First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Disgust is even more powerful than desire. We should use this more to our advantage. Become a food snob. The ideal scenario for healthy food shopping is when you won’t buy most of what’s for sale, not because you shouldn’t, but because it repels you.

Eating well is a skill. We learn it. Or not. It’s something we can work on at any age.

We mostly eat what we like (give or take). Before you can change what you eat, you need to change what you like. And you will never like new foods unless you give yourself the chance to try them. The fact that you don’t like something now is not necessarily a sign that you will never like

It may not feel like it, but you never lost your potential to change how you eat. The wonderful secret of being an omnivore is that we can adjust our desires, even late in the game. It won’t happen on the first bite. Long-standing appetites do not take kindly to being ignored;

In contrast to all the other things we work on in life that are far less likely to increase our well-being—including dieting—it is astonishing how little effort we put into changing our eating preferences for the better. There is every indication that the basic methods of eating better—increasing variety, including more plant foods, structuring mea

Rozin and Schiller argue that the human conversion to chili—which is not seen in other omnivores, such as rats—represents a “hedonic shift.” Around the age of five, children start to season their own food. They see older siblings and parents reaching for the salsa on the table and start to copy them. Maybe the first bite makes them cry with pain, b

If you pressure children to eat whole plates of greens, you are teaching them to dislike the greens—and to dislike you, for that matter. If you persuade them to take tiny tastes (today and again tomorrow and the next day and the day after that), there’s a chance they will become lifelong eaters of greens.

What’s bad manners is to make someone feel ashamed for leaving food on their plate when they are full.

Yet the greatest obstacle remains the old familiar one, unchanged from childhood, of summoning the appetite to fulfill nutritional requirements.