First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
First
Bite
Also by Bee Wilson
Consider the Fork
Sandwich
Swindled
The Hive
First
Bite
How We Learn to Eat
Bee Wilson
with illustrations by Annabel Lee
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
New York
Copyright © 201
5 by Bee Wilson
Published by Basic Books,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
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Designed by Linda Mark
Excerpt on page 37 from the poem “An Evening in Terezin” from
I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children’s Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942–44
by Hana Volavkova, copyright © 1978, 1993 by Artia, Prague. Compilation © 1993 by Schocken Books. Used by permission of Schocken Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wilson, Bee, author.
First bite : how we learn to eat / Bee Wilson ; with illustrations by Annabel Lee.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-465-07390-0 (e-book) 1. Gastronomy. 2. Food preferences. I. Lee, Annabel, 1966– illustrator. II. Title.
TX631.W548 2015
641.01’3—dc23
2015027683
For Emily
Contents
S
ome find the whole matter of eating easy, while others
find it hard. I used to be on the wrong side of this great divide and somehow, to my own surprise and relief, leaped over to the other side. This book is my attempt to explore how this switch was possible.
You don’t have to look far in our world to encounter people—of all sizes—who relate to food in chaotic ways. The chaos can take many forms: compulsive overeating, undereating, or extreme pickiness. Some people become so obsessed with the purity of what enters their mouths that they cannot accept invitations to eat with friends. 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. Snacks assail us at the checkout; dream feasts tease us from billboards, newspapers, and TV cooking shows.
Without ever quite having a full-blown eating disorder—though I came close—I managed to make myself pretty miserable about eating for the best part of a decade, from the middle school years to young adulthood. I probably appeared fine: a bit overweight, nothing more. But food was my main relationship, and although it had some of the thrills of romance—especially when I was in the kitchen with a hunk of sweet brioche dough—it wasn’t a stable or sustaining kind of love.
We talk in a sickly way of “indulgent” foods, but when you are trapped in compulsive habits of dependency on them, it does not feel like being pampered. There were days when I gave myself up to consuming guilty treats. Other days were for not-eating, which was even worse, as I taunted myself with the foods that I wouldn’t permit myself.
Thankfully, that phase of life now seems distant. Eating well—by which I don’t mean “clean eating” or raw juice fasts but regular meals of real, flavorsome food—just isn’t that complicated for me anymore. Now that I am through on the other side, I can see that over a period of months, if not years, I learned to master a series of skills that I’d once deemed insurmountable. I learned that it was okay to eat a hearty meal when I was hungry, but also okay to stop when I was full. My cravings for pastries lessened and my cravings for vegetables increased. There are still plenty of things I worry and obsess about—believe me—but my own eating is seldom one of them. Dinner is just dinner: nothing more nor less than the high point of the day.
In our house, as in many others, the battleground over food has shifted to the children. As a parent trying to getting my three children to eat healthily—but not obsessively so—I have sometimes felt as lost as I once did about my own eating. After the milk stage (and that was hard enough), none of the skills of feeding came naturally. How do you promote vegetables to an ironic teenager in a way that isn’t counterproductive? What do you do when your daughter comes home and says her friends have started skipping lunch? How do you keep a sense of proportion about fat and sugar without giving in completely to the ultra-processed food that is now ubiquitous?
In those busy moments after school and before bed, I cook a quick meal that I hope will please everyone. I may find that one child grumbles about the grilled eggplant, while another says it is the best bit, and the third sits quietly weeping because, while he actually likes eggplant, the pieces on his plate are touching his chicken and are therefore inedible. Did I say the high point of the day? And yet, comparatively speaking, my children are not problem eaters.
All parents have moments of thinking that it just isn’t possible to teach a child to eat well, or at least not your child. Many grown-ups are more
pessimistic still about their own ability to change how they behave around food. But writing this book has taught me that there is immense potential for improving our eating habits. It may take longer for some people to get there than others, but learning how to eat better—which is quite different from going on a diet—is within anyone’s grasp. Perhaps the most eloquent argument for learning new ways to eat is that of pleasure. Eating is—or should be—a daily source of delight rather than something to fight against. It’s good here, on the other side of the divide. I do hope you’ll join me.
“One of the reasons I like bread and jam,” said Frances,
“is that it does not slide off your spoon in a funny way.”
Russell Hoban,
Bread and Jam for Frances
S
o many of our anxieties around diet take the form of a
search for the perfect food, the one that will cure all our ills. Eat this! Don’t eat that! We obsess about the properties of various ingredients: the protein, the omega oils, the vitamins. But this is getting ahead of ourselves. Nutrients only count when a person picks up food and eats it.
How
we eat—how we approach food—is what really matters. If we are going to change our diets, we first have to relearn the art of eating, which is a question of psychology as much as nutrition. We have to find a way to want to eat what’s good for us.
Our tastes follow us around like a comforting shadow. They seem to tell us who we are. Maybe this is why we act as if our core attitudes to eating are set in stone. We make frequent attempts—more or less half-hearted—to change what we eat, but almost no effort to change how we feel about food: how well we deal with hunger, how strongly attached we are to sugar, our emotions on being served a small portion. We try to eat more vegetables, but we do not try to make ourselves enjoy vegetables
more, maybe because there’s a near-universal conviction that it is not possible to learn new tastes and shed old ones. Yet nothing could be further from the truth.
All the foods that you regularly eat are ones that you learned to eat. Everyone starts life drinking milk. After that, it’s all up for grabs.
Bone marrow from wild game is considered the best first baby food among the hunting tribes of Tanzania. If you were born in the Far Eastern republic of Laos, it could be gelatinous rice, pre-chewed by your mother and transferred from her mouth to yours (this is sometimes called kiss-feeding). For Western babies, that first bite of solid food may be powdered cereal from a packet or puree from a jar; it could be organic pumpkin, steamed and strained and served with a hypoallergenic spoon; or a random nibble from a parent’s plate. Aside from milk, there is simply no such thing as a universal food. Not even for babies.
a
From our first year of life, human tastes are astonishingly diverse. As omnivores, we have no inbuilt knowledge of which foods are good and safe. Each of us has to use our senses to figure out for ourselves what is edible, depending on what’s available. In many ways, this is a delightful opportunity. It’s the reason there are such fabulously varied ways of cooking in the world.
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
. A parent feeding a baby is training him or her how food should taste. At the most basic level, we have to learn what is food and what
is poison. We have to learn how to satisfy our hunger and also when to stop eating. Unlike the anteater, which eats only small termites, we have few natural instincts to fall back on. Out of all the choices available to us as omnivores, we have to figure out which foods are likable, which are lovable, and which are disgusting. From these preferences, we create our own pattern of eating, as distinctive as a signature.
Or that’s how it used to be. In today’s food culture, many people seem to have acquired uncannily homogeneous tastes, markedly more so than in the past. In 2010, two consumer scientists argued that the taste preferences of childhood provided a new way of thinking about the causes of obesity. They noted a “self-perpetuating cycle”: food companies push foods high in sugar, fat, and salt, which means that children learn to like them, and so the companies invent ever more of these foods “that contribute to unhealthy eating habits.” The main influence on a child’s palate may no longer be a parent but a series of food manufacturers whose products—despite their illusion of infinite choice—deliver a monotonous flavor hit quite unlike the more varied flavors of traditional cuisine.
I went to the cinema with one of my children recently. We stood at the ice cream concession and I realized, with a jolt, that almost all of the options—other than plain vanilla—contained chocolate in one form or another. Would we pick mint chocolate chunk or cherry chocolate chunk or chocolate ice cream with chocolate brownie pieces or caramel ice cream with pieces of caramel chocolate? The danger of growing up surrounded by these endless sweet and salty industrial concoctions is not that we are innately incapable of resisting them, but that the more frequently we eat them, especially in childhood, the more they train us to expect all food to taste this way.
Once you recognize the simple fact that food preferences are learned, many of the ways we currently approach eating start to look a little weird. To take a small example, consider the parents who go to great lengths to “hide” vegetables in children’s meals. Is broccoli really so terrible that it must be concealed from innocent minds? Whole cookbooks have been devoted to this arcane pursuit. It starts with the notion that children have an innate resistance to vegetables, and will only swallow them unawares,
blitzed into pasta sauce or baked into sweet treats; they could never learn to love zucchini for its own sake. In our harried, sleep-deprived state, as parents we find it hard to play the long game. 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.
By failing to see that eating habits are learned, we misunderstand the nature of our current diet predicament. As we are often reminded, in doom-laden terms, eating has taken a dramatic collective wrong turn in recent decades. As of 2010, poor diet and physical inactivity accounted for 10 percent of all deaths and disease worldwide, ahead of tobacco smoke (6.3 percent) and household air pollution (4.3 percent). Around two-thirds of the population is either overweight or obese in rich countries, and the rest of the world is fast catching up. The moral usually drawn from these statistics is that we are powerless to resist the sugary, salty, fatty foods that the food industry promotes. Everything tastes better with bacon! As the journalist Michael Moss exposed in 2013, the big food companies engineer foods with a chemically calculated “bliss point” designed to get us hooked. Newspapers sometimes project a future in which obesity levels continue to rise indefinitely until almost everyone in the world is affected.
But there’s something else going on here that usually gets missed. Not everyone is equally susceptible to the dysfunction of our food supply. Some people manage to eat sugary, salty, fatty foods in modest quantities, and then stop. Others find these supposedly irresistible foods the opposite of blissful. If two-thirds of the population is overweight or obese, then fully a third is not. This is astonishing, given just how many opportunities there now are to eat doughnuts. Exposed to the same food that bombards us all, these lucky people have learned different responses. It’s in all our interest to find out how they have done it.
Many campaigners would say cooking is the answer. If only children could be taught how to cook and plant vegetable gardens, they would automatically become healthier. It sounds convincing: school gardens
are a lovely thing. But by themselves, they are not enough to make a child relate to food in healthy ways. 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. 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 day. Much cooking now, however, is nothing like this. In my experience as a food journalist, chefs and food writers are, if anything, more prone to compulsive eating and other disordered food obsessions than non-cooks. For cooking to become the solution to our diet crisis, we first have to learn how to adjust our responses to food. Cooking skills are no guarantee of health if your inclinations are for twice-fried chicken, Neopolitan rum babas, and French aligot: potatoes mashed with a ton of cheese.
The reason that many find it hard to eat healthily is that we
have never learned any differently. Like children, most of us eat what we like, and we only like what we know. Never before have whole populations learned (or mislearned) to eat in societies where calorie-dense food was so abundant and policed with so few norms about portion sizes and meal times. Nor is overeating the only problem that plagues modern affluent civilizations. Statistics suggest that around 0.3 percent of young women are anorexic and another 1 percent are bulimic, with rising numbers of men joining them. What statistics are not particularly effective at telling us is how many others—whether overweight or underweight—are in a perpetual state of anxiety about what they consume, living in fear of carbs or fat grams and unable to derive straightforward enjoyment from meals. A 2003 study of 2,200 American college students suggested that weight concern is very common: 43 percent of these students were worried about their weight most of the time (across both sexes), and 29 percent of the women described themselves as “obsessively preoccupied” with weight.
Our dietary malaise is often discussed in fatalistic terms, as if our preference for hamburgers were a life sentence: diets don’t work, sugar is addictive, and so on. What we forget is that, as omnivores, we are extremely
gifted at changing the way we eat to accommodate different environments. Admittedly, no one has ever encountered a food environment quite like the one in which we now find ourselves, flooded with cheap calories in deceptive packaging. Surviving in our current situation will entail very different skills from those needed by a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer. Yet there is every reason to suppose that we are capable of acquiring these skills if we give ourselves half a chance.
If our food habits are learned, they can also be relearned. Imagine you were adopted at birth by parents who lived in a remote village in a far-flung country. Your tastes would be quite unlike the ones you ended up with. We all begin life with an innate liking for sweetness and a suspicion of bitterness, yet there is nothing inevitable in our physiology that says we will grow up dreading vegetables and craving fudge. The trouble is, we do not tend to see it this way.
My premise in
F
irst
B
ite
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. But we have been looking for answers in the wrong places.
Our discussion about diet is usually framed in terms of the need for better information. A sea of articles and books suggests that the reason for the obesity crisis is that we were given the wrong advice: we were told to avoid fat when the real demon was sugar. There’s something in this. It certainly didn’t help that many of the “low-fat” products marketed as healthy over the past few decades were padded with refined carbohydrates, and were therefore more fattening than the fats we were being advised to give up. During the period that dieticians were admonishing us to abstain from saturated fats such as those in butter, cream, and meat, obesity rates were consistently going up, not down. It is becoming increasingly clear that eating fat is not in and of itself what makes you fat or gives you heart disease.
Before we start blaming the confusing low-fat advice for our current ill health, however, it might be useful to consider the extent to which
we
ever followed those anti-fat warnings. The vast majority of people heard what the “food police” had to say on the subject of fat and ignored it. At the height of the low-fat orthodoxy, in 1998, some of the leading nutrition scientists in the world coauthored a paper in which they lamented the public’s failure to follow their guidelines. The scientists found, to their dismay, that after more than two decades of being advised to reduce fat, people were still eating “about the same” amount of it. The percentage of calories from fat in the American diet dropped slightly from 1976 to 1991 (from about 36 percent in 1976 to 34 percent in 1991), but people were also consuming more total calories. In absolute terms, the fat grams people consumed remained, on average, the same.
David L. Katz of the Yale University Prevention Research Center is a rare voice of sanity in the clamorous world of nutrition. He disputes the commonly held view that the reason we don’t eat better is that there is so much confusion over what the “best diet” really is. Katz points out that the essential tenets of a healthy life—moderate helpings of a variety of real whole foods, plus regular exercise—have been very well established for decades. The medical evidence suggests that it doesn’t matter whether we reach this point via a low-fat route or a low-carb one (or vegan or Paleo or just good old-fashioned home cooking). Across all diets, there is, notes Katz, a huge “aggregation of evidence” that the best pattern of eating for health is a diet of minimally processed foods, mostly plant-based. “Our problem,” notes Katz, “is not want of knowledge about the basic care and feeding of Homo sapiens. Our problem is a stunning and tragically costly cultural reluctance—to swallow it.”
Take vegetables. The advice to eat more vegetables for health could hardly have been clearer. We have been given the message many times, in many forms. Unlike with fat or sugar, there is no about-turn or controversy in mainstream nutrition over the “eat more vegetables” message. Yet since the 1970s, the total intake of calories from vegetables in America has actually declined by 3 percent, which is a bigger drop than it sounds like, considering that vegetables contain very few calories compared to other foods. This decline has come at a time when there has never been a wider variety of tempting vegetables available, from deep orange butternut squash to pale green Romanesco broccoli. Many people,
however, have absorbed the lesson from childhood that vegetables and pleasure—and more generally, healthy food and pleasure—can never go together. Witness the waves of antipathy directed at public figures such as Michelle Obama when they dare to suggest that we eat more plants. Consumer scientists have found that when a new product is described as “healthy,” it is far less likely to be a success than if it is described as “new.”