You can teach yourself to enjoy food if you do incorporate more of specific types of food.įirst Bite is ultimately a very hopeful book. Wilson’s central premise is, for all intents and purposes, you have more control than you think over what you like and dislike.
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Learning how to eat better isn’t easy, but it’s possible Then meals consisted mostly of rice and pickles Miso, sushi, and ramen noodles became prevalent only later. Contrast this to the middle of the 20th century, where there was never enough food in Japan, and what little was available lacked flavor and variety. In modern Japan, Wilson notes that people mostly eat an ideal diet with adequate protein, modest amounts of fat, and enough fiber.
Some chapters discuss stubborn toddlers, overeaters, undereaters, fussy eaters, the obese, the anorexic, and people with various other eating disorders-and how they’re being taught to relish food and learn new tastes. Wilson makes a compelling case on how food preferences can change-for individuals and for entire societies. To change your diet, you have to relearn the art of eating and how you approach food In China, which suffered the Great Famine not three generations ago, obesity is on the rise, partly because of affordability, convenience, and the overabundance of food choices now available. Since the 1950s, children’s food has gone from being something nourishing but pleasureless to something whose primary aim is to pander to childish tastes. Somehow, a new generation of youngsters were able to manipulate their parents into buying them exactly the foods they desired, which were the ones they saw advertised on TV. Whereas in the past, manufacturers aimed their messages at the parents who bought the groceries, they now found that there was money in aiming products directly at children.
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The kids’ foods in supermarkets, laced with sugar and adorned with happy cartoons, teach children that what they eat must be a form of entertainment, portable packages of fun. 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. People are not physiologically inclined to dread certain foodsĮspecially appealing is Wilson’s exposé of modern Western-style food production, marketing, and accessibility: … The danger of growing up surrounded by these endless sweet and salty industrial concoctions is not that we are innately incapable of resisting them, but that the more frequently we eat them, especially in childhood, the more they train us to expect all food to taste this way.
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The main influence on a child’s palate may no longer be a parent but a series of food manufacturers whose products-despite their illusion of infinite choice-deliver a monotonous flavor hit quite unlike the more varied flavors of traditional cuisine. She considers food in the context of family and culture, memory and self-identity, scarcity and convenience, and hunger and love. Wilson summons an abundance of anthropological, psychological, sociological, and biological research in examining how food preferences come into play. The foods parents give to babies provide them with powerful memories that trigger lasting responses to certain flavors. First Bite will help you look back at your upbringing and reflect upon what-and how-you learned to eat. Wilson asserts that the real root of your eating problems is your very first childhood experiences with food.
Many of us now have found ourselves in an adversarial relationship with food, which is tragic.
Parents have an incredible power to shape their kids’ appetites for various foods … The kids’ foods in supermarkets, laced with sugar and adorned with happy cartoons, teach children that what they eat must be a form of entertainment, portable packages of fun. … Over the centuries, the grown-ups who have devised children’s food have seldom paid much attention to the fact that its composition matters not just in the short term but because it forms how the children will eat in adult life. Many children habitually seek out precisely the foods that are least suitable for them. Eating Should Be a Pleasurable ActivityĪt its core, First Bite is an exhaustively researched discourse on how you’re taught to eat since your childhood and the various social and cultural forces that have shaped your individual-and society’s collective-appetites and tastes. Rather, it’s about why you eat what you eat and how you can be persuaded-and persuade yourself-to eat better by changing your habits and removing barriers to change. British food writer and food historian Bee Wilson’s First Bite: How We Learn to Eat (2015) may just be the most important diet book of the past decade.įirst Bite isn’t a diet book in the sense that it doesn’t offer you tidy little prescriptions about how to get slimmer.