Quotes from Bee Wilson

Cereal is a medium through which we learn to confuse hunger with marketing.

Of all the foods that we could give a child a free rein over, cereal makes the least sense. Parents let children choose cereal but dictate which vegetables they eat; it should be the other way around.

The cereals marketed for children are consistently the most sugary and highly processed in the whole cereal aisle.

The first step in recovering from an eating disorder is recognising that there is a problem.

Structured meals, at which a wide range of foods is offered in a firm but loving way, are a key part of the cure for any eating disorder.

There are signs that the Japanese themselves consider their excellent cuisine as an essential part of what it means to be Japanese.

For people with eating disorders, food is both a poison and the remedy, but this is true for the rest of us as well. Food is an inescapable fact of life and the task for each of us is to find a way to make out peace with it.

With our own personal diets, we often convince ourselves that there is something vital within us that prevents us from ever eating differently.

When eating goes wrong, the antidote is not a life without food, but figuring out how we can bring ourselves to eat new food in new ways.

If you can improve the eating, the rest of life gets a little better too.

The great American food writer M. F. K. Fisher once wrote an essay called 'The Anatomy of a Recipe.' To have a good anatomy, in her view, a recipe should have a sense of logical progression. She despaired of recipes with 'anatomical faults,' where the reader is told to make a cake batter and only then to grease the loaf pans.

One thing I always make - and I'm sure this is partly to do with memory and yearning and because I've made it ever since my children were born - I make gingerbread every year. And it's partly just the perfume of the spices in the house, makes it smell like winter to me.

Years ago, during a John Grisham phase, I tried to pinpoint exactly why I found Grisham's often predictable legal thrillers quite so comforting. The best answer I could come up with was the frequency with which Grisham tells us that his lead characters are sipping coffee. When it comes to food and drink, predictability can console.

The danger of growing up surrounded by 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.

In the right circumstances, I'm a big fan of eating alone. Often, on a Sunday evening, I go to a yoga class whose charm is largely that it gives me an alibi to avoid cooking family supper for once. I return to have boiled eggs and soldiers in silence with a book. Bliss.

One of the rudest things you can do, food-wise, is to stare at someone in the act of eating. It draws attention to the unseemly fact that eating is a bodily function - like animals, we are trapped by our hungers, but we do our best to disguise them with such civilized props as menus and forks.

What strikes me, the more I cook, is that the best recipes are ones where the basic anatomy is so sound it will survive multiple adjustments. When a recipe has good bones, you can change the seasoning, double the garlic, swap lime for lemon, and it still turns out delicious.

The comeback of true green olives was part of a Spanish food revival in the early 2000s. I credit Sam and Sam Clark of Moro Restaurant in London with making them cool again.

The saddest utensil I've come across is an 'anti-loneliness ramen bowl,' which holds your iPhone to keep you company as you slurp your solitary bowl of noodles. But the iPhone cannot return your gaze or reassure you that you didn't squeeze too much lime into the soup, though maybe a dinner-conversation app is only a matter of time.

One of the strange things about imaginary food is that it allows us to take pleasure in reading about things that we would never want to eat in real life.

A recipe is not an exact formula, but it does need a certain structure. When the bones are right, you can dress it in many ways.

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 flavour hit, quite unlike the more varied flavours of traditional cuisine.

When we consume vastly more protein than we need, our kidneys struggle to process it, resulting in protein in the urine. Too much protein from meat may also contribute to kidney stones.

Protein bars, protein flapjacks, protein granola, protein ice cream and protein coconut water... To look at the health-food aisles, you'd think that protein was a substance no one could overeat. Even bread now comes in protein-enriched form.