First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

"Food historian Bee Wilson delves deep into the latest research from food psychologists, neuroscientists, and nutritionists to reveal that our food habits are shaped by family and culture, memory and gender, hunger and love. We do not come into the world with an innate sense of taste or nutrition as omnivores: we have to learn how and what to eat, how sweet is too sweet, and what food will give us the most energy for the coming day. Drawing on the psychology of eating, she shows that it is possible, despite our dysfunctional food industry and habits, to feed ourselves better"--

Publisher Marketing: A Wall Street Journal Book of the Year Biographical Note : Bee Wilson is a celebrated food writer, food historian, and author of five books, including First Bite: How We Learn to Eat and Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat . She has been named BBC Radio's food writer of the year and is a three-time Guild of Food Writers food journalist of the year. She writes a monthly column on food in the Wall Street Journal . She lives in Cambridge, England. Review Quotes : " First Bite is a feast of a book."-- Financial Times Review Quotes : "An anthropological category killer on the topic of how we learn to eat."-- New York Times Book Review Review Quotes : "A fascinating new book.... [Bee Wilson's] message is a hopeful, even liberating, one."-- Washington Post Review Quotes : "A brilliant, heartfelt book about [the] crisis in our contemporary diet.... Wilson is intelligent, passionate, sincere, tirelessly curious and endlessly willing to admit mistakes and learn from experience."-- London Review of Books Review Quotes : "Delightful.... The well-meaning experts lecture us about what we ought to eat; Wilson wants to understand why we eat what we do."-- Guardian (UK) Review Quotes : "Wilson sprinkles just enough personal narrative through First Bite to establish her as a sympathetic figure without turning the book into a memoir.... Her tone is refreshingly loose and friendly; she's one of the few scholars I can think of who can effectively quote both Margaret Mead and Homer Simpson."-- Washington Post Review Quotes : "Wilson lays out her discoveries in a series of easily digestible chapters that balance science and anecdote with short interludes on various foods.... Her tone is down-to-earth and research-based at once, gentle, encouraging, no-nonsense."-- Boston Globe Review Quotes : "Absorbing read...timely."-- Los Angeles Review of Books Publisher Marketing : We are not born knowing what to eat; as omnivores it is something we each have to figure out for ourselves. From childhood onward, we learn how big a "portion" is and how sweet is too sweet. We learn to enjoy green vegetables -- or not. But how does this education happen? What are the origins of taste?

Format: Paperback | Pages: 360 | Publication Date: 2016-11-08