Bee Wilson > Quotes

“Every new technology represents a trade-off: something is gained, but something is also lost.”
― Bee Wilson, Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

“Technology is not a form of robotics but something very human: the creation of tools and techniques that answer certain uses in our lives.”
― Bee Wilson, Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

“Traditional histories of technology do not pay much attention to food. They tend to focus on hefty industrial and military developments: wheels and ships, gunpowder and telegraphs, airships and radio. When food is mentioned, it is usually in the context of agriculture—systems of tillage and irrigation—rather than the domestic work of the kitchen. But there is just as much invention in a nutcracker as in a bullet.”
― Bee Wilson, Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

“The modern scientific method in which experiments form part of a structured system of hypothesis, experimentation, and analysis is as recent as the seventeenth century; the problem-solving technology of cooking goes back thousands of years.”
― Bee Wilson, Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

“The way you teach a child to eat well is through example, enthusiasm, and patient exposure to good food. And when that fails, you lie.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“The danger of growing up surrounded by these endless sweet and salty industrial concoctions is not that we are innately incapable of resisting them, but that the more frequently we eat them, especially in childhood, the more they train us to expect all food to taste this way.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“This technological stagnation reflects a harsh truth. There was very little interest in attempting to save labor when the labor in question was not your own.”
― Bee Wilson, Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

“Your first job when eating is to nourish yourself.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“When we say we are lacking in the time to eat well, what we often mean is that we lack synchronised time to eat. Our days and weeks are broken up with constant interruptions and meals are no longer taken communally and in unison, but are a cacophony of individual collations snatched here and there, with no company but the voices in our headphones. Many of us, to our own annoyance, are trapped in routines in which eating well seems all but impossible. Yet this is partly because we live in a world that places a higher premium on time than it does on food.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“Our kitchens are filled with ghosts. You may not see them, but you could not cook as you do without their ingenuity: the potters who first enabled us to boil and stew; the knife forgers; the resourceful engineers who designed the first refrigerators; the pioneers of gas and electric ovens; the scale makers; the inventors of eggbeaters and peelers.”
― Bee Wilson, Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

“Every man carries within him a world, which is composed of all that he has seen and loved,”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“No one is doomed by genes to eat badly. Pickiness is governed more by environment than biology.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“It is the technique, above all, that makes a meal Chinese or not.”
― Bee Wilson, Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

“Love and travel are both powerful spurs to change.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“The problem isn't just that some people are overfed and others are underfed, lacking enough basic calories to ward off gnawing hunger (though that still remains a real and brutal problem). The new difficulty is that billions of people across the globe are simultaneously overfed and undernourished: rich in calories but poor in nutrients. Our new global diet is replete with sugar and refined carbohydrates yet lacking in crucial micronutrients such as iron and trace vitamins. Malnutrition is no longer just about hunger and stunting; it is also about obesity.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“When we lament the decline of time spent on cooking, we need to be clear what it is that we are lamenting. Many of the female cooks who devoted so many hours to preparing food in the past did so because they did not think their own time was worth much.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“The subtext of all table manners is the fear that the man next to you may pull his knife on you.”
― Bee Wilson, Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

“Eating well is a skill. We learn it. Or not. It’s something we can work on at any age. Sugar is not love. But it can feel like it.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“The true calamity of clean eating is not that it is entirely false. It is that it contains a kernel of truth. Underneath all the nutribabble talk of 'glowing' and wellness, the gurus of clean eating are completely right to say that most modern eaters would benefit from consuming less refined sugar and processed meat and more vegetables and meals cooked from scratch. The problem is that it's near impossible to pick out the sensible bits of clean eating and ignore the rest. Whether the term clean is used or not, there is a new puritanism about food that has taken root widely.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“When we say we lack time to cook -- or even time to eat -- we are not making a simple statement of fact. We are talking about cultural values and the way that our society dictates that our days should be carved up.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“For much of the twentieth century, American visitors to Britain found that everything was the wrong temperature: cold, drafty rooms; warm beer and milk; rancid butter and sweating cheese.”
― Bee Wilson, Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

“The technology of food matters even when we barely notice it is there. From fire onward, there is a technology behind everything we eat, whether we recognize it or not. Behind every loaf of bread, there is an oven. Behind a bowl of soup, there is a pan and a wooden spoon (unless it comes from a can, another technology altogether). Behind every restaurant-kitchen foam, there will be a whipping canister, charged with N2O.”
― Bee Wilson, Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

“The Romans also had beautifully made metal colanders and bronze chafing dishes, flattish metal patinae, vast cauldrons of brass and bronze, pastry molds in varying ornate shapes, fish kettles, frying pans with special pouring lips to dispense the sauce and handles that folded up. Much of what has remained looks disconcertingly modern. The range of Roman metal cookware was still impressing the chef Alexis Soyer in 1853. Soyer was particularly taken with a very high-tech sounding two-tiered vessel called the authepsa (the name means “self-boiling”). Like a modern steamer, it came in two layers, made of Corinthian brass. The top compartment, said Soyer, could be used for gently cooking “light delicacies destined for dessert.” It was a highly valued utensil. Cicero describes one authepsa being sold at auction for such a high price that bystanders assumed the thing being sold was an entire farm.”
― Bee Wilson, Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

“A few decades from now, the current laissez-faire attitudes to sugar - now present in 80 per cent of supermarket foods - may seems as reckless and strange as permitting cars without seatbelts or smoking on aeroplanes.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Technology is the art of the possible.”
― Bee Wilson, Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

“It is only now that we can, following Khoury, speak of a Global Standard Eater, because it is only now that humans have come to eat in such startlingly similar ways. Perhaps the biggest change is in the quantities that we eat – around 500 calories on average more per day than our equivalents in the 1960s (from 2,237 calories in 1961 to 2,756 calories in 2009). The Global Standard Eater consumes a whole lot more of almost everything than most eaters of the past. From the 1960s, we started to eat more refined grains and more fat, we drank more alcohol and, quite simply, we ate much more food.”
― Bee Wilson, The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

“The Japanese only really started eating what we think of as Japanese food in the years after the Second World War.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“No one is too busy to cook.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“For thousands of years, servants and slaves--or in lesser households, wives and daughters--were stuck with the same pestles and sieves, with few innovations. This technological stagnation reflects a harsh truth. There was very little interest in attempting to save labor when the labor in question was not your own.”
― Bee Wilson

“In the West the word “delicious” is likely to conjure up something laced with sugar, fat and salt, whereas in Japan it signifies a flavour found in mushrooms, grilled fish and light broths.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat