Loe raamatut: «First Bite: How We Learn to Eat»

Introduction

‘One of the reasons I like bread and jam,’ said Frances, ‘is that it does not slide off your spoon in a funny way.’

RUSSELL HOBAN, Bread and Jam for Frances

So many of our anxieties around diet take the form of a search for the perfect food, the one that will cure all our ills. Eat this! Don’t eat that! We obsess about the properties of various ingredients: the protein, the omega oils, the vitamins. But this is getting ahead of ourselves. Nutrients only count when a person picks up food and eats it. How we eat – how we approach food – is what really matters. 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.

Our tastes follow us around like a comforting shadow. They seem to tell us who we are. Maybe this is why we act as if our core attitudes to eating are set in stone. We make frequent attempts – more or less half-hearted – to change what we eat, but almost no effort to change how we feel about food: how well we deal with hunger, how strongly attached we are to sugar, our emotions on being served a small portion. We try to eat more vegetables, but we do not try to make ourselves enjoy vegetables more, maybe because there’s a near-universal conviction that it is not possible to learn new tastes and shed old ones. Yet nothing could be further from the truth.

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.

Bone marrow from wild game is considered the best first baby food among the hunting tribes of Tanzania.¹ If you were born in the Far Eastern republic of Laos, it could be gelatinous rice, pre-chewed by your mother and transferred from her mouth to yours (this is sometimes called kiss-feeding).² For Western babies, that first bite of solid food may be powdered cereal from a packet or purée from a jar; it could be organic pumpkin, steamed and strained and served with a hypoallergenic spoon; or a random nibble from a parent’s plate. Aside from milk, there is simply no such thing as a universal food. Not even for babies.^fn1

From our first year of life, human tastes are astonishingly diverse. As omnivores, we have no inbuilt knowledge of which foods are good and safe. Each of us has to use our senses to figure out for ourselves what is edible, depending on what’s available. In many ways, this is a delightful opportunity. It’s the reason there are such fabulously varied ways of cooking in the world.

But we haven’t paid anything like enough attention to another consequence of being omnivores, which is that eating is not something we are born instinctively knowing how to do, like breathing. It is something we learn. A parent feeding a baby is training them how food should taste. At the most basic level, we have to learn what is food and what is poison. We have to learn how to satisfy our hunger and also when to stop eating. Unlike the anteater which eats only small termites, we have few natural instincts to fall back on. Out of all the choices available to us as omnivores, we have to figure out which foods are likeable, which are lovable and which are disgusting. From these preferences, we create our own pattern of eating, as distinctive as a signature.

Or that’s how it used to be. In today’s food culture, many people seem to have acquired uncannily homogenous tastes, markedly more so than in the past. In 2010 two consumer scientists argued that the taste preferences of childhood provided a new way of thinking about the causes of obesity. They noted a ‘self-perpetuating cycle’: food companies push foods high in sugar, fat and salt, which means that children learn to like them, and so the companies invent ever more of these foods ‘that contribute to unhealthy eating habits’.³ The main influence on a child’s palate may no longer be a parent but a series of food manufacturers whose products – despite their illusion of infinite choice – deliver a monotonous flavour hit, quite unlike the more varied flavours of traditional cuisine.

I went to the cinema with one of my children recently. We stood at the ice-cream concession and I realized, with a jolt, that almost all the options – other than plain vanilla – contained chocolate in one form or another. Would we pick mint chocolate chunk or cherry chocolate chunk or chocolate ice cream with chocolate brownie pieces or caramel ice cream with pieces of caramel chocolate? The danger of growing up surrounded by these endless sweet and salty industrial concoctions is not that we are innately incapable of resisting them but that the more frequently we eat them, especially in childhood, the more they train us to expect all food to taste this way.

Once you recognize the simple fact that food preferences are learned, many of the ways we currently approach eating start to look a little weird. To take a small example, consider the parents who go to great lengths to ‘hide’ vegetables in children’s meals. Is broccoli really so terrible that it must be concealed from innocent minds? Whole cookbooks have been devoted to this arcane pursuit. It starts with the notion that children have an innate resistance to vegetables, and will only swallow them unawares, blitzed into pasta sauce or baked into sweet treats; they could never learn to love courgette for its own sake. In our harried, sleep-deprived state, parents find it hard to play the long game. We think we are being clever when we smuggle some beetroot into a cake. Ha! Tricked you into eating root vegetables! But since the child is not conscious that they are consuming beetroot, the main upshot is to entrench their liking for cake. A far cleverer thing would be to help children learn to become adults who choose vegetables consciously, of their own accord.

By failing to see that eating habits are learned, we misunderstand the nature of our current diet predicament. As we are often reminded, in doom-laden terms, eating has taken a dramatic collective wrong turn in recent decades. As of 2010, poor diet and physical inactivity accounted for 10 per cent of all deaths and disease worldwide, ahead of tobacco smoke (6.3 per cent) and household air pollution (4.3 per cent).⁴ Around two-thirds of the population are either overweight or obese in rich countries; and the rest of the world is fast catching up. The moral usually drawn from these statistics is that we are powerless to resist the sugary, salty, fatty foods that the food industry promotes. Everything tastes better with bacon! As the journalist Michael Moss exposed in 2013, the big food companies engineer foods with a chemically calculated ‘bliss point’ designed to get us hooked.⁵ Newspapers sometimes project a future in which obesity levels continue to rise indefinitely until almost everyone in the world is affected.

But there’s something else going on here, which usually gets missed. Not everyone is equally susceptible to the dysfunction of our food supply. Some people manage to eat sugary, salty, fatty foods in modest quantities, and then stop. Others find these supposedly irresistible foods the opposite of blissful. If two-thirds of the population are overweight or obese, then fully a third are not. This is astonishing, given just how many opportunities there now are to eat doughnuts. Exposed to the same food that bombards us all, these lucky people have learned different responses. It’s in all our interests to find out how they have done it.

Many campaigners would say cooking is the answer. If only children could be taught how to cook and plant vegetable gardens, they would automatically become healthier. It sounds convincing: school gardens are a lovely thing. But by themselves, they are not enough to make a child relate to food in healthy ways. Our difficulty is not just that we haven’t learned to cook and grow food, however important that is: it’s that we haven’t learned to eat in ways that support health and happiness. Traditional cuisines across the world were founded on a strong sense of balance, with norms about which foods go together, and how much one should eat at different times of day. Much cooking now, however, is nothing like this. In my experience as a food journalist, chefs and food writers are, if anything, more prone to compulsive eating and other disordered food obsessions than non-cooks. For cooking to become the solution to our diet crisis, we first have to learn how to adjust our responses to food. Cooking skills are no guarantee of health if your inclinations are for twice-fried chicken, Neapolitan rum babas and French aligot: potatoes mashed with a ton of cheese.

The reason many find it hard to eat healthily is that we have never learned any differently. Like children, most of us eat what we like and we only like what we know. Never before have whole populations learned (or mislearned) to eat in societies where calorie-dense food was so abundant and policed with so few norms about portion sizes and mealtimes. Nor is overeating the only problem that plagues modern affluent civilizations. Statistics suggest that around 0.3 per cent of young women are anorexic and another 1 per cent are bulimic, with rising numbers of men joining them.⁶ What statistics are not particularly effective at telling us is how many others – whether overweight or underweight – are in a perpetual state of anxiety about what they consume, living in fear of carbs or fat grams and unable to derive straightforward enjoyment from meals. A 2003 study of 2,200 American college students suggested that weight concern is very common: 43 per cent of this sample were worried about their weight most of the time (across both sexes) and 29 per cent of the women described themselves as ‘obsessively preoccupied’ with weight.⁷

Our dietary malaise is often discussed in fatalistic terms, as if our preference for hamburgers were a life sentence: diets don’t work, sugar is addictive and so on. What we forget is that, as omnivores, we are extremely gifted at changing the way we eat to accommodate different environments. Admittedly, no one has ever encountered a food environment quite like the one we now find ourselves in, flooded with cheap calories in deceptive packaging. To survive in our current situation will entail very different skills from those needed by a Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer. Yet there is every reason to suppose that we are capable of acquiring these skills, if we give ourselves half a chance.

If our food habits are learned, they can also be relearned. Imagine you were adopted at birth by parents who lived in a remote village in a far-flung country. Your tastes would be quite unlike the ones you ended up with. We all begin life with an innate liking for sweetness and a suspicion of bitterness, yet there is nothing inevitable in our physiology that says that we will grow up dreading vegetables and craving fudge. The trouble is, we do not tend to see it this way.

My premise in First Bite is that the question of how we learn to eat – both individually and collectively – is the key to how food, for so many people, has gone so badly wrong. The greatest public health problem of modern times is how to persuade people to make better food choices. But we have been looking for answers in the wrong places.

Our discussion about diet is usually framed in terms of better information. A sea of articles and books suggests that the reason for the obesity crisis is that we were given the wrong advice: we were told to avoid fat when the real demon was sugar.⁸ There’s something in this. It certainly didn’t help that many of the ‘low-fat’ products marketed as healthy over the past few decades were padded with refined carbohydrates and were therefore more fattening than the fats we were being advised to give up.⁹ During the period that dieticians were admonishing us to abstain from saturated fats such as those in butter, cream and meat, obesity rates were consistently going up, not down. It is becoming increasingly clear that eating fat is not in and of itself the thing that makes you fat or gives you heart disease.

Before we start blaming the confusing low-fat advice for our current ill health, however, it might be useful to consider the extent to which we ever followed those anti-fat warnings. The vast majority of people heard what the ‘food police’ had to say on the subject of fat and ignored it. At the height of the low-fat orthodoxy, in 1998, some of the leading nutrition scientists in the world co-authored a paper in which they lamented the public’s failure to follow their guidelines. The scientists found, to their dismay, that after more than two decades of being advised to reduce fat, people were still eating ‘about the same’ amount of it. The percentage of calories from fat in the American diet dropped slightly from 1976 to 1991 (from about 36 per cent in 1976 to 34 per cent in 1991) but this was only because people were consuming more total calories. In absolute terms, the fat grams people consumed on average remained the same.¹⁰

David L. Katz of the Yale University Prevention Research Center is a rare voice of sanity in the clamorous world of nutrition. He disputes the commonly held view that the reason we don’t eat better is because there is so much confusion over what the ‘best diet’ really is. Katz points out that the essential tenets of a healthy life – moderate helpings of a variety of real whole foods, plus regular exercise – have been very well established for decades. The medical evidence suggests that it doesn’t matter whether we reach this point via a low-fat route or a low-carb one (or vegan or Paleo or just good old-fashioned home cooking).¹¹ Across all diets, there is, notes Katz, a huge ‘aggregation of evidence’ that the best pattern of eating for health is a diet of minimally processed foods, mostly plant-based. ‘Our problem,’ notes Katz, ‘is not want of knowledge about the basic care and feeding of Homo Sapiens. Our problem is a stunning and tragically costly cultural reluctance – to swallow it.’¹²

Take vegetables. The advice to eat more vegetables for health could hardly have been clearer. We have been given the message many times, in many forms. Unlike with fat or sugar, there is no about-turn or controversy in mainstream nutrition over the ‘eat more vegetables’ message. Yet since the 1970s the total intake of calories from vegetables in America has actually declined by 3 per cent, which is a bigger drop than it sounds considering that vegetables contain very few calories compared to other foods.¹³ This decline came at a time when there has never been a wider variety of tempting vegetables available, from deep orange butternut squash to pale green Romanesco broccoli. Many people, however, have absorbed the lesson from childhood that vegetables and pleasure – and more generally, healthy food and pleasure – can never go together. Witness the waves of antipathy directed at public figures such as Michelle Obama when they dare to suggest that we eat more of them. Consumer scientists have found that when a new product is described as ‘healthy’, it is far less likely to be a success than if it is described as ‘new’.¹⁴

When it comes to our dining habits, there is a giant mismatch between thought and deed; between knowledge and behaviour. ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,’ says influential food writer Michael Pollan.¹⁵ A wise and simple mantra, much repeated; yet for many it seems anything but simple to follow in daily life. To adhere to it you need to: ‘Like real food. Not enjoy feeling overstuffed. And appreciate vegetables.’ These are skills that many people have not yet acquired, however intelligent or advanced in years they may be. There’s another complication, too. The ‘not too much’ part of Pollan’s dictum needs modifying to take account of those who have learned to eat too little, or at least not enough of the right foods. I am not just talking about the underweight. The term ‘malnutrition’ now covers obesity as well as starvation; there is evidence that obese populations across the world suffer disproportionately from micronutrient deficiencies, notably vitamins A and D, plus zinc and iron.¹⁶ Learning how to eat better is not about reducing consumption across the board. While we undoubtedly need to eat less of many foods – sugar springs to mind – we need more of others. Among other lost eating skills – see also not ‘spoiling your appetite’ and not ‘wolfing down your dinner’ – we seem to have lost the old-fashioned concept of ‘nourishing’ ourselves.

A tone of judgemental impatience often creeps into discussions of obesity. ‘It’s not exactly rocket science, is it?’ is a frequent observation on newspaper comment boards, from some of those lucky ones who have never struggled to change their eating, followed by the quip that all that needs to be done to fix the situation is to ‘eat less and move more’. The implication is that those who do not eat less and move more are somehow lacking in moral fibre or brains. But consider this. American firefighters, who are not people notably lacking in courage or quick-wittedness, have higher rates of obesity and overweight – at 70 per cent – than the general population.¹⁷ The way we eat is not a question of worthiness but of routine and preference, built over a lifespan. As the philosopher Caspar Hare has said: ‘It is not so easy to acquire or drop preferences, at will.’¹⁸

Once we accept that eating is a learned behaviour, we see that the challenge is not to grasp information but to learn new habits. Governments keep trying to fix the obesity crisis with well-intentioned recommendations. But advice alone never taught a child to eat better (‘I strongly advise you to finish that cabbage and follow it with a glass of milk!’), so it’s strange that we think it will work on adults. 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. In Hungary, children are taught to enjoy eating carrots by being told that they bestow the ability to whistle. The point is that before you can become a carrot eater, the carrots have to be desirable.

When this book started taking shape in my head, I thought that my subject was childhood food. Bit by bit, I started to see that many of the joys and pitfalls of children’s eating were still there for adults. As grown-ups, we may still reward ourselves with treats, just as our parents did, and continue to ‘clean our plates’, though they are no longer there to watch us. We still avoid what disgusts us, though we probably know better than to throw it under the table when no one is looking. Put a lit-up birthday cake in front of anyone and they are young again.

One of the questions I wanted to explore was the extent to which children are born with hard-wired preferences. As I trawled through endless academic papers in the library, I predicted fierce disagreement among contemporary scientists. On one side, I would find those who argued that food likes and dislikes were innate; and on the other, those who insisted they were acquired: nature versus nurture. To my astonishment, I found that this was not the case. Far from controversy, there was a near-universal consensus – from psychologists, from neuroscientists, from anthropologists and biologists – that our appetite for specific foods is learned.¹⁹ Within this broad agreement, there are, as you might expect, still plenty of scholarly disputes, such as the brouhaha over whether our love–hate relationship with bitter vegetables such as Brussels sprouts has a genetic underpinning. There are also competing theories on the extent to which our food learning is mediated by particular genes, hormones and neurotransmitters. But the fundamental insight that human food habits are a learned behaviour is not the subject of scientific debate.

This scientific consensus is remarkable, given that it is the opposite of how we usually discuss eating habits in everyday conversation. There’s a common assumption – shared, curiously enough, by those who are struggling to eat healthily and many of the nutritionists who are trying to get them to eat better – that we are doomed by our biology to be hooked on junk food. The usual story goes something like this: our brains evolved over thousands of years to seek out sweetness, because in the wild we would have needed a way to distinguish wholesome sweet fruits from bad bitter toxins. In today’s world, where sugary food is abundant, or so the thinking goes, our biology makes us powerless to turn down these ‘irresistible’ foods. We know that tasting something sweet activates the pleasure-generating parts of the brain and even acts as an analgesic, comparable to drugs or alcohol. Palaeolithic brain + modern food = disaster.

What’s missing from this account is the fact that, while the taste for sweetness is innate to all human beings and common to all cultures, when it comes to actual sweet foods – and other unhealthy processed foods – we show profoundly varied responses. As one 2012 study of food preferences states, our attitudes to sweetness vary ‘in terms of perception, liking, wanting and intake’.²⁰ Different people enjoy sweetness in very different forms. Sweetness could mean a whole cob of corn at the height of summer; or a plate of milky-fresh mozzarella; or fennel cooked long and slow until it is toffee-brown. Our love of sweetness may be universal but there are vast individual differences in how we learn to ingest it. Put another way: not everyone wants to get their sweet hit in the form of Froot Loops.

Nutritionists use the word ‘palatable’ to describe foods high in sugar, salt and fat, as if it were impossible to prefer a platter of crunchy greens dressed with tahini sauce to a family-sized bar of chocolate. Yet around a third of the population – Palaeolithic brain or not – manage to navigate the modern food world just fine and select a balanced diet for themselves from what’s available.

I’m not saying that to be thin is necessarily healthy. Some of the non-overweight may be anorexic or bulimic. Others avoid food through cigarettes and drugs or burn off a junk-food habit with manic exercise. When we speak of an ‘obesity epidemic’, as well as making those trying to lose weight feel worse than they already do, we miss the fact that the situation is more complex than thin = good and fat = bad. Professor Robert Lustig, a leading specialist on the effects of sugar on the human body, points out that up to 40 per cent of normal-weight people have exactly the same metabolic dysfunctions associated with obesity – ‘diabetes, hypertension, lipid problems, cardiovascular disease … cancer and dementia’ while around 20 per cent of obese people get none of these diseases and have a normal lifespan.²¹