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Helen Veit, "Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History" (St Martin's Press, 2026)
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Dr. Miranda Belcher
I oh, let's go.
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Dr. Helen Zoe Veit
So good, so good, so good.
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Dr. Helen Zoe Veit
welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Belcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Belcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Helen Zoe Veit about her book titled How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in history, published by St. Martin's Press in 2026. Now, the way I read out that title is not by accident. The emphasis is on became. Because as this book helps us understand the fact that we now and in recent decades have thought about children as being picky eaters didn't come out of nowhere, has not always been that way. Which immediately raises the question, what happened? And that's what this book helps us understand. So we, we have clearly quite a lot to discuss. Helen, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Helen Zoe Veit
Thanks so much for having me.
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Dr. Miranda Belcher
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? Beyond the kind of big question of why picky eating, what sorts of questions are you asking? How did this project develop?
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Dr. Helen Zoe Veit
Yeah, that's a great question. I'm an associate professor of history at Michigan State University and I've been working on the history of food for my whole career. My first book was about the modernization of food in the early 20th century, and when I was researching older sources about food, I just Kept bumping into historical sources describing children having a completely different relationship with food than what we think of today generally as being natural, inevitable, biological, evolutionary. And yet these sources again and again and again were just throwing that into question. I realized that in the 19th century, people just didn't see children as picky eaters. If anything, it was the opposite. People tended to describe children as childishly enthusiastic about food. You know, in other words, to be a childish eater was to be curious and greedy and wide ranging and non discriminating. It was really just the opposite of what we think today. And I love the history of food in general because I love the intersection of biology and culture. I, I just think very interesting things happen. Both, you know, the way we think about our bodies and also the way thoughts about bodies can actually influence them. It can change. You know, our bodies change. They're not always the same in all historical contexts. You know, for example, a lot of people have vision problems now and shortsightedness because so many of us spend our lives on screens. You know, just. That's a small example. But you know, our culture shape our bodies and our bodies shape our culture. And I'm just fascinated by that. So this was this really big and I would argue, kind of important topic that was almost hiding in plain sight simply because so many people today, across the world don't see it as a historical phenomenon. They don't see children's pickiness as being the product of history. They just see it as a natural phenomenon.
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Dr. Miranda Belcher
See, this is exactly the sort of book I always find fascinating. Even when it's not about food.
- [04:39]
Dr. Helen Zoe Veit
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Belcher
Investigating things that seem so normal. We don't ask questions about them, but we probably should because as you mentioned. Right. They come from somewhere. So can you tell us more about what these sources you were finding about sort of 19th century American children were saying? I mean, you make it sound like curious and fun seeking. Is it though that they were just. If they didn't eat everything, they'd go hungry?
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Dr. Helen Zoe Veit
Yeah, that's. That is the number one thing that most people tend to assume today when we, you know, because most educated people realize that children in the past ate differently or children in different places in the world today might eat differently. And we tend to assume two things. We tend to assume one, perhaps it was harsh discipline that parents in the past or in other cultures forced their children to eat things. Or we think, well, it was hunger, it was scarcity. There, there just wasn't enough food to go around. So children forced down vegetables and other unpleasant foods because Those were the only alternatives to starvation. And it turned out that neither of those two explanations holds up at all. So for one, 19th century Americans hardly talked about discipline when it came to food. They did talk, they did talk about discipline in other realms. But it was very rare to hear children's food described as a problem to be solved. If it was a problem, it was about trying to make sure the food, you know, was good for their bodies, but it wasn't about getting them to eat it. You know, I think this idea that it must be discipline came in large part from the 20th century because in the 20th century mass pickiness was emerging and many parents who themselves had not been picky as kids, were grappling with children who were refusing foods. And in the 20th century, parents were often trying these pretty ham handed methods. They were, you know, telling children they had to sit at the table till they finished the meal. Or you know, some people said, if you don't eat, you're going to eat it for breakfast, you know, I'm going to serve it to you cold, you know, kind of, you know, really unpleasant things that I think today, rightly many parents have rejected these, this really disciplinarian approach to food. But you don't see that in earlier time periods, you don't see that in the 19th century. So then is it scarcity? Is it hunger? Hunger turns out to be very important in a way. I'll describe in a moment, but it's not really about scarcity. It's not that children were on the brink of malnutrition or starvation and so they, they were forcing themselves to eat unpleasant foods. Um, in, in fact, you know, my fo, my study is focused on the 19 on the 19 century United States in this period. And the United States was the most abundant country in the world. Some people absolutely were desperately poor. There were, there were lots of desperately poor people. Those children were not picky. But pickiness, lack of pickiness was a cross class phenomenon then. So in the wealthiest households, children were not picky. On abundant farms, you know, where there was, you know, prosperity and plenty to eat, children weren't picky. In, you know, groups of Native Americans where they are, you know, seasons of abundance, children weren't picky. So it's, if it's not scarcity, how, how is it hunger? I realized a couple of things about hunger. One, children were coming to their meals so much more hungry than children typically are today. And that was true even of well fed children. So abundance and pleasant pre meal hunger were not mutually exclusive. And the reasons for that were that kids were using their bodies much more even, even pretty well to do kids. There was just so much more playing outside. There were more physical chores, there was more walking and there wasn't much snacking. You know, American kids sometimes ate a little bit between meals. They might have a little bread or they might have some, you know, that they might forage when they're outside. Lots of descriptions of kids eating, you know, berries when they're in season, things like that. But there wasn't heavy snacking. There wasn't what we would later call grazing. There wasn't much drinking too. You know, if they were drinking anything, it was probably water. So by the time they actually came to their meals, they often had really roaring pre meal appetites. And I always say, if you've ever gone grocery shopping on an empty stomach, I think you can appreciate how much a really sharp hunger can, can help us to take an interest in new foods. I mean, I am, I am a queen of getting wacky stuff at the grocery store when I'm hungry because it just looks so good to me at that moment. So that, that basic. What I really think is potentially a piece of wisdom, actually. The idea of a bon appetit, you know, that can. A good appetite can really help us learn to like and appreciate new foods. That was happening all the time in the 19th century in a way that I think really benefited children. It helped them learn to take an interest in foods and to learn from a very early age, from earliest toddlerhood, to like the meals of their elders.
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Dr. Miranda Belcher
Okay, let's be more specific then about what some of these meals are to really hammer home just how different the food is that some of these children were eating versus what we expect children to eat now. So what were they eating and how much were they enjoying things like eating the food, but also cooking it and sort of thinking about it.
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Dr. Helen Zoe Veit
Mm. American food at least. And you know, again, it's a, it's an American study. American food was so different then. Largely, I'd say the number one reason, you know, we might think it's globalization today, I think it was refrigeration. The fact that people didn't have refrigerators forced them to preserve food at home in all sorts of ways. You know, people were drying food, they were salting it and smoking it and pickling it, all sorts of different kinds of fermentation, making alcohols. And the result was that a lot of the food Americans were eating was really funky. You know, it had this, these, the funky flavors of fermentation because that was being used to, to preserve the foods. This was just essential. It was happening. You know, if you pick up a 19th century cookbook, you're, you're going to find lots of recipes for preserving foods. They're also, because, you know, it wasn't, you know, the industrialization of agriculture was happening by this point certainly, but there were many, many more kinds of animals and breeds and vegetables and you know, what we'd now call like heirloom varieties. Those were very normal. You know, food tended to be much more diverse, you know, across regions or even town to town sometimes. Most Americans lived on farms. There was also much more consumption of a wider variety of animal species as well. So it wasn't just, you know, chicken and pigs and cows, but there were possums and squirrels and sometimes raccoon. There were woodcocks and snipes and all different kinds of fish and shellfish and then all sorts of body parts. So Americans were enthusiastic organ meat eaters at the time. And also different things like ears and feet of animals. There was just, I would say, a much more diverse food supply, you know, when, when Americans could get their hands on diverse foods. And of course, if it was winter, if you were poor, you might have a very narrow and homogenous, you know, food supply. So it's not that everyone had diversity all the time, but this really diverse, funkily flavored organ meat, shellfish and coffee centered diet. Kids were loving this kind of food. You know, I, I read one, I read lots of different sources for this book. You know, I read school and orphanage records and I read cookbook writers and medical writers and, and lots and lots of memoirs and autobiographies written by people who'd grown up in the 19th century. And the descriptions of food in a positive light are just, you know, they're really beautiful. Like these really kind of like blissful memories of, of childish eating and, you know, and a description of this kind of diversity just, just reveling in the different kinds of foods that they could get. It was, it's very, it's very neat. You know, just from a literary standpoint and as a food person, as a food writer, it was like this genre, like the, the child, the blissful memories of childhood diversity in food that you just don't see anymore. And it was, it was really, it was really neat to be able to read those.
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Dr. Miranda Belcher
Yeah, that is definitely a window into the past in quite a vivid way. So thank you for giving us sort of a taste of the things that you found in the Archive. And it certainly sounds like, obviously with the caveats you mentioned of kind of, if you have access to a diverse diet and varied options, then this would be a good thing for children. And there were people at the time you discuss in the book who thought this was all great, but there were also some people who seemed concerned. Why were they concerned?
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Dr. Helen Zoe Veit
Childhood mortality was really high during, during everything that I'm discussing. You know, and I want to make clear I am not someone who's nostalgic about the 19th century. I would, you know, I'm, I feel incredibly lucky to have, be raising kids at a time when I have access to vaccines and modern healthcare and things like toothbrushes and also all sorts of modern things that we, you know, we take for granted today. But in the 19th century, the death rate for children was around 1 in 4 or 1 in 5, astronomically high by our standards. And also at the time, you know, so many parents just lived with tremendous fear that their children would die. Most of the 19th century took place before the popularization of germ theory. Germ theory only started to take hold in the last two decades of the 19th century. And the leading cause of death for children as well as well as adults was epidemic diseases that people didn't know why they happened. They didn't have a, you know, a compelling explanation for contagion before, before they knew about bacteria and viruses and, and, and what we call germs. And so some, a group of reformers hypothesized that, you know, diet might be playing a really large role in making kids vulnerable to these diseases. And they advocated drawing on older ideas about children's, you know, physical delicacy, but also older ideas about the four humors, millennia old, really ancient medical ideas that were still pretty robust in the 19th century. They argued that the very fact that children were so non discriminating, the fact that they were such wide ranging eaters, that they were eating raw fruits and meats and savory sauces and rich desserts, that these were killing them. That these literally were killing them. You know, we now see this clearly as pseudoscience, but at the time, in the absence of other explanations, this seemed, you know, plausible to many people. And I should, I should emphasize not too many. These, these ideas were pretty fringy throughout the 19th century, but there was a small and growing body of reformers arguing that parents should feed their children much simpler diets, that children should not eat what adults were eating, that children's bodies were uniquely vulnerable to disease and they needed special plain food. Again, most Americans, partly just for logistical reasons. I mean, if you don't, if you don't have shelf, stable foods or a refrigerator, you know, you're not going to be able to whip up multiple meals for, for, you know, at every meal. But Americans generally just kept feeding their kids whatever they were eating. But this idea that maybe kids should be getting special food, different food, plain food, this started to catch on by the late 19th century and, and would really influence this, this new genre, children's food, as its own culinary category that emerged in the early 20th century.
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Dr. Miranda Belcher
Yeah, I want to talk about this sort of early 20th century moment. So we've got ideas that maybe there is such a thing as children's food. We're also slowly starting to get these ideas that picky eating might be a thing. You talk about this in the book, especially sort of coming to the fore in the 1930s. Why was this becoming a phrase at this moment and what did it actually mean?
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Dr. Helen Zoe Veit
Yeah, so in the early 20th century, like 1900s, 1910s, this idea that children need special plain food for their health really catches on. Among middle class parents, poorer parents, more rural folks, people who didn't read or speak English, they generally are still feeding their children the same foods as themselves. But among more highly educated middle class, upper class Americans, scientific parenting is really in vogue and a pillar of it is feeding kids different foods. By then, children's death rates were getting much better, thanks to understanding of germs and early vaccines. But there's growing fear about digestion, that you could mess your kids little stomachs up by feeding them adult foods. And also it's the emergence of nutrition. So modern nutrition science, premised on the discovery of vitamins, also starts to take hold. So you have these middle class parents feeding their kids carefully measured portions of plain food, often by the, you know, 1910s, unsalted food, not, not really rich, no sauces. People even discourage giving kids butter because it's too rich for their stomach, supposedly. And also keeping track, starting to say, wait, has he eaten it? How many ounces of that did he eat? At the same time? This is the age when milk becomes, you know, supposedly the perfect food for kids. Milk was genuinely safer than it ever had been because of a variety of reforms around pasteurization and tuberculosis testing and refrigeration. And kids start drinking large amounts of whole milk. The daily recommendation by the government and that you saw it all over the place in America at least, was a quart of whole milk a day. For children as young as two. It's a Lot that's a lot of stomach. Real estate that was suddenly being taken up by milk. So kids are arriving at their meals often having just drunk milk. So they're less hungry than they had then. The food is less interesting, it's less diverse, it's, it's often totally unseasoned. Sometimes they're eating separately from their families, they're given separate dinner times and parents are watching what they eat. And this starts, this starts to create some resistance among kids. And middle class parents start talking about their kids being reluctant eaters. And it doesn't really make sense yet. This is not mass pickiness because the parents themselves had no sense that kids had to be picky. These were kids, these were parents who'd all been raised in the 19th century, so they themselves had not, had not been picky. They don't think pickiness is a thing. But they're like, why are my kids refusing food? They start to talk about teaching kids to like foods and getting them to eat the foods they have to have. And by the 1930s, when we get that late, what, what really seals the deal is refrigeration. Both, both ice boxes and mechanical refrigeration become common in middle class homes. And shelf stable factory foods start to become common. So kids are snacking much more. They're eating these shelf stable snacks, they're having peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on pre sliced white bread, they're having, you know, Campbell's soup that they can instantly heat up, they're having breakfast cereal, they're having Ritz crackers. All of these modern foods, these start to become common by the 1930s. And it means both that kids are less hungry when they get to the table. And also it becomes quite easy for the first time in human history, for, for the most part, you know, speaking really generally that it becomes possible to offer kids alternatives. So by the 1930s, if a child is really reluctant to eat, a parent can say, well, let me just get you a bowl of cereal or let me make you some toast or here's a banana. You know, we also have these global shipping networks that are just making a lot of food more available. I should also add, in many ways this is fantastic, right? Like the fact that food is more abundant, it's easier to prepare than it ever has been. We can get this new kind of diversity of foods. This is wonderful in many ways, but it has this unexpected downside and often a kind of an invisible downside. People aren't making these connections because it's making, it's, it's taking away the natural structure that in the past had shunted kids towards family meals with a good appetite. It's taking away that basic structure.
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Dr. Miranda Belcher
This is really interesting to think about because as you said, like, this wasn't that goal. And in many ways it's great to have more options, but that doesn't mean it's sort of uniformly amazing. There's all sorts of clearly unintended consequences to a lot of these changes. And it's not just parents that are noticing as we move forward in the 20th century. You talk about psychologists really getting involved here. So what are they up to in terms of not just changing what children eat, but also how parents are thinking about all of this?
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Dr. Helen Zoe Veit
Yeah, the the immediate Post World War II period is crucial for a couple of reasons. One, it's when pickiness is becoming more and more democratized. More and more Americans are having access to these highly processed foods, the shelf stable foods, instantly edible, both for snacks and as alternatives to family meals. But while this is going on, psychologists are starting to offer very new advice. Freudian psychology was just starting to take hold in American culture in a mainstream way by the late 1940s. And psychologists led by Dr. Benjamin Spock, who was a Freudian trained in Freudian psychiatry, start to say, you know, moms in particular. It was really about mothers. For the most part. We could say parents today, but at the time, it was really about moms. Moms. You are annoying your kids with food. You are telling them what to eat. You're insisting they eat certain amounts of things. You're hovering over them, you're forcing them to eat, or you're, you're brow beating them. You're, you know, insisting they eat their vegetables. You're not letting them have dessert until they eat their main meal. This is potentially traumatic for kids. You're harming your kids with your nagging. These are their words, by the way, I'm quoting. It's not mine, it's. But this, this very like negative descriptions of parents and especially mothers activity and concern around food and the claim by psychologists that it was psychologically harmful. This idea that eating was this uniquely important formative time, that there was something special about food and that the best thing to do with food was just to totally stay out of children's choices, not ever to make dessert contingent on the meal. Because psychologist said, you know, if you say you can't have your dessert until you finished your spinach, then kids are going to think of spinach as punitive and they're going to associate dessert with love and rewards. And you're going to raise a kid who hates vegetables and overeats desserts and becomes overweight. This, this was the idea. There, there was no evidence for this. There was zero evidence for any of these claims. None of these midcentury psychological claims was based on big comparative studies of the psychological outcomes of kids raised under different feeding models. It was all conjecture and hypothesis, as they actually admitted freely at the time. But this became cemented as common sense in American culture, this idea that parents should stay out of their children's food choices, that if you push a child to, you know, to eat something too hard, they're going to hate that food. Food, if you reward them for eating, they'll never gain a sense of authentic fullness. They'll they'll associate, you know, whatever reward food is with love and they'll overeat that. This idea that eating has these unique psychological stakes, this has stayed really central to American culture in a way that most of us, we don't even think of it as an idea or a concept or a hypothesis. Most Americans, or at least many Americans, just think of it as commonsensical. And one of the things I really hope the book does is to start conversations that question that, that we, you know, by looking at it in a historical context, we can see, oh, all these things we're so scared of today because parents are so scared. They're so scared they're going to mess their kids up around food today. There's enormous anxiety about that. And that's, that's part of the reason this is such a terrible topic for parents is on the one hand they're, they're terrified of, that they're going to hurt their kids health. They know that a lot of the highly processed food that's now a majority of kids diets, at least in the US it's 2/3 of what kids eat. It's not leading to great health outcomes. Kids are developing diseases like type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart problems, all these diseases that used to be vanishingly rare in childhood. Obesity rates are really climbing globally among children. They've quadrupled in the US since the 1970s. Parents are really scared about the health part, but they're equally scared of the psychological piece. They're really worried that if they say the wrong thing or push too hard, they could cause their kids to develop dysfunctional relationships with food. They could even cause eating disorders. All of these fears are circulating and parents feel paralyzed. They don't know what to do. The good news is when we look back at the origin of these psychological warnings that they weren't well founded. In fact, it's the contrary. If we look back, you know, in the, in the 19th century US or in most cultures around the world, we can see that when parents didn't provide alternatives when they talked about health, were also warned, don't talk about health because kids hate health. When they talked about health, when kids were, you know, forced by structure and logistics, not forced to eat family foods, but when there was no alternative to family foods and kids were eating them, all of these terrible scenarios were warned about, didn't happen. Most kids in the past grew up to have healthy body weights and healthy relationships with food while being totally unpicky as children. And this is excellent news. It means we really can Potentially have it both ways. You can raise kids who are healthy, who are happy, who love to eat, and who grow up to have a good relationship with food. We've been told it's impossible, but, you know, the history shows it, it's not impossible at all.
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Dr. Miranda Belcher
That is very encouraging indeed, especially, I think, because of the point you just mentioned there in that answer that I think we want to talk a little bit about more, which is what kinds of children's food is available at the moment.
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Dr. Miranda Belcher
We really are, as you said, talking about a majority that is processed food. And that's a transformation I think we should spend a little bit of time on. Right. You talk about that in the book as being in many ways a product of world, post World War II advertising changing. So can we discuss how we got to this point where that's such a majority of children's diets?
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Dr. Helen Zoe Veit
Yeah, the. This new rhetoric, you know, this new advice to parents, don't tell your kids what to eat. Let them decide. This turned out unintentionally to be an enormous gift to marketers and to the food companies that they were promoting. So by the 1950s and 60s in the United States, you see an explosion of new food products that are aimed specifically at children. And you see, correspondingly, you see an explosion of advertising to boost these kinds of products to get Americans thinking that kids needed them, to get kids thinking they wanted them. A lot of the advertising is really direct. You know, early on, it's really kind of blunt. Like, there's an advertisement where, you know, the brand is like, kids, come up to the TV with a piece of paper and trace the name of the brand from the screen so that you'll have a reminder to buy it later. And just lots and lots of telling, kids, kids, ask your mom for these foods. When you're at the grocery store, look for this sign, look for this brand, or look for this mascot. And also messages to parents, like mothers, you know, kids deserve to have fun food. They deserve food that's just for them. They deserve to have a voice in family food choices. This was, of course, also this time when ideas about family hierarchies are changing. So the more hierarchical family style of the early 20th century and 19th century, that's. That's giving way in some significant ways. In the mid 20th century, families are becoming more egalitarian in many ways, this is a wonderful thing. But kids are also being given a lot of power when it comes to consumer choices around food. And because of this advertising onslaught, a lot of what they're asking for are these highly processed products which tend to be highly palatable. So highly palatable means just really easy to love, easy to like from the very first taste, which is not true of many foods. I mean that's, that's part of this too. There, there are undoubtedly biological things at play where, you know, if kids in the 19th century are loving lima beans and there are many descriptions of them loving lima beans, you know, a child who's choosing between lima beans and let's say Kraft fudgy candies in the mid 20th century, you know, many kids are going to choose the candies. You know, they're fattier, they're sweeter. You know, they have these things that make them more biologically alluring to us as mammals. And food companies are of course completely aware of that. And, and they're crafting these products to be, you know, sweet, fatty, salty, and to also have these, these unique textures that are the, the result of factory processing. So we get these new foods that are, you know, uniquely crunchy and melty and crispy and just have all these qualities that we all know today, you know, as, as 21st century eaters, we all recognize these factory textures and taste, but they made them, you know, really hard to resist, hard to eat just a few of and, and hard to compare with the kinds of, you know, whole food based ingredients that people had just naturally been cooking with before the industrialization of food in this way. So this idea that kids should be allowed to choose what to eat and also that it's okay. There is also these new scientific studies at the time that are saying kids, if you just leave them alone, they will, they will naturally, instinctively, instinctively choose healthy diets. And there, there's some very intriguing studies showing that when kids are only offered, you know, a buffet of unprocessed, unseasoned whole foods, they, they, at least in these studies, they were making some pretty healthy choices. But you just couldn't compare that when in a kitchen that is, you know, overstuffed with these highly processed, highly palatable foods that the more vegetable forward foods, the family meals, they're, they're not that appealing by comparison, it turns out. So we see all this marketing focused on getting kids to eat these kinds of foods. We see new messages going to parents about kids, kids rights as consumers and also about what it means to be a good parent. You know, a good mother by the, by the 50s and 60s, according to advertising, is someone who pleases her family through food by letting them have the food they want. And of course this also leads, you know, to increasing like market niches. So this idea that kids need kids food, they, they need this special genre and the kind of cereal a child likes, that's going to be different from a child, from a cereal that an adult likes or the, even the kind of like lunch meat a kids have. Kids have, you know, those are getting market segmented, different kinds of, you know, all sorts of different kinds of juices and different products and increasingly packaged snacks. By, by the 70s, we start to see lots more packaged snacks. By the 60s too, we're seeing like, you know, both ways to make food more portable and to get people to eat at all hours of the day. This starts to become much more normal, much more accepted in culture. And of course it's cyclical because then kids are even less hungry at their meals, they're more likely to reject them, and it's just so much easier to give them options afterwards.
- [34:42]
Dr. Miranda Belcher
Okay, so I think there's probably a number of things that listeners by now might have been quite surprised by. In you excavating all of this history, was there anything that really surprised you?
- [34:54]
Dr. Helen Zoe Veit
1. I worked on this book for a long time. I started when my first child was a young toddler and by the time I finished she was in high school. So it really did take a long time. And I had two more children while writing it. So I really lived with this book in meaningful ways. And one thing that I just didn't see, like as someone living in the 21st century today, that I just didn't see for a long time, was reverse psychology. This concept, the idea that if you push too hard, a kid will rebel. If you tell them to eat vegetables, they're going to hate vegetables. This. If you talk about health, kids are going to hate health. This. It's actually very normal idea today. It's in a lot of our parenting and especially around food, this idea that you can't be direct, you have to do this kind of mental jiu jitsu where you use children's supposedly contrarian impulses against them. I realize that that's actually very new, that in the past, parents had generally expected their children, you know, to, to listen to what they said and, you know, at a certain level to do it. And that, that sounds really, you know, might sound authoritarian to parents today, but I think our kind of reverse psychology model might have felt quite manipulative or dishonest to them. This idea that, you know, children can get on board with what parents want and also that children can take an interest in their own Health that children can be interested in. You know, the fact that eating a healthy diet could make them feel better even in the short term, much less the long term, that had seemed really natural to people in the past. And it was only in the second half of the 20th century, as reverse psychology became an important part of parenting, that parents started to question that and to sort of say, well, if it's healthy, don't tell them it's healthy, because then they're not going to want to eat it. So that was surprising to me just in that I had kind of. I had kind of absorbed a lot of reverse psychology, I think, myself. And it took. It took a minute. A minute, meaning, like, years, for. For me to realize that this, too, is a historical concept.
- [37:00]
Dr. Miranda Belcher
Yeah, I think that's definitely worth being clear about. Are there any other key ways in which excavating this history helps us make sense of parenting today? I mean, we've sprinkled them in throughout the conversation, but anything you especially hope parents take away from this that we haven't mentioned yet?
- [37:17]
Dr. Helen Zoe Veit
Yeah, I would say, you know, today, when we think about getting kids to eat diverse foods so often, like, if you're just talking to people, they'll be like, well, I don't want to force my kid to eat. You know, we tend to. We tend to use, like, military metaphors. You know, people talk about standoffs and battles, and it doesn't have to be like that. Like, people in the past didn't use that kind of, you know, Marshall. Marshall vocabulary to talk about getting kids to eat that. In fact, you know, I would love people to start to think about, you know, teaching kids to like new foods. You know, every. Every new food you can teach a child to like is. Is a great gift. You know, that's a new source of pleasure, pleasure in life. And that's a very different way to frame the issue than sort of, oh, you successfully forced your kid to eat something. I. I also think so much of this comes down to confidence. You know, parents. You know, as I said, parents feel quite paralyzed because of the conflicting messages they've gotten about, you know, you must. You can't be too direct with kids. You can't. You don't want to, you know, hover over them, telling them what they should eat. But also our real concerns about their health. We just have all these competing concerns that parents used to really have confidence that they were wiser than young children when it came to food, that they had a better sense of how nutrition worked or even what an appropriate amount of Food was parents. Parents used to just sort of assume that, like, of course, as adults, they. They had a pretty good sense of that and children might not. And that the kind of confidence that let you know that people had, that was really wide shared. We have. We still have that today around other things. If you think about like toothbrushing or taking a bath or getting a kid to wear their pants to school or getting them to wear shoes, kids reject things all the time. You know, my children thought that getting sunblock put on was torturous. They hated that if I had just let them choose, they would. 0% of the time wanted to have worn sunblock. And I think parents today are, you know, we tend to be confident. We're like, oh, you know, my kid doesn't really want to take a bath, but it's bath time, or it's bedtime, or my kid doesn't want to wear a seat belt or sit in their car seat, but I'm. I'm wiser than my preschooler. I'm. I have to have to do this. Even if it upsets them temporarily. We're confident A, that it's good for them, and B, that they can get used to it. And people tended to have this same general mentality around food, and they brought this kind of confidence into their parenting in a way that I think was very important, that. That helped them say, you know, you can't have a different meal than what the family's eating because this is the family meal. And also, I believe you can learn to like it, that kind of confidence that you really can not just get used to it, like learn to. To hatefully ingest it, but that you really can learn to like it. If we can start to get some families having the kind of positive results that. That come from that confidence, I think it's going to build confidence in other people. You know, we're in a vicious cycle now where our very fears around children's food are leading some of us to do things that are. Are probably cementing and reinforcing pickiness. And my hope is that with more information about the past, with more of a sense that children's food can be a realm of enormous pleasure for kids, that this is something that we can almost think of like pickiness as depriving kids of all these different kinds of pleasures and also of pickiness is causing a lot of stress for kids. You know, I think there's a lot of stress for children who are really picky. It's hard to move through the world if you're not sure you're going to be able to eat, you know, if you go to a friend's house or if you travel or if you go to your grandparents. If we think of pickiness as being harmful and if we think of it, you know, as being non inevitable again, I realize that's really painful for a lot of parents because it, you know, it raises questions like, should I have done something different? How dare you suggest that? But it's really, you look around the world and you look in history and mass pickiness is not inevitable. And if we can get parents to, to think that, to really believe that kids are capable of learning to love a wide variety of foods from the earliest ages, that could really shift how parenting is happening in the homes. It could shift how we as a culture are talking about kids food. And my hope is that it can start to lead to a more expansive view of kids capacities as eaters and as people.
- [41:44]
Dr. Miranda Belcher
Well, I think that's a lovely place to conclude our discussion about the book, but I am curious what you might be working on now that it's, you know, finally off your desk out in the world. Anything you'd like to give us a sneak preview of?
- [41:57]
Dr. Helen Zoe Veit
I'm working on a little project right now which is actually about teeth. So dental health. I'm just fascinated by the 19th century and how absolutely terrible people's teeth were back then because sugar was, you know, widely available, it was cheap, and yet they didn't have modern dental care. And as a result, people were living with terrible tooth pain and tooth decay all the time and it was affecting what they could eat. So this is one of those things where I, you know, I was looking in old cookbooks and I kept finding references to like this is good for people with tooth decay or for people with bad teeth, give them this mushy or, you know, really long cooked thing. So this is a little side project. I don't think it's going to be, you know, not necessarily something big. But yeah, I'm really interested in teeth right now.
- [42:43]
Dr. Miranda Belcher
Well, that certainly sounds an intriguing historical archival rabbit hole to go down. So enjoy that process. And of course, while you're doing it, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in history, published by St. Martin' Press in 2026. Helen, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [43:03]
Dr. Helen Zoe Veit
Thank you so much, Miranda. It was truly a pleasure.
- [43:06]
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