275 Quotes by Bee Wilson

A few decades from now, the current laissez-faire attitudes to sugar – now present in 80 per cent of supermarket foods – may seems as reckless and strange as permitting cars without seatbelts or smoking on aeroplanes.

The way you teach a child to eat well is through example, enthusiasm, and patient exposure to good food. And when that fails, you lie.

We speak of having better food choices, but for the most part, we eat the foods that food companies want to sell us.

The answer to how to engage with obesity, Cahnman said, was ‘an agreement of mutual respect for the common humanity of each and every one of us’. Weight stigma, he pointed out, cannot be removed except by treating individuals with obesity as normal human beings – as intelligent and capable as anyone else – and removing any sense of moral shame about their condition.

No home-cooked food, no matter how delicious, can match the power of bringing people together in misty-eyed recollection of industrially produced food.

This technological stagnation reflects a harsh truth. There was very little interest in attempting to save labor when the labor in question was not your own.

The true value of food goes beyond price, and once we collectively start to realize this once again, the challenge will be for policy makers to build food environments that encourage people to make better food choices rather than berating them for making bad ones.

Many of us cling to particular vessels, fetishizing over this mug or that plate.

Our kitchens are filled with ghosts. You may not see them, but you could not cook as you do without their ingenuity: the potters who first enabled us to boil and stew; the knife forgers; the resourceful engineers who designed the first refrigerators; the pioneers of gas and electric ovens; the scale makers; the inventors of eggbeaters and peelers.