Quotes from Bee Wilson

We are the first generation to be hunted by what we eat. Since the birth of farming ten thousand years ago, most humans haven't been hunters, but never before have we been so insistently pursued by our own food supply. The calories hunt them down even when we are not looking for them.

The United States is today one of only three countries not to have officially adopted the French metric system. The other two are Liberia and Myanmar (Burma).

As things stand, our culture is far too critical of the individuals who eat junk foods and not critical enough about the corporations that profit from selling them. We spend a lot of time discussing unhealthy foods in terms of individual guilt and willpower and not enough looking at the morality of big food companies that have targeted some of the poorest consumers in the world with products that will make them sick, or the governments that allowed them to do so.

The art of feeding, it turns out, is not about pushing 'one more bite' into someone's mouth, however healthy the food. Nor is it about authoritarian demands to abstain from all treats. It is about creating a mealtime environment where those eating are free to develop their own tastes, because all the choices on the table are real, whole food.

Part of the magic of childhood for most of us, looking back, was the sensation of freedom in your own body - the feeling that these legs were made for skipping.

There is a deep resistance to the idea of dietary change, at both a cultural and an individual level. And yet, you accept the premise that eating is a learned behaviour, it follows that changing eating habits must be - if not likely and certainly not easy - at least possible.

The needs of the eating disorder sufferer are like a warped version of the travails we all face when learning to eat.

Before addressing what to eat, the most urgent matter is how to eat.

Umami is the savoury meatiness in seaweed and miso and soy sauce. It is, to a large extent, the concept that enables Japanese cuisine to be healthy and attractive at the same time.

Tools are first adopted because they meet a certain need or solve a particular problem, but over time the utensils we feel happy using are mainly determined by culture.

When you are eating all the time, food curiously loses much of its joy, along with its sense of ceremony and sociability.

The concept of "delicious" was born in Japan in 1908 when a chemist called Ikeda discovered a "fifth taste" called umami that was neither bitter nor salty nor sweet nor sour but something more wonderful and compelling than any of these.

Before we can resolve our endless quandaries about food - such as 'where the zucchini came from and how far it had to travel' - we should first establish the basic paradigm that at certain times, every day, we stop, we sit and we eat.

When children are exposed through 'sensory education' to a wider range of flavours they start to love complexity and be bored by simplicity.

Noodles arrived in Japan with Buddhist monks from China in the Middle Ages, but until the twentieth century they tended to be made from buckwheat, or a mix of wheat and rice.

What all of us need is to find a way to eat regular meals, to take pleasure in a variety of foods, and to be able to eat them without being consumed by negative emotions.

As society, we haven't quite figured out what a new structure for meals would look like that isn't just a hasty sandwich in the car on the way to something more important.

Japanese cuisine did not change all at once but in stages.

Soldiers, like footballers, are famously resistant to new foods.

It is what happens whenever a machine replaces the labor of an artisan: the artisan's skills become devalued.

The problem with lunchboxes is the problem with the way we feed children in general. Parents trust that anything they place in this magical box will be good for the child, because it comes with their love.

In the US from 1980 to 2011, it became more than twice as expensive for Americans for purchase fresh fruit and vegetables compared to purchasing sugary carbonated beverages. Tomatoes and broccoli are far more expensive on average than they used to be for American shoppers. Energy-dense foods such as cakes and burgers have become far cheaper now in comparison to fruits and vegetables.

Japan shows the extent to which food habits evolve.

Our sense of taste is something that anchors us to the person we have always known ourselves to be.