At the most basic level, we have to learn what is food and what is poison. A parent feeding a baby is training them how food should taste. But we haven’t paid anything like enough attention to another consequence of being omnivores, which is that eating is not something we are born instinctively knowing how to do. From our first year of life, human tastes are astonishingly diverse. Yet nothing could be further from the truth.Īll the foods that you regularly eat are ones that you learned to eat. We try to eat more vegetables, but we do not try to make ourselves enjoy vegetables more, maybe because there’s a near-universal conviction that it is not possible to learn new tastes and shed old ones. We make frequent attempts – more or less half-hearted – to change what we eat, but almost no effort to change how we feel about food: how well we deal with hunger, how strongly attached we are to sugar, our emotions on being served a small portion. Maybe this is why we act as if our core attitudes to eating are set in stone. Our tastes follow us around like a comforting shadow. We have to find a way to want to eat what’s good for us. If we are going to change our diets, we first have to relearn the art of eating, which is a question of psychology as much as nutrition. How we eat – how we approach food – is what really matters. But nutrients only count when a person picks up food and eats it. Eat this! Don’t eat that! We obsess about the properties of various ingredients: the protein, the omega oils, the vitamins. S o many of our anxieties around diet take the form of a search for the perfect food, the one that will cure all our ills.
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