Fortnum & Mason Food Book of the Year 2016We are not born knowing what to eat. We all have to learn it as children sitting expectantly at a table. For our diets to change, we need to relearn the food experiences that first shaped us.Everyone starts drinking milk. After that it’s all up for grabs.We are not born knowing what to eat; we each have to figure it out for ourselves. From childhood onwards, we learn how big a portion is and how sweet is too sweet. We learn to love broccoli – or not. But how does this happen? What are the origins of taste? And once we acquire our food habits, can we ever change them for the better?In First Bite, award-winning food writer Bee Wilson draws on the latest research from food psychologists, neuroscientists and nutritionists to reveal how our food habits are shaped by a whole host of factors: family and culture, memory and gender, hunger and love. She looks at the effects siblings can have on eating choices and the social pressures to eat according to sex. Bee introduces us to people who can only eat food of a certain colour; toddlers who will eat nothing but hot dogs; doctors who have found radical new ways to help children eat vegetables. First Bite also looks at how people eat in different parts of the world: we see how grandparents in China overfeed their grandchildren, and how Japan came to adopt such a healthy diet (it wasn’t always so).The way we learn to eat holds the key to why food has gone so disastrously wrong for so many people. But Bee Wilson also shows that both adults and children have immense potential for learning new, healthy eating habits. An exploration of the extraordinary and surprising origins of our taste and eating habits, First Bite explains how we can change our palates to lead healthier, happier lives.
Оглавление
Bee Wilson. First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Introduction
CHAPTER 1: Likes and Dislikes
BEETROOT
CHAPTER 2: Memory
MILK
CHAPTER 3: Children’s Food
BIRTHDAY CAKE
CHAPTER 4: Feeding
LUNCHBOX
CHAPTER 5: Brothers and Sisters
CHOCOLATE
CHAPTER 6: Hunger
BREAKFAST CEREAL
CHAPTER 7: Disorder
CRISPS
CHAPTER 8: Change
CHILLI
EPILOGUE: This is Not Advice
Footnotes
Notes. Introduction
CHAPTER 1: Likes and Dislikes
CHAPTER 2: Memory
CHAPTER 3: Children’s Food
CHAPTER 4: Feeding
CHAPTER 5: Brothers and Sisters
CHAPTER 6: Hunger
CHAPTER 7: Disorder
CHAPTER 8: Change
Further Reading
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
By the same author:
About the Publisher
Отрывок из книги
For Emily
Title Page
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Changing our food habits is one of the hardest things anyone can do, because the impulses governing our preferences are often hidden, even from ourselves. And yet adjusting what you eat is entirely possible. We do it all the time. Were this not the case, the food companies who launch new products each year would be wasting their money. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, housewives from East and West Germany tried each other’s food products for the first time in decades. It didn’t take long for those from the East to realize that they preferred Western yoghurt to their own.31 Equally, those from the West discovered a liking for the honey and vanilla wafer biscuits of the East. From both sides of the wall, these German housewives showed a remarkable flexibility in their food preferences.
There is hope as well as concern in the fact that we remain like children in our eating patterns. We are like children in our fussiness and love of junk. But we also remain like children in that we have a capacity to learn new tricks, one that we seldom credit ourselves with. Even though most of us have tastes acquired very young, we can still change.
