How we learn to eat.įirst Bite reminds us that, as omnivores, we possess an incredible ability to eat almost everything. The taste may be identity but it is not destiny.’ Bee Wilson, First Bite. ‘We did not come into the world disliking bitter greens we were taught to dislike them by our environment. We learn what we like through repeated exposure: we are sometimes appalled by the taste of something new, but then learn to love it later in life. In First Bite, Wilson notes that since flavours and food preferences are all learned, we can, with a bit of work, train our brains to desire broccoli and spinach more than a greasy cheeseburger with fries. Processed foods, the greatest success of the industrial food system, rely heavily on the holy trio of sugar, fat and salt – the evil clique responsible for most diet-related diseases. How do we distinguish what’s safe amongst the harrowing variety of foods in the modern supermarket? Navigating the jungle of the industrialised food system brings us back to the omnivore’s dilemma, a term coined thirty years ago by Paul Rozin, a psychologist from the University of Pennsylvania: omnivores must seek out and explore new potential foods while remaining cautious of them until they are proven safe. The fairytale and horror stories of our modern food system coexist simultaneously: food is abundant but not all of it is, strictly speaking, food. The definition of malnutrition has been changed in recent years, too, and it now includes – next to absolute hunger and nutrient deficiency – obesity, caused by over-, not underfeeding. According to WHO, ‘In 2014, approximately 462 million adults worldwide were underweight, while 1.9 billion were either overweight or obese’ – for the first time in history of humanity, obesity among adults is a more common problem than hunger. ‘Diet causes more health problems in the world than any other single factor, including tobacco and alcohol’, says Wilson in her talk. According to Wilson, abundance is not as much the solution of the problem, as it is the core of the food system’s horror story: food, although abundant, is not necessarily nourishing, nor (in extreme cases) deserving to be called food at all. Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future’, that the food problem is finally being solved. She also challenges the claim by Johan Norberg, the author of the ‘Progress. More food is produced each year than ever’, says Wilson in her 15-minute speech for 5X15 Stories. ‘Now it’s the only time in history that we have lived taking abundance for granted, taking food for granted. Have you heard about it before? I haven’t either. The author points to the Haber-Bosch process (a method for synthesising ammonia that enabled mass-producing of the cheap nitrogen fertilisers for agriculture) as one of the most important discoveries of the 20th century, that profoundly changed not only the food system but also the course of the history of humanity. The first is a story of abundance: never have humans been fed as well as they are now. As an attempt to answer this quest, Wilson tells two stories of the modern food system: a fairytale one and a horror one. How did eating become so complicated for modern humans? is a question that keeps coming back throughout the 400 pages of the book. First Bite is a story of pleasures of eating, about reconnecting with our senses and bodily needs to be able to make better food choices because, as Wilson puts it: ‘when our preferences are in order, nutrition should take care of itself.’ We’re forgetting, however, that eating is a skill, and hence it is something that can be learned and re-learned, regardless of our age. Many of us might think that one’s eating habits are virtually non-changeable once established. The greatest public health problem of modern times is how to persuade people to make better food choices.” Bee Wilson, First Bite. “My premise in First Bite 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. How we learn to eattakes the reader on a journey through the human relationship with food: from how our preferences for certain foods are related to our mother’s diet when she was pregnant, through a history of nursery food, to the modern eating and how it’s become almost impossible for many of us to feed ourselves healthily in the world of the seemingly endless food supply. But the echo of that flavour stayed with you until today. Do you remember your first bite? Probably not.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |