Quotes from Bee Wilson

But almost no one speaks of building up girls - these delicate soufflé-nibbling creatures who ought to be able to survive on air and compliments. Instead, a great focus is placed on building up their brothers, stoking them with dangerous delusions about how much food they need. In the current food environment, the overfeeding of boys is no more helpful than the underfeeding of girls.

We create our own pattern of eating, as distinctive as a signature.

From the perspective of almost everyone else in the world, the Japanese have an enviable relationship with food. Japanese cuisine - with its focus on fresh vegetables, even fresher fish, delicate soups and exquisitely presented rice dishes - has a global reputation for healthiness.

Traditional cuisines across the world were founded on a strong sense of balance, with norms about which foods go together, and how much one should eat at different times of the day.

Too many overweight teenage girls are being pressurised by their families to lose weight when what they in fact need is better nourishment (which would almost certainly help them lose weight along the way).

Like children, many of us eat what we like and we only like what we know.

Chocolate's status as food for girls and women - something to be yearned for and then regretted - is so ingrained that it would be easy to assume that there is something deep within females that makes them crave chocolate.

What we forget is that, as omnivores, we are extremely gifted at changing the way we eat to accommodate different environments.

Women have a special relationship with chocolate mostly because our culture tells them to. It goes back to the old claptrap about sweet treats being for 'ladies', while savoury tastes for men.

My premise in First Bite is that the question of how we learn to eat - both individually and collectively - is the key to how food, for so many people, has gone so badly wrong. The greatest public health problem of modern times is how to persuade people to make better food choices.

Once the pattern of not being hungry in the morning is set, it modifies the way you eat for life.

Feeding is learning.

Many people have absorbed the lesson from childhood that vegetables and pleasure - and more generally, healthy food and pleasure - can never go together.

Registering different flavours is one of the main ways that our bodies interact with the world around us. Amazingly enough, the human olfactory bulb is the only part of the central nervous system that is directly exposed to our environment, through the nasal cavity. Our other senses - sight, sound and touch - need to travel on a complicated journey via nerves along the spinal cord up to the brain. Smell and flavour, by contrast, surge direct from plate to nose.

Prolonged chronic malnutrition affects children for the rest of their lives because it affects both brain development and growth.

The way we eat is not a question of worthiness but of routine and preference, built over a lifespan.

Being able to regulate the amount of food we eat according to our needs is perhaps the single most important skill when it comes to eating, and the one that we leat often master.

The unreliable quality of frozen foods contributed to the deep suspicion with which many shoppers viewed them. There was a general sense that frozen food was subpar: salvaged goods. The turning point was when Birdseye embarked on a PR campaign, renaming the produce as "frosted foods," a name that implied icy glamour. "Frozen food" was something you would eat rather than starve. "Frosted food" was the stuff of childhood fantasy. It worked.

Flavour is not actually in food, any more than redness is in a rose or yellow in the sun. It is a fabrication of our brains and for each taste we create a mental 'flavour image', in the same way that we develop a memory bank of the faces of people we know. The difference is that whereas faces fade when you haven't seen them in a while, flavours and smells have a way of lodging themselves in indelibly.

Very little of the eating that happens in the modern world is as simple as: feel hungry, eat food. The great challenge for most people is learning how to recognise when we have had enough.

There are hundreds of millions of individuals who somehow swim against the tide of the dysfunctional modern food supply and feed themselves pretty well.

What you taste as a child is still there in your adult brain, even if you haven't thought of it for years.

If food is a fuel, we should feel that the tank is emptiest when the longest time has elapsed since it was filled - usually in the morning.

You did not choose the environment in which you learned to eat, nor did you design the shops in which you buy your food. If you eat too much sugar and refined oil, that says less about you than it does about the world you are eating in.