Quotes from Bee Wilson

Hunger - this mechanism that we suppose to be so basic - turns out to be one of the more intricate bodily impulses.

Dietary change comes not from forcing someone to eat what they do not like, but in helping them to discover their own passions.

Dopamine is one of the chemical signals that passes information between neutrons to tell your brain that you are having fun.

If you can cancel a child's hunger during those first three years - from conception to toddlerdom -you create possibilities that stretch decades into the future. If not, the consequences can last for generations.

Molecules that look near-identical to a specialist chemist lab will be easily distinguished by an ordinary person who smells them.

The canning industry, which was growing by the day, made considerable use of additives: saccharine to make corn sweeter, copper to make peas greener, and all sorts of preservatives to stop meat from going off.

The experience of tasting food is far more multi-sensory than is the case with hearing, sight or touch, which is why it requires the most sophisticated part of our brain to process it. In fact, eating is influenced by hearing, sight or touch, as well as flavour: we prefer apples that crunch loudly, steaks that look blood-red, sauces so smooth they seem to caress the inside of our throats.

Every bite is a memory and the most powerful memories are the first ones.

Neuroscience confirms that chocolate means more to some people than others.

The childhood foods that we ache for are very specific to the place and the time where we grew up.

Contrary to the popular view, malnutrition is very seldom about an absolute lack of food.

One of the reasons hunger is so hard to pin down is that it is a negative concept, an absence.

Wherever you start, the first step to eating better is to recognise that our tastes and habits are not fixed but changeable.

Childhood food memories, like family jokes, are often untranslatable to outsiders.

Hara hachi bu is a Confucian principle, popular in Japan since medieval times, that you should eat until you are only eight-tenths full. This principle has since been given backing by nutrition scientists who note that when we eat there is a time delay between the body receiving the food and the brain registering that we are full. When the urge comes to have a second helping, it's worth waiting twenty minutes, and the feeling may pass.

The importance of shared childhood food memories for bonding families together can be seen among expats who carry their 'homeland' with them in the form of ingredients smuggled in suitcases.

One of the commonest ways our eating goes wrong is that we consistently choose foods that offer immediate satiation in the belly rather than longer lasting satiety.

It is possible for children to learn and improve their eating skills in ways that will automatically lead them to a healthier diet.

When the flavour of white bread and processed meat are linked in your memory with the warmth and authority of a parent and the camaraderie of siblings, it can feel like a betrayal to stop eating them.

One of the functions of traditional cuisines is to reinforce these shared childhood food memories.

Different meals, different times of day and different locations can all make the same food or drink seem either desirable or not. Call it the retsina effect: that resinated white wine that is so refreshing when sipped on a Greek island tastes of paint-stripper back home in the rain.

All soup is soul food.

If we want to relearn how to eat, we need to become children again. Bad food habits can only change by making 'healthy food' something pleasure-giving. If we experience healthy food as a coercion - something requiring willpower - it can never taste delicious.

To eat these foods again in the new country was a way of holding on to the grandmothers and mothers who had first cooked with them. Often, however, the remembering through food is bittersweet, because even when you have tracked down every last herb and spice, the missing ingredient is the cook. You find you don't want pasta 'just like Mama used to make'; you actually want Mama herself.