275 Quotes by Bee Wilson

Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” This is certainly true in the kitchen. Tools are not neutral objects. They change with changing social context. A mortar and pestle was a different thing for the Roman slave forced to pound up highly amalgamated mixtures for hours on end for his master’s enjoyment than it is for me: a pleasing object with which I make pesto for fun, on a whim.

Christine Frederick’s rational kitchen had been driven by efficiency: the fewest steps, the fewest utensils. The new ideal kitchens were far more opulent. These were dollhouses for grown women, packed with the maximum number of trinkets. The aim was not to save labor but to make the laborers forget they were working.

Eating well is a skill. We learn it. Or not. It’s something we can work on at any age. Sugar is not love. But it can feel like it.

The fact that the juice does not pucker my mouth with bitterness is thanks to a female inventor, Linda C. Brewster, who in the 1970s was granted four patents for “debittering” orange juice by reducing the presence of acrid limonin.

Your first job when eating is to nourish yourself.

Kitchens are places of violence.

Kitchen technology is not just about how well something works on its own terms – whether it produces the most delicious food – but about all the things that surround it: kitchen design; our attitude to danger and risk; pollution; the lives of women and servants; how we feel about red meat, indeed about meat in general; social and family structures; the state of metallurgy.

The subtext of all table manners is the fear that the man next to you may pull his knife on you.

But something important about eating is lost when meals are never – or almost never – timed to be taken together. There’s an old word, ‘commensality’, which literally means eating at the same table. The food anthropologist Claude Fischler has written that commensality is what provides the fundamental human ‘script’ of eating in every society. It was how basic bonds of kinship were forged.