First Bite

A Wall Street Journal Book of the Year

"First Bite is a feast of a book."—Financial Times

"An anthropological category killer on the topic of how we learn to eat."—New York Times Book Review

"A fascinating new book.... [Bee Wilson's] message is a hopeful, even liberating, one."—Washington Post

"A brilliant, heartfelt book about [the] crisis in our contemporary diet.... Wilson is intelligent, passionate, sincere, tirelessly curious and endlessly willing to admit mistakes and learn from experience."—London Review of Books

"Delightful.... The well-meaning experts lecture us about what we ought to eat; Wilson wants to understand why we eat what we do."—Guardian (UK)

"Wilson sprinkles just enough personal narrative through First Bite to establish her as a sympathetic figure without turning the book into a memoir.... Her tone is refreshingly loose and friendly; she's one of the few scholars I can think of who can effectively quote both Margaret Mead and Homer Simpson."—Washington Post

"Wilson lays out her discoveries in a series of easily digestible chapters that balance science and anecdote with short interludes on various foods.... Her tone is down-to-earth and research-based at once, gentle, encouraging, no-nonsense."—Boston Globe

"Absorbing read...timely."—Los Angeles Review of Books