Preference: the missing ingredient in food policy

With Bee Wilson – food writer, journalist and historian

Chaired by Professor Corinna Hawkes, Centre for Food Policy, City, University of London

The Centre for Food Policy’s Food Thinkers series aims to advance the thinking and practice of integrated approaches to food policy.

The likes and dislikes populations have about food – reinforced by habit and mediated by food prices – are one of the greatest reasons anyone eats something. Bee will present some of the mechanisms through which human preferences are formed; and how they can change throughout the human lifespan.

The seminar will consider a few examples of whole populations either changing their food preferences in a healthier direction, encouraged by food policy (Japan) or retaining traditional preferences in the wake of the nutrition transition (South Korea).

Bee will also draw on and share her experience of involvement with a new charity called Flavour School which is using the Sapere method of sensory education pioneered in Scandinavia to help children in the UK develop new and more varied preferences for fruits and vegetables among other foods.

This will be followed by Q&A and discussion with the audience.

Bee Wilson

Bee Wilson is a food writer, journalist and historian. She is the author of several books including First Bite: How We Learn to Eat and Consider the Fork: a history of how we cook and eat. Her next book, due out next year, is about the nutrition transition.

She writes for a wide range of newspapers including The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal and The London Review of Books. She is the chair of Flavour School, a new charity offering a programme of sensory food education to primary school children in the U.K.