There is an important message for anyone bringing up children in Bee Wilson’s new book First Bite: How We Learn to Eat.
Taste, she says, is a learned preference that is determined by what we eat when we are kids. It’s not some characteristic set in stone by our genetic make up.
This is vindication of an opinion that I have always had, which makes me cringe when I see parents feeding their kids junk food/massive quantities of sugar. You know that they are programing their children to crave these foods for the rest of their lives – unless they happen to go through some radical nutritional epiphany (as our tastes can be reprogrammed she also notes).
Most of us stick with what we were brought up on – which is heavily influenced by the crap the food industry pushes on us.
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