Food Anthropology Quotes

“Love and travel are both powerful spurs to change.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“A culinary cosmopolitan perspective resides in a context of tremendous inequality, but it may simultaneously facilitate meaningful cultural exchange, and attempt to link food choices to global risks like climate change.”
― Josée Johnston, Foodies

“Our olfactory bulbs have gathered endless sense patterns of foods high in sugar, fat and salt. These flavour memories have become part of the fabric of our sense of self and are not easily discarded, because the system, as we have seen, is designed ‘not to forget’.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“The way we eat is not a question of worthiness but of routine and preference, built over a lifespan.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“There are hundreds of millions of individuals who somehow swim against the tide of the dysfunctional modern food supply and feed themselves pretty well.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Dopamine is one of the chemical signals that passes information between neutrons to tell your brain that you are having fun.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Every bite is a memory and the most powerful memories are the first ones.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Wherever you start, the first step to eating better is to recognise that our tastes and habits are not fixed but changeable.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“When the flavour of white bread and processed meat are linked in your memory with the warmth and authority of a parent and the camaraderie of siblings, it can feel like a betrayal to stop eating them.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“If we want to relearn how to eat, we need to become children again. Bad food habits can only change by making ‘healthy food’ something pleasure-giving. If we experience healthy food as a coercion - something requiring willpower - it can never taste delicious.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“It’s seldom easy to change habits, particularly those so bound up with memories of family and childhood, but, whatever our age, it looks as if eating well is surprisingly teachable skill.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“There are three big things we would all benefit from learning to do: to follow structured mealtimes; to respond to our own internal cues for hunger and fullness rather than relying on external cues such as portion size; and to make ourselves open to trying a variety of foods.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Having a healthy relationship with food can act like a life jacket, protecting you from the worst excesses of obesogenic world we now inhabit. You see the greasy meatball sandwich and you no longer think it has much to say to you. This is not about being thin. It’s about reaching a state where food is something that nourishes and makes you happy rather than sickening or tormenting us. It’s about feeding ourselves as a good parent would: with love, with variety, but also with limits.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“After all, as omnivores, we were not born knowing what to eat. We all had to learn it, every one of us, as children sitting expectantly, waiting to be fed.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Appetite is a profoundly social impulse.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Our urge to avoid eating something that makes us feel sick is often at the root of disordered eating, as we swerve away from whole categories of foods that we imagine would make us feel uneasy.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“It’s a truism that we know what we like and we like what we know. If you ask young children which foods they most detest, they tend to be the ones they have never actually tasted, often vegetables.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Every day, children are exposed to messages - whether on giant hoardings and TV ads or from looking in friends’ lunchboxes - telling them that they should like the very foods that will do them the most harm.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Our tastes are learned in the context of immense social influences, whether from our family, our friends, or the cheery font on a bottle of soda.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Every culture seems to have certain challenging vegetables that children find hard to love at first bite.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“To eat these foods again in the new country was a way of holding on to the grandmothers and mothers who had first cooked with them. Often, however, the remembering through food is bittersweet, because even when you have tracked down every last herb and spice, the missing ingredient is the cook. You find you don’t want pasta ‘just like Mama used to make’; you actually want Mama herself.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Unlike traditional food, which is remembered jointly within families or communities, mass-produced food and drink is remembered across continents.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Candy bar nostalgia puts us all on the same page.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Contrary to the popular view, malnutrition is very seldom about an absolute lack of food.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Many seed savers see themselves as stewards, not only of their own family memories but of the shared stories and genetic codes contained within these plants. This kind of recollection works against collective forgetting and the widespread disappearance of so many agricultural plants and animals. Old localized, traditional varieties of plants and animals fell (or were pushed) out of everyday use as agriculture became increasingly large scale, industrialized, and standardized, relying on ever fewer varieties in order to achieve the high levels of uniformity and predictability expected not only by stockholders but also by grocery store shoppers. The loss of biodiversity also means a broader form of forgetting.”
― Jennifer A. Jordan, Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and Other Forgotten Foods

“While this book focuses on the heirloom food movement, I argue that edible memory is far more expansive than simply the way people treat old-fashioned tomatoes or apples. Based on my observations, edible memory is something people enact with regard to a whole range of foods--including some of the most highly processed foods around. The heirloom varieties I focus on in most of this book are a particularly charged site of the intersections of food, memory, and meaning, but they serve as one rich example of a much larger process.”
― Jennifer A. Jordan, Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and Other Forgotten Foods

“I came upon the links between a simple midday meal and the complex webs of history and geography in which we dwell. I learned the ways a tomato can evoke the past and an apple can offer hope for the future.”
― Jennifer A. Jordan, Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and Other Forgotten Foods

“Some people hate pigs,
Some people love pigs,
Some people behave like pigs.
Some people worship cows,
Some people feast on cows,
Some people just act like cows.

Eat what you like,
Believe what you like.
As long as you don't
behave like pigs and cows,
let no tradition be your guide.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Aşk Mafia: Armor of The World

“The squabs in wine sauce and the fragrant, steaming frumenty and apples seethed in almond milk went some way to reviving his strength, as did the sweet, potent ice-wine with which they plied him.”
― Elizabeth Chadwick, The Greatest Knight

“Cooking deserves its place as one of the great revolutionary innovations of history, not because of the way it transforms food—there are plenty of other ways of doing that—but because of the way it transformed society. Culture begins when the raw gets cooked. The campfire becomes a place of communion when people eat around it. Cooking is not just a way of preparing food but of organizing society around communal meals and predictable mealtimes. It introduces new specialized functions and shared pleasures and responsibilities. It is more creative, more constructive of social ties than mere eating together. It can even replace eating together as a ritual of social adhesion.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food