Quotes from Bee Wilson

In pretty much every country in the world, something hot and brothy cooked in a pot and served in a bowl is viewed as uniquely nourishing. Soup places low demands on the eater. It treats you as a child, who may or may not know how to use a knife and fork. You do not have to chop, or even to chew. Soup is what our mothers gave us when we were ailing. It's what we return to after a hard day at work, when all we want to do is curl up in a foetal position on the sofa.

We think we are being clever when we smuggle some beets into a cake. Ha! Tricked you into eating root vegetables! But since our children are not conscious that they are consuming beets, the main upshot is to entrench their liking for cake. A far cleverer thing would be to help children learn to become adults who choose vegetables consciously, of their own accord.

Very little about the way we eat is, in fact, logical.

Our difficulty is not just that we haven't learned to cook and grow food, however important that is; it's that we haven't learned to eat in ways that support health and happiness

Once we accept that eating is a learned behavior, we see that the challenge is not to grasp information but to learn new habits.

It's easy to confuse hunger with other emotional states.

excuse my squeamishness about the gooey whites of soft-boiled eggs.

We eat so often and so much because we have more or less lost touch with the signals our body is sending us about hunger.

At a certain point as a child, we notice that the food at home is not the same as the dinners our friends eat.

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

Up until the age of three, children have a remarkable ability to stop eating when they are full.

Given that we all bring such different food memories to the table, how is it ever possible to cook a meal that will please everyone?

The loss of hunger regulation after the age of four is a phenomenon that transcends cultures and continents.

From childhood onwards, our idea of fullness is heavily influenced by how much food we are offered.

In contrast to all the other things we work on in life that are far less likely to increase our wellbeing - including dieting - it is astonishing how little effort we put into changing our eating preferences for the better.

Chefs are cooking blind, for strangers whose memories are unknown.

We need new eating methods to take account of the new ways we are being supplied with food.

Though it was composed of shortening, corn syrup, colourings and other unwholesome ingredients, with a shelf-life so long it became the punchline of many jokes, for many the Twinkie was the taste of childhood. It was Proust's madeleine for the junk-food generation.

It's a chancy business, taking our cues about how much to consume from our surroundings.

Until the twentieth century, the threat of famine was a universal aspect of human existence across the world. Harvests failed; populations starved; for anyone but the wealthy, food wasn't to be relied on. Even in rich countries such as Britain and France, ordinary people lived with the daily spectre of going to sleep hungry and spent as much as half their income on basic staples such as grain and bread.

Unlike traditional food, which is remembered jointly within families or communities, mass-produced food and drink is remembered across continents.

It may not feel like it, but you never lost your potential to change how you eat. The wonderful secret of being an omnivore is that we can adjust our desires, even late in the game. It won't happen on the first bite.

Candy bar nostalgia puts us all on the same page.

The fact that millions of children every year can learn to like chilli offers hope to us all; that our next bite can be different from the first.