Feeding children is an immense responsibility.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Children Responsibility Food Feeding

“You want to see the treat vanish and the happy face to appear and when this happens, you feel great about yourself.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Food Happy Quotes Treat

“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

“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

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Taste is identity.”

Identity Food Taste Buds

“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

“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