Quotes About Culture

It turns out that wherever we are from, people are capable of altering not just what they eat but what they want to eat and their behaviour when eating.

We tend to automatically associate hearty meat dishes with men and lighter salads and sweets with women, and these stereotypes are replicated in cultures as different as France and Japan.

what we are prepared to accept in the way of the technology of eating is often determined more by cultural forces than function.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In India, children's food is just food.

It's not birthday cake in itself that is the problem. It's the surrounding culture of food, where sweet treats are ever-present, consumed without ceremony.

Changing the way you eat is hard, but it can be done. Look at Japan.

A treat cannot possibly have the same meaning in an era where white-flour cakes are everywhere and candy canes are sold by the dozen for less than the price of a loaf of bread.

Appetite is a profoundly social impulse.

The Japanese must be doing something right in the way they eat, given that they live longer on average than people form any other nation.

Every culture seems to have certain challenging vegetables that children find hard to love at first bite.

In Japan, food filters into every aspect of the culture.