Karin Schimke
FOOD and eating is an elaborate net of learnt behaviour, psychological complexes, environmental feedback, and emotional and socio-political circumstances.
Our relationship with food – whether we live on the “enough” or the “not enough” side of the breadline – is anything but straightforward.
Straightforward would be: we are hungry and we fulfil our nutritional needs with wholesome, unprocessed food.
“Satisfying hunger,” says Wilson, “is the most basic function of eating. Assuming there’s enough food, and this cannot always be assumed, hunger management doesn’t seem like something anyone should have to learn…
“Hunger is an innate animal mechanism that we are born with. Yet it plays out in the modern food environment, hunger is far from simple. Beyond infancy, acquiring the ability to cancel out our hunger adequately without overshooting the mark has become a complicated task, whether in the hungry developing world or the overstuffed West.”
Food writer and historian Wilson’s fifth book attempts to pry loose the knots around modern eating. In doing so, she makes no personal arguments – except perhaps that we can change our eating habits – but brings to bear a vast array of studies and research to show us how it is that we learn to eat. “My premise 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.”
She reiterates what most middle-class or educated people already know that it has been well established that health lies on the road of “moderate helpings of a variety of real whole food, plus regular exercise”, as well as minimally processed food that are mostly plant-based. But there is a vast abyss between knowing this and living this. Wilson sets out to find out why.
Considering what an emotional minefield personal eating habits are, the tone she adopts – neutral, factual and non-judgemental – is pitched just right. If you’re looking for a zealously defended “new” way to lose weight and find health, this is not the book for you. Wilson maintains a cool eye, merely presenting the reader with much of the research that has been done about the ways in which we respond to food, food rules, tastes and change.
The book is not without personality though. Wilson herself once had a dangerous predilection for sugar, and food was her “main relationship”. She managed to get to “the other side” where food was no longer complicated for her, meaning eating is no longer surrounded by a miasma of guilt, obsession, control, punishment and worry.
She eats when she is hungry and stops when she is full, and her diet is varied and without crazy restrictions, though it is low in processed foods. But the personal battle around food is not Wilson’s main focus. Food is a societal issue, and she never strays far from linking individual responses to food with the familial, environmental, governmental and marketing milieus.
Because however personal a dire hunger for food or extreme guilt around eating are, our relationship with food is not wholly of our own making. We do not develop our preferences, nutritional shortcomings or psychological food barriers in a vacuum.
From that point of view, First Bite cannot be read as self-help. There are no guidelines and top tips and to-do lists. There are no calls to arms, there is no motivational bombast, and there are no quotable inspirational catchphrases. Nor are there calorie, forbidden-food and weight-guideline lists.
In a chapter headed “Change”, Wilson explains why it is not possible to convince people to eat better by scaring them with statistics or dire stories about how too much sugar leads to diabetes which can result in kidney failure, blindness and amputations.
Neither fear nor advice is a good motivator for change because no matter how nicely you dress up good advice, you are telling the other person what do to, and “human beings don’t respond well to being bossed around”. Yet, at the same time as gleaning an enormous amount of knowledge of how food shapes lives and nations (read, for instance, the fascinating stories of how wholesale food change has been affected in Japan and Sweden), the reader imbibes a wisdom that is unlikely to fall by the wayside once the last page has been reached.
The solidity of the research, and its quiet delivery, has an unexpected transformational effect. Wilson spends a few pages at the end of the book documenting what people who lose weight and keep it off have in common with one another. In the spirit of what went before, this epilogue is titled “This is Not Advice”. It’s the best very non-advice I’ve read for a while.