Quotes from Bee Wilson

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.

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.

Changing the way you eat is hard, but it can be done. Look at Japan.

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.

Much of what we learn about eating comes from the way our parents feed us.

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.

Feeding, like eating, is a learned behaviour and the methods that most parents absorb for doing it are based on the values of former times when a child needed to be protected from scarcity rather than plenty.

Feeding children is an immense responsibility.

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

Avoid 'distracting' meals such as TV dinners and computer lunches. replace the biscuit jar with a fruit bowl. Repackage food into smaller containers. Order half-size portions in restaurants. Replace short wide glasses with tall narrow ones. And get smaller plates.

Throughout Brazil there are 'dual burden households' where some family members (usually the children) are underweight and stunted and others (usually the mothers) are obese.51 Many adolescent girls in Brazil are both anaemic and obese, suggesting that their diets, though plentiful, are low in crucial micronutrients, especially iron.52

Could I really be so childish that my brain would be fooled by the smaller plate? Yes, I could.

A treat cannot possibly have the same meaning in an era where white-flour cakes are everywhere and candy canes are sold by the dozen for less than the price of a loaf of bread.

We are all descended from survivors, and survivors were the chubby ones.

Many things that matter in the kitchen are beyond measuring: how much you enjoy the company of those you dine with; the satisfaction of using up the last crust of bread before it goes moldy; the way an Italian blood orange tastes in February; the pleasure of cold cucumber soup on a hot evening; the feeling of having a hearty appetite and the means to satisfy it.

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.

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.

After all, as omnivores, we were not born knowing what to eat. We all had to learn it, every one of us, as children sitting expectantly, waiting to be fed.

Taste is identity.

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.

Appetite is a profoundly social impulse.

Our urge to avoid eating something that makes us feel sick is often at the root of disordered eating, as we swerve away from whole categories of foods that we imagine would make us feel uneasy.

Anything eaten just before a bout of stomach bug may be hated for life.

We urgently need to invent new models of generosity. We need to find a way for a small portion to feel as much like love as a large one.