From Codfish Cakes to Cap’n Crunch

If you have never encountered, or had to provide sustenance for, kiddos who eat a narrow, self-selected range of foods, count yourself among the rarest of gastronomic unicorns. For the rest of us, a source that offers context and sets a forward course ought to be a home run.

The author of Picky has stepped up to the plate and delivered a hit, it seems, garnering serious coverage in serious publications. This reader is on the fence about how to score it.

History professor Helen Zoe Veit cannot be faulted for her breadth of research, which took over a decade to complete. The investigation into why children’s appetites morphed from a non-issue to dinner DEFCON 1 is evident in her book’s 75-page bibliography. The 19th century is her diving-in point, surveying 200 years that span young ones’ eager consumption of the "briny, sour, smoky, and funkily fermented"—same as adults—as well as all things green and edible to the bland, nuggetized pantry staples they demand today.

It is chucklesome to consider current reactions to serving up what the kids once downed with relish, as relayed in the book’s pre-20th century chapters: codfish cakes, turnips raw and mashed, jellied pork brain, herring, beef tea. Children in America helped prepare what they churned, hunted, fished, and foraged, which stirred pride of accomplishment into the mix.

So how did we get here? Veit found that "happy childhood omnivorousness" was the norm in the early 1800s, even as 1 in 4 children were dying before age 10 due to epidemic disease and pathogens. Notions about pickiness arose among reformers who claimed that an indiscriminate diet might be weakening or killing the young. They began to advocate for children’s food that was plain and bland, and, most of all, distinct and "special."

Prejudice and discrimination played a part, and so did a parental blame game. Wealthy white Americans tagged those of Chinese descent and blacks as less civilized because they were not choosy about what they ate. Eating between meals was deemed a sign of being "ill-bred." William Alcott, a noted physician of the mid-1800s, declared that careless parents "murdered" their children with food.

The author also makes the case that industrialization and marketing have each shaped the food lives of American children, with mixed results. Sure, most eight-year-olds no longer do farm chores before breakfast or tend their own vegetable gardens after school. Snacks are built into their schedules, daily physical exertion is not a given, and convenience fare makes it all too easy for them to eat fast but not well.

Combine those factors with expert opinions based in pseudoscience, and it’s no wonder parental anxieties have shot up through modern times. In the 1920s and ’30s, pediatrician Clara Davis conducted limited experiments whose misleading conclusion was that young children would eat healthfully when left to choose foods on their own.

By the ‘40s and ’50s, that did not hold true, because around the same time, new and easy boxed mac ’n’ cheese, sweetened/vitamin-fortified cereals, squishy white bread, and Twinkies came on the scene. Mushy canned vegetables displaced seasonal ones on the plate. Thus began a plague of picky eating, Veit contends.

To be fair, the target audience of those ultraprocessed foods didn’t stand a chance, amused by cartoon characters on packaging and product endorsements embedded in kiddie television shows. Mechanized pony rides and gumball stands lured them to grocery stores, where they became vocal consumers seated in shopping carts.

Along came Benjamin Spock. For reasons the author explains extensively, this pediatrician turned into a bestselling source of common-sense child rearing. Overbearing mothers risked turning temporary pickiness into lifelong hatreds, he said. Parents backed off as guilt set in. Spock changed his tune by the 1970s, however, citing concern that children without limits were becoming spoiled. Too late—their eating habits were now defined by what they didn’t like. Psychologists for decades afterward attributed picky eating to a mindset rather than to children’s tastes or texture predispositions.

Supermarket abundance has never been greater. Yet hunger remains a reality for the 14 million children who live in food-insecure households, as nonprofits such as No Kid Hungry and Feed the Children run thousands of free pantries across the country. The freedom to choose, however poorly, and the price of putting wholesome foods on the table are at odds.

Although the history is compelling, the author’s prose is not. The surveying Veit does refers too often to the era when children ate with abandon, and the exposition of conflicting theories is revealing to the point of distraction. Taste doesn’t matter, but it is partly biological. Taste buds have been studied, but not reliably so. American children are hella picky, but family incomes, ancestry, and dietary restrictions still can create welcome diversity in their day-to-day nourishment.

In the end, Picky fails to offer a novel way for parents to cope. Don’t worry, Veit says. Mass childhood pickiness is capable of change via a culture of kindness and confidence. Moms and dads should politely decline an offer of alternative foods to their reluctant eaters and not offer snacks soon after a barely touched meal. Finally, they need to gird their loins, citing: At any meal, there’s no maximum number of times you can offer a food and no minimum amount of time you must wait between offers. That last piece of advice is recycled from 1922.

Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History
by Helen Zoe Veit
St. Martin’s Press, 290 pp., $29

Bonnie S. Benwick, formerly of the Washington Post Food section, is a freelance editor and recipe tester. You can find her Instagram and Threads: @bbenwick.

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