I’m becoming increasingly aware of being surrounded by an ever-widening circle of people who are either impossibly fussy or dangerously unenlightened eaters. I’m not just talking about some of the young women I know who won’t, for example, touch any meat dish if it contains a bone, look at a fish with its face still on, or down more than three grains of rice with a curry.
We don’t have to look very far to see people of all sizes who relate to food in chaotic ways.
The chaos, says the food writer and historian Bee Wilson in her new book, can take many forms: compulsive eating, undereating or extreme pickiness.
It’s the pickiness that gets me. Never have we lived in an era where so many adults feel the need to avoid gluten (a protein found in wheat, rye and barley), dairy (because they’re allergic to or intolerant to lactose, the natural sugar in milk), meat, nuts, seeds, wheat, and so on.
Every menu you look at must now, by law, list Dairy Free (DF) or Gluten Free (GF), and many include Vegetarian or Vegan to indicate just how politically correct it is.
Yet, as Bee Wilson, author of a tell-it-like-it is book about how we learn to eat, First Bite (4th Estate; £12.99), points out, only 1% of the population has been diagnosed with celiac disease; lactose intolerance affects fewer than one in five.
But medical conditions apart, there are an astonishing number of adults who still consume the same foods they’ve been eating since childhood and adolescence: mostly those that satisfy our desire for sweet things and our suspicion of anything vaguely sour.
Comfort foods such as milky drinks and cappuccinos, sugary full-fat yoghurts, cheesy pizza, chips, ice-cream and chocolate bars, which many Scots stuff into their supermarket trolleys without batting an eyelid. Many are full of fat (like around two-thirds of the population of Scotland, a third of whom are obese,) yet it doesn’t seem to occur to them that they could just try tasting other foods. Like shredded cabbage instead of spaghetti with their bolognese. Or cut-price tinned salmon with boiled potatoes instead of sausage rolls and chips.
This personal observation is endorsed by Wilson, who writes that in today’s food culture, people seem to have acquired uncannily homogeneous tastes, markedly more so than in the past.
This is down to food companies pushing foods high in sugar, salt and fat, causing children to learn to like them early on, and seek them out as they go through life.
The manufacturers then invent ever more of these foods that – arguably - contribute to unhealthy eating habits, and thus the self-perpetuating cycle is established.
Wilson says the reason many find it hard to eat healthily is that we have never learned any differently, and that’s why most of us eat what we like and we only like what we know.
Ah, but, here’s the thing. It’s not necessarily the case, as is often mooted, that we’re powerless to resist the unhealthy foods so readily available in shops and supermarkets just because they match what we have learned to like. Learned food habits can be relearned.
The author concedes that the greatest public health problem of modern times is how to persuade people to make better food choices. But we’ve been looking for answers in the wrong places.
The challenge is not to grasp the “sea of book and articles” and public health information leaflets, but to learn new habits. Well-intentioned Government recommendations for fixing the obesity crisis are all very well, but what does it take for us to undergo the shift to enjoying a diet of healthy food?
The first step is to recognise that our tastes and habits are not fixed but changeable. Just like children, adults have the capacity to learn new tricks.
Three of these that we could all learn to benefit from are, Wilson suggests: following structured mealtimes; responding 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.
We can teach ourselves to cook in order to relearn the food experiences that first shaped us. This is described as a form of “reconditioning” meal by meal. After all, we weren’t born knowing what to eat.
She also suggests that government could do a lot more to help us modify our eating habits.
In place of all that advice, she says, they could reshape the food environment in ways that would help us to learn better habits of our own accord.
“In a few decades’ time, the current laissez-faire attitudes to sugar – now present in 80% of supermarket foods – will seem as reckless and strange as permitting cars without seatbelts or smoking on aeroplanes,” says Wilson.
With the pressure mounting on both the Westminster and Scottish governments to introduce some form of sugar tax (more on which next week), this is just one of the ways in which Wilson’s book chimes with the zeitgeist and will, I’m sure, make for comforting reading for the Scottish Food Commission.
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