First Bite: How We Learn to Eat Read Online Free Page A

temperance preachers, we demonize many of the things we consume most avidly, leaving us at odds with our own appetites. Numerous foods that were once reserved for celebrations—from meat to sweets—have become everyday commodities, meaning not only that we overconsume them, but that they have lost much of their former sense of festal joy. The idea that you don’t eat between meals now seems as outdated as thinking you must wear a hat when you step out of the house.
    Yet, while the nutritional content of our food supply has changed hugely over the past fifty or so years, other aspects of eating have not changed fast enough to keep pace with the new conditions of modern life. Parents are still using a range of traditional feeding methods—such as urging children to finish what’s on their plate—that were devised for a situation where famine was always around the corner. As we’ll see, such feeding techniques are contributing directly to child obesity in cultures as diverse as China and Kuwait.
    The theme I revisit more than any other is families. Most of what we learn about food happens when we’re children—when we’re sitting at the kitchen table (if your family is lucky enough to have one), being fed. Every bite is a memory, and the most powerful memories are the first ones. At this table, we are given both food and love, and we could beforgiven if, later in life, we have trouble distinguishing the two. It is here that we develop our passions and our disgusts, and get a sense of whether it is more of a waste to leave something on the side of the plate, or eat it up when we are not hungry.
    Our parents—like our governments—hope we will learn about food from all the things they tell us, but what we see and taste matters more than what we hear. In many ways, children are powerless at the table. They cannot control what is put in front of them, or where they sit, or whether they are spoken to kindly or harshly as they eat. Their one great power is the ability to reject or accept. One of the biggest things many children learn at that table is that their own choices about food—to eat or not to eat—can unleash deep emotions in the grown-ups close to them. We find that we can please our parents or drive them to rage just by refusing dessert. And then the adults complain that we are difficult at mealtimes!
    After a certain point in our lives, it is us, and not our parents, spooning food into our mouths. We discover the glorious liberation of being able to choose whatever we want to eat—budget permitting. But our tastes and our food choices are still formed by those early childhood experiences. Rather alarmingly, it seems that our food habits when we were two—whether we played with our food, how picky we were, the amount of fruit we ate—are a pretty accurate gauge of how we will eat when we are twenty.
    The acquisition of eating habits is a far more mysterious skill than other things we learn in childhood, such as tying our shoelaces, counting, or riding a bike. We learn how to eat largely without noticing that this is what we are doing. Equally, we don’t always notice when we have learned ways of eating that are dysfunctional, because they become such a familiar part of ourselves. Having particular tastes is one of the ways that we signal to other people that we are unusual and special. We become known as the person in the family who adores munching on bitter lemon rind, or the one who eats apples right down to the pips.
    You might say that food dislikes do not matter much: each to their own. I won’t give you a hard time for hating the fuzzy skin of peachesifyou will excuse my squeamishness about the gooey whites of soft-boiled eggs. The danger is when you grow up disliking entire food groups, becoming unable to get the nutrition you need from your diet. Doctors working at the front line of child obesity say it has become common in the past couple of decades for many toddlers to eat no fruits or vegetables