Quotes from Bee Wilson

Love and travel are both powerful spurs to change.

We speak of having better food choices, but for the most part, we eat the foods that food companies want to sell us.

The true value of food goes beyond price, and once we collectively start to realize this once again, the challenge will be for policy makers to build food environments that encourage people to make better food choices rather than berating them for making bad ones.

It was little trouble to boil up mutton and water and mash in some leeks, garlic, and green herbs, then leave it to bubble away in its own good time. The elementary pattern these Mesopotamian recipes took was: prepare water, add fat and salt to taste; add meat, leeks, and garlic; cook in the pot; maybe add fresh coriander or mint; and serve.

Soup leaves us full because we believe it will.

Kitchens are places of violence.

The rise of vast portions - particularly in fast-food restaurants - means that if we eat only the calories we need, we should often stop at half of something; or even a quarter. And no one - child or adult - seems to like the feeling of the glass- - or plate - half empty.

The earliest recipes on record come from Mesopotamia (the site of modern-day Iraq, Iran, and Syria). They are written in cuneiform on three stone tablets, approximately 4,000 years old, offering a tantalizing glimpse of how the Mesopotamians might have cooked. The vast majority of the recipes are for pot cooking, most of them for broths and court bouillons. "Assemble all the ingredients in the pot" is a frequent instruction.

Our olfactory bulbs have gathered endless sense patterns of foods high in sugar, fat and salt. These flavour memories have become part of the fabric of our sense of self and are not easily discarded, because the system, as we have seen, is designed 'not to forget'.

The fact that the juice does not pucker my mouth with bitterness is thanks to a female inventor, Linda C. Brewster, who in the 1970s was granted four patents for "debittering" orange juice by reducing the presence of acrid limonin.

No one is too busy to cook.

But something important about eating is lost when meals are never – or almost never – timed to be taken together. There's an old word, 'commensality', which literally means eating at the same table. The food anthropologist Claude Fischler has written that commensality is what provides the fundamental human 'script' of eating in every society. It was how basic bonds of kinship were forged

But in most places, the new global diet has involved a narrowing down of what people eat. Our world contains around seven thousand edible crops, yet 95 per cent of what we eat comes from just thirty of those crops. As omnivores, humans are designed to eat a varied diet, so there's something strange and wrong when, as a species, we become so limited in our choice of foods

Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral." This is certainly true in the kitchen. Tools are not neutral objects. They change with changing social context. A mortar and pestle was a different thing for the Roman slave forced to pound up highly amalgamated mixtures for hours on end for his master's enjoyment than it is for me: a pleasing object with which I make pesto for fun, on a whim.

The existence of birthday cake ice cream suggests that we can no longer distinguish celebration foods from everyday ones. We are also not too sure whether we are children or adults.

The gap in quality between the diet of the poorest and that of the richest is wide and widening. The poorest families in America may not look hungry in the way that Victorian orphans looked hungry, but they eat fewer dark green vegetables, fewer whole grains, and fewer nuts.

when owning our own set of gleaming pans, all matching -- as opposed to the assorted chipped-enamel vessels of student days -- seemed mysteriously grown up.

Podemos afirmar que não havia relógios na cozinha medieval e no princípio dos tempos modernos, dado que as receitas indicam os tempos não em minutos, mas em orações.

The term curfew now means a time by which someone—usually a teenager—has to get home. The original curfew was a kitchen object: a large metal cover placed over the embers at night to contain the fire while people slept.

There's a joke about a man who tested his blade using his tongue: sharp blades taste like metal; really sharp blades taste like blood.

Christine Frederick's rational kitchen had been driven by efficiency: the fewest steps, the fewest utensils. The new ideal kitchens were far more opulent. These were dollhouses for grown women, packed with the maximum number of trinkets. The aim was not to save labor but to make the laborers forget they were working.

Japan has somehow managed to achieve the ideal attitude to eating: an obsession with culinary pleasure that is actually conductive to health.

Most of our problems with eating come down to the fact that we have not yet adapted to the new realities of plenty, either biologically or psychologically.

The answer to how to engage with obesity, Cahnman said, was 'an agreement of mutual respect for the common humanity of each and every one of us'. Weight stigma, he pointed out, cannot be removed except by treating individuals with obesity as normal human beings – as intelligent and capable as anyone else – and removing any sense of moral shame about their condition.