American Kids Used to Eat Everything
The most striking passages in Picky, a forthcoming book by the historian Helen Zoe Veit, describe the way famous 19th-century American figures ate as children. I found myself gripped with envy as I read—not because the foods were particularly appetizing, but because I would kill for my kid to eat like that.
To wit: As a girl, Edith Wharton adored oyster sauce, turtle, stewed celery, cooked tomatoes, and lima beans in cream. Mark Twain fondly remembered eating succotash, string beans, squirrels, and rabbits on his uncle’s farm. And during her childhood, Veit writes, Elizabeth Cady Stanton “happily ate vegetables, hickory nuts, and cold jellied brain.”
If these don’t sound like typical “kid foods,” that’s because they aren’t, and weren’t. “Kid food,” as a category, is a recent invention. According to Veit, American kids weren’t picky until the early 20th century. (Indeed, the word picky came into widespread usage around then.) Before that, Veit writes, children in the United States ate “spicy relishes, vinegary pickles, wild plants, and a huge variety of animal species and organ meats. They slurped up raw oysters and looked forward to their daily coffee.” Fennel seeds and tomatoes were considered treats.
According to Veit, the idea that kids are naturally neophobic, or wary of new tastes, is a myth. Eating like a child, Veit explains, was once understood to mean being overly excited and undiscriminating about food, not being picky. In the 1860s, a doctor wrote that children generally ate “anything and everything.”
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Veit’s book recounts how kids went from eating jellied brain to consuming, like my toddler, little but macaroni and cheese. A big part of the story, as she tells it, is that American kids used to be hungrier at mealtimes—which meant that they were more eager to eat anything. Before the 20th century, many children did hours of chores both before and after school, so they worked up a good appetite. (Maybe Twain was hungry for those string beans because he spent so much time hunting wild turkeys and clubbing pigeons to death.) Few kids snacked between meals, because processed foods weren’t widely available. In addition, parents tended to be confident that children could learn to like most adult foods. If a child didn’t like a given meal, they generally wouldn’t be offered an alternative, because, due to a lack of refrigeration, no other food was on hand. But after a series of societal changes in the 20th century, Veit writes, “the children were less hungry. The food was less delicious.” And pickiness was born.
First, children’s appetites waned because they became less active. As more Americans moved into cities and more families bought cars, fewer kids walked miles to school or performed farm chores. This coincided with a major shift in the American diet. Thanks to pasteurization and stepped-up government regulations, milk became much safer to drink in the 20th century, and food experts began to see it as essential. The standard recommendation for children in the 1930s and ’40s was a quart of milk a day—or roughly 600 calories of it. All that milk made kids less hungry for solid foods. Doctors eventually lowered their recommendation to two to three servings of dairy a day, but by then, snacking had emerged as another hunger dampener: Food companies began manufacturing snack cakes, cereals, and cookies, and suggesting that parents buy special foods for their kids.
Meanwhile, a misguided, Progressive-era public-health campaign encouraged parents to serve their children “easily digested” food such as eggs, broths, and gruel. Because child-nutrition experts at the time had little knowledge of germ theory, they claimed that rich and flavorful foods were the culprits for children constantly getting sick, and thus advised that kids should be given only bland foods with few condiments. Children’s foods, they said, should be seasoned with just salt, onion juice, or a “splash of milk”—even butter was considered too rich by some. Nutritionists no longer recommend giving kids bland food, but the idea that children should eat different foods than adults nevertheless stuck.
Advice to parents on how to address pickiness in their children also shifted over time. Prior to the ’40s and ’50s, Veit writes, the standard guidance was to just let food-refusing children go hungry until the next meal. But mid-century experts such as Clara Davis and Benjamin Spock suggested that children instinctively choose a healthy diet on their own, without their parents’ prodding. In fact, they argued without evidence, parents who urge children to try a bite of fish, say, might make them hate fish and turn them into picky eaters. All of this gave the impression that a good mother is one who presents a plate of food and sits silently by as her child pokes at it half-heartedly; if he refuses the meal, she offers something else.
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This is still a common way of thinking—at least on social media. In my feeds, parenting influencers warn against putting “pressure” on kids to eat things they’re reluctant to try. They say that you shouldn’t let a child who has rejected a food go hungry until the next meal or use dessert as a reward for eating dinner. Instead, as one influencer puts it, you should enthusiastically comment on the food yourself—this is crunchy; this is green—a performance that, when observed by your child, might “invite them to their plate and their food.” Laura Ingalls’s Ma would never.
These changes in food options and advice have created a country in which the majority of kids’ daily calories come from ultra-processed foods. American kids today eat so poorly, Veit writes, that they are actually getting shorter. At the same time, she notes, “parents are exhausted by the struggle” of getting picky eaters to eat. (And some parents, of course, can’t afford to buy their kids food that they won’t eat.) She reassures parents that pickiness is not their fault. But it often feels like it is.
My son, Evan, became picky the way people go bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly. I distinctly remember him eating peas and coleslaw as a baby, but over time he grew less and less adventurous. Now, at nearly 2, pretty much all he eats is pasta.
My husband and I tried many of the tricks suggested to me by friends and by the internet. We’ve tried telling him that beans are pasta. (He begs to differ.) We’ve tried blending vegetables into his pasta sauce. (Tolerated up to a point.) We’ve tried giving him a small amount of his “safe food” (pasta) along with some new foods to try. (He eats only the pasta and then screams “more papa!” until we relent.)
Veit’s recommendations to reduce pickiness differ from these solutions, and some of them seem, well, more hard-core. She suggests restoring that appropriate feeling of hunger at mealtime by limiting the amount of snacks and milk that children have between meals. She recommends “affectionately and persistently” encouraging the child to try a rejected food at the same meal, including, perhaps, by “popping a small amount of food into her mouth when she’s distracted.” Crucially, she argues, parents should not offer alternative foods if a child won’t eat a meal.
Even reading that last one felt shocking. Forcing Evan to eat what I make, or else to go hungry, seems so wrong. I was a kid once, after all, and I hated it when adults pressured me to eat things I didn’t like. Sure, every day I slather him in sunscreen as he screams, and I shove a toothbrush between his locked little jaws, but I can’t bring myself to have a standoff over spinach.
When I called Nancy Zucker, a Duke psychiatrist who works with extremely picky kids, she told me that she agreed with some of Veit’s techniques but not others. She endorsed having set snack times that don’t interfere with meals—kids thrive on knowing, “This is when we eat, this is when we don’t eat,” she said. And she acknowledged that children probably have more sophisticated palates than adults may think; many of her patients, she said, are actually craving flavor.
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But she cautioned against Veit’s other recommendations. Goading a child to eat more of something they don’t like may make them feel frustrated and recalcitrant, not excited to eat, she said—as can popping something into their mouth unexpectedly. And some kids can’t be starved into eating a rejected meal just because there’s no alternative. For some kids, “the hungrier they get, the more irritable they get, the more anxious they get, and the more rigid they get,” Zucker said. She’s known parents whose kids refused to eat for so long that they wound up in the emergency room for dehydration.
Zucker’s guidance to her patients depends on the specifics of the family she’s working with. But for many of them, her first step is to encourage families to restore positive associations with food and eating: having fun grocery shopping or cooking together, without expecting that the kid will become an instant cauliflower convert. She also thinks parents should reconsider how they engage with their kids at the dinner table. For many families, she said, mealtime is “like a sports commentary, where parents are constantly, ‘Take a bite of this!’” She asked, “Would you be having fun if you were the kid?” Instead, she suggests “letting the kid just kind of eat and experiment with the food.”
Since reading Veit’s book, I’ve tried some of her strategies and have been pleasantly surprised. One day, I withheld a snack after day care even as Evan hopped around the kitchen yelling “Mama, cookie!” He ate a bit of salmon that night and sampled some broccoli before spitting it out. Another night, pushing dinner a half hour later made him proclaim that a homemade soup—with visible chicken pieces—was “tasty.” But when he completely rejects an entire dinner, I still heat up something I know he’ll like. Eventually, I want him to eat oysters, but for now, I just want him to be full.
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