This is The Guardian.

The Guardian Archive Long Read.

Hi, I'm B Wilson and I'm the author of a long read which was published in 2022 called

How We Lost Our Sensory Connection with Food and How to Restore It.

So this was a story I've been thinking about for a while, and some of the moments that led me to write about it were working with a charity that I co-founded called Taste Ed, short for Taste Education, which is all about teaching children to reconnect with food using their five senses.

And I kind of already knew before I started my taste ed work that a lot of kids didn't have direct sensory knowledge of what we might

think of as basic fruits and vegetables. But it was only actually being in a classroom with nine, 10-year-old kids who would say things like,

oh, I didn't know that a real peach doesn't look anything like a peach emoji.

And that was this comment that just stayed with me and kept sort of swirling around my mind

of thinking, wow, we're just deprived in a sensory way when it comes to food to such a

degree that we have these 2D cartoon images that mean more to us than an actual real peach

or a real apple or a real tomato. So really, I was having lots of thoughts all at once that were coming from my

observations of children, thoughts about the anosmia caused by the pandemic, and also wider

thoughts about the use of plastics in supermarkets and the way in which we actually buy our food now compared to

in the past. So when I wrote the piece in 2022, only recently the French government had banned

supermarkets and other shops from selling 30 types of fruits and vegetables in plastic wrapping.

And my hope was very much that other countries were going to follow suit, including the UK.

And in fact, sadly, the opposite has happened.

The last year in 2024, France actually annulled its plastic wrap ban because there was a court ruling saying it didn't attune with EU regulation.

So that seems to me to be really sad because not only have other countries not followed France, but it has gone into reverse.

Three years on and at Tastead we've seen so many more examples now of children learning to use their own senses and experimenting with fruits and vegetables.

When I wrote the piece, I wrote that Taste Ed was only in 160 schools in the UK.

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