First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

The danger of growing up surrounded by these endless sweet and salty industrial concoctions is not that we are innately incapable of resisting them, but that the more frequently we eat them, especially in childhood, the more they train us to expect all food to taste this way.

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.

Your first job when eating is to nourish yourself.

No one is doomed by genes to eat badly. Pickiness is governed more by environment than biology.

Every man carries within him a world, which is composed of all that he has seen and loved,

No one is too busy to cook.

The Japanese only really started eating what we think of as Japanese food in the years after the Second World War.

In the West the word “delicious” is likely to conjure up something laced with sugar, fat and salt, whereas in Japan it signifies a flavour found in mushrooms, grilled fish and light broths.

Love and travel are both powerful spurs to change.

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.

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.

We are stuck in habits and attitudes that seem impossible to break. We are stuck thinking food is love. We are stuck with guilt about food because we are female; or stuck not liking vegetables because we are male. We are stuck feeding hungers that often exist more in our brain than our stomach. We are stuck in our happy childhood memories of unhealthy foods. But the biggest way we are stuck is in our belief that our eating habits are something we can do very little about. In fact, we can do plenty. The first step is seeing that eating is a skill that each of us learns and that we retain the capacity for learning it, no matter how old we are.

It is not about learning to like this or that vegetable; but developing an overall attitude to eating that is more open to variety and less governed by the simple sugar-salt-fat palate of junk food.

It is possible to educate children in the pleasures of food; and that doing so will set the children up for a lifetime of healthy eating. Feeding is learning.

If we consistently eat less sugar, it actually changes our sense of sweetness.

Japanese cuisine did not change all at once but in stages.

Japan has somehow managed to achieve the ideal attitude to eating: an obsession with culinary pleasure that is actually conductive to health.

The rise of vast portions - particularly in fast-food restaurants - means that if we eat only the calories we need, we should often stop at half of something; or even a quarter. And no one - child or adult - seems to like the feeling of the glass- - or plate - half empty.

Hunger is always a kind of emptiness - an absence of nourishment - but what it will take to replenish it is far from obvious.

The power siblings have over our eating habits is no small thing. yet we hardly ever talk about these familial influences.

The Japanese bento - pioneered using aluminium boxes in the early twentieth century - offers a structure ideally designed for eating a healthy lunch.

The art of feeding, it turns out, is not about pushing ‘one more bite’ into someone’s mouth, however healthy the food. Nor is it about authoritarian demands to abstain from all treats. It is about creating a mealtime environment where those eating are free to develop their own tastes, because all the choices on the table are real, whole food.

The existence of birthday cake ice cream suggests that we can no longer distinguish celebration foods from everyday ones. We are also not too sure whether we are children or adults.

Why is a bowl of frosted cereal loops with added rainbow marshmallows allowed to count as ‘breakfast’ and not ‘sweets’?

Our olfactory bulbs have gathered endless sense patterns of foods high in sugar, fat and salt. These flavour memories have become part of the fabric of our sense of self and are not easily discarded, because the system, as we have seen, is designed ‘not to forget’.

Chefs are cooking blind, for strangers whose memories are unknown.

Anything can start to taste good if you have enough positive memories of being fed it by a parent.

When eating becomes a matter of life or death, and each new bite is a celebration, you may discover that none of the other stuff was quite as important as sitting and breaking bread together.

Unlike traditional food, which is remembered jointly within families or communities, mass- produced food and drink is remembered across continents. How often do you meet someone who hasn't tasted Coca-Cola, at least once? I have no idea what your mother's cooking tasted like, or whether I would have enjoyed her macaroni cheese. But if you tell me she gave you a Mars bar for a treat every Saturday, I'd instantly be able to share your memory. I'd be recollecting the soft squidge of the nougat and the way the layer of chocolate sometimes splintered as I bit into it. Candy bar nostalgia puts us all on the same page.