Food Writing Quotes

“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

“Childhood food memories, like family jokes, are often untranslatable to outsiders.”

Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Childhood Food Food Writing

“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