Excellent research, good audiobook

The Eating Instinct
by Virginia Sole-Smith

So It's our discomfort, and even disgust, with the "joy of eating" that frightens us. And that's because we've create a culture that tells us in a thousand ways from the time we first start solid foods, that this comfort cannot be trusted--that we cannot be trusted, to know what and how much to eat. We must outsource this judgement to experts who know better. First to our parents, then to teachers, then to food gurus and big brands, who sell us on diets, cleanses, food dogmas and lifestyle changes. We cede our knowledge, our  own personal relationship with food, to an entire world built on the premise that we don't know how to feed ourselves.

She goes on to discuss (in engaging detail) how her own daughter's instinctual ability to feed herself will be eroded over the years by society--by the friends who put their barbie dolls on diets, by well-meaning warnings from parents. And then interviews a lot of people with strange and even scary relationships with food that control their lives.

I admired her research and her writing and her courage in taking on such a "fraught" topic. The stories are heartbreaking, mostly, but bring up issues we need to understand. But I take issue with her notion that we have an "instinctual ability" to feed ourselves. If we ever had such a thing, it's been lost in the 600,000 years of our evolution. We're not rats and haven't been for a long, long time. And I, for one, am at least two generations removed from a basic knowledge of how to find, grow, and cook nutritious food. I don't know--society doesn't know--experts don't even know.