Quotes from Bee Wilson

Sugar is not love. But it can feel like it.

If it's not a mealtime and you are wondering which of two 'healthy snacks' you should buy, the answer is probably neither.

Overeaters often say they are swallowing their feelings.

If you want your children to eat better, don't tell them what to do; eat better yourself.

The flavour of sweet milk is perhaps the most firmly imprinted of all food memories in Western culture.

Modern meals marketed at children send the message that if you are a kid, you cannot be expected to find enjoyment in anything so boring as real, whole food.

The main way that anyone learns to like new foods is through repeated exposure.

Then I realised the very question I was asking was wrong. The whole point is that in the 1960s, there was no such thing as an average eater across most countries, just lots of specific and wildly divergent patterns of eating. Back then, there were maize eaters in Brazil and sorghum eaters in Sudan. There were steak and kidney pie enthusiasts in Britain and goulash devotees in Hungary. But it made little sense to ponder how a globally average person

With good cooking and a patient but persistent approach at mealtimes, it could be food that was both good for the children and enjoyable.

Most of our approaches to feeding children are too short term. We worry about the next five minutes when we should worry about the next five years.

In most places, for most of history, children's food has not existed as a separate category after the age of weaning.

The main reason to be suspicious of fruit as a food for children was that it was just so delicious.

We know that letting our children eat too many sweets makes us a bad parent, hence the pointless ritual at Halloween when parents allow their children to go from house to house accumulating a big haul of treats, only to confiscate them at the end of the night, because they don't want their child to get cavities. Yes despite their anxiety about sweets, parents will happily feed their children highly sweetened sports bars, fruit snacks and cereals which are sweets in all but name.

Girls eat better when food stops being something forbidden.

While the form of 'kid food' is more varied than ever, however, the content is far less so. Foods marketed specifically at children tend to be higher than average in salt, sugar and fat.

How can wholesome nursery food compete with hundreds of new and heavily advertised concoctions, calculated to appeal to a child's sense of novelty?

What children need is to develop the skills to navigate the environment for themselves.

In India, children's food is just food.

Boys eat better when their parents continue to expect them to eat vegetables and include them in home-cooked meals as they get older. Or - better still - get them to prepare the home-cooked meals themselves.

Have you noticed that when someone wants to express that something tastes extra specially wonderful, they will often invoke childhood?

Large numbers of adults as well as children have now become habituated to eating a version of 'kid food' over a whole lifetime: sweet, salty, undemanding to chew and swallow and heavily processed.

Flavour has a remarkable ability to imprint itself on our memories and therefore to drive our future food choices.

When parents as well as children are eating 'kid food', perhaps it's time to call not something else. 'Kid food' started off as something separate and different from normal food. Now it is close to being the new normal for all age groups. The danger is that when adults have childish tastes too, it becomes very difficult for anyone to break the cycle and learn the pleasures of real food.

It is genuinely possible to reach the point where you desire broccoli more than fries and wholemeal sourdough more than sliced white bread.