203 Quotes About Food-writing

Having a healthy relationship with food can act like a life jacket, protecting you from the worst excesses of obesogenic world we now inhabit. You see the greasy meatball sandwich and you no longer think it has much to say to you. This is not about being thin. It’s about reaching a state where food is something that nourishes and makes you happy rather than sickening or tormenting us. It’s about feeding ourselves as a good parent would: with love, with variety, but also with limits.

Our tastes are learned in the context of immense social influences, whether from our family, our friends, or the cheery font on a bottle of soda.

It’s not just that people learn to tolerate beetroot: they switch from dislike to adoration.

Memory is the single most powerful driving force in how we learn to eat; it shapes all our yearnings.

When we talk of memory of food, we generally assume that nostalgia is a phenomenon that occurs late in life - like Proust being transported to his youth by a madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea. But food memory is there from the start. Even babies have nostalgia!

We are all born with echoes of our mother’s diet, which means that no one is a totally blank slate when it comes to flavour.

Already, by thirteen weeks, the taste buds are mature. A thirteen-week-old foetus weighs maybe an ounce, with no fat under the skin, no air in the lungs. Yet already they can not only swallow but taste, and these sips of fluid leave memories.

Molecules that look near-identical to a specialist chemist lab will be easily distinguished by an ordinary person who smells them.

The experience of tasting food is far more multi-sensory than is the case with hearing, sight or touch, which is why it requires the most sophisticated part of our brain to process it. In fact, eating is influenced by hearing, sight or touch, as well as flavour: we prefer apples that crunch loudly, steaks that look blood-red, sauces so smooth they seem to caress the inside of our throats.