Bee Wilson Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 50 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Bee Wilson.
Famous Quotes By Bee Wilson
All the foods that you regularly eat are ones that you learned to eat. Everyone starts life drinking milk. After that, it's all up for grabs. From our first year of life, human tastes are astonishingly diverse. — Bee Wilson
Protein, we keep being told, is the vital nutrient that will give us a boost. It will burn fat, build muscle, reduce tiredness and kill our hunger pangs. Maybe if we shake enough protein powder into our daily smoothie, we will actually morph into Gwyneth Paltrow. — Bee Wilson
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
I'd rather have a good food - lots and lots of different varieties of good foods - than search for something perfect. — Bee Wilson
In the 1930s, the Nazis borrowed the frugal image of the one-pot meal, putting it to ideological use. In 1933, Hitler's government announced that Germans should put aside one Sunday, from October to March, to eat a one-pot meal: Eintopf. The idea was that people would save enough money in this way to donate whatever was saved to the poor. Cookbooks were hastily rewritten to take account of the new policy. One recipe collection listed no fewer than sixty-nine Eintopfs, including macaroni, goulash, Irish stew, Serbian rice soup, numerous cabbagey medleys, and Old German potato soup. — Bee Wilson
I appreciate recipes that tell you what can be changed and what must remain fixed. 'The Zuni Cafe Cookbook' by the late Judy Rodgers is superb at this. — Bee Wilson
The main influence on a child's palate may no longer be a parent but a series of food manufacturers whose products - despite their illusion of infinite choice - deliver a monotonous flavour hit, quite unlike the more varied flavours of traditional cuisine. — Bee Wilson
Every new technology represents a trade-off: something is gained, but something is also lost. — Bee Wilson
Learning to cook in the 1990s, I thought 'proper olives' meant black. The benchmark was Kalamata from Greece: purple-black with an almost mushroomy depth of flavour. Other fine examples were tiny Coquilles from Nice and plump round Tanches from Nyons. — Bee Wilson
The comeback of true green olives was part of a Spanish food revival in the early 2000s. I credit Sam and Sam Clark of Moro Restaurant in London with making them cool again. — Bee Wilson
What strikes me, the more I cook, is that the best recipes are ones where the basic anatomy is so sound it will survive multiple adjustments. When a recipe has good bones, you can change the seasoning, double the garlic, swap lime for lemon, and it still turns out delicious. — Bee Wilson
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
Protein bars, protein flapjacks, protein granola, protein ice cream and protein coconut water ... To look at the health-food aisles, you'd think that protein was a substance no one could overeat. Even bread now comes in protein-enriched form. — Bee Wilson
The great American food writer M. F. K. Fisher once wrote an essay called 'The Anatomy of a Recipe.' To have a good anatomy, in her view, a recipe should have a sense of logical progression. She despaired of recipes with 'anatomical faults,' where the reader is told to make a cake batter and only then to grease the loaf pans. — Bee Wilson
The group who really could benefit from more protein is not fit young gym-goers but older people, who seem to be at much greater risk of protein deficiency. — Bee Wilson
How were they to square the tremendous wealth they accrued with their image of themselves as frugal and virtuous? Easy: just argue that commerce was itself virtuous. To be rich in corrupt old Europe must be a sign of droneishness; but to be rich in fresh young American was the fruit of hard work. The beehive provided Americans with the ideal image for their religion of work. — Bee Wilson
When eating becomes a matter of life or death, and each new bite is a celebration, you may discover that none of the other stuff was quite as important as sitting and breaking bread together. — Bee Wilson
Here's a quick translation: spork = a spoon with added tines; splayd = a knife, fork, and spoon in one, consisting of a tined spoon with a sharpened edge; knork = a fork with the cutting power of a knife; spife = a spoon with a knife on the end (an example would be the plastic green kiwi spoons sold in kitchenware shops); sporf = an all-purpose term for any hybrid of spoon, fork, and knife. — Bee Wilson
The old injunction 'Don't talk with your mouth full' is based on the presumption that, however multifunctional a mouth may be, it should only perform one job at a time. Humans have found a way around this limitation in the form of food writing. — Bee Wilson
When we consume vastly more protein than we need, our kidneys struggle to process it, resulting in protein in the urine. Too much protein from meat may also contribute to kidney stones. — Bee Wilson
In the right circumstances, I'm a big fan of eating alone. Often, on a Sunday evening, I go to a yoga class whose charm is largely that it gives me an alibi to avoid cooking family supper for once. I return to have boiled eggs and soldiers in silence with a book. Bliss. — Bee Wilson
The danger of growing up surrounded by 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
One thing I always make - and I'm sure this is partly to do with memory and yearning and because I've made it ever since my children were born - I make gingerbread every year. And it's partly just the perfume of the spices in the house, makes it smell like winter to me. — Bee Wilson
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
In 2009, it was forecast that the number of single-person households would increase by two million in 10 years, suggesting that social isolation will only get worse. — Bee Wilson
Kitchen technology is not just about how well something works on its own terms - whether it produces the most delicious food - but about all the things that surround it: kitchen design; our attitude to danger and risk; pollution; the lives of women and servants; how we feel about red meat, indeed about meat in general; social and family structures; the state of metallurgy. — Bee Wilson
The saddest utensil I've come across is an 'anti-loneliness ramen bowl,' which holds your iPhone to keep you company as you slurp your solitary bowl of noodles. But the iPhone cannot return your gaze or reassure you that you didn't squeeze too much lime into the soup, though maybe a dinner-conversation app is only a matter of time. — Bee Wilson
A recipe is not an exact formula, but it does need a certain structure. When the bones are right, you can dress it in many ways. — Bee Wilson
No one is doomed by genes to eat badly. Pickiness is governed more by environment than biology. — Bee Wilson
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
When someone watches us eating, we feel exposed. We might also harbor a suspicion that the person staring wants to steal food from our plate. The taboo, in any case, is long-standing. — Bee Wilson
No home-cooked food, no matter how delicious, can match the power of bringing people together in misty-eyed recollection of industrially produced food. — Bee Wilson
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
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. We have to find a way to want to eat what's good for us. — Bee Wilson
There's a new dividing line in olives: between those who prefer Nocellara to all other varieties, and the people who have never tasted them. — Bee Wilson
The more people get advised to eat vegetables, the less it seems they wish to eat them. And it is quite a natural response. So I've said that the main way that we get to like food is through being exposed to them, but there's a second condition. We have to be exposed to them without feeling any sense of coercion. — Bee Wilson
One of the strange things about imaginary food is that it allows us to take pleasure in reading about things that we would never want to eat in real life. — Bee Wilson
Technology is the art of the possible. — Bee Wilson
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
Sometimes the buzz of reading about others eating comes from the voyeuristic thrill of seeing how the other half lives: the gold leaf and truffles or - in the case of Trimalchio's feast in Petronius' 'Satyricon' - the dormice and honey. — Bee Wilson
Restaurant critics all struggle with the difficulty of writing about eating without resorting to the word 'delicious' and its synonyms. — Bee Wilson
In theory, food writing is an aid or a prelude to actual meals: you read a recipe, and then you cook. In practice - in a 'paradox' that Michael Pollan, among others, has identified - our current gastronomic fantasies, particularly on TV, have coincided with a decline in home cooking. — Bee Wilson
One of the rudest things you can do, food-wise, is to stare at someone in the act of eating. It draws attention to the unseemly fact that eating is a bodily function - like animals, we are trapped by our hungers, but we do our best to disguise them with such civilized props as menus and forks. — Bee Wilson
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
I like quinoa. I like gingerbread. I feel they should be kept separate. I'm not in favor of this thing of making kind of raw, vegan chocolate cake and saying it's as good as chocolate cake. I mean, just eat cake and be done with it. And then have a separate meal of quinoa. — Bee Wilson
Years ago, during a John Grisham phase, I tried to pinpoint exactly why I found Grisham's often predictable legal thrillers quite so comforting. The best answer I could come up with was the frequency with which Grisham tells us that his lead characters are sipping coffee. When it comes to food and drink, predictability can console. — Bee Wilson
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
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