Quotes from Bee Wilson

Protein, we keep being told, is the vital nutrient that will give us a boost. It will burn fat, build muscle, reduce tiredness and kill our hunger pangs. Maybe if we shake enough protein powder into our daily smoothie, we will actually morph into Gwyneth Paltrow.

In 2009, it was forecast that the number of single-person households would increase by two million in 10 years, suggesting that social isolation will only get worse.

I appreciate recipes that tell you what can be changed and what must remain fixed. 'The Zuni Cafe Cookbook' by the late Judy Rodgers is superb at this.

When someone watches us eating, we feel exposed. We might also harbor a suspicion that the person staring wants to steal food from our plate. The taboo, in any case, is long-standing.

The old injunction 'Don't talk with your mouth full' is based on the presumption that, however multifunctional a mouth may be, it should only perform one job at a time. Humans have found a way around this limitation in the form of food writing.

There's a new dividing line in olives: between those who prefer Nocellara to all other varieties, and the people who have never tasted them.

All the foods that you regularly eat are ones that you learned to eat. Everyone starts life drinking milk. After that, it's all up for grabs. From our first year of life, human tastes are astonishingly diverse.

The group who really could benefit from more protein is not fit young gym-goers but older people, who seem to be at much greater risk of protein deficiency.

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.

The more people get advised to eat vegetables, the less it seems they wish to eat them. And it is quite a natural response. So I've said that the main way that we get to like food is through being exposed to them, but there's a second condition. We have to be exposed to them without feeling any sense of coercion.

Restaurant critics all struggle with the difficulty of writing about eating without resorting to the word 'delicious' and its synonyms.

Sometimes the buzz of reading about others eating comes from the voyeuristic thrill of seeing how the other half lives: the gold leaf and truffles or - in the case of Trimalchio's feast in Petronius' 'Satyricon' - the dormice and honey.

In theory, food writing is an aid or a prelude to actual meals: you read a recipe, and then you cook. In practice - in a 'paradox' that Michael Pollan, among others, has identified - our current gastronomic fantasies, particularly on TV, have coincided with a decline in home cooking.

Learning to cook in the 1990s, I thought 'proper olives' meant black. The benchmark was Kalamata from Greece: purple-black with an almost mushroomy depth of flavour. Other fine examples were tiny Coquilles from Nice and plump round Tanches from Nyons.

Technology is not a form of robotics but something very human: the creation of tools and techniques that answer certain uses in our lives.

Traditional histories of technology do not pay much attention to food. They tend to focus on hefty industrial and military developments: wheels and ships, gunpowder and telegraphs, airships and radio. When food is mentioned, it is usually in the context of agriculture—systems of tillage and irrigation—rather than the domestic work of the kitchen. But there is just as much invention in a nutcracker as in a bullet.

Every new technology represents a trade-off: something is gained, but something is also lost.

The way you teach a child to eat well is through example, enthusiasm, and patient exposure to good food. And when that fails, you lie.

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.

The modern scientific method in which experiments form part of a structured system of hypothesis, experimentation, and analysis is as recent as the seventeenth century; the problem-solving technology of cooking goes back thousands of years.

This technological stagnation reflects a harsh truth. There was very little interest in attempting to save labor when the labor in question was not your own.

No one is doomed by genes to eat badly. Pickiness is governed more by environment than biology.

Every man carries within him a world, which is composed of all that he has seen and loved,

A few decades from now, the current laissez-faire attitudes to sugar - now present in 80 per cent of supermarket foods - may seems as reckless and strange as permitting cars without seatbelts or smoking on aeroplanes.