First Bite: How We Learn to Eat. Bee Wilson
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу First Bite: How We Learn to Eat - Bee Wilson страница 2
Название: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
Автор: Bee Wilson
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Кулинария
isbn: 9780007549719
isbn:
You don’t have to look far in our world to encounter people – of all sizes – who relate to food in chaotic ways. The chaos can take many forms: compulsive overeating, undereating, or extreme pickiness. Some people become so obsessed with the purity of what enters their mouths that they cannot accept invitations to eat with friends. It is a lonely occupation, being someone who wrestles to control their responses to food, given that modern life is steeped with things to eat, both real and imaginary. Snacks assail us at the checkout; dream feasts tease us from hoardings, newspapers and TV cooking shows.
Without ever quite having a full-blown eating disorder – though I came close – I managed to make myself pretty miserable about eating for the best part of a decade, from the middle school years to young adulthood. I probably appeared fine: a bit overweight, nothing more. But food was my main relationship, and – although it had some of the thrills of romance, especially when I was in the kitchen with a hunk of sweet brioche dough – it wasn’t a stable or sustaining kind of love. We talk in a sickly way of ‘indulgent’ foods, but when you are trapped in compulsive habits of dependency on them, it does not feel like being pampered. There were days when I gave myself up to consuming guilty treats. Other days were for not eating, which was even worse, taunting myself with the foods that I wouldn’t permit myself.
Thankfully, that phase of life now seems distant. Eating well – by which I don’t mean ‘clean eating’ or raw juice fasts but regular meals of real, flavoursome food – just isn’t that complicated for me any more. Now that I am through on the other side, I can see that over a period of months, if not years, I learned to master a series of skills that I’d once deemed insurmountable. I learned that it was OK to eat a hearty meal when I was hungry; but also OK to stop when I was full. My cravings for pastries lessened and my cravings for vegetables increased. There are still plenty of things I worry and obsess about, believe me, but my own eating is seldom one of them. Dinner is just dinner: nothing more nor less than the high point of the day.
In our house, as in many others, the battleground over food has shifted to the children. As a parent trying to get my three children to eat healthily – but not obsessively so – I have sometimes felt as lost as I once did about my own eating. After the milk stage (and that was hard enough) none of the skills of feeding came naturally. How do you promote vegetables to an ironic teenager in a way that isn’t counterproductive? What do you do when your daughter comes home and says her friends have started skipping lunch? How do you keep a sense of proportion about fat and sugar without giving in completely to the ultra-processed food that is now ubiquitous?
In those busy moments after school and before bed, I cook a quick meal that I hope will please everyone. I may find that one child grumbles about the grilled aubergines, another says they are the best bit and the third sits quietly weeping because, while he actually likes aubergines, they are touching a piece of chicken and are therefore inedible. Did I say the high point of the day? And yet, comparatively speaking, my children are not problem eaters.
All parents have moments of thinking that it just isn’t possible to teach a child to eat well; or at least not your child. Many grown-ups are more pessimistic still about their own ability to change how they behave around food. But writing this book has taught me that there is immense potential for improving our eating habits. It may take longer for some people to get there than others, but learning how to eat better – which is quite different from going on a diet – is within anyone’s grasp. Perhaps the most eloquent argument for learning new ways to eat is that of pleasure. Eating is – or should be – a daily source of delight rather than something to fight against. It’s good here, on the other side of the divide. I do hope you’ll join me.
‘One of the reasons I like bread and jam,’ said Frances, ‘is that it does not slide off your spoon in a funny way.’
RUSSELL HOBAN, Bread and Jam for Frances
So many of our anxieties around diet take the form of a search for the perfect food, the one that will cure all our ills. Eat this! Don’t eat that! We obsess about the properties of various ingredients: the protein, the omega oils, the vitamins. But this is getting ahead of ourselves. Nutrients only count when a person picks up food and eats it. How we eat – how we approach food – is what really matters. If we are going to change our diets, we first have to relearn the art of eating, which is a question of psychology as much as nutrition. We have to find a way to want to eat what’s good for us.
Our tastes follow us around like a comforting shadow. They seem to tell us who we are. Maybe this is why we act as if our core attitudes to eating are set in stone. We make frequent attempts – more or less half-hearted – to change what we eat, but almost no effort to change how we feel about food: how well we deal with hunger, how strongly attached we are to sugar, our emotions on being served a small portion. We try to eat more vegetables, but we do not try to make ourselves enjoy vegetables more, maybe because there’s a near-universal conviction that it is not possible to learn new tastes and shed old ones. Yet nothing could be further from the truth.
All the foods that you regularly eat are ones that you learned to eat. Everyone starts life drinking milk. After that, it’s all up for grabs.
Bone marrow from wild game is considered the best first baby food among the hunting tribes of Tanzania.1 If you were born in the Far Eastern republic of Laos, it could be gelatinous rice, pre-chewed by your mother and transferred from her mouth to yours (this is sometimes called kiss-feeding).2 For Western babies, that first bite of solid food may be powdered cereal from a packet or purée from a jar; it could be organic pumpkin, steamed and strained and served with a hypoallergenic spoon; or a random nibble from a parent’s plate. Aside from milk, there is simply no such thing as a universal food. Not even for babies.fn1
From our first year of life, human tastes are astonishingly diverse. As omnivores, we have no inbuilt knowledge of which foods are good and safe. Each of us has to use our senses to figure out for ourselves what is edible, depending on what’s available. In many ways, this is a delightful opportunity. It’s the reason there are such fabulously varied ways of cooking in the world.
But we haven’t paid anything like enough attention to another consequence of being omnivores, which is that eating is not something we are born instinctively knowing how to do, like breathing. It is something we learn. A parent feeding a baby is training them how food should taste. At the most basic level, we have to learn what is food and what is poison. We have to learn how to satisfy our hunger and also when to stop eating. Unlike the anteater which eats only small termites, we have few natural instincts to fall back on. Out of all the choices available to us as omnivores, we have to figure out which foods are likeable, which are lovable and which are disgusting. From these preferences, we create our own pattern of eating, as distinctive as a signature.
Or that’s how it used to be. In today’s food culture, many people seem to have acquired uncannily homogenous tastes, markedly more so than in the past. In 2010 two consumer scientists argued that the taste preferences of childhood provided a new way of thinking about the causes of obesity. They noted a ‘self-perpetuating cycle’: food companies push foods high in sugar, fat and salt, which means that children learn to like them, and so the companies invent ever more of these foods ‘that contribute to unhealthy eating habits’.3 The main influence on a child’s palate may no longer be a parent but a series of food manufacturers whose products – despite their illusion of infinite choice – deliver a monotonous flavour hit, quite unlike the more varied flavours of traditional cuisine.
I went to the cinema with one of my children СКАЧАТЬ