Learn to love food at first bite
About 15 years back, while on vacation in Mexico, I decided to try to make peace with my old childhood nemesis. That would be the avocado.
I’d heard a theory that it only took11tries for most people to learn to like a previously hated food. It only took me five and, by the end of the vacation, I was kneedeep in guacamole.
This story surprises some people, but would not remotely surprise Bee Wilson, author of First Bite: How We Learn to Eat, a new release that’s essentially a book-length argument that we can learn to change our eating habits.
But, since so few people think you can learn to like new, good things (or break bad food habits), Wilson has to devote a considerable portion of First Bite to debunking the ideas that we’re born with certain immutable tastes.
Much has been made of the fact that humans are hardwired to select sweet, and naturally averse to bitter — a survival mechanism that helped us detect poison back when foraging was a necessity, not a fashionable urban pastime for eccentric foodies. But, as Wilson argues, this does not doom us to a life in servitude to sugary fats in a corn syrup-soaked modern world. Because that discounts a little thing called human agency.
Wilson’s main evidence that we can learn and unlearn good or bad eating habits is not anecdotal (though she, herself, has experience unlearning bad habits), it’s this: Despite the presence of cupcakes on every corner, some people still manage to eat salad. Although diabetes and heart disease stats are terrifying, some one-third of the people in the western world are just fine. How do they do it? Are they superhuman? No. They just learned to like vegetables, whether as adults, looking to eat better or, back in childhood, when parents helped them to learn to eat well.
Even with children, it’s not impossible, as Wilson demonstrates. To learn how — and to achieve a deeper understanding of how we learn to eat — read the book. But, (spoiler alert) it isn’t so terribly different than how I learned to like avocado: Not exactly love at first bite, but, instead, a decision to embark on a long-term, committed relationship. Christine Sismondo is the author of America Walks Into a Bar: A Spirited History of Taverns and Saloons, Speakeasies and Grog Shops (Oxford University Press).