“When it comes to our dining habits, there is a giant mismatch between thought and deed, between knowledge and behavior.” (pg.xx)
This week I am reading from First Bite: How We Learn to Eat by Bee Wilson. One of my ILC objectives is to explore the nature versus nurture aspect of taste development, or as it applies to me, to find out if I was born a picky eater, or did I learn to be? In Michael Twitty’s The Cooking Gene it is said that Twitty’s palette was “ruined” by the introduction of fast food, making me wonder how foods play parallel to each other while ones taste is developing, and how our human evolution influences what we seek as children. First Bite was highly recommended to me as a tool for answering these questions and has the bonus of being endorsed by Nigella Lawson
Introduction
“We think we are being clever when we smuggle some beets into cake. Ha! Tricked you into eating root vegetables! But since our children are not consiouse that they are consuming beets, 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.” (pg.xvi)
This quote captured me early on in the book, I identify with it very much although the child I am tricking is myself. I am always hiding vegetables in my own meals, trying to disguise them in sauces and making them generally undetectable to myself. Can I teach myself to enjoy these vegetables at this point in my life? I have tried virtually zero methods of trying to make vegetables I don’t like taste good, although I have a playbook of ways to overpower their flavor and hide their form. Could I not use the very same flavors but keep and try to enjoy the vegetables?
“When it comes to our dining habits, there is a giant mismatch between thought and deed, between knowledge and behavior.” (pg.xx)
The introductions sets up several of the topics explored in the main sections of the book, hitting on many questions and ideas I was already hoping to explore. She references the way evolution has influenced human taste buds, how pre-historic eras taught us to seek sugar as a high-calorie food source as a means of survival, as well as the chemical process of our brains and dopamine’s role in eating and enjoyment. She goes on to discuss the nationwide obecity epidemic and the role of manufactured foods in human health, and questions how our early exposure to these foods effects our taste development.
Chapter One ~ Likes and Dislikes
In chapter one Wilson begins by exploring different possibilities for our unique palettes, looking at both genetics and social reasonings. I particularly enjoyed the way she explained her thinking early in the chapter, through this story about her children.
“There is no such thing as a food that will please everyone. My oldest child- a contrarian- doesn’t like chocolate; my youngest- a conformist- adores it. It’s hard to say how much of this has to do with chocolate actually tasting different to each of them, and how much of this has to do with the social payoff you get from being the person who either likes or loathes something so central to the surrounding culture. The one who loves chocolate gets the reward of enjoying something almost everyone agrees is a treat. And he gets lots of treats. The one who doesn’t like chocolate gets fewer sweets, but what he does get is the thrill of surprising people with his oddball tastes. He fills the chocolate-shaped void with licorice” (pg.2)
Looking past messages surround health and weight, do children receive cultural or social messages/rewards from food? How much is the brain able to decide that it enjoys a certain food, and how much is out of its control? Wilson goes on to share the findings of scientists over the years, notable Kent Berridge who brought to light the difference between wanting and liking a food (the first being motivation to eat, the second being motivation to enjoy) and that the taste impact differes between the two.
Wilson spends a good deal of time explaining the findings and conclusions of a study conducted by Dr. Clara Marie Davis in 1926, which studied the effects of food choice freedom in young children aged six to eleven months. Each day they were studied the children were offered a selection of whole foods, of which they could have unlimited amounts every day. Dr. Davis’s hypothesis contradicted scientific beliefs at the time, but within two years was proving to have positive effects on the health of the children, many of whom came into the study underweight. Within six years she was also discovering new facts about child taste development.
“The results, which have been hotly discussed by doctors ever since, were dramatic. Without any preconceived notions about what foods were suitable for them, the babies showed enthusiasm for everything from bone marrow to turnips. They didn’t realize they weren’t supposed to like beets or organ meats. All of them tried all of the thirty-four foods, except for two who never attempted lettuce and one who shunned spinach.” (pg.6)
Wilson later determines that “The main way we learn to like foods is by trying them” (pg.19) and references Robert Zajonc’s term “mere exposure” as a means of explaining how one area of the world will develop a taste for what another region dislikes or does not use. She discusses neophobia in food and how our aversions to the unknown can create the earlier referenced social messages conveyed through food, as well as how food fears are socially created, limiting what a child will try. Her section on neurodivergent children’s development of taste hit close to home, I was a very picky eater as a child and I grew up to have a pretty unusual brain. I am curious if I will learn some things about myself as I read this book.
“Maybe it is the sense of achievement in having conquered an aversion that makes adult beet fans flaunt their enjoyment so overtly. Foodies trumpet their love of the hated vegetables of childhood: cauliflower and Brussels sprouts join beets as dinner-party favorites. But beet-eaters are not just showing off. It is possible to reach a point where those complex, bitter flavors deliver more pleasure than the simple blandness of mashed potato. (pg.35)
Chapter Two ~ Memory
“Memory is the single most powerful driving force in how we learn to eat; it shapes all of our yearnings” (pg.40)
Chapter two explores the role of memory in taste development, and the many ways memory plays into the social role food takes in our lives. Wilson takes the reader back through their lives, explaining how they had the capacity of nostalgia as a baby, and even in the womb we are developing with our mother diets. She proves this by the results of a study, which found adults who were fed vanilla breastmilk as a child would later in life still enjoy that familiar taste, even when in something as contrasting as ketchup.
Wilson takes a large interest in smell and the human olfaction process as she explores food and memory. She opens the chapter by telling stories of people with anosmia, the inability to smell and therefore taste most foods. These stories included the diagnosis of a four-year-old who rarely seemed hungry and struggled at mealtimes, and a woman whose marriage ended quickly following the accident that caused her anosmia.
“Her relationship could not survive her inability to share her husband’s continuing pleasure in food. Before the accident, they had both loved throwing dinner parties, and her husband couldn’t understand that elaborate cooking now did nothing for her. Every meal was a cruel reminder of what she had lost. The predicament of those who are born with anosmia is that they can’t share the pleasurable food memories that the rest of us have. The predicament of those who develop anosmia later in life is that they have the memories, but no means to access them. They are cut off from their own past.” (pg.38)
The way Wilson wrote this chapter makes it hard for me to summarize, while she is supporting a cohesive message throughout it is sometimes hard to understand or explain why each pieces of her writing are relevant until you’ve finished reading. Overall she is trying to get through the message that smell and the human olfaction system create and therefore drive the nostalgia and connection we feel with certain tastes and smells, and that this connection to memory drives taste development as both a child and an adult. She continues to use the words of anosmia patients combined with an account of scientific discoveries related to human smell capacity to paint this picture, and by the end of the chapter it feels very powerful and well put, but the writing style causes me to struggle with my summaries.
“Among memoirs by World War II prisoners of war, a common theme is not just hunger, but the fevered memories to which it gave rise, consisting of all the things the POWs would eat again once they were free. Very seldom did they build these dreams about the grown-up foods of sophisticated restaurants; it was the food of childhood and of home that came to mind: stodgy, filling, and safe. One British ex-POW remembered dreaming two nights in a row about “omelets and treacle pudding.” He also remembered his bitter disappointment on waking up, since “either was as obtainable as a slice of the moon” (pg.52)
I was particularly interested in this section in which Wilson discusses the food cravings and desires recorded by prisoners of war in World War II. These deep food longings were not isolated to the British prisoners, prisoners from the Americas, Australia, Europe, and Japan all experienced this “food obsession” to the point that they began hallucinating about sugar. She pulls a quote from food historian Sue Shepard, stating that the men in the Japanese camps “regressed to a childish state” throughout these withdrawals. I wonder how much of this is the evolutionary craving for sugar as a high-calorie source, when your body is hungry will it begin to crave things it knows will keep it alive so sugar has become the evolutionary “good” taste. But they weren’t craving purely sugar, they were craving the baked goods and sweet treats they grew up around, seeking a feeling of comfort in the memory. Historically, oppressed people have in some way recorded the foods they wished they had, but this is also a pattern observed most often in tandem with famine.
Throughout this chapter Wilson stresses the importance of “homeland” foods, and tastes that induce nostalgia and memory. I am curious how one could test the way we taste in different contexts, different frequencies, how much of flavor is our own life experiences influencing our taste buds. How does place impact the way we eat, our emotions and memories while we eat?
Chapter Three ~ Children’s Food
In her third chapter, Children’s Food Wilson gives a detailed timeline of the debates surrounding children’s food, specifically what food is suitable for children, and how much say children should have in their own diets. Throughout the first half of the chapter she explores the many phases and fads that have passed through the realm of children’s nutrition since the Edwardian era, explaining their views on children’s food needs to be similar to the food needs of a young animal, they should be fed by what their parents and guardians gather and determine is good for them. She touches on many foods that were at some point in history considered unfit for children consumption, mainly focused on communities in the United Kingdom, highlighting their rationale and impact. Standouts included bread as being too tempting and hard to digest, spinach as it came out whole in babies stool similar to corn, and fruit, somewhat for for the fear that its seeds and pulp were causing harm to children, but mostly because it was considered “the candy of its day” as Wilson says, stating that there was a suspicion that anything beneficial to a child diet could be something so highly desired by children.
Of all of these stories I was most interested in the rice pudding debates, as I have personal experience with English school lunch rice pudding. Wilson shines light on the prevalence of rice pudding in children’s school meals in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and children’s overwhelming dislike for it. During this time the general thinking surrounding children’s food did not take into account any of the child’s own preferences for food, or in fact any well known food preference patterns children. As Wilson points out and I can distinctly remember, rice pudding is a warm, slightly sweet, milky mush of a desert. I have never liked it and honestly I don’t care to try it again at this moment, just the memory makes me feel a little sickly. It is compared to risotto but I would argue that in most schools it is much more liquidy, the rice is mushy and still notably more savory than the sweet milk soup it sits in. The referenced debated pulled in many school and community leaders, many of which attested that oftentimes students will turn down rice pudding even if food insecure.
The general of this chapter seems to be centered on whether we should be catering children’s diets to their taste preferences, or if children’s bodies require such a rigid set of rules to nourish themselves. Wilson looks at the shift in food manufacturing and marketing that took place in the 1990’s, when corporate marketing began to shift to directly marketing to children with the goal of “entertaining and amusing children with food” (pg.87). This also lead her into a discussion about the kinds of foods you find on a children’s menu at a restaurant, the common presences of fries, chicken fingers, Mac and cheese. While I love all of these foods, they’re definitively not the ideal food for children to be eating all the time. We know that children can and do develop a love for healthy foods but that it is often a matter of exposure. I see a direct link between direct-to-child marketing of these foods and a childs tastes developing a positive association with them. I think there is a middle ground to be found between allowing children and children’s food to fall within this plain and ill-nutritious food, and the expectation that we can convince or compel children to like rice pudding.
Personal Menu
This week I am working on writing about the years after moving the United States and the cakes my mother would make that marked celebrations. It is not finished yet but I would say it’s 70% there and I know where I want to take it next so I am very happy with my progress this week. I also talked to my mom about my first foods/meals.