First Bite: How We Learn to Eat (38 page)
In contrast to all the other things we work on in life that are far less likely to increase our well-being—including dieting—it is astonishing how little effort we put into changing our eating preferences for the better. There is every indication that the basic methods of eating better—increasing variety, including more plant foods, structuring meals, and becoming more responsive to hunger cues—can be learned at any
age,
given the motivation. In the preceding chapters, we have seen that while we think of our “tastes” as being an intimate part of ourselves, they are actually mostly learned, and therefore can be relearned. Remember how the great Karl Duncker—in Chapter 1—taught himself in his thirties to like the strange substance called salad cream, so that he would be able to consume British salads? Or think back to how Keith Williams, in Chapter 7, was able to use his Plate A–Plate B system with both adults and kids to free them from a lifetime of picky eating.
You were a child once, too. When you arrived in the world, your only food preferences were milk and buried memories from your mother’s diet. Those early weeks were dominated by meals—the stab of hunger, the sweet contentment of being sated—but you could not yet tell dinner from breakfast. You didn’t yet know—lucky you!—what a trans fat was, or a Frappuccino. No one had taught you to worry whether you were getting enough protein, or to feel guilt when your stomach was full. You had never watched a fast-food commercial, and on the relative merits of quinoa and macaroons, you had no opinion. Food was wide open for you. The great garden of ingredients—from bitter greens to sweet dates—was all equally unknown: all new, all strange, all waiting to be discovered.
It may not feel like it, but you never lost your potential to change how you eat. The wonderful secret of being an omnivore is that we can adjust our desires, even late in the game. It won’t happen on the first bite. Long-standing appetites do not take kindly to being ignored; it is unsettling at first to lengthen the gap between meals, or to leave your habitual foods uneaten. Sometimes, it is hard to wrestle your disgust long enough to put something new in your mouth. Assuming that you don’t retch or die, maybe you try the experiment again. Over time, you forget that this food was ever strange. It settles into something like a pleasure. One day, you eat a plate of cucumber with mint, and instead of finding it dull, you marvel at how clean and herbal it tastes. Now, it is the old hungers and habits—the sickly sugar headrush, the lingering salty aftertastes—that feel uncomfortable. Given enough repetitions, the new ways of eating may become as familiar and sweet to you as milk.
If
you still doubt
that tastes are something we learn, consider the chili pepper. On first encounter, chili is irritating, containing a chemical (capsaicin) that activates pain receptors on the tongue. Chili burns! Yet in many parts of Asia, Africa, and South America, these pungent peppers (
Capsicum
spp.) are eaten with relish every day.
The obvious assumption, which those of us with milder diets leap to, is that chili just doesn’t feel as painful to those who eat a lot of it. But a groundbreaking paper by Paul Rozin and Deborah Schiller in 1980 refuted this theory. Rozin and Schiller tested Mexicans in a rural village where chili is eaten three times a day. Surprisingly, they found that the Mexicans were not desensitized to chili. They felt the burn just as strongly as Americans who ate it, on average, only once a week. The difference was that they enjoyed it more.
Very young children are generally protected from the burn in chili-eating cultures. The only time a toddler is likely to taste chili is when a mother places it on her breast to wean the child off her milk, a gesture that confirms that children find the spiciness horrifying. The question, as Rozin and Schiller put it, is “How do tens of millions of little chili haters become chili lovers every year?” In the Mexican village they studied, almost everyone over the age of five or six ate chili in some form at every meal. The villagers yearned for it when it was not available and said that food tasted bland without it.
Rozin and Schiller argue that the human conversion to chili—which is not seen in other omnivores, such as rats—represents a “hedonic shift.” Around the age of five, children start to season
their own food. They see older siblings and parents reaching for the salsa on the table and start to copy them. Maybe the first bite makes them cry with pain, but over time, they start to enjoy the aftereffects. They associate chili with other good-tasting foods, such as tortillas and refried beans. They develop a perverse enjoyment of the very aspect of the chili that they first disliked: the warmth and pain it causes in the mouth. Rozin compares it to the benign masochism of watching horror movies or going on roller coasters.
Not everyone needs to learn to like chili. Some people never stop finding it irritating. But for chili, we could substitute many other pungent foods, from bitter vegetables to sour citrus to strong cheese to peppery olive oil. The fact that millions of children every year can learn to like chili offers hope for us all: that our next bite can be different from the first.
This Is Not Advice
A
fter everything I’ve written about the futility and
inefficacy of so much dietary advice, it would be pretty rich for me to give you any. No amount of urging from me to eat this or that food will make you eat it. If I suggest you give up the foods you love, you might—quite understandably—tell me where to get off. So I won’t try. I have no idea what your personal circumstances are. I don’t know what’s in your fridge or what your views are on cheese or whether gluten agrees with you or whether you run marathons or how easy you find it to decline a second slice of pie or whether your mother gave you sweets when you cried. Maybe you are one of those fortunate people for whom neither food nor weight has ever been an issue. Good luck to you!
But in the course of writing this book—not to mention through the experiences of eating food for forty years and feeding various people, including my children—I feel I’ve learned some things that have helped me to make my peace with eating. These are some of the insights I wish I’d figured out sooner. I hope you won’t mind if I pass them on.
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.
No one is doomed by genes to eat badly. Pickiness is governed more by environment than by biology.
We mostly eat what we like (give or take). Before you can change what you eat, you need to change what you like. And you will never like new foods unless you give yourself the chance to try them. The fact that you don’t like something now is not necessarily a sign that you will never like it.
If you want yourself to eat better, focus less on the food and more on your own response to it.
Nothing tastes good when it’s eaten in a spirit of coercion. The secret is—as far as possible—to make healthy food and pleasurable food one and the same.
Your first job when eating is to nourish yourself.
Most people eat much better when most of what they eat is home-cooked. But this principle only works if you learn to make at least a few things other than cupcakes.
No one is too busy to cook.
Disgust is even more powerful than desire. We should use this more to our advantage. Become a food snob. The ideal scenario for healthy food shopping is when you won’t buy most of what’s for sale, not because you shouldn’t, but because it repels you.
Calories are not the same as morals. No food can be either “naughty” or “virtuous.” It’s all just food.
Before you change what you eat, change how you eat. It is virtually impossible to have a healthy relationship with food if you don’t eat structured meals. I won’t tell you how many meals a day you need. It might be two large ones; it might be five or six smaller ones. Either way, don’t skip them.
Eat soup.
If it’s not a mealtime and you are wondering which of two “healthy” snacks you should buy, the answer is probably neither.
If it is a mealtime, and you are vacillating between two main courses, go for the one you really love. And when you are full, stop.
No one likes waste, but it’s time to abandon the idea that it’s bad manners to leave food on your plate. What’s bad manners is to make someone feel ashamed for leaving food on their plate when they are full.
Smaller plates—and smaller lunchboxes and smaller wineglasses—really do work (and mean you can minimize wasting food when at home). Eat dinner on side plates or bowls and dessert on saucers. If you spend a week or two weighing everything you eat on a digital scale—without actually calorie counting—you start to see how out of kilter our idea of portions has become.
Rethink what counts as a main course. Instead of having a large pizza with a tiny salad garnish, have a huge salad with a small pizza on the side. It’s still a very comforting meal.
Not every happy occasion needs to be marked with a gargantuan piece of cake smothered in sugar. You may find equal joy in a smaller piece, a basket of cherries, and a victory dance.
When making small changes to your diet, try to avoid the mindset of deprivation. Except for my first coffee of the day, I recently switched from milky lattes to black coffee. Instead of feeling sad that I wasn’t drinking all that foamy white milk, I would ask myself whether I’d rather have a drink of water or a drink of black coffee. I chose the black coffee. It then tasted so much nicer. Clearly, the next thing I need to work on is my caffeine addiction.
We hear a lot about “superfoods.” The term is used for foods that are supercharged with certain nutrients. Usually, this is a marketing device, trying to get you to hand over your cash for expensive exotica, such as goji berries or wheatgrass. But how many people do you know who actually eat goji berries on a daily basis? The real superfood would be one that you enjoy that also happens to be healthy: crisp, sweet apples, say; or hard-boiled eggs with celery salt for dipping; or warm asparagus with sesame-soy dressing; or Moroccan carrot and garlic salad. The more of these superfoods you can build into your personal repertoire, the better you will eat.
Regular exercise definitely helps: the endorphins, the expenditure of energy, the fact you are doing something other than eating. But again, find a version that you like so much you positively want to do it, rather than the one that burns the most fat but leaves you so drained you need to take urgent solace in carbohydrates.
If you want your children to eat better, don’t tell them what to do: eat better yourself.
Most of our approaches to feeding children are too short term. We worry about the next five minutes when we should be thinking about the next five years.
If you pressure children to eat whole plates of greens, you are teaching them to dislike the greens—and to dislike you, for that matter. If you persuade them to take tiny tastes (today and again tomorrow and the next day and the day after that), there’s a chance they will become lifelong eaters of greens.
Cajoling, urging, and hinting don’t change how people eat. These techniques don’t work with children and they don’t work with adults.
Girls eat better when food stops being something forbidden.
Boys eat better when their parents continue to expect them to eat vegetables and include them in home-cooked meals as they get older. Or—better still—get them to prepare the home-cooked meals themselves.
It is genuinely possible to reach the point where you desire broccoli more than fries and whole-grain sourdough more than sliced white bread.
Hunger is not always a signal to panic. A day in which you haven’t had a couple of spells of feeling slightly peckish is probably—sad to say—a day when you ate too much.
No one is truly omnivorous. You are allowed to find some foods revolting. You don’t have to like sprouts. It’s when you don’t like any or many vegetables that you are in trouble.
Changing the way you eat is hard, but it can be done. Look at Japan.
T
his book has benefited from the knowledge and wisdom of
many others.
I’m so grateful to those who spoke to me and shared either their experiences or their scholarship on the questions of why and how we come to eat as we do. Some spoke anonymously. Of those who spoke or emailed on the record, I’d like to thank Jose Luis Álvarez Morán and the Action Against Hunger staff, Duncan Boak and the Fifth Sense staff, Carmel McConnell and the Magic Breakfast staff, and Paul Breslin, Lucy Cooke, Helen Crawley, Luis Gigliotti, Yasmin Hosny, David Jukes, E. P. Köster, Barak Kushner, Arja Lyytikäïnen, Dawn and Abi Millard, A. O. Musaiger, Daniel Patterson, Dympna Pearson, Susan Ringwood, Marlena Spieler, Stephen Strauss, Claire Thompson, Albert Westergren, and Keith Williams.
My thinking on food always owes much to my friends at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. I presented an early version of the ideas in
First Bite
to The School of Artisan Cookery; thank you to Alison Swan Parente for inviting me to talk. Another institution I need to thank is the Guild of Food Writers for, among other things, putting on Barak Kushner’s ramen noodle workshop.
I’m grateful to the staff of the Cambridge University Library, where I did much of the research, and to the staff of Hot Numbers coffee shop, where I did much of the writing.
I’ve also been helped by conversations with various people. I found that this was a subject on which everyone has an opinion. First and foremost, my thanks go to David, Tasha, Leo, and Tom Runciman (thanks, Tom, for being so brutally honest). Others who gave me insights and other help include, in no particular order, Abby Scott, Lily Scott Turner, Mark Turner, Melissa Mohr, Caspar Hare, Ranjita Lohan and family, Sarah and Olivia Ray, Dan Jones, Sophie Hannah, Helen Conford, Diana Henry, Jane Kramer, Caroline Boileau, Catherine Blyth, Deborah Friedell, Anne Malcolm, Imogen Roth, Freya and Psyche Brackett, Ed Caffyn, Hilary Cooper, Sybil Kapoor, Emily Gowers, Michele Humes, Susan Friedland, Gareth Stedman Jones, Rose Hilder, Anna Hont, Attila Bacsò, Cara Isaac, Amy Bryant, Lizzie Collingham, Sharon Knights, Jane Ladlow, Anthea Morrison, Tamsin O’Connell, Siân Pooley, Ruth and Garry Runciman, Cathy Runciman, Gonzalo Gil, Lisa Runciman, Reg Lee, Ruth Scurr, Catherine Carr, Inigo Thomas, Andrew Wilson, and Katherine Duncan-Jones. Special thanks to Emily Wilson, Caroline Boileau, and Miranda Landgraf for reading draft versions and offering perceptive comments. I’m grateful to Sylvana Tomaselli for telling me that my original idea didn’t work; you were right.
Thank you to the editors of my former food column at
Stella
magazine, especially Elfreda Pownall, who guided my thoughts on food over the twelve years I wrote it.
I owe immense thanks to my agents, Zoe Pagnamenta and Sarah Ballard, plus Zoe Ross, who couldn’t have been more supportive, of me and of this project.
It’s been a joy to work with the illustrator Annabel Lee again; she drew the birthday cake of my childhood dreams. Nicole Caputo created another beautiful and original cover—thank you.
I’ve been extraordinarily lucky to work for a second time with Lara Heimert at Basic Books, and to work for the first time with Louise Haines at Fourth Estate: two wonderful and perceptive editors. They each improved the book in so many ways, large and small. Kathy Streckfus in the United States and Morag Lyall in the United Kingdom were both superb copyeditors. I’d also like to thank all at Basic Books including Michelle Welsh-Horst, Leah Stecher, Melissa Raymond, Cassie Nelson, and Linda Mark, and all at Fourth Estate, including Georgia Mason, Jo Walker, and Patrick Hargadon.
Needless to say, the mistakes are my own.