![]() Two of my favorites include: 1) Eat soup, and 2) “Sugar is not love. And listening to a few simple “rules” like those listed in the epilogue. But she rationally makes her case for this, explaining that between the ages of four and seven months, “there is a window when humans are extraordinarily receptive to flavor, but by following current guidelines on exclusive breastfeeding, parents tend to miss it.” While Wilson discusses Baby Led Weaning in Chapter 4 on feeding, she generally thinks that picture is not all positive, instead suggesting that parents expose children to a range of whole foods as early as four months, making repeated attempts even if a child first resists by making a face. In a somewhat controversial move, Wilson departs from the worldwide guidelines that infants should be exclusively breastfed for the first six months of life. When it comes to chocolate Wilson convincingly explains that, “Female chocolate cravings are an archetypal learned behavior.” As for potato chips, she argues that our love of them may go back to our primate ancestors for whom crunchy insects were an important source of protein. Two of these food mini-essays-chocolate and potato chips-capture the tone, factual research, and complexity of First Bite. After each analytic and reflective chapter, eight specific foods get a mini-essay about themselves, like beets, birthday cake, chocolate, and potato chips. Over eight chapters Wilson takes us on a food journey that roughly parallels a child’s development, with detours into disorders (turns out that “eating disorders are as numberless as snowflakes”) and meditations on hunger. ![]() After my boys arrived though thoughts changed to do things: how best to feed them and how best to lose my “baby weight.” In reading First Bite, I have come to see these desires as interrelated, and almost certainly in ways I still do not fully understand, but which will surely influence my children’s eating habits, and thus those of all my descendants. I can confirm that when I was pregnant I indeed had yearnings for comfort food. Wilson writes, “Memory is the single most powerful driving force in how we learn to eat it shapes all of our yearnings.” According to Bee Wilson, food critic and historian and author of the recent book First Bite: How We Learn to Eat, this is not at all surprising. In other words, I conjure up memories of food-tastes, settings, celebrations. An exploration of the extraordinary and surprising origins of our tastes and eating habits, First Bite also shows us how we can change our palates to lead healthier, happier lives.When I think about my childhood home I think about Buddy’s pizza, Leo’s Coney Island Greek salad, and Lelli’s zip sauce. But Wilson also shows that both adults and children have immense potential for learning new, healthy eating habits. The way we learn to eat holds the key to why food has gone so disastrously wrong for so many people. Wilson examines why the Japanese eat so healthily, whereas the vast majority of teenage boys in Kuwait have a weight problem - and what these facts can tell Americans about how to eat better. ![]() Taking the reader on a journey across the globe, Wilson introduces us to people who can only eat foods of a certain color prisoners of war whose deepest yearning is for Mom's apple pie a nine year old anosmia sufferer who has no memory of the flavor of her mother's cooking toddlers who will eat nothing but hotdogs and grilled cheese sandwiches and researchers and doctors who have pioneered new and effective ways to persuade children to try new vegetables. In First Bite, award-winning food writer Bee Wilson draws on the latest research from food psychologists, neuroscientists, and nutritionists to reveal that our food habits are shaped by a whole host of factors: family and culture, memory and gender, hunger and love. But how does this education happen? What are the origins of taste? We learn to enjoy green vegetables - or not. From childhood onward, we learn how big a "portion" is and how sweet is too sweet. We are not born knowing what to eat as omnivores it is something we each have to figure out for ourselves.
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