Never mind teaching children to cook: they need to be taught to eat. Obvious? Totally, but this is the choosing part of eating, not the chomping and swallowing we are born to do. Yet, terrific survivors that omnivores have proven to be, they do not know poison from medicine unless told so. So, if you were a cave baby all those eons ago, your cave parents would have pointed out the poisonous berries from the nutritious ones, and later on taught you which animals to hunt.
Today’s infants face rather more complicated food lessons, and their parents a horrendous task if they are to bring up a brood with good eating habits and perhaps more importantly a relationship with food that is just as healthy. Bee Wilson’s First Bite: How We Learn To Eat is one of the books that makes me wish I could have my time again. I would guess from the bibliography that she has read every standard work on the psychology of eating, digested all and spat back a condensed form that even so shows what a galling task we face if we are to teach our children to eat in the modern world.
What if we don’t? There’s obviously the obesity epidemic to show that more than a quarter of the population are eating wrong and poor diet is the biggest killer, ahead of smoking and air pollution. There are myriad eating disorders, from mild to serious mental illness, and no amount of pre-programming is going to solve the problem.
Everyone has personal tastes, inherited, learned or just there. ‘Human tastes are astonishingly diverse, and can be mulishly stubborn,’ Wilson says. ‘Even within the same family, likes vary dramatically from person to person [tell me about it].There
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