First Bite: How We Learn to Eat. Bee Wilson

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СКАЧАТЬ I realized, with a jolt, that almost all the options – other than plain vanilla – contained chocolate in one form or another. Would we pick mint chocolate chunk or cherry chocolate chunk or chocolate ice cream with chocolate brownie pieces or caramel ice cream with pieces of caramel chocolate? 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.

      Once you recognize the simple fact that food preferences are learned, many of the ways we currently approach eating start to look a little weird. To take a small example, consider the parents who go to great lengths to ‘hide’ vegetables in children’s meals. Is broccoli really so terrible that it must be concealed from innocent minds? Whole cookbooks have been devoted to this arcane pursuit. It starts with the notion that children have an innate resistance to vegetables, and will only swallow them unawares, blitzed into pasta sauce or baked into sweet treats; they could never learn to love courgette for its own sake. In our harried, sleep-deprived state, parents find it hard to play the long game. We think we are being clever when we smuggle some beetroot into a cake. Ha! Tricked you into eating root vegetables! But since the child is not conscious that they are consuming beetroot, the main upshot is to entrench their liking for cake. A far cleverer thing would be to help children learn to become adults who choose vegetables consciously, of their own accord.

      By failing to see that eating habits are learned, we misunderstand the nature of our current diet predicament. As we are often reminded, in doom-laden terms, eating has taken a dramatic collective wrong turn in recent decades. As of 2010, poor diet and physical inactivity accounted for 10 per cent of all deaths and disease worldwide, ahead of tobacco smoke (6.3 per cent) and household air pollution (4.3 per cent).⁴ Around two-thirds of the population are either overweight or obese in rich countries; and the rest of the world is fast catching up. The moral usually drawn from these statistics is that we are powerless to resist the sugary, salty, fatty foods that the food industry promotes. Everything tastes better with bacon! As the journalist Michael Moss exposed in 2013, the big food companies engineer foods with a chemically calculated ‘bliss point’ designed to get us hooked.⁵ Newspapers sometimes project a future in which obesity levels continue to rise indefinitely until almost everyone in the world is affected.

      But there’s something else going on here, which usually gets missed. Not everyone is equally susceptible to the dysfunction of our food supply. Some people manage to eat sugary, salty, fatty foods in modest quantities, and then stop. Others find these supposedly irresistible foods the opposite of blissful. If two-thirds of the population are overweight or obese, then fully a third are not. This is astonishing, given just how many opportunities there now are to eat doughnuts. Exposed to the same food that bombards us all, these lucky people have learned different responses. It’s in all our interests to find out how they have done it.

      Many campaigners would say cooking is the answer. If only children could be taught how to cook and plant vegetable gardens, they would automatically become healthier. It sounds convincing: school gardens are a lovely thing. But by themselves, they are not enough to make a child relate to food in healthy ways. Our difficulty is not just that we haven’t learned to cook and grow food, however important that is: it’s that we haven’t learned to eat in ways that support health and happiness. Traditional cuisines across the world were founded on a strong sense of balance, with norms about which foods go together, and how much one should eat at different times of day. Much cooking now, however, is nothing like this. In my experience as a food journalist, chefs and food writers are, if anything, more prone to compulsive eating and other disordered food obsessions than non-cooks. For cooking to become the solution to our diet crisis, we first have to learn how to adjust our responses to food. Cooking skills are no guarantee of health if your inclinations are for twice-fried chicken, Neapolitan rum babas and French aligot: potatoes mashed with a ton of cheese.

      The reason many find it hard to eat healthily is that we have never learned any differently. Like children, most of us eat what we like and we only like what we know. Never before have whole populations learned (or mislearned) to eat in societies where calorie-dense food was so abundant and policed with so few norms about portion sizes and mealtimes. Nor is overeating the only problem that plagues modern affluent civilizations. Statistics suggest that around 0.3 per cent of young women are anorexic and another 1 per cent are bulimic, with rising numbers of men joining them.⁶ What statistics are not particularly effective at telling us is how many others – whether overweight or underweight – are in a perpetual state of anxiety about what they consume, living in fear of carbs or fat grams and unable to derive straightforward enjoyment from meals. A 2003 study of 2,200 American college students suggested that weight concern is very common: 43 per cent of this sample were worried about their weight most of the time (across both sexes) and 29 per cent of the women described themselves as ‘obsessively preoccupied’ with weight.⁷

      Our dietary malaise is often discussed in fatalistic terms, as if our preference for hamburgers were a life sentence: diets don’t work, sugar is addictive and so on. What we forget is that, as omnivores, we are extremely gifted at changing the way we eat to accommodate different environments. Admittedly, no one has ever encountered a food environment quite like the one we now find ourselves in, flooded with cheap calories in deceptive packaging. To survive in our current situation will entail very different skills from those needed by a Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer. Yet there is every reason to suppose that we are capable of acquiring these skills, if we give ourselves half a chance.

      If our food habits are learned, they can also be relearned. Imagine you were adopted at birth by parents who lived in a remote village in a far-flung country. Your tastes would be quite unlike the ones you ended up with. We all begin life with an innate liking for sweetness and a suspicion of bitterness, yet there is nothing inevitable in our physiology that says that we will grow up dreading vegetables and craving fudge. The trouble is, we do not tend to see it this way.

      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. The greatest public health problem of modern times is how to persuade people to make better food choices. But we have been looking for answers in the wrong places.

      Our discussion about diet is usually framed in terms of better information. A sea of articles and books suggests that the reason for the obesity crisis is that we were given the wrong advice: we were told to avoid fat when the real demon was sugar.⁸ There’s something in this. It certainly didn’t help that many of the ‘low-fat’ products marketed as healthy over the past few decades were padded with refined carbohydrates and were therefore more fattening than the fats we were being advised to give up.⁹ During the period that dieticians were admonishing us to abstain from saturated fats such as those in butter, cream and meat, obesity rates were consistently going up, not down. It is becoming increasingly clear that eating fat is not in and of itself the thing that makes you fat or gives you heart disease.

      Before we start blaming the confusing low-fat advice for our current ill health, however, it might be useful to consider the extent to which we ever followed those anti-fat warnings. The vast majority of people heard what the ‘food police’ had to say on the subject of fat and ignored it. At the height of the low-fat orthodoxy, in 1998, some of the leading nutrition scientists in the world co-authored a paper in which they lamented the public’s failure to follow their guidelines. The scientists found, to their dismay, that after more than two decades of being advised to reduce fat, people were still eating ‘about the same’ amount of it. The percentage of calories from fat in the American diet dropped slightly from 1976 to 1991 (from about 36 per cent in 1976 to 34 per cent in 1991) but this was only because people were consuming more total calories. In absolute terms, the fat grams people consumed on average remained the same.¹⁰

      David L. Katz of the Yale University Prevention Research Center is a rare voice of sanity in the clamorous world of nutrition. СКАЧАТЬ