The problem with food is we care too much. Take the example of Diane, a 48-year-old office manager who took part in a study of eating habits in 2010. She believed food was entirely about pleasure and imagination, a matter of “what I like and what I fancy,” she told an interviewer. She obsessed over the variables that might interfere with her enjoyment—as a gourmet might critique the texture of a sous vide chicken breast or frown at the seasoning of a broth. The temperature of her food was particularly important. Diane invited the researchers to a café nearby so they could see her navigate the menu, or rather navigate its dearth of appetizing options. When dinner was served, she ate rapidly but didn’t finish. She would only eat a cooked meal, she explained, when it was still piping hot.



So Diane was a picky eater. And this might have given the food she ate greater meaning, since in order to truly love a certain dish—not too salty, not too sweet—you have to reject other, lesser forms of it. But in truth Diane complained of being deeply miserable. Her selections were more pained than indulgent. The food she made such a show of ordering at the café was nothing more than a plain egg on toast, which quickly became revolting to her as it cooled. As she neared the age of 50, she felt she’d let her mother down because her fussiness meant they could never share a meal together; her friends no longer invited her to dinner. Though Diane wanted to change her ways, she doubted she could. She lived on a diet of de-food-ified food: processed cheese, breakfast cereal, potato chips, and sliced bread.



Of course, these culinary preferences and the anguish that often trails behind them aren’t uncommon. The British historian Bee Wilson’s new book First Bite takes on the subject of how we learn to eat as children and the habits we end up with as adults. As well as negative health effects, the book describes the contortions people perform in their social and professional lives because of disordered eating: One woman chooses her college on the assurance the cafeteria will serve the kind of pizza she finds acceptable; another has to call any restaurant she plans to visit and check that they will cook a hamburger with absolutely no fixings. Nor are the outcomes of these situations so different from the person who likes a wide range of foods but ends up buying a sandwich for lunch and pizza for dinner. These daily struggles are good examples of a much bigger dysfunction: Why do we find it so hard to eat nourishing, whole foods, even if they are available and we can afford them and we want to eat them?

Any account of the Western diet in the twenty-first century is going to be both a bleak picture and one that contains a lot of candy. A 2002 study of the foods children like to eat—tastes they would, it was hoped, grow out of—revealed that their parents favored the same popcorn, pancakes, ground beef, and pizza. Nostalgic, fattening “kids’ foods” have become part of everyday life: Wilson cites the “cereal milk” sold at David Chang’s Momofuku Milk Bars in New York and the rise of birthday-cake-flavored ice cream that asks to be consumed on the 364 un-special days of the year. (She also has a disdain for cupcakes that made me instantly trust this book.) The average American in 2006 consumed 2,533 calories per day, including 422 calories worth of drinks, compared with 2,090 calories in 1977. In studies of portion size, a common reason to stop eating was boredom.

FIRST BITE: HOW WE LEARN TO EAT by Bee Wilson Basic Books, 362 pp. $27.99

Wilson’s explanation of how we got to this state of affairs feels the most human of the many that have been offered in the past 15 years. There is a lot of blame to go round after all, and you could start with Eric Schlosser’s target in his 2001 best-seller Fast Food Nation: the huge fast-food companies that invented supersize portions and use Disney-style marketing tactics to sell them to families. Or you could look at the corrupt politics that have given us sugary drinks in schools and deliberately confusing government dietary advice, as Marion Nestle does in Food Politics (2002). Naturally, the military is behind much of this. After World War II, the Army partnered with corporations to create a permanent market for processed foods originally developed as soldiers’ rations, as described in The Combat-Ready Kitchen (2015) by Anastacia Marx de Salcedo. And maybe Kraft and Frito-Lay are just really, deceptively good at what they do. The $1 trillion snack industry, Michael Moss’s Salt, Sugar, Fat (2013) argues, is built on the “bliss point,” an addictive combination of the three title ingredients. It doesn’t help, Michael Pollan suggests in The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), that Americans have few long-established food traditions to guide us—what we need is “food rules.”