Bee Wilson Quotes

Japan has somehow managed to achieve the ideal attitude to eating: an obsession with culinary pleasure that is actually conductive to health.

Many of us cling to particular vessels, fetishizing over this mug or that plate.

One thing I always make - and I'm sure this is partly to do with memory and yearning and because I've made it ever since my children were born - I make gingerbread every year. And it's partly just the perfume of the spices in the house, makes it smell like winter to me.

I like quinoa. I like gingerbread. I feel they should be kept separate. I'm not in favor of this thing of making kind of raw, vegan chocolate cake and saying it's as good as chocolate cake. I mean, just eat cake and be done with it. And then have a separate meal of quinoa.

In theory, food writing is an aid or a prelude to actual meals: you read a recipe, and then you cook. In practice - in a 'paradox' that Michael Pollan, among others, has identified - our current gastronomic fantasies, particularly on TV, have coincided with a decline in home cooking.

The problem isn't just that some people are overfed and others are underfed, lacking enough basic calories to ward off gnawing hunger (though that still remains a real and brutal problem). The new difficulty is that billions of people across the globe are simultaneously overfed and undernourished: rich in calories but poor in nutrients. Our new global diet is replete with sugar and refined carbohydrates yet lacking in crucial micronutrients such as iron and trace vitamins. Malnutrition is no longer just about hunger and stunting; it is also about obesity.

Learning to cook in the 1990s, I thought 'proper olives' meant black. The benchmark was Kalamata from Greece: purple-black with an almost mushroomy depth of flavour. Other fine examples were tiny Coquilles from Nice and plump round Tanches from Nyons.

The technology of food matters even when we barely notice it is there. From fire onward, there is a technology behind everything we eat, whether we recognize it or not. Behind every loaf of bread, there is an oven. Behind a bowl of soup, there is a pan and a wooden spoon (unless it comes from a can, another technology altogether). Behind every restaurant-kitchen foam, there will be a whipping canister, charged with N2O.

The subtext of all table manners is the fear that the man next to you may pull his knife on you.

Protein bars, protein flapjacks, protein granola, protein ice cream and protein coconut water ... To look at the health-food aisles, you'd think that protein was a substance no one could overeat. Even bread now comes in protein-enriched form.

There's a new dividing line in olives: between those who prefer Nocellara to all other varieties, and the people who have never tasted them.

Traditional histories of technology do not pay much attention to food. They tend to focus on hefty industrial and military developments: wheels and ships, gunpowder and telegraphs, airships and radio. When food is mentioned, it is usually in the context of agriculture - systems of tillage and irrigation - rather than the domestic work of the kitchen. But there is just as much invention in a nutcracker as in a bullet.

Every new technology represents a trade-off: something is gained, but something is also lost.

When we lament the decline of time spent on cooking, we need to be clear what it is that we are lamenting. Many of the female cooks who devoted so many hours to preparing food in the past did so because they did not think their own time was worth much.

In a world of forty thousand choices, the old advice of 'everything in moderation' no longer cuts it. The signs are that many people have understandably had enough of this free-for-all of supersizing and hidden sugars, of type 2 diabetes and food waste. In the past five years, millions of eaters have rejected huge swaths of mainstream food and created their own rules to eat by. Such reactions offer a sliver of hope that eating -- for some populations anyway -- is finally moving in a healthier direction, with a new thoughtfulness about food and a return to vegetables. On the other hand, some of the new diet rules we have invented for ourselves are as extreme and unbalanced as the food system they seek to replace.

A recipe is not an exact formula, but it does need a certain structure. When the bones are right, you can dress it in many ways.

The great American food writer M. F. K. Fisher once wrote an essay called 'The Anatomy of a Recipe.' To have a good anatomy, in her view, a recipe should have a sense of logical progression. She despaired of recipes with 'anatomical faults,' where the reader is told to make a cake batter and only then to grease the loaf pans.

No home-cooked food, no matter how delicious, can match the power of bringing people together in misty-eyed recollection of industrially produced food.

Technology is not a form of robotics but something very human: the creation of tools and techniques that answer certain uses in our lives.

The way you teach a child to eat well is through example, enthusiasm, and patient exposure to good food. And when that fails, you lie.

The group who really could benefit from more protein is not fit young gym-goers but older people, who seem to be at much greater risk of protein deficiency.

In 2009, it was forecast that the number of single-person households would increase by two million in 10 years, suggesting that social isolation will only get worse.

If we are going to change our diets, we first have to relearn the art of eating, which is a question of psychology as much as nutrition. We have to find a way to want to eat what's good for us.

Sometimes the buzz of reading about others eating comes from the voyeuristic thrill of seeing how the other half lives: the gold leaf and truffles or - in the case of Trimalchio's feast in Petronius' 'Satyricon' - the dormice and honey.

The existence of birthday cake ice cream suggests that we can no longer distinguish celebration foods from everyday ones. We are also not too sure whether we are children or adults.

Most of our problems with eating come down to the fact that we have not yet adapted to the new realities of plenty, either biologically or psychologically.

The true calamity of clean eating is not that it is entirely false. It is that it contains a kernel of truth. Underneath all the nutribabble talk of 'glowing' and wellness, the gurus of clean eating are completely right to say that most modern eaters would benefit from consuming less refined sugar and processed meat and more vegetables and meals cooked from scratch. The problem is that it's near impossible to pick out the sensible bits of clean eating and ignore the rest. Whether the term clean is used or not, there is a new puritanism about food that has taken root widely.

One of the strange things about imaginary food is that it allows us to take pleasure in reading about things that we would never want to eat in real life.

All the foods that you regularly eat are ones that you learned to eat. Everyone starts life drinking milk. After that, it's all up for grabs. From our first year of life, human tastes are astonishingly diverse.

The answer to how to engage with obesity, Cahnman said, was 'an agreement of mutual respect for the common humanity of each and every one of us'. Weight stigma, he pointed out, cannot be removed except by treating individuals with obesity as normal human beings – as intelligent and capable as anyone else – and removing any sense of moral shame about their condition.

In the right circumstances, I'm a big fan of eating alone. Often, on a Sunday evening, I go to a yoga class whose charm is largely that it gives me an alibi to avoid cooking family supper for once. I return to have boiled eggs and soldiers in silence with a book. Bliss.

Restaurant critics all struggle with the difficulty of writing about eating without resorting to the word 'delicious' and its synonyms.

Kitchen technology is not just about how well something works on its own terms - whether it produces the most delicious food - but about all the things that surround it: kitchen design; our attitude to danger and risk; pollution; the lives of women and servants; how we feel about red meat, indeed about meat in general; social and family structures; the state of metallurgy.

When we say we are lacking in the time to eat well, what we often mean is that we lack synchronised time to eat. Our days and weeks are broken up with constant interruptions and meals are no longer taken communally and in unison, but are a cacophony of individual collations snatched here and there, with no company but the voices in our headphones. Many of us, to our own annoyance, are trapped in routines in which eating well seems all but impossible. Yet this is partly because we live in a world that places a higher premium on time than it does on food.

...when owning our own set of gleaming pans, all matching -- as opposed to the assorted chipped-enamel vessels of student days -- seemed mysteriously grown up.

In the 1930s, the Nazis borrowed the frugal image of the one-pot meal, putting it to ideological use. In 1933, Hitler's government announced that Germans should put aside one Sunday, from October to March, to eat a one-pot meal: Eintopf. The idea was that people would save enough money in this way to donate whatever was saved to the poor. Cookbooks were hastily rewritten to take account of the new policy. One recipe collection listed no fewer than sixty-nine Eintopfs, including macaroni, goulash, Irish stew, Serbian rice soup, numerous cabbagey medleys, and Old German potato soup.

But in most places, the new global diet has involved a narrowing down of what people eat. Our world contains around seven thousand edible crops, yet 95 per cent of what we eat comes from just thirty of those crops. As omnivores, humans are designed to eat a varied diet, so there's something strange and wrong when, as a species, we become so limited in our choice of foods

Our kitchens are filled with ghosts. You may not see them, but you could not cook as you do without their ingenuity: the potters who first enabled us to boil and stew; the knife forgers; the resourceful engineers who designed the first refrigerators; the pioneers of gas and electric ovens; the scale makers; the inventors of eggbeaters and peelers.

A survey of more than three hundred international policymakers found that 90 per cent of them still believed that personal motivation – aka willpower – was a very strong cause of obesity.6 This is absurd.
It makes no sense to presume that there has been a sudden collapse in willpower across all ages and ethnic groups and each sex since the 1960s. What has changed most since the sixties is not our collective willpower but the marketing and availability of energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods.

The saddest utensil I've come across is an 'anti-loneliness ramen bowl,' which holds your iPhone to keep you company as you slurp your solitary bowl of noodles. But the iPhone cannot return your gaze or reassure you that you didn't squeeze too much lime into the soup, though maybe a dinner-conversation app is only a matter of time.

When eating becomes a matter of life or death, and each new bite is a celebration, you may discover that none of the other stuff was quite as important as sitting and breaking bread together.

These can be scary and confusing times in which to eat, made still scarier by the fact that there are so many 'experts' out there selling us fear of food and fad cures. Times of transition have always been a gift to confidence tricksters. When everything seems to be changing and we can no longer rely on the truths of the past, we become vulnerable to hucksters. Some diet gurus tell us to beware all grains; others tell us that we should fear supposedly 'acid-producing' foods from ranging from dairy to meat and coffee. These new diets are perhaps best seen as a dysfunctional response to a still more dysfunctional food supply: a false promise of purity in a toxic world.

Yet Laudan's mother had no choice about whether to be a good cook or not. It was simply what was expected of her, and of every other farmer's wife in England at that time. She did not cook because she 'loved' cooking but because this was the role that life had allotted her.
There was nothing unusual in the way that Laudan's mother cooked. If anything, her life in the kitchen was easy by the standards of the day. At least a farmer's wife had access to plentiful meat and vegetables, whereas city cooks in early twentieth-century Britain were expected to produce the same quantity of meals but with meagre ingredients and limited equipment, often in single-room dwellings where there was no kitchen and no escape from cooking. We idealise the homespun meals of the past, imagining rosy-cheeked women laying down picturesque bottles of peaches and plums. But much of the art of 'cooking' in pre-modern times was a harried mother slinging what she could in a pot and engaging in a daily smoke-filled battle to keep a fire alive and under control, on top of all the other chores she had to manage.
Before we offer too many lamentations for the cookery of the past, we should remember how hard it was – and still is, for millions of people – to cook when you have no choice in the matter.

I'd rather have a good food - lots and lots of different varieties of good foods - than search for something perfect.

Why is a bowl of frosted cereal loops with added rainbow marshmallows allowed to count as 'breakfast' and not 'sweets'?