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How American kids became the pickiest eaters in history
00:49:11
It's not just your kids. Author and historian Helen Zoe Veit's latest book, , "Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History," explores how U.S. culture has shaped selective palates. In this episode of Settle In, she sat down wi...
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- [00:00]
A
Hey, everyone, it's Amna. Welcome to another episode of Settle In. This time we're talking with food historian and associate professor Helen Zoe Veit. She's the author of a new book called How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History. We talked about how kids in America used to eat everything and anything. Little omnivores is how she described them and why that changed. We talked about the irony of how food abundance and having more food, cheaper food, actually led to kids being pickier eaters than ever before. And we also talked about what you should do if you're the parent of a picky eater. Tips and tricks you can put into place right now that may help to alleviate some of that stress. So settle in and enjoy my conversation with Helen Zoe Veidt. Helen, welcome to Settle In. Thank you so much for joining us.
- [00:53]
B
Thanks so much for having me.
- [00:55]
A
So selfishly, I wanted to read your book for a lot of questions I will ask in a coded way so as not to put my children on blast in this conversation. But this is a book, it touches on a topic that a lot of families grapple with, like, how do you not make meal time a struggle every time? How do you get your kids to eat more widely and in a more varied way? What was it that made you want to dig into this in the first place?
- [01:20]
B
Yeah, well, two things, really. One is that I'm, I'm a historian and I had written previous books on the 19th century, and I just kept bumping into sources describing kids in the past eating totally differently than they do today and eating with pleasure. There were, there weren't these descriptions of kids as picky eaters. There were these descriptions of kids as food lovers. So that just piqued my curiosity. And I also, I'd grown up in North Carolina in the 1980s, and my parents had been Northern college professors, and they were sending me to school with things like stews from the Moosewood Cookbook and just really different food. And so I'd open up my lunchbox and the kids at my lunch table would always think my food was really weird and gross. And so that just made me interested in the culture, like the culture of kids food from even a really young age. And so, yeah, I just started digging into it like 15 years ago, slowly, when I had my first baby, actually, and was just so different in the past.
- [02:20]
A
That story of opening up your lunchbox and wondering what other kids will think, like, that's something every first generation American kid deeply understands, by the way, in immigrant households. But this Specific topic. I mean, you mentioned having your child, your first child, and wanting to think about this more deeply too. American kids diets their eating habits. Is that something you've been dealing with in your own home as well?
- [02:43]
B
So I had this very unique experience as a parent because I was writing this book. So I raised eventually three children while writing the book. My oldest is now a 16 year old, my youngest is 10, and I've got a 13 year old. And all of them were just incredibly neophobic. Neophobic means scared of new foods. They rejected foods all the time. They would put foods in their mouth, they would spit them out over and over again. And I say in the book, I just have zero doubt that if I'd followed the parenting rules that, that were supposed to follow, that my kids probably would have been picky. But instead I was spending my work days with these millions of dead people, like these people from the 19th century who were parenting in totally different ways and who more than anything else had this bedrock confidence that kids could learn to eat just about anything. And I just, I just had that confidence. I just, it was just deep inside me. So they, when they would reject food, I wouldn't think pickiness, I would think neophobia. Neophobia is something this fear of new food that we see in a lot of animal species, and in most animal species, fear of any particular food can be overcome in a matter of minutes. And that's adaptive evolutionarily because as human, if you think about our hunter gatherer ancestors, you hear today, you hear these myths that, oh, pickiness is evolutionary because if our ancestors hadn't been picky, they would have gone around stuffing poisonous mushrooms and berries in their mouths. And that's true of neophobia. It's good that kids are naturally wary of new foods, and yet it's not evolutionarily adaptive to be picky for years. Like, there were no special caches of children's food in the past. There were no Cheerios or Mac and cheese or Lunchables. There wasn't even wheat. Like there were, there weren't even apples. Like all of those are the products of domestication, the main food that our, our human ancestors lived on. And I'm talking about 300,000 years since Homo sapiens emerged. They were mainly wild plants, you know, plants that were even more bitter than supermarket vegetables today. So, you know, I just. And of course, it's not just history, and it's not just the deep past. It's also cultures around the world today. If you look, you see kids eating really differently and Often with a lot of pleasure. And so I just brought this parent, I brought this confidence to my own parenting. I was very joyful around food. That's just my, that's kind of my personality. Like, I love feeding people, I love food, I love to eat, I love to cook. And I would just enthusiastically describe the foods I was eating and why I liked them. And I would encourage my kids to eat again and again and again. And this is the biggest, this is the hardest thing I'm going to say, like, this is the hardest thing for parents to hear today. But I also didn't offer alternatives like that. In so many, for so many parents today, it just seems cruel, like if a child is rejecting a food, you give them something else. Because it seems to us like the alternative is going to be hunger. But I knew for most of human history, there were no alternatives. And as a result, there was this kind of built in structure to our meals in the past where children were exposed again and again and again to the same foods. There was this broad expectation they would learn to like them. And then if they hesitated to eat something, they weren't given an alternative because there wasn't something else. In my house, of course I have a refrigerator. You know, I have these modern things. So what we would do is I would say you don't have to eat if they were, if they didn't want to eat something. But you know, this is dinner. So if you don't want to eat, you know, you can go do your thing. But if you get hungry in a little while, come back. I'm going to put your, put your plate in the refrigerator or I'll warm it up for you. If you get hungry, you can have two more bites, we'll say that's dinner and then you can have a snack. And that worked every single time.
- [06:38]
A
Well, there's a lot in there about, you know, who we are as parents culturally. Right. The kind of standards and expectations we've set for ourselves too, but also just how the food industry has changed, let alone where we are today in modern food history versus, you know, back when you were studying it in the 1800s. And I want to dive into all of it because the book is joyful. It really is your joy for this topic comes through. But I was just so curious as I was reading it. Like, if you're the food historian among all your kids, parents, friends, like, does that mean everyone's just coming, coming to you for advice all the time and being like, my kid's not eating broccoli, how Do I do it?
- [07:19]
B
Yeah. So I, I didn't talk much about my research because it is so terrible for parents.
- [07:25]
A
Terrible how?
- [07:27]
B
I think for many parents, food is the hardest part of parenting. I mean, for some families, it's sleep, or for some, it's social media. You know, there's competition these days for what's the, what's the hardest part. But for so many parents, it's food. It's an immense source of stress, tension, and for some parents, shame. You know, like a lot of parents, they are doing everything they can to try to get their parent, their children to eat widely, using the parenting rules that we've been given. But a lot of the rules are contradictory. Like we've been told, on the one hand, kids, health matters. It affects their growth, it affects disease. We now have kids developing in childhood diseases like type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart problems, things that kids never used to develop in childhood. Parents are so worried about health and they're told they should be, but on the other hand, they're told, actually it doesn't really matter what kids eat. Kids will naturally figure it out as long as you don't push them. But if you push a child to eat, all sorts of problems could develop that makes meals stressful. That could lead them to develop aversions to those very foods you want them to eat. Because we've heard children are natural rebels. They're contrarian. And we've heard that if you push too hard or say the wrong thing or ask a child to eat when they say they're done or they're full, they'll never develop a sense of authentic fullness. They won't know what it means to feel full. So they'll, they'll be more likely to overeat. Or if you give a child like a treat or, or a reward for eating, they will associate treats and desserts with love. And then they'll be more likely to overeat. Those. This could lead to overweight. This could lead to obesity. This could lead to disordered or dysfunctional eating, to eating disorders, or are so scared as parents of doing or saying the wrong thing.
- [09:16]
A
Yeah.
- [09:16]
B
And a lot of us just feel paralyzed. We feel trapped. We sometimes feel judgment from other parents or sometimes from our own parents. There's a lot of intergenerational tension around what kids are eating today. And for, for so many parents, it feels personal.
- [09:30]
A
Yeah.
- [09:31]
B
And the, the big point of the book for me, like maybe the single biggest point, is that it's not a personal problem. This is a mass phenomenon that was caused by concrete historical changes over time, Some of which are about parenting rules, but some are about the kind of food that's available. It's about marketing. It's created this culture today where many of us assume that the only way to get a child to eat must be to force them to eat, either through hunger or through harsh discipline. And the great news from the past, from the 19th century, is that that just wasn't true. People with plenty of food and plenty of choice were not raising picky eaters either. And nobody was talking about discipline. I think today we have these kind of ideas about what it was like to discipline kids around food from the 20th century. We think of maybe our grandparents or people today can remember their parents in the 20th century saying, you sit at this table until you finish that meal. If you don't, you know you're going to eat it for breakfast. Like there's there, there's all. There are some really kind of traumatic memories about harsh discipline around food. But what I realized is that in the 20th century, parents were already dealing with the emergence of mass pickiness. Mass pickiness really started to emerge in the 1930s in this country. And parents in the 40s and the 50s and the 60s, they often didn't know what to do about it. They themselves had many, many of them had not been picky eaters. They'd grown up in a time where picky eating was really rare. And so a lot of them just had this ham handed, you know, really authoritarian approach to discipline that our generation, you know, parents today, and especially maybe younger parents, have really want to go against. They're like, I'm not going to be one of those parents who forces kids to eat. How terrible, like, how stressful that must be. And yet what we're doing today is also not creating happy, healthy eaters. The great news is that these are not our only options. It's not, you know, tyrannical authority at the table or a total, you know, what many parents do today. Like, they're really scared to give much structure at all. And they kind of let kids eat what they want. But in a food system that's filled with highly processed foods, constant snacks, really a lot of food that foods that don't have many nutrients but have a lot of calories, we're seeing all of these problems ensue. And these are not the only options. That's the beauty of looking at the past.
- [12:00]
A
So let's look at the past then a little more deeply, because you ground this so beautifully in our own food History. And you lay out, I loved in each of the chapters how you lay out the typical diet of a child around this time. Right. And some of these are things like I have never even heard of some of these foods, let alone imagine my kids eating them these days. But you go back to the 1800s, you say kids back then were eating like little omnivores. They ate everything. Rabbit and codfish cakes, deer liver, vinegary pickles. Why were they doing that? What was it about the time and the food that had them eating that way?
- [12:33]
B
Yeah, I came to see the 19th century as this crucially important time. It's really the last moment in America where like childhood pickiness didn't even exist as a concept. Sometimes individual kids had dislikes, but so did some adults. And, and nobody associated pickiness with age. That just wasn't, wasn't on anyone's radar. And I think in seeing why children weren't picky, we can really see some of the things we can do today to start to reverse or correct pickiness. One of the most important things is hunger. Now when I say that, I'm sure a lot of parents are like, aha. I knew that it was scarcity, but scarcity and hunger are not necessarily the same thing. So. So poor kids, and there were lots of poor kids in the 19th century for sure, they were not picky. They were eating indiscriminately what they were given. But what was amazing to me was that the children of wealthy parents in comfortable homes, or just like children on prosperous farms or Native Americans in situations of abundance, these children were also not picky. But I realized that hunger was important because even children who were well fed overall were still coming to meals with a lot of pre meal hunger today. I think, you know, we've been told often by the snack industry that hunger is a problem to be solved. You know, I mean, obviously, let me make, let me make clear too. Hunger is a major issue in America today. Like food, chronic food insecurity is affecting, you know, approximately.
- [14:04]
A
You're talking about persistent, serious hunger as a problem. That's different.
- [14:08]
B
Yes, and that's scandalous in the wealthiest country in the world. But I'm talking about pleasant premal hunger for people who know that they're going to have a meal in the near future. I realize, like, you know, I say if you've ever gone grocery shopping on an empty stomach and come home with all sorts of impulse buys that just looked so good, you realize that hunger is actually a really powerful tool you in helping us learn to Enjoy new foods.
- [14:36]
A
So why were kids back then hungry in a way that they're not today?
- [14:40]
B
So several different things. One is that they were exercising much more, they were playing outside more, they were doing physical chores. Most Americans lived on farms at the time, so farm children were just involved in the work of the home. They often walked to school, and at the same time, they weren't snacking much. So they weren't. There just wasn't much edible food between meals. Sometimes they had bread, sometimes they foraged for fruits, you know, on trees. You know, there's a lot of joyful descriptions of, like, gathering fruit among 19th century kids or sometimes nuts. But there wasn't heavy snacking. It was not a culture of grazing. So children would typically come to meals hungry, sometimes really hungry. You know, they hadn't eaten since lunch a lot of the time, and they'd been walking back from school, doing chores and then playing outside. So they were often ravenous by the time they sat down. And I really think that primed them to take an eager interest in foods. One other thing, of course, snacking is really common today. Parents often use snacking. We see it as a necessity. And I should also mention, I actually am pretty pro snack, personally. I love to snack myself. I rarely, like, go a whole, like, stretch between meals without eating. I love to nibble a little bit. And I, you know, with my kids, too, I absolutely, you know, love them to have snacks, but not too much. And I, you know, I think it can be wise to keep an eye on the clock. Like, what if you're going to have dinner in an hour and a child says, I'm hungry, you know, it's okay to say, you know, hey, like, we're actually going to have dinner in a little while. Hold off and you know, you're going to really enjoy your dinner.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Another thing that changed in the 20th century, too, was milk drinking. So starting in the early 1900s, nutritionists started saying milk is the essential food of childhood. Kids have to have milk to grow. And by the way, they hadn't actually been drinking that much milk in the 19th century, because unless you lived on a dairy farm, you know, there wasn't refrigeration. It was hard to get fresh, unspoiled, uncontaminated milk. So milk drinking hadn't been that common in the 19th century, but it explodes in the 20th century. The recommendation is that kids as young as two years old drink a quart of milk. That's a, that's a four cups of creamy whole milk a day. And it really tamped down appetites for meals. So kids, you know, would come to meals, they weren't exercising as much, they were snacking more, they were drinking large amounts of milk. And it really affected their ability to, to learn to like new foods. Another reason that I came to think was quite important was that kids were doing all that work with food. They were living on farms.
- [17:24]
A
They were more connected to the food that they were consuming.
- [17:26]
B
They were connected to the food. You know, we have this stereotype today that food was women's work in the past, and cooking was often feminized. Like, often it was women cooking, but everybody was working with food. Like men, women and children were taking care of the livestock and, you know, they were helping in the vegetable gardens, and they were farming and plowing and hoeing. And so much of the work Americans did was related to food, children very much included. You know, another really interesting thing about doing this book was just to read about how competent children were in helping. I think today, if we think of like, oh, my child is going to help make dinner. It's more work than it's worth. Often, you know, like, you, you kind of spend all this time and the child is like, barely peeling the carrot, and we're like, okay, the. The child imagines they're helping, but of course, it's not actually that helpful. But in the past, even young children, through practice and repetition, they got good at a lot of tasks and they made meaningful contributions to their homes in ways that, you know, when they did leave, you know, it's not like every child was then writing down, like, because I helped, you know, harvest the pumpkin, then later I ate it. You know, it's with, with pleasure. You know, they rarely leave like a trail of breadcrumbs like that in the archive, but they occasionally describe their work. And children who were not enslaved, non enslaved children, overwhelmingly described their work with pride. And I do think that was related to their later grateful consumption of it.
- [18:54]
A
Something that struck me as I was reading the book was just like today, even back then, there were like, food and wellness influencers, I'll call them.
- [19:04]
B
Yes.
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A
In the 1800s, there's someone named Sarah Josepha Hale, who you describe as a zealous food reformer who really changes the way that people think about food and what children should be eating. Tell me about her.
- [19:18]
B
Okay, so Hale, she was also the author of Mary Had a Little Lamb, among other things. She was, she was, did lots of things, but she was a food reformer. And there was this group of food reformers in the 19th century, who were concerned about children's high rates of illness and death. This was before vaccines. It was before anyone knew about how diseases really spread, before people really understood contagion. And the number one cause of death for all Americans then was epidemic diseases, things like measles and typhoid and scarlet fever. And children were the most vulnerable of all. They died at really high rates. I mean, they also died of things like food poisoning. There was no refrigeration. So food poisoning was sometimes a real issue and sometimes from accidents or other things. But children died. You know, about one out of five children died without reaching adulthood. And parents were obviously terrified about this. And there was this group of food reformers who stepped forward and said, it's the food. It's because children are so omnivorous, because children will just eat anything they're given. Again, this is a culture of omnivorousness, because parents are carelessly feeding them the same food that the parents are eating. They're feeding them rich meats, pies, all these kinds of vegetables, vinegary sauces, sometimes chilies, coffee. Reformers start to say, it's this very diversity of food that's killing the kids. This was totally pseudoscientific. It was not. It was not correct. They didn't understand how epidemic diseases worked. But it seemed like, you know, at the time, a powerful explanatory model for children's high rates of illnesses and death. And this idea that children should eat differently and that. And that what they should be eating was really plain food, bland food. I mean, to us today, what's so interesting is that it's like they're trying to make children pickier. You know, the sort of foods they describe children as needing medically were things like, just give them plain bread or just give them plain rice. Like, don't give them all of these sauces or vegetables that they obviously want. Instead, make it really plain and simple. Now, not that many Americans listened in the 19th century. These ideas just didn't broadly catch on. But they were starting to listen by the end of the 19th century. And by the start of the 20th century, this parenting trend emerges, called scientific parenting. By then, people did know about germs. So there's less concern about, like, you know, that you'll spark diphtheria by giving your child, you know, the wrong food. But there is new concern about digestion. And all of these scientists, because at the same time, like, nutrition science is emerging. This was a new culture of expertise in the early 1900s, and they start to say, you know, children's bodies are weak. They're smaller and weaker than adults. Obviously their stomachs are also smaller and weaker. So we shouldn't give them such difficult food. The idea at the time, for a lot of people, they didn't really understand the chemistry of digestion. They really imagined it as a physical process where stomachs had to like squeeze the food. You know, they thought it was all about palpitation. And so they said stomachs get confused easily. Children should not have spicy foods, they shouldn't have coffee, they should not have food that's all been mixed together. They need plain and simple food.
- [22:43]
A
And so this whole idea starts to emerge where people are basically saying children should be eating differently than adults. Right.
- [22:50]
B
Children's food is born as a simple.
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A
And the kids menu is born essentially.
- [22:54]
B
Yes, it is. It is. You start, I mean, before then. What was so interesting too, because I was fascinated by children's menus. And so I looked at hundreds of different restaurant menus, maybe thousands. And what you saw often on restaurant menus in the early 20th century were things like, you can have a half portion for half the price. Like in other words, they didn't think child eaters needed different foods, they just needed less foods. So whatever was on the adult menu, if you had a child, you could say, could I have a half of the creamed spinach and lamb chop for my child and I'll pay half the price. But then you start to see children's menus emerging in the, really in the 20s and 30s. They start to come out. They're still wildly different from kids menus today. There were very few french fries or
- [23:40]
A
hamburgers, tenders, mini pizzas. I'm speaking from experience here, totally non
- [23:45]
B
existent at the time, but. Yeah, but this idea that kids should eat differently really hardens in the early 20th century. Although still nobody's saying kids have special taste. You know, there's still this idea, at least the idea that children can learn to eat whatever they're given, that they can learn to like it. But people start to talk more about training. You can train your child to like the food they ought to have.
- [24:08]
A
So this idea starts to emerge that, and I love how you track this in the book, that suddenly we're all talking about kids food and children's menus and what children should be eating separately from the food that adults are eating. You also talk about the advent of, of the American supermarket.
- [24:23]
B
Yeah.
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A
The way that it exists today. How does that change how we look at the way kids eat and what they eat?
- [24:28]
B
Yeah. So before modern supermarkets which really came around in the 1940s and 50s. Before supermarkets there were grocery stores. But the grocery store really involved a person named a grocer. Like that was a, that was an occupation. And if you owned a grocery and you were the grocer, most of the food was stored behind the shelves and a lot of it was wholesale. So a customer would come in with a list and they'd say, could I please have a pound of crackers and two pounds of sugar? And the grocer would, or the clerk would get it for them. So there was actually much less impulse buying because, you know, really there wasn't much like direct working with the food themselves by, by the 40s, you know, there are some, there are some bigger grocery stores that emerge in the 20s and 30s, like Piggly Wiggly and A and P. But by the 40s, we start to see the modern supermarket, these large box stores with this brand new invention which is a cart, a big supermarket cart with a special place for kids to sit. And in these new supermarkets, there's no longer like a grocer. There really isn't much adult conversation. It's really, you know, the shoppers by themselves in the store, they're getting the stuff off the shelves. You know, occasionally they might visit the deli counter or something, but it's really a self serve model. And just as they stop talking to adults, of course, who is face to face with them, just like inches away is their child. And marketers immediately start to put kid friendly packaging and, you know, imagery exactly at the level where kids are going
- [25:59]
A
to see right at that eye level, just as they're rolling down the aisle.
- [26:01]
B
Yes, yeah. And at the same time, marketing starts to flood into American homes, especially via television. Television is probably the single most important medium for inculcating these new ideas about kids food. With tons of direct marketing to kids now, parents are getting marketed to as well. They're being told you should get kids food they like. That's really important for them. But kids are being told you have special tastes. You don't want boring, dull adult food. You want food that's fun. You want food that's just for you. A lot of it's startlingly direct. Like there was one advertisement where it literally was like, kids come up to the television with a piece of paper and trace our brand from the screen so you can remember to buy it later. Things that, you know, ethically seem questionable but were undoubtedly really effective, they really, you know, they gave a sense that children's consumer power was normal and natural. That children needed special food, and the children's food should be fun, entertaining, and interactive. And that regular food, you know, adult food was boring for kids.
- [27:08]
A
There's this inherent sort of juxtaposition, really an irony that you track so well in the book, that just as there's more food available, there's an abundance of food, right? There's larger farms producing, more people have more choice, there's more options for adults and for kids. And all of that tracks with the trend of kids becoming pickier about what they're eating and more selective about what they're choosing to eat. How do you look at that irony?
- [27:37]
B
Yeah, there are so many ironies in the book. I feel like every chapter I was like, and another irony is. But, yeah, the irony of abundance. Now, of course, abundance was a wonderful thing. Like, I am so grateful to live in this modern world where there's a lot of abundance and where food is relatively cheap. I mean, even in this time of rising food prices, we still spend a historically lower percentage of our incomes on food than most populations in history. And of course, again, that is not general. There's a lot of food insecurity in the country. But for the majority of Americans, it's still true. But as wonderful as abundance was, it's hard not to see that as food became cheaper, it also became easier to take it for granted and also to waste it. And this, this, this also played into the, you know, what became the standard parenting model of offering a child a food, and if they don't want it, you throw it away. Now, that was that. That's inseparable from this larger context of the normalization of food waste in American homes. Americans waste an enormous amount of food. I mean, another irony, actually, is that today kids who are food insecure are actually especially likely to be picky. There's now this widespread idea that poor kids, of course they're going to be picky because their parents don't have the luxury of offering them a food multiple times and then throwing it away. And parents who are their food insecure or they don't have a lot of money for food, they're understandably reluctant to take a chance on some food that their child might not actually want to eat. But the interesting thing is that in the past, nobody thought that poor children were especially likely to be picky. Up through the 1960s, it was just kind of common wisdom that poor children were especially unlikely to be picky. They were especially likely to just, of course, eat what they were given because there weren't alternatives. And so this idea we have today that, you know, poor children are going to be naturally picky because we can't waste the food. It's just, it's based on this modern parenting model that is not inevitable. And there's, there's good news in that. I mean, a lot of, a lot of this, there is a lot of good news in the book. You know, we, we're so, we're in such a terrible position with food today, but we have these models, basically these laboratories with millions of people in the past and in other countries where food worked differently and it didn't mess people up in the way that we're scared that it will. You know, all these, these ideas we have today that kids will develop disordered eating or dysfunctional eating or they'll, they'll be obese, like, none of those problems were remotely common in the 19th century. They were all vanishingly rare.
- [30:14]
A
There is a major difference right today in terms of how we live, which is the conversation around food too, and the way we have conversations. And you talk a little bit about this in the book, about the role of the Internet and the conversation online around food and how we talk about it. I think it's fair to say it's a very emotional topic. It's a very hot button topic for a lot of people. As you mentioned, parents feel judgment and shame. People take it personally. Why do you think it's become that kind of conversation, especially online?
- [30:47]
B
Yeah, well, I mean, online conversations tend to, you know, I think, bring out extremes in people. And sometimes people say things quickly or they say things online that they wouldn't say in person. There's also a lot of, you know, I think people who are struggling can find communities of people who are also struggling with similar issues. And one of those things is extreme picky eating. Today, diagnoses of extreme picky eating, particularly arfid, which is a new eating disorder, avoidant restrictive food intake disorder. You know, I think to have your child diagnosed with ARFID can be a real relief for parents. If they're struggling with extreme picky eating. Their child just does not seem to want to eat. It's a real disorder. Kids with ARFID are struggling. Parents, I think, are probably struggling even more. Like it's so terrible and stressful. And to have a community of other parents who have, you know, similar struggles and to have an official diagnosis, it can be really helpful and comforting. But the, the mind bending thing about it is that ARFID is also really new. It only became an official diagnosis in 2012 and ARFID like behaviors were not common at all until the late 20th century. You just don't see large numbers of children having, you know, these. These same kinds of struggles. And today around the world, you don't see incidents of, you know, really disordered, extreme pickiness. You don't see that equally in different cultures around the world. And again, there's hope there because it says that there may be things that we can do to help children who are struggling with this and that. You know, one thing I do want to make clear, too, almost undoubtedly, some kids come out of the womb, like, eager to eat anything. They come out excited to try, you know, mussels and blue cheese and anything else you throw at them.
- [32:38]
A
Yeah.
- [32:39]
B
And other children almost undoubtedly have biological propensities that make it much harder for them to want to eat. Some kids need much more practice around food. I always get a little annoyed or sad when I see, you know, you sometimes hear some kids need 10 to 15 times to try a food before, you know, if they really dislike it and which is, you know, it's great that parents would try something as much as 15 times, but the truth is maybe you need to try it 30 times or 100 times. Like, there's no culture before ever put, like, a ceiling, like a numerical cap, on how many times you can offer a food to a child. In most cultures around the world, there was a limited number of foods, and you would just keep offering it to that child until they learn to like it. And I've. I've been in touch with some wonderful pediatricians since publishing this book. One of them is a woman named Dr. Namali Fernando, who started a nonprofit called Dr. Yum. She's working with Head Start programs in public schools around the country. And the big thrust of the program is positive exposures, repeated positive exposures with young children to fruits and vegetables over and over and over again. And they're finding that even in special needs classrooms, even with. With children with diagnosed sensory issues, where their parents had despaired of ever getting them to like to eat, you know, a variety of foods they're finding success with, even with students who had seemed like the most extreme, picky eaters with multiple positive exposures to different kinds of foods, which, of course, was just happening naturally in the past, that was just the model that was organically happening when there weren't alternatives and there wasn't just an infinite number of different varieties at the grocery store.
- [34:19]
A
Well, you touched on this a little bit, but just to kind of drill down on it. In all your research and everything you've seen and studied, how do you account for like a family in which the children are all raised the same, they're all so spoken to the same way in terms of positive food imaging and conversation, exposed to the same things. But one kid will eat everything under the sun and the other one does not.
- [34:41]
B
Yeah, and that's so common actually. Like a lot of parents have this experience and I think, you know, thinking historically if that same child had been, you know, if that whole family, if you could just transport them to the, to the mid 19th century, probably that structure of, you know, the pleasant pre meal hunger, the culture wide expectation that kids are good eating, good eaters, the multiple positive exposures that would have just been naturally happening again and again and again, you know, probably would have helped even the child who had more problems eating learn to eat. You know, so some kids in our culture are learning to eat and it's probably, you know, easier for them for a variety of reasons, maybe naturally, but even kids who might have like, you know, struggled today to eat if they had been born in a different time period or a different country, probably those, those structures that helped all those millions of children learn to eat in the past probably would have helped them too. You know, being, having, you know, like pressure is the wrong word, but having this just kind of organic, like there were limits in what you could refuse and also in the kinds of foods you were offered, you know, you were, you've never tasted any alternative foods. You know, it's, you just see it not happening in other places. And I think, you know, so it's a little bit ineffable in part because people just so rarely talked about kids having problems. One thing I, one thing I came to think about comparatively when I was writing this book is that of course today with food we're so uncomfortable to think about like forcing a kid to eat. But we actually force kids, we don't use that word. But there are lots of physical parts of life with young children where children often initially reject things like I remember like trying to brush one of my kids teeth at one point and she just did not want to have that toothbrush in her mouth. You know, she had one of nothing to do with the toothbrush or the toothpaste or the brushing. And you know, I was just like, we have to brush your teeth. You know, you're going to get cavities. Same thing with seatbelts, same thing with sunblock, car seats, pants, like my, my, one of my child, one of my Children was a nudist, like she never wanted to wear clothes. And I realized that parents are often just confronted with children not wanting to do physical things. But we're really confident in most realms that children can get used to all sorts of things they initially fear or reject. And we don't even talk about it. We don't talk about like the, the pants rejecting stage or the shoes rejecting stage. And parents really used to bring that same confidence to food. They lived in a culture where all the kids were doing it just as, as today we live in a culture where all the kids are wearing pants even if there was a temper tantrum before they left the house. We don't see that part. We just see that kids, kids are, kids are capable of wearing pants. And we just get, we just kind of with enthusiasm or confidence or sometimes just by wriggling the pants onto their little limbs, we get children to do it. We have this idea that parents are wiser than preschoolers. And we used to think that about
- [37:34]
A
food, but with food it's become so laden not just with all the cultural and commercial changes around us, but the emotional part of it, right? This idea that you're forcing them to do something, that if you make it a quote unquote a thing, you could create other problems down the line.
- [37:49]
B
And that set of ideas has a history too. That idea that food was uniquely psychologically loaded and that it was psychologically harmful for parents, especially mothers, to nag their children or boss them around about what to eat. That came from a particular moment in the 1940s and 1950s when psychologists led by Dr. Spock, who was by far like the best selling child rearing authority of the 20th century, he was a Freudian and Sigmund Freud was obsessed with mothers. And a lot of these child rearing authorities were seeing mothers telling their kids what to eat and talking to them about health and vitamins. And they said, moms, stay out of your kids food. It's so bossy and annoying. But the key is this. To them, they assumed that children were not picky eaters because none of them had been picky eaters. They were all born like 1900, 1910. And they all said, you know, if you leave your kids alone, they'll just naturally be great eaters. Kids will be eating a grown up diet by age two. That's, that's what Dr. Spock said, as long as we don't push them. But if you push them to eat, that's actually where pickiness comes from. That's what they claimed that most prolonged childhood pickiness came from mothers neuroses. Now we lost that part of it, but we kept this idea culturally that we should just let children eat what they want, they'll figure it out on their own, we should never tell them what to do. Or it could kind of backfire psychologically. And that just became common sense in the last couple of generations. And I don't think it's been beneficial for either kids or adults.
- [39:20]
A
You know, it's impossible to remove politics from any of these conversations these days. So while I have you, I have to ask what you think about the whole Maha movement, right, the Make America Healthy Again movement that's been led by the Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. What do you think about that?
- [39:36]
B
I think it points to a larger sense that I think transcends politics, that things are not all as they could or should be with American food today. Especially to the degree that the Maha movement, there's a lot of food specific stuff in there and a lot of skepticism about received wisdom. I think this sense that we may have been told things that are not completely right, that big business has influenced what we eat and even what we like, I think that that goes beyond Maha and that a lot of people on the right and the left are increasingly questioning what they've been told about food. You know, a lot of it, I think, is the interest in highly processed food, which is definitely a trans political issue. A lot of people are sort of questioning, wow, half of what adults eat is now highly processed food. In America, two thirds of what children eat is highly processed food. The more research that comes out, you know, points strongly to the idea that, you know, diets that are, that are heavy in highly processed food tend to be correlated with negative health outcomes. And of course, you know, that, that points to some of the dysfunction that really underlines a lot of American eating. Not just food. You know, people don't eat as much with their families. People's health is often really poor. You know, we're, we're on track to have almost half of American adults be obese. It's now over 40% of American adults are obese. There's just a lot of issues with how we eat today. And I think there's a broad cultural attempt to start to try to resolve them. And Maha is one result of that.
- [41:09]
A
So let me see if I can try to do a little lightning round with you here and pull together some of these ideas, because I feel like this will be the part of the conversation most people, parents will clip and save or scroll right to fantastic. But there's so much fantastic, useful advice in the book as well that's based in history and in science. So this whole idea of sitting a kid down at mealtime and saying, you got to clean your plate, you got to finish the food in front of you, should that be a goal? Is that something parents should do?
- [41:35]
B
I. Well, I'll just speak for myself. I never said you've got to clean your plate. But the idea that you should never tell a child to eat or. Or that children should always decide the quantity, that's not a long historical idea. I think parents often have a better idea than children of what an appropriate amount is. And if a child has eaten very little at a meal, I think it can be appropriate to ask them to have one or two more bites or three, depending on their age and what you see, especially if you're the parent and, you know, they say they're full, and then 15 minutes later they ask for a snack. If you have that experience and you know your child, I do not think it is necessarily traumatic or bad to say, like, hey, you haven't had dinner yet. You know, you need to have two more bites and then we'll call that dinner, okay?
- [42:20]
A
If a kid doesn't want what's on offer at the table, should you offer them something else?
- [42:26]
B
I am more radical than most people today on this. You know, there are many pediatricians who say no, but you can offer them fruit. I stuck with the historical method. 300,000 years of human history, and I didn't offer them any alternatives. But again, my children never once actually went hungry. I would always offer them the same food warmed up if they got hungry later. It always worked with my kids.
- [42:51]
A
So a lot of schools have, like, snack times built into the schedule now, right? Kids are expected to snack during their day. And I know you're pro snack, right? Snacking has contributed to kids eating less at mealtimes, too. So if there's going to be a snack, what should that be?
- [43:07]
B
Fruits and vegetables, you know, maybe roasted beans. Roasted chickpeas are one of the most delicious things on earth with salt and pepper and a little olive oil. I realize many schools can't have nuts, but nuts are a great food. Or seeds, if you can. Cubes of cheese, I think can be good. I think that, you know, I think snacking again can be good, but not too much and not too soon before the meal. Something like graham crackers or, you know, a highly processed, like cheddar bunnies, things that we might think of as wholesome and for kids, you know, these really are meaningfully junk food in a lot of ways. They're high calorie, they don't have a lot of nutrition. So getting to more whole foods, you know, I think that that can really help kids. And if it's fruit, they're probably not going to overeat. Right At a snack.
- [43:48]
A
Okay, Is it ever okay to offer a reward for trying a new food or eating less popular food? Like, hey, if you finish your spinach, you can have a cookie. Is that okay?
- [43:58]
B
Psychologists in the 1940s and 50s said, no, don't ever reward your kid. They'll associate desserts with love and rewards that. They just made that up. There was literally no evidence. There were no comparative studies. Europeans and Americans have been having desserts after dinner for centuries with good outcomes. So to say, you know, you can't, you can't have dessert until you finished your dinner, or if you finish your dinner, if you have two more bites, whatever, you as a parent decide, you can have a snack afterwards or you can have a gold star, wear a sticker. I think those are incredibly great tools for helping kids learn to like new foods. And there's, there's literally no evidence that they're harmful.
- [44:37]
A
So you talk a lot about your joy around this topic. And I realize in reading your book too, that language really matters, like, tone really matters in how we talk about these things. So if a kid says to you, I'm not hungry, or I don't like that food, what do you say in response? What's the actual language you use?
- [44:53]
B
Yeah, so as a parent, for one thing, you know, it vastly depends on the age of the child. So if a child's one, it's very different from if they're five or if they're eight. But I, I would never, ever say, you don't like that food. Like, I. And that's one thing. I often hear parents say it to children even before they've tried something. You won't like that. Or if they reject it once or twice, they'll say, oh, he doesn't like that. He doesn't like that food. Never let them hear you say that. Never say it to them. I would always put it in the framework of learning to like, like, oh, you're still learning to like goat cheese. You know, you don't have to eat it today. Like, you know, no big deal. But, you know, this is our dinner. So if you get hungry later, I'll warm it up for you. But I would also just encourage them to try it again and again and again during the meal. This is also radically countercultural. We're told not to do this, but you know, with, especially if a child's like 1 years old or 2 years old, they don't know that that's weird. They just like, you know, hey, try it again. I can't tell you how many times in raising three kids, a child would reject, reject something multiple times at the start of the meal. But I would keep trying. I'd be like, try it again. It's so. This olive is so slippery. It's so salty. Like, I love how weird it tastes. It doesn't taste like anything else. Try it again. We try again and again. And by the end of the meal, they'd be eating it with, with pleasure. Like, it's that sort of like. And again. Like that in some ways was just imitating the necessity of the past where there weren't alternative foods. You had to have that food or you wouldn't get the nutrition. You know, we've been told it's harmful. There have been no studies showing that it's harmful. On the contrary, there's a lot of evidence from the past, you know, this laboratory with millions of people in it, that it helps kids learn to like foods.
- [46:32]
A
So I gotta ask, you've tracked hundreds of years of how kids have eaten, how that's changed, how the industry has changed, culturally, psychologically, all of these things. It's all trended towards making kids pickier. Do you see it changing anytime soon? Do you see those trends reversing? Are kids going to eat deer liver again? I guess is the question.
- [46:54]
B
Yeah. I think two things are going on at once today. Extreme picky eating is increasing. Diagnoses have exploded just in the 2020s. I think the Internet has a lot to do with it and the circular nature of popular culture. You hear your neighbor's child has a condition, you wonder if yours does too. You read about it, you start to see things. And, and one of the ironies of our fear of picky eating is that in not wanting to push things, we might unintentionally be reinforcing or kind of making picky eating more concrete than it would have been. So that concerns me very much, the trend towards extreme picky eating. But at the other side, I think I've gotten so much more positive response to the book than I ever expected. So much more curiosity and open mindedness and, and I think a sense among a lot of people that, you know, it just doesn't make sense that lunchables is children's natural food. Like, like that's not what our species grew up eating. There are just so many holes in the story, the story we've been told about why pickiness exists. All these anomalies are kind of bubbling up, all these counter examples. And I think a lot of people are really curious to get out of more complex picture than we've been given before. So I will also say, as someone who studies the history of child rearing and childhood, American parenting trends often move in zigzags. So we've been on a really long, picky eating zigzag now for like many decades. But sometimes, sometimes change happens quickly. And so there's part of me that thinks, part of me is like, this will never change. Like, how could it change? It's so deeply embedded in our culture. But part of me says, you know, sometimes things change really quickly. So who knows?
- [48:39]
A
Who knows? We will see. I loved reading this book. I got so many useful tips and tricks from it. And I just found it fascinating to look back at how kids and their diets and parents and the way they've approached it has changed over the years. So thank you for putting this out into the world.
- [48:55]
B
Thank you so much for reading it. I really, I really appreciate it.
- [48:58]
A
Helen, Zoe, Veit, really appreciate you making the time to talk to us today. Thank you.
- [49:03]
B
Thank you.