First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

by Bee Wilson

Overview

We are not born knowing what to eat; as omnivores it is something we each have to figure out for ourselves. From childhood onward, we learn how big a "portion" is and how sweet is too sweet. We learn to enjoy green vegetables -- or not. But how does this education happen? What are the origins of taste?

In First Bite, award-winning food writer Bee Wilson draws on the latest research from food psychologists, neuroscientists, and nutritionists to reveal that our food habits are shaped by a whole host of factors: family and culture, memory and gender, hunger and love. Taking the reader on a journey across the globe, Wilson introduces us to people who can only eat foods of a certain color; prisoners of war whose deepest yearning is for Mom's apple pie; a nine year old anosmia sufferer who has no memory of the flavor of her mother's cooking; toddlers who will eat nothing but hotdogs and grilled cheese sandwiches; and researchers and doctors who have pioneered new and effective ways to persuade children to try new vegetables. Wilson examines why the Japanese eat so healthily, whereas the vast majority of teenage boys in Kuwait have a weight problem -- and what these facts can tell Americans about how to eat better.

The way we learn to eat holds the key to why food has gone so disastrously wrong for so many people. But Wilson also shows that both adults and children have immense potential for learning new, healthy eating habits. An exploration of the extraordinary and surprising origins of our tastes and eating habits, First Bite also shows us how we can change our palates to lead healthier, happier lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465094127
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	11/08/2016
Edition description:	First Trade Paper Edition
Pages:	360
Sales rank:	977,446
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Bee Wilson is a celebrated food writer, food historian, and author of five books, including First Bite: How We Learn to Eat and Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat. She has been named BBC Radio's food writer of the year and is a three-time Guild of Food Writers food journalist of the year. She writes a monthly column on food in the Wall Street Journal. She lives in Cambridge, England.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1: LIKES AND DISLIKES
With Beetroot

Chapter 2: MEMORY
With Milk

Chapter 3: CHILDREN”S FOOD
With Birthday Cake

Chapter 4: FEEDING
With Lunchbox

Chapter 5: BROTHERS AND SISTERS
With Chocolate

Chapter 6: HUNGER
With Breakfast Cereal

Chapter 7: DISORDER
With Potato Chips

Chapter 8: CHANGE
With Chilis

Epilogue: This is Not Advice

Notes

Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

"First Bite is a feast of a book."--Financial Times

"A brilliant, heartfelt book about [the] crisis in our contemporary diet.... Wilson is intelligent, passionate, sincere, tirelessly curious and endlessly willing to admit mistakes and learn from experience."--London Review of Books

"A fascinating new book.... [Bee Wilson's] message is a hopeful, even liberating, one."--Washington Post

"Absorbing read...timely."--Los Angeles Review of Books

"An anthropological category killer on the topic of how we learn to eat."--New York Times Book Review

"Delightful.... The well-meaning experts lecture us about what we ought to eat; Wilson wants to understand why we eat what we do."--Guardian (UK)

"Wilson lays out her discoveries in a series of easily digestible chapters that balance science and anecdote with short interludes on various foods.... Her tone is down-to-earth and research-based at once, gentle, encouraging, no-nonsense."--Boston Globe

"Wilson sprinkles just enough personal narrative through First Bite to establish her as a sympathetic figure without turning the book into a memoir.... Her tone is refreshingly loose and friendly; she's one of the few scholars I can think of who can effectively quote both Margaret Mead and Homer Simpson."--Washington Post

A Wall Street Journal Book of the Year

From the Publisher

Wilson isn't in the business of finger-wagging. For starters, as her exhaustively researched book tells us, she knows that making people feel bad about habits (food or otherwise) is the surest way to invite their entrenchment. But mostly, the central premise of First Bite is one that we'd all be wise to see as liberating, generous and ultimately optimistic: If we learned what and how to eat as babies, we can unlearn and relearn and actually change what Wilson sees as our collectively chaotic relationships with food—even if those relationships are tangled up in powerful childhood memories or crippling guilt; even if our children are deceived into craving Fruit Loops while watching SpongeBob; even if we make our way through a supersized world where "there are countless triggers messing with the off-button for eating." It's possible for anyone to change, Wilson promises. That means the whole lot of us: stubborn toddlers, compulsive overeaters, the obese, the anorexic and other people with severe eating disorders, even entire nations.

The New York Times Book Review - Jenny Rosenstrach

10/12/2015
“Most of what we learn about food happens when we’re children—when we’re sitting at the kitchen table (if you’re lucky enough to have one), being fed,” says Wilson (Consider the Fork), a food writer and historian. Wilson takes a scholarly approach in this smart and telling journey that outlines food habits and where they originate. Mixing science with anecdotes, she incorporates past studies, including one landmark research study on infants’ inherent patterns of taste, explicating the sometimes-conflicting theories scholars spun from the outcome, Wilson debunks the notion that appetite is genetic and the idea that the body naturally selects what it needs. Old reports are countered by the latest research from food psychologists, neuroscientists, and biologists. Using brief tales, Wilson details many disorders across the consumption spectrum in an insightful and earnest tone that appeals to food-lovers and parents. Discussing everything from adults with stringent eating patterns to gendered weight misperceptions and changes in cultural norms, Wilson delineates how diets develop and, more importantly, how to make healthy modifications. Agent: Zoë Pagnamenta, Zoë Pagnamenta Agency. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

03/01/2016
Wilson (Consider the Fork) draws on research from food psychologists, neuroscientists, and nutritionists to reveal that food-related habits are shaped by multiple factors including family, culture, memory, gender, hunger, and love. Featured here are people who only eat foods of a certain color, toddlers whose preferences are limited to hot dogs and grilled cheese sandwiches, and researchers who have pioneered effective ways to introduce new foods into a child's diet. While there are many solid books about getting children and babies to eat, ranging from straightforward cookbooks to more detailed feeding manuals such as Jill Castle and Maryann Jacobsen's Fearless Feeding, most focus on the practical aspects; not on the reasons behind developing food habits. With chapters addressing particular foods such as milk and cake and discussions on topics including eating disorders, pickiness, and binging, this book provides in-depth discussion of what makes us indulge, enjoy, crave, dislike, and choose the tastes and provisions that we do. VERDICT This work will appeal to food scientists, parents wishing to know the roots of their children's meal choices, and curious readers in general.—Dawn Lowe-Wincentsen, Oregon Inst. of Technology, Portland

Library Journal

Narrator Alison Larkin evokes the listener’s curiosity about this detailed exploration of relearning how to eat. Based on the premise that food preferences are learned, FIRST BITE argues that the key to changing one’s diet and adopting healthy food choices is changing one’s thinking, rather than receiving nutrition education. Larkin’s diverse voices and lively accents bring out the international flavor of research that compares global food and eating habits. The plethora of information, which includes industrial and scientific influences on natural food and our eating habits, occasionally threatens to become dry listening. But these sections are effectively tempered by Larkin’s lively tone as well as some of the book’s surprising discoveries. M.F. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2016 - AudioFile

2015-09-02
An exploration of the notion that we can change our early food habits. Following her lively and strikingly original history of culinary tools and techniques, Consider the Fork (2012), Wilson enters the increasingly crowded category of diet and nutrition with a well-informed, albeit overly earnest guide to healthy eating and a well-balanced diet. She demonstrates the ways our tastes and eating habits, formed at our earliest stages of development and influenced by friends, siblings, and overwhelmingly aggressive marketing campaigns, can often lead to a variety of eating disorders. "My premise…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," writes the author. "The greatest public health problem of modern times is how to persuade people to make better food choices." Wilson maintains a strong belief in change and sets out to prove how it is possible. In such chapters as "Likes and Dislikes," "Feeding," "Hunger," "Disorder," and "Change," the author shares numerous anecdotes from her personal life—she had to overcome challenges as an overweight teenager and later as a mother of picky eaters—to underscore wide-ranging case-study results, often with encouraging outcomes. A profound example is the huge cultural shift in eating that has taken place in Japan over the past 50 years; prior to that, the current diet of fresh fish and rice was not customary. In a sublimely entertaining early chapter, flashes of M.F.K. Fisher or Diane Ackerman may come to mind as Wilson describes how the subtle influences of scent and taste can trigger memory, "the single most powerful driving force in how we learn to eat; it shapes all of our yearnings." With generous measures of grounded wisdom and solid research findings, the book should attract and possibly inspire broad groups of readers struggling with eating-related issues; for others, it may be of less interest.

Kirkus Reviews