275 Quotes by Bee Wilson

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.

Appetite is a profoundly social impulse.

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

Likes and dislikes cannot be reduced to molecules and genes. It means that our food habits are not final and fixed but adaptable and open, if only we will give ourselves half a chance. We did not come into the world disliking bitter greens; we were taught to dislike them by our environment. Taste may be identity but it is not destiny. The hope is that while we are stuck with our genes, the environment is something that can change.

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.

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

Foodies trumpet their love of the hated vegetables of childhood: cauliflower and Brussel sprouts join beetroot as dinner party favourites.

Our sense of taste is something that anchors us to the person we have always known ourselves to be.

One of the reasons that we do not usually think of our tastes as learned is that most of the learning tends to happen in the very early years of life; and then it stops.