Quotes About Food

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 is so damaging about our gendered approach to food is that it encourages both boys and girls to feed themselves in ways that go against what their bodies require. We have got things the wrong way round. It is girls more than boys who need the most haemoglobin-boosting foods. And boys more than girls are lacking in salad and vegetables. Girl food and boy food are dangerous nonsense that prevents us from seeing the real problems of feeding boys and girls.

But almost no one speaks of building up girls - these delicate soufflé-nibbling creatures who ought to be able to survive on air and compliments. Instead, a great focus is placed on building up their brothers, stoking them with dangerous delusions about how much food they need. In the current food environment, the overfeeding of boys is no more helpful than the underfeeding of girls.

From the perspective of almost everyone else in the world, the Japanese have an enviable relationship with food. Japanese cuisine - with its focus on fresh vegetables, even fresher fish, delicate soups and exquisitely presented rice dishes - has a global reputation for healthiness.

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 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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

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