First Bite: How We Learn to Eat - Softcover

Wilson, Bee

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007549725 ISBN 13: 9780007549726

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2016

Synopsis

Fortnum & Mason Food Book of the Year 2016

We are not born knowing what to eat; we each have to figure it out for ourselves. From childhood onwards, we learn how big a portion is and how sweet is too sweet. The way we learn to eat holds the key to why food has gone so disastrously wrong for so many people. But how does this happen? And can we ever change our food habits for the better?

An exploration of the extraordinary and surprising origins of our taste and eating habits, in First Bite award-winning food writer Bee Wilson explains how we can change our palates to lead healthier, happier lives.

About this title

About the Author

Bee Wilson is an award-winning food writer, historian, and author of four books, including Consider the Fork and Swindled. She has been named BBC Radio's Food Writer of the Year and writes a weekly food column for the Sunday Telegraph's Stella magazine. Wilson lives in Cambridge, England.

Alison Larkin was born in Washington, DC, adopted at six weeks old by British parents, and raised in England and Africa. After graduating from Royal Holloway College, London University, and the Webber-Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, she became a playwright and classical actress on the British stage. Then, at twenty-eight, she found her birth mother, who was living in Bald Mountain, Tennessee. The experience turned her into a stand-up comic. She was soon headlining at the Comic Strip in New York and the Comedy Store in Los Angeles, while maintaining her theatrical career. She also spent three years under a studio development contract to star in her own sitcom with ABC, CBS, and Jim Henson Productions. Her unusually wide range of voices can be heard in cartoons and movies, from work by James Cameron and Robert Altman to Pocahontas and The Wonder Pets. The audiobook of The English American, narrated by Alison, won an AudioFile Earphones Award. She has narrated over thirty audi books and lives in the Berkshires, western Massachusetts, with her husband and two children.

Review

A Wall Street Journal Book of the Year

"First Bite is a feast of a book."―Financial Times

"An anthropological category killer on the topic of how we learn to eat."―New York Times Book Review

"A fascinating new book.... [Bee Wilson's] message is a hopeful, even liberating, one."―Washington Post

"A brilliant, heartfelt book about [the] crisis in our contemporary diet.... Wilson is intelligent, passionate, sincere, tirelessly curious and endlessly willing to admit mistakes and learn from experience."―London Review of Books

"Delightful.... The well-meaning experts lecture us about what we ought to eat; Wilson wants to understand why we eat what we do."―Guardian (UK)

"Wilson sprinkles just enough personal narrative through First Bite to establish her as a sympathetic figure without turning the book into a memoir.... Her tone is refreshingly loose and friendly; she's one of the few scholars I can think of who can effectively quote both Margaret Mead and Homer Simpson."―Washington Post

"Wilson lays out her discoveries in a series of easily digestible chapters that balance science and anecdote with short interludes on various foods.... Her tone is down-to-earth and research-based at once, gentle, encouraging, no-nonsense."―Boston Globe

"Absorbing read...timely."―Los Angeles Review of Books

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0007549725
• ISBN 13: 9780007549726
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432