Quotes About Food

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

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.

Overeaters often say they are swallowing their feelings.

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.

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.

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

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?

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'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.

Many things that matter in the kitchen are beyond measuring: how much you enjoy the company of those you dine with; the satisfaction of using up the last crust of bread before it goes moldy; the way an Italian blood orange tastes in February; the pleasure of cold cucumber soup on a hot evening; the feeling of having a hearty appetite and the means to satisfy it.

There are three big things we would all benefit from learning to do: to follow structured mealtimes; to respond to our own internal cues for hunger and fullness rather than relying on external cues such as portion size; and to make ourselves open to trying a variety of foods.

After all, as omnivores, we were not born knowing what to eat. We all had to learn it, every one of us, as children sitting expectantly, waiting to be fed.

Parents and children resemble each other no more in the foods they like than couples do, suggesting that nurture - who you eat with - is more powerful than nature in determining our food habits. Whatever our innate dispositions, our experience with food can override them.

Anything eaten just before a bout of stomach bug may be hated for life.

Feeding children too often can make them forget what their own hunger feels like. Large portions lead to overeating. And giving food to calm a distressed child teaches them that unhappiness is a reason to eat.

It is a lonely occupation, being someone who wrestles to control their responses to food, given that modern life is steeped with things to eat, both real and imaginary.

Every day, children are exposed to messages - whether on giant hoardings and TV ads or from looking in friends' lunchboxes - telling them that they should like the very foods that will do them the most harm.

Learning how to eat better - which is quite different from going on a diet - is within anyone's grasp.

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