First Bite: How We Learn to Eat Read online

  You might say that food dislikes do not matter much: each to their own. I won’t give you a hard time for hating the fuzzy skin of peaches if you will excuse my squeamishness about the gooey whites of soft-boiled eggs. The danger is when you grow up disliking entire food groups, becoming unable to get the nutrition you need from your diet. Doctors working at the front line of child obesity say it has become common in the past couple of decades for many toddlers to eat no fruits or vegetables at all. This is one of the reasons that constipation is now such a huge—though little mentioned—problem in Western countries, giving rise to 2.5 million physician visits a year in the United States.

  Some hold the view that it doesn’t really matter if children have unhealthy tastes, because once they grow up, they will effortlessly acquire a penchant for salad, along with a deeper voice and mature political opinions. Sometimes it does work out this way. Love and travel are both powerful spurs to change. In the 1970s, it was a common rite of passage to reject the conventional bland watery foods of a 1950s childhood and embrace mung beans and spices. Many tastes—for green tea, say, or vodka—are acquired, if at all, in adulthood. When we learn to love these bitter but lovely substances, we undergo what psychologists call a hedonic shift from pain to pleasure. You may overcome your childish revulsion at the bitterness of espresso when you discover the wonderful aftereffects, how it wakes up your whole body and infuses you with a desire for work. The great question is what it takes for us to undergo a similar shift to enjoying a moderate diet of healthy food.

  The process will be different for each of us, because each of us has learned our own particular way of eating. But wherever you start, the first step to eating better is to recognize that our tastes and habits are not fixed, but changeable.

  There’s a danger here that I’m making the process of changing how you eat sound easy. It isn’t. In particular, it isn’t easy for those who feed themselves on a tight budget. Many have observed that—in developed countries—obesity disproportionately affects those on low incomes. Poverty makes eating a healthy diet harder in numerous ways. It’s not just because it is far more expensive, gram for gram, to buy fresh vegetables than to buy heavily processed carbohydrates. Maybe you live in a “food desert” where nutritious ingredients are hard to come by, or in housing without an adequate kitchen. Growing up poor can engender a lifetime of unhealthy food habits, because a narrow diet in childhood is likely to narrow your food choices as an adult, even if your income later rises. When the flavors of white bread and processed meats 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.

  Yet it’s striking that some children from low-income households eat much better than others, and sometimes better than children from more affluent families. The problems with how we now eat cut across boundaries of class and income. It is possible to create decent, wholesome meals—bean goulash, spaghetti puttanesca—on a shoestring budget. Equally, one can have the funds to buy chanterelle mushrooms and turbot but no inclination to do so. According to feeding therapists with whom I have spoken, there are successful businesspeople who will—literally—pass out from hunger at their desks rather than allow an unfamiliar meal to pass their lips, just because their preferred junk food is not available. Assuming you are not living in a state of famine, the greatest determinant of how well you eat is the way you have learned to behave around food.

  This behavior is often immensely complex. As we grow up, we become capable of second-order preferences as well as first-order preferences. A first-order preference is simple: you love crispy roasted potatoes, smothered in butter and salt. A second-order preference is more convoluted: you want to like eating carrots instead of the potatoes, because you think they would be less fattening and healthier. Indeed, you probably can, at least sometimes, limit yourself to eating raw vegetables instead of the carb-laden potatoes. But the real question is what happens next. In 1998, the social psychologist Roy Baumeister did a famous experiment. Baumeister, who is known for his work on self-defeating behaviors, found that the struggle of will required when a group of people were asked to eat “virtuous” foods, such as radishes, instead of the foods they really wanted, such as chocolate and cookies, led to diminishing returns. They were so depleted by the effort of the task that, when faced with another difficult task—solving a tricky puzzle—they gave up more quickly. The emotional effort of not eating the cookies had a “psychic cost.”

  Changing our food habits is one of the hardest things we can do, because the impulses governing our preferences are often hidden, even from ourselves. And yet adjusting what you eat is entirely possible. We do it all the time. Were this not the case, the food companies that launch new products each year would be wasting their money. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, housewives from East and West Germany tried each other’s food products for the first time in decades. It didn’t take long for those from the East to realize that they preferred Western yogurt to their own. Equally, those from the West discovered a liking for the honey and vanilla wafer biscuits of the East. From both sides of the wall, these German housewives showed a remarkable flexibility in their food preferences.

  There is hope as well as concern in the fact that we remain like children in our eating patterns. We are like children in our fussiness and love of junk. But we also remain like children in that we have a capacity to learn new tricks. We seldom credit ourselves with this ability. But even though most of us have tastes that we acquired very young, we can still change.

  When I was a teenager, I could eat whole pint-sized tubs of ice cream, and second and third helpings of everything. Everywhere I went, food screamed at me. Maybe it was a response to living with my older sister, who was anorexic, though this was never mentioned, because in our family we did not speak of such things. Or it could have been a consequence of growing up in a house where emotional talk was taboo. It definitely got worse when I was fourteen and my parents separated. Overeaters often say they are swallowing their feelings.

  Around the age of twenty, something changed. I fell in love, I got happier, and my meals became more structured. I shrank, going from large to medium, without particularly dieting. I ate lots of vegetables—not because I had to, but because they were delicious, and they made me feel good. Then I had children. I could now bake a whole chocolate cake, eat a small slice, and leave the rest. Recently I discovered yoga. My teenage self would have found my current self intensely annoying.

  The strange thing, however, is that my behavior changed without me ever really noticing that this was what was happening. Unlike the adolescent diets that I imposed on myself in a conscious, self-correcting way, this new healthier life crept up on me unawares. It’s not that I never keep eating potato chips long after I’m full, especially when there’s a glass of wine in my hand. And though I may be safe around chocolate cake, I wouldn’t fancy my chances with a Vacherin Mont d’Or cheese in the kitchen. But I have definitely reached the point where my second-order food preferences—I want to like greens—and my first-order food preferences—I do like greens—are fairly in sync. Food no longer screams at me, but speaks to me. It helps that our concept of healthy eating has enlarged in recent years to take in satisfying meals such as chicken and chickpea soup, buckwheat pancakes, avocado toast, or buttery scrambled eggs with herbs. I’m in the groove now of eating smaller lunches and larger dinners, but small or large, meals are occasions for pleasure, not angst. This feels good. I must have relearned how to feed myself somewhere along the way, treating myself with some of the solicitude I bestow on my own children.

  E. P. Köster, a behavioral psychologist who has spent decades studying why we make the food choices we do, says that food habits “can almost exclusively be changed by relearning through experience.” That is, if we want to relearn how to eat, we need to become like children again. Bad food habits can only change by making “healthy food” something ple
asure-giving. If we experience healthy food as a coercion—as something requiring willpower—it can never taste delicious.

  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 a surprisingly teachable skill. This is not to say that everyone should end up with the same tastes. Life would be dull if everyone preferred satsumas to clementines. But certain broad aspects of eating can be learned and then tailored to your own specific passions and needs. 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. All three can be taught to children, which suggests that adults could learn them, too.

  For our diets to change, we do need to educate ourselves about nutrition—and yes, teach ourselves to cook—but we also need to relearn many of our responses to food. The change doesn’t happen through rational argument. It is a form of reconditioning, meal by meal. You get to the point where not eating when you are not hungry—most of the time—is so instinctive and habitual that it would feel odd to behave differently. In truth, governments could do a great deal more to help us modify our eating habits. In place of all that advice, they could reshape the food environment in ways that would help us to learn better habits of our own accord. A few decades from now, the current laissez-faire attitudes to sugar—now present in 80 percent of supermarket foods—may seem as reckless and strange as permitting cars without seatbelts or smoking on airplanes. Given that our food choices are strongly determined by what’s readily available, regulating the sale of unhealthy food would automatically make many people eat differently. Banishing fast-food outlets from hospitals and the streets surrounding schools would be a start. One study shows that you can reduce chocolate consumption almost to zero in a student cafeteria by requiring people to line up for it separately from their main course.

  But at an individual level, we won’t achieve much by waiting for a world where chocolate is scarce. The question is what it might take to become part of that exceptional group of people (one-third of the population, give or take a few) who can live in the modern world, with all its sugary and salty allurements, and not be agonized or seduced. Having a healthy relationship with food can act like a life jacket, protecting you from the worst excesses of the 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 us 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.

  Changing the way you eat is far from simple; nor, crucially, is it impossible. 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.

  a Even milk is complicated. Formula will never be the same as breast milk, as the breastfeeding campaigners often remind us. But nor is human milk a single substance. It’s been found that breastfed babies in Spain have a different range of bacteria in their guts than breastfed babies in Sweden. A mother’s milk will vary in composition and flavor depending on her own diet. It may taste garlicky in France or be scented with star anise in China. Slightly surprisingly, not everyone recognizes it as the ideal food for newborns. Let’s go back to my first sentence about us all starting life drinking milk. It isn’t quite true. There are remote rural cultures where the people believe that babies will be harmed by colostrum, the rich yellowish milk that mothers produce in the first few days after birth. Parents may give babies honey or sweet almond oil for the first three days instead, because they fear—wrongly—that this early milk is too “strong” for a tiny baby to digest; these far-off communities do not know that giving honey to a baby creates a risk of infant botulism.

  b Strangely, in humans, unlike in rats, obesity seems to be associated with reduced rather than heightened dopamine release, suggesting, once more, the complexity of our pleasure responses.

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  Likes and Dislikes

  Every man carries within him a world, which

  is composed of all that he has seen and loved,

  and to which he constantly returns, even when

  he is travelling through, and seems to be living in,

  some different world.

  François-René de Chateaubriand,

  Travels in Italy, 1828

  He won’t eat anything but cornflakes” complained the mother of a boy I used to know. Breakfast, lunch, or dinner—always a bowl of cornflakes and milk. Even at other people’s houses, this boy made no concessions. To his mother, his extreme diet was a source of worry and exasperation. To the rest of us, he was a fascinating case study. Secretly, I was slightly in awe of him; my sister and I would never have dared to be so fussy. To look at, you wouldn’t know there was anything different about this kid: scruffy blond hair, big grin, neither unduly skinny nor chubby. He was not socially withdrawn or difficult in any other way. Where did it come from, this bizarre cornflake fixation? It just seemed to be part of his personality, something no one could do anything about.

  Whether you are a child or a parent, the question of “likes and dislikes” is one of the great mysteries. Human tastes are astonishingly diverse, and they can be mulishly stubborn. Even within the same family, likes vary dramatically from person to person. Some prefer the components of a meal to be served separate and unsullied, with nothing touching; others can only fully enjoy them when the flavors mingle in a pot. There is no such thing as a food that will please everyone. My oldest child—a contrarian—doesn’t like chocolate; my youngest—a conformist—adores it. It’s hard to say how much of this has to do with chocolate actually tasting different to each of them, and how much it has to do with the social payoff you get from being the person who either likes or loathes something so central to the surrounding culture. The one who loves chocolate gets the reward of enjoying something that almost everyone agrees is a treat. And he gets a lot of treats. The one who doesn’t like chocolate gets fewer sweets, but what he does get is the thrill of surprising people with his oddball tastes. He fills the chocolate-shaped void with licorice.

  Yet my chocolate-hating boy will happily consume pieces of chocolate if they are buried in a cookie or melted in a mug of hot cocoa. One of the many puzzles about likes and dislikes is how they change depending on the context. As the psychologist Paul Rozin says, “to say one likes lobster does not mean that one likes it for breakfast or smothered in whipped cream.” Different meals, different times of day, and different locations can all make the same food or drink seem either desirable or not. Call it the Retsina effect: that resinated white wine that’s so refreshing when sipped on a Greek island tastes of paint-stripper back home in the rain. It’s also worth remembering that when we say we like this or that, though we use the same words, we are often not talking about the same thing. You may think you hate “mango” because you have only ever tasted the fibrous, sour, yellow kind. When I say I adore it, I am thinking of a ripe Alphonso mango from India, brimming with orange juice and so fragrant you could bottle it and use it for perfume.

  The foods we eat the most are not always the ones we like the most. In 1996, the psychologist Kent Berridge changed the way many neuroscientists thought about eating when he introduced a distinction between “wanting” (the motivation to eat something) and “liking” (the pleasure the food actually gives). Berridge found that “wanting” or craving was neurally as well as psychologically distinct from “liking.” Whereas the zone of the brain that controls our motivation to eat stretches across the entire nucleus accumbens, the sections of the brain that give us pleasure when we eat occupy smaller “hotspots” within this same area. For Berridge, this discovery offers a fruit
ful way for thinking about some of the “disorders of desire” that bedevil humans. For example, binge eating may—like other addictive behaviors—be associated with “excessive wanting without commensurate ‘liking.’” You may feel a potent drive to purchase an extra-large portion of cheesy nachos, even though the pleasure they deliver when you actually consume them is much less potent than you expected. Indeed, binge eaters often report that the foods they crave do not even taste good when they are eating them: the desire is greater than the enjoyment.

  However, several neuroscientists have pointed out in response to Berridge that liking and wanting remain “highly entangled.” Berridge himself admits that there is strong evidence that if you reduce the amount a food is liked, the consequence is that it is also wanted less. Even if our craved foods do not make us as happy as we hope they will, the reason that we crave them in the first place is that we once loved them. Like drug addicts, we are chasing a remembered high. Our “likes” thus remain a central motivating force in shaping how and what we eat. Why we like the foods we do remains a vital question for anyone who is interested in feeding themselves or their family better. If asked to say where tastes come from, I suspect that most of us would say they were determined by individual temperament, which is another way of saying “genes.” Being a chocolate lover—or hater—becomes so much a part of our self-image that we can’t imagine ourselves any other way. We show that we are adventurous by seeking out the hottest chilis; we prove we are easygoing by telling our host we “eat anything.” We confirm that we are naturally conservative by eating patriotic hunks of red meat. Taste is identity. Aged eight, my daughter used to draw pictures of herself and write “prawns-peas-mushrooms” at the top, surrounding herself with the tastes she loved best.