This spoon is from a wooden wine barrel, turned into a board, turned into a spoon – wood given new life for a new life. It was carved by Brandon, and this week we handed it over to a special new arrival who was celebrating having been in the world for just nine months.
Imagining what first taste might be carried by that spoon had me thinking about all the sensory exhilaration that lay in wait for this little one: a block of milk chocolate melting in the mouth, a lip-puckering lemon wedge, a sea salt flake dissolving on the tongue like a snowflake from the ocean.
My mind went to an Israel-born friend who fed her son hummus when he went onto solids, and the person we met in Reggio Emilia who talked about Parmesan as a first food for children in Emilia-Romagna. As Bee Wilson writes, ‘A parent feeding a baby is training them how food should taste.’
In her book First Bite1, she writes that eating (unlike breathing) is something we learn how to do. And contrary to her expectations, ‘[…] there was a near-universal consensus – From psychologists, from neuroscientists, from anthropologists and biologists – that our appetite for specific foods is learned.’
More important, in a way, than whether the spoon is used for feeding or tasting from the parental cooking pots is its symbolism: a blessing of sorts, that nourishing food may always be plentiful and that the adventure of all those first tastes may be joyful.
A little while ago Brandon made us a tasting spoon from the same wooden board. And although this one didn’t stay in our kitchen, it was perhaps a personal reminder, to slow down and try to experience every taste with the full attention we gave it the very first time.
Read about how the spoon process relates to cooking over here.
First Bite: How We Learn to Eat by Bee Wilson (Fourth Estate, 2016)
Wish my first solids had been humus. I’m now making up for lost time!
Loved reading this. I hadn't thought of a child's first taste experiences in this way. How beautiful!