If I’d read Bee Wilson’s new book First Bite: How We Learn to Eat (Basic) during the joyously fat-and-sugar-filled holiday season, when everything smells like butter and vanilla and you can’t go anywhere without being offered a cookie, I probably wouldn’t have been very receptive to Wilson’s central argument. “Eating well is a skill,” she writes. “We learn it. Or not. It’s something we can work on at any age.” But now it’s January, season of self-improvement, and we’re no longer supposed to enjoy anything we put in our mouths. The nicest thing about First Bite, though, is that Wilson truly believes that foods that taste good and foods that are good for you are not mutually exclusive. If, during this most shit-tastic, anhedonic time of the year, there’s a glimmer of hope that I might actually find pleasure in anything that’s good for me—even kale—I will cling to it.
Some of Wilson’s recommendations are commonplace in magazines and the health columns of newspapers: use smaller plates and serving bowls, make meals social experiences (because screens are distracting and make you overeat), learn to stop eating when you feel full instead of when you’ve finished everything in front of you. Like just about every food writer during the month of January, Wilson heaps praise upon soup (invariably described as “nourishing”).
By Bee Wilson
