Quotes About Eating

Most of our problems with eating come down to the fact that we have not yet adapted to the new realities of plenty, either biologically or psychologically.

There is a deep resistance to the idea of dietary change, at both a cultural and an individual level. And yet, you accept the premise that eating is a learned behaviour, it follows that changing eating habits must be - if not likely and certainly not easy - at least possible.

What all of us need is to find a way to eat regular meals, to take pleasure in a variety of foods, and to be able to eat them without being consumed by negative emotions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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