Until the twentieth century, Japanese food was often neither delicious nor nourishing. Junichi Saga, a Japanese doctor who chronicled the memories of elderly villagers from just outside Tokyo, in the nineteen-seventies, found that, in the early years of the century, most families scraped by on a mixture of rice and barley, accompanied by small quantities of radish leaves, pickles, or miso. Animal protein was almost entirely absent in the Buddhist country, and even fish, as one of Saga’s informants recalled, was limited to “one salted salmon,” bought for the New Year’s celebrations, “though only after an awful fuss.”
It wasn’t until after the Second World War, with the arrival of American food aid as well as new fishing and storage technologies, that Japanese cuisine became varied in both seasoning and substance. In the course of the twentieth century, consumption of grains in Japan fell by almost half, replaced by eggs, meat, fresh fruit and vegetables, and, most of all, fish. These new influences were incorporated into Japanese cuisine, adapted to fit traditional ideas about portion size and meal structure as well as traditional tastes for miso, soy, and pickled and fermented vegetables. By the nineteen-seventies, the country’s food culture had been utterly transformed. Today, Japan is one of the most food-obsessed countries in the world—the first perfect watermelon of the season sells at auction for more than two thousand dollars, and gourmet manga top best-seller lists—and yet it also has one of the lowest rates of obesity in the world.
In her new book “First Bite,” an exploration of how individuals and cultures learn to eat, for better and for worse, the British food historian Bee Wilson cites Japan’s culinary history as an example of how dietary improvements can take place on a national scale. The lesson to draw from the Japanese, she argues, is not that the West must move to a sushi-based diet to tackle its obesity pandemic, no matter how delicious that sounds. Instead, Japan is an example of how eating habits, far from being “inevitable or innate,” can evolve remarkably quickly, even in places where healthy practices are lacking. “We often convince ourselves that there is something vital within us that prevents us from ever eating differently,” Wilson writes. But “if the Japanese can change, why can’t we?”
Wilson—whose previous book, “Consider the Fork,” was a fascinating look at how kitchen utensils have shaped how and what we eat—often uses the topic of food as a gateway to explore the intersecting histories of ideas, culture, technology, and society. She’s written about the evolution of food fraud, the history of the sandwich, and humans’ relationship with bees. “First Bite” marks something of a shift in subject matter and approach: the book contains copious archival research, illuminating, for example, the history of school-food programs and eating disorders, but it also incorporates personal anecdotes from Wilson’s life: her troubled relationship with carbohydrates as a teen, and her desperate attempts to spoon healthful foods into the mouth of her resistant toddler son. Much of the book is concerned with how children learn to eat: Wilson explores the latest research on when to introduce solid food and the long history of government interventions in childhood nutrition, as well as how flavor preferences are imprinted or picky eating habits developed. Although she seems reluctant to preach (“No amount of urging from me to eat this or that food will make you eat it,” she writes), Wilson does have an agenda. It may be difficult to relearn how to eat as an adult, she tells us, but it is possible, and, in much of the developed world, it is necessary.
After all, in America, at least, many adult diets remain stuck in an endless rotation of scaled-up favorites from the kids’ menu: more than half of all food ordered in restaurants consists of burgers, French fries, pizza, or Mexican food. As a nation, our intake of calories from vegetables has fallen by three per cent since the nineteen-seventies, which, as Wilson points out, “is a bigger drop than it sounds like,” since vegetables contain fewer calories than other food groups. Even more dispiritingly, five foods—iceberg lettuce, frozen potatoes, fresh potatoes, potato chips, and canned tomatoes—made up nearly half of those vegetable servings. With skyrocketing rates of obesity and diet-related diseases, a Japan-style transformation in the United States seems overdue.
Obesity researchers and healthy-food advocates today offer a variety of suggestions for how to reform the American diet. Some, such as Adam Drenowski, the director of the Center for Public Health Nutrition at the University of Washington, blame the country’s poor eating habits on structural issues: economic inequality, an obesogenic environment, and a national agricultural policy that favors the production of calories over nutrients. Change, seen from this perspective, will only come about through government action. Others, such as the chef and activist Alice Waters, take a more didactic approach to food reform. If individual Americans were taught to grow and cook healthy food, she and others argue, they would learn to eat that way—and the country’s food system would shift to meet that demand. Yet another approach, perhaps best embodied by the now ubiquitous hundred-calorie “snack pack,” holds that the best way to change American eating habits is by stealth: redesigning packaging, grocery store layouts, and kitchen counters across the country to make it harder not to make healthy food choices.
Wilson does not discount any of these solutions, but she is realistic about the barriers that stand in the way of systemic change. Established agribusinesses lobby against farm bill reform, supermarkets lose money when they remove candy from the checkout aisle, and low-income single parents working several jobs to make ends meet will struggle to find the time to cook dinner from scratch, whether they know how to or not. Wilson’s interest in “First Bite” lies in how the combined forces of culture, memory, and long-standing food preferences lead individuals to perpetuate the often unhealthy eating habits they’ve inherited. “Just because dietary change can happen on a national stage,” she writes, “does not make it easy to enact it at a personal level.”
The key to lasting dietary change, according to Wilson, is “a hedonic shift” in attitudes toward food—a reorienting of our palates that would render broccoli at least as delicious as cookies. “When our preferences are in order,” she argues, “nutrition should take care of itself.” Better yet, the trick to learning to love cruciferous greens turns out to be relatively simple: repeated, positive exposure to broccoli and its cousins. To prove how malleable our palates can be, Wilson marshals an array of case studies and experiments that have examined the human ability to shape and reshape food preferences.
Though our tastes can seem as hard-wired as eye color or blood type, evidence shows that genetics can account for only a small fraction of the variation in individual food likes and dislikes. Far more important are the pressures and cues we’re exposed to from the time we begin choosing what to eat. In an astonishing experiment conducted in Cleveland and Chicago in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, the pediatrician Clara Davis set out to explore what babies would choose to eat if freed from the expectations of their parents. At each meal, the subjects were presented with ten bowls of puréed foods. A team of nurses was trained to only scoop a spoonful of a food if the infant pointed toward a particular bowl, and to only put the spoon in the child’s mouth if the mouth was open. Children in Davis’s “eating-experiment orphanage” chose to eat liver, sour milk, and beets just as happily as they chose chicken and bananas.
In another chapter, Wilson describes the simple technique that Keith Williams, the director of the Penn State Hershey Children’s Hospital Feeding Program, employs to expand the palates of extremely picky young eaters. Bite-sized servings of three or four new or “difficult” foods are placed on one plate, known and liked foods are served on a second plate, and the picky child is asked to take a bite from the first plate, and then from the second plate, moving back and forth between plates for ten minutes. This process is repeated several times a day, over the course of several days. For Tyler, a sixteen-year-old boy with Asperger syndrome who would only eat ham steak, cereal, and farfalle pasta, two weeks of this two-plate treatment resulted in the addition of seventy-eight different foods to his diet.
Children, Wilson’s engaging journey through the research shows, are especially receptive to this kind of dietary exposure. But her larger point is that it’s never too late to change how we eat. In Sweden, an experimental “taste school for the elderly” managed, through repeated and enjoyable cooking and dining activities, to get a group of eighty-year-old men to not only try fennel and sweet potato for the first time but to actively choose to eat them. Being an omnivore does indeed pose its dilemmas, but its “wonderful secret,” Wilson writes, “is that we can adjust our desires, even late in the game.”
