Quotes from Bee Wilson

Memory is the single most powerful driving force in how we learn to eat; it shapes all our yearnings.

One of the reasons that we do not usually think of our tastes as learned is that most of the learning tends to happen in the very early years of life; and then it stops.

Each bite that you see the other person take reinforces your liking. Or not: it is hard to sit calmly by and carry on eating if you share a table with someone who is grumbling that peas are 'gross' and pinging them at you with a knife.

When we talk of memory of food, we generally assume that nostalgia is a phenomenon that occurs late in life - like Proust being transported to his youth by a madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea. But food memory is there from the start. Even babies have nostalgia!

Inequality among siblings goes all the way to the gut: we are born with different microbes inside us, outnumbering our cells ten to one. Some of them affect our chances of becoming obese in later life and others affect how well we digest our dinner. What we eat is constantly changing the composition of our microbiota, but, equally, the nature of the microbes inside us determines how well we respond to the food we eat.

We are all born with echoes of our mother's diet, which means that no one is a totally blank slate when it comes to flavour.

Flavour principles change. Diets change. And the people eating these diets also change.

Flavours - these memories generated backwards through our nose - are all learned.

Already, by thirteen weeks, the taste buds are mature. A thirteen-week-old foetus weighs maybe an ounce, with no fat under the skin, no air in the lungs. Yet already they can not only swallow but taste, and these sips of fluid leave memories.

When fairy-tale children seek their fortune, food is the main thing they're after.

Our childhood experiences with food can trap us in destructive patterns for the rest of our lives.

It turns out that wherever we are from, people are capable of altering not just what they eat but what they want to eat and their behaviour when eating.

It is curious that we talk so little about the flavour of formula, given that it is the main food many babies taste for that crucial first year.

Like so many of the things parents do out of loving solicitude, putting pressure on girls to lose weight has no good outcomes and a lot of bad ones.

We tend to automatically associate hearty meat dishes with men and lighter salads and sweets with women, and these stereotypes are replicated in cultures as different as France and Japan.

Having other people try to fix you is one of the things that paradoxically holds you back from reaching that magical place called "After

We often overattribute efficiency to the technologies we are accustomed to.

The social pressure to eat according to your sex matters more than it seems. For one thing, it undermines our pleasure in eating, which is seldom a good idea. women often deny themselves the dish they might really want pn the menu because they feel it isn't "appropriate".

what we are prepared to accept in the way of the technology of eating is often determined more by cultural forces than function.

What is so damaging about our gendered approach to food is that it encourages both boys and girls to feed themselves in ways that go against what their bodies require. We have got things the wrong way round. It is girls more than boys who need the most haemoglobin-boosting foods. And boys more than girls are lacking in salad and vegetables. Girl food and boy food are dangerous nonsense that prevents us from seeing the real problems of feeding boys and girls.

You are unlikely to eat something if you don't know what it is.

But we haven't paid anything like enough attention to another consequence of being omnivores, which is that eating is not something we are born instinctively knowing how to do, like breathing. It is something we learn.

Contrary to the impression given by the health pages of newspapers, the greatest single nutritional shortfall in our diets right now is not our failure to eat enough 'superfoods', whatever those might be. It is the iron deficiency of girls.

When our preferences are in order, nutrition should take care of itself.