The Way We Eat Now Quotes

“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.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“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.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“When we say we lack time to cook -- or even time to eat -- we are not making a simple statement of fact. We are talking about cultural values and the way that our society dictates that our days should be carved up.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“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.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“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.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“It is only now that we can, following Khoury, speak of a Global Standard Eater, because it is only now that humans have come to eat in such startlingly similar ways. Perhaps the biggest change is in the quantities that we eat – around 500 calories on average more per day than our equivalents in the 1960s (from 2,237 calories in 1961 to 2,756 calories in 2009). The Global Standard Eater consumes a whole lot more of almost everything than most eaters of the past. From the 1960s, we started to eat more refined grains and more fat, we drank more alcohol and, quite simply, we ate much more food.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“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.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“The true value of food goes beyond price, and once we collectively start to realize this once again, the challenge will be for policy makers to build food environments that encourage people to make better food choices rather than berating them for making bad ones.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“We speak of having better food choices, but for the most part, we eat the foods that food companies want to sell us.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“The gap in quality between the diet of the poorest and that of the richest is wide and widening. The poorest families in America may not look hungry in the way that Victorian orphans looked hungry, but they eat fewer dark green vegetables, fewer whole grains, and fewer nuts.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“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.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“As things stand, our culture is far too critical of the individuals who eat junk foods and not critical enough about the corporations that profit from selling them. We spend a lot of time discussing unhealthy foods in terms of individual guilt and willpower and not enough looking at the morality of big food companies that have targeted some of the poorest consumers in the world with products that will make them sick, or the governments that allowed them to do so.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“We are the first generation to be hunted by what we eat. Since the birth of farming ten thousand years ago, most humans haven't been hunters, but never before have we been so insistently pursued by our own food supply. The calories hunt them down even when we are not looking for them.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“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.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“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.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“But something important about eating is lost when meals are never – or almost never – timed to be taken together. There’s an old word, ‘commensality’, which literally means eating at the same table. The food anthropologist Claude Fischler has written that commensality is what provides the fundamental human ‘script’ of eating in every society. It was how basic bonds of kinship were forged”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“A second dilemma of the diet without staples is that when we can afford not to obsess too much about satisfying our hunger, we cease to value food in the same way and our senses become dulled to changes in its quality. Just as Sherlock Holmes could recognise every variety of cigarette from its ash, an eighteenth-century European could distinguish different types of wheat from a single bite of bread. People knew when a loaf of bread had been made from inferior grain. Now, as chef Dan Barber has observed, we no longer even expect wheat to have a taste.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“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.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“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”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“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.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“You did not choose the environment in which you learned to eat, nor did you design the shops in which you buy your food. If you eat too much sugar and refined oil, that says less about you than it does about the world you are eating in.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“We speak of hidden sugars (such as the unexpected glucose syrup in a pizza topping or the surprising amount of sugar in teriyaki sauce), but oils are still more deeply hidden in our diets. Most of us are well aware that we eat a lot of sugar precisely because we love it so much. We can see the sweetness gleaming at us in the shiny slice of chocolate gateau, the scoop of praline ice cream, and the crunchy handful of M&Ms. No one deliberately seeks out foods because they are oily, but often we consume them without realizing the oil is there.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“It's not becoming abundantly clear that the way most of us currently eat is not sustainable -- either for the planet or for human health. The signs that modern food is unsustainable are all around us, whether you want to measure the problem in soil erosion, in the fact that so many farmers cannot make a living from producing food, or from the rising numbers of children having all their teeth extracted because of their sugary diet. Food is the single greatest user of water and one of the greatest drivers of the loss of biodiversity. We cannot carry on eating as we are without causing irreparable harm to ourselves and the environment.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“In this Asian store, greens functioned as a ‘loss leader’, meaning the items designed to lure customers through the door. The selection of leaves, shoots and pods included ‘Chinese garlic chives, sweet potato vines, baby Chinese broccoli, chrysanthemum greens, snow peas, green beans, baby red amaranth, Malaman spinach, yam tips’ and more, including six types of bok choy. Cowen found that the price of these delicious greens was a fraction of what he would have paid in the nearest Safeway. Green peppers were just 99c a pound, compared with $5.99 at the Safeway. After a month of shopping at Great Wall, Cowen found that he began to enjoy greens far more, and started to choose them almost automatically”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“In the US from 1980 to 2011, it became more than twice as expensive for Americans for purchase fresh fruit and vegetables compared to purchasing sugary carbonated beverages. Tomatoes and broccoli are far more expensive on average than they used to be for American shoppers. Energy-dense foods such as cakes and burgers have become far cheaper now in comparison to fruits and vegetables.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“There may also be more biological reasons why stigmatising obesity entrenches weight gain. Feeling victimised is very stressful and it is well established that cortisol, the main human stress hormone, encourages overeating. It’s known from rodent studies that cortisol messes up the normal cues for hunger and fullness.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“Throughout Brazil there are ‘dual burden households’ where some family members (usually the children) are underweight and stunted and others (usually the mothers) are obese.51 Many adolescent girls in Brazil are both anaemic and obese, suggesting that their diets, though plentiful, are low in crucial micronutrients, especially iron.52”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“Then I realised the very question I was asking was wrong. The whole point is that in the 1960s, there was no such thing as an average eater across most countries, just lots of specific and wildly divergent patterns of eating. Back then, there were maize eaters in Brazil and sorghum eaters in Sudan. There were steak and kidney pie enthusiasts in Britain and goulash devotees in Hungary. But it made little sense to ponder how a globally average person”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change