First Bite by Bee Wilson review – how we can change our tastes to eat better

A refreshing attempt to understand why we eat what we do swaps finger-wagging for common sense. More broccoli, anyone?

The great British rice pudding debates of 1912-13 pitted against each other two notions of how children did, and should, develop their eating habits. The controversies were largely about working-class kids – how to properly nourish them, how to make them better representatives of an “imperial race”, and how to overcome the “stupid feeding” that produced so many sallow, stunted and disease-ridden children, destined to be unfit for military service or productive work. Rice pudding, and its relatives made from sago, tapioca and semolina, were at the heart of the matter, because experts had thought for some time that these milky concoctions were cost-effective ways of getting good stuff into the kids. The problem was that many children – of all classes – detested rice pudding. When, years later, Mary Jane was “crying with all her might and main”, and AA Milne asked what was the matter with her, the answer was, of course, “it’s lovely rice pudding for dinner again!”.

One side of the rice pudding controversies maintained that children’s tastes were corrupt: youngsters liked bad things – bread and jam, sweets, tea and sugar – and they needed vigorous expert intervention to get them to eat properly. Perhaps they would come to like foods that were good for them, but, really, who cared whether they enjoyed them or not? As a rule, children didn’t like foods that were genuinely nourishing. Hence, longstanding parental battles to get the kids to “eat your veggies first”, or “eat a little broccoli and you can have a sweet later”.

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