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Cambridge Forum for Sustainability and the Environment

 

Biography

Bee Wilson is a food writer and historian. Her books include Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat and, most recently, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat (Fourth Estate), about the psychology of eating and how we can change our diets for the better, which won the Fortnums food book of the year 2016 and Special Commendation at the Andre Simon awards.

First bite draws on current research from both neuroscience and psychology, and the author's experience parenting three children and visiting numerous school canteens, as well as talking to dieticians, biologists and consumer researchers, to look at where our food habits come from; and what it would really take to change them for the better. The food we consume over the course of a day - a week - a lifetime - depends on countless glancing choices, most of which are based on preference. And these preferences, in turn, are largely formed by the way we first learn to feed ourselves in childhood.

Of all our behaviours, eating is one of the most habitual and repetitive and one of the least susceptible to cognitive reasoning. This book shows that for our diets to change, as well as educating ourselves about nutrition, we need to relearn the food experiences that first shaped us.

Bee also writes (on food and other subjects including biography and film) for a wide range of publications including The Sunday Telegraph, The London Review of BooksThe Guardian, The New Statesman, The New York Times and Borough Market Blogs.  In 2016, she won the food writer of the year award from The Guild of Food Writers for articles in The Times Literary Supplement and The Happy Reader. She regularly appears on the radio in both the UK and US and is the Chair of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. She has three children and lives in Cambridge.

A food writer, journalist and historian
 Bee  Wilson
Not available for consultancy