First Bite: How We Learn to Eat Read Online Free

something important to tell us. There are hundreds of millions of individuals who somehow swim against the tide of the dysfunctional modern food supply and feed themselves pretty well. There are those who can eat an ice cream cone on a hot day without needing to punish themselves for being “naughty,” who automatically refuse a sandwich because it isn’t lunchtime yet, who usually eat when they are hungry and stop when they are full, who feel that an evening meal without vegetables isn’t really a meal. These individuals have learned eating skills that can protect them in this environment of plenty.
      
    Viewed through the lens of psychology, eating is a classic form of learned behavior. There is a stimulus—an apple tart, say, glazed with apricot jam. And there is a response—your appetite for it. Finally, there is reinforcement—the sensory pleasure and feeling of fullness thateating the tart gives you. This reinforcement encourages you to seek out more apple tarts whenever you have the chance and—depending on just how great you feel after eating them—to choose them over other foods in the future. In lab conditions, rats can be trained to prefer a less sweet diet over a sweeter one when it is packed with more energy and therefore leaves them more satisfied: this is called post-ingestive conditioning.
    We know that a lot of this food-seeking learning is driven by dopamine, a neurotransmitter connected in the brain with motivation. This is a hormone that is stimulated in the brain when your body does something rewarding, such as eating, kissing, or sipping brandy. Dopamine is one of the chemical signals that passes information between neurons to tell your brain that you are having fun, and its release is one of the mechanisms that “stamps in” our flavor preferences and turns them into habits. Once animals have been trained to love certain foods, the dopamine response can be fired up in the brain just by the sight of those foods: monkeys have a dopamine response when they see the yellow skin of bananas; the surge begins to take place as they anticipate the reward. Anticipating dopamine release is the incentive that makes lab rats work hard for another treat by pressing a lever.
    Humans, needless to say, are not lab rats. b In our lives, the stimulus-response behavior around food is as infinitely complex as the social world in which we learn to eat. It’s been calculated that by the time we reach our eighteenth birthday, we will have had 33,000 learning experiences with food (based on five meals or snacks a day). Human behavior is not just a clear-cut matter of cue and consequence, because human beings are not passive objects, but deeply social beings. Our conditioning is often indirect or vicarious. We learn not just from the foods we put in our own mouths, but from what we see others eat, whether in our own families, at school, or on TV.
    As children watch and learn, they pick up many things about food besides how it will taste. A rodent can press a lever to get a sweet reward, but it takes an animal as strange and twisted as a human being to injectsuch emotions as guilt and shame into the business of eating. Before we take our first bite of a certain food, we may have rehearsed eating it in our minds many times. Our cues about when to eat and what to eat and how much extend beyond such drives as hunger and hormones into the territory of ritual (eggs for breakfast), culture (hotdogs at a baseball game), and religion (turkey at Christmas, lamb at Eid).
      
    It soon became clear to me that I could not get the answers I sought about how we learn to eat without exploring our wider food environment, which is a matter of mealtimes and cuisine, and parenting and gender, as well as neuroscience.
    Our modern food environment is fraught with contradictions. The burden of religious guilt that has been progressively lifted from our private lives has become ever more intense in the realm of eating. Like hypocritical