Below, Helen Zoe Veit shares five key insights from her new book, Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History.
Helen Zoe is an associate professor of history at Michigan State University who specializes in the history of American food. She was an advisor for HBO’s The Gilded Age, is the director of the What America Ate and the America in the Kitchen projects, and is a former editor of Gastronomica.
What’s the big idea?
Modern childhood pickiness isn’t inevitable; it’s the result of cultural myths about feeding kids. By rethinking the rules around food, parents can raise adventurous, unpicky eaters.
Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Helen Zoe herself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.
1. In the 19th century, Americans thought children were less picky eaters than grown-ups.
Getting a healthy child to eat family meals was hardly ever considered a problem back then. Instead, “eating in a childish way” meant being curious, undiscriminating, and eager to eat.
This wasn’t just because of scarcity. Most Americans had enough to eat. People assumed that children naturally loved food, whether they were rich, poor, or in between. Children around the country adored coffee, spent their allowances on raw oysters doused with vinegar and pepper, and gobbled up fruits and vegetables. They happily ate organ meats, zesty fermented sauces, and every other family food. At the time, it seemed obvious that wealthy adults were the people most prone to being discriminating, finicky, and wasteful.
2. It’s a myth that humans evolved to go through a long picky stage as children.
Today, it’s common to hear that prolonged pickiness is a protective strategy that prevented our hunter-gatherer ancestors from eating poisonous mushrooms and berries when they were small. As a result, pickiness seems natural and even helpful. But this claim makes no sense when you look closely.
Almost no children on Earth went through a long, picky stage before the mid-20th century. And in the deep past, our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate nothing like American kids today. The bulk of calories eaten by early humans came from foraging, and most of what they foraged were grubs and insects, bird and reptile eggs, and undomesticated plants. Wild plants weren’t very palatable by modern standards. They were often more bitter than the bitterest broccoli rabe, and even the sweetest wild fruit was only about as sweet as a modern carrot.
“Children evolved to eat extremely widely.”
Hunter-gatherers didn’t have access to a special cache of “children’s food.” Instead, children had to learn quickly that some bitter leaves, sour berries, and earthy mushrooms were good to eat, or our species wouldn’t have survived. Children evolved to eat extremely widely. If parents are looking for “natural” children’s food today, it’s not chicken nuggets, Cheerios, or macaroni and cheese. It’s definitely not Lunchables. It’s dandelion greens.
3. Older parenting methods around food did not lead to dire problems.
By the late 20th century, it became common to claim that expecting children to eat the same food as adults was cruel and psychologically harmful. Today, we’re told that there are all sorts of ways to really mess kids up around food. Supposedly, we should never insist kids eat anything specific; we should never offer dessert as a reward for vegetables; we should never refuse to provide alternatives if a child hesitates to eat family foods; a lot of people even think we should talk sparingly to kids about health, because if they know a food is healthy, they’ll want to eat it less.
We’ve heard that if we parent wrong around food, it can lead to all sorts of problems—conflict, food aversions, obesity, and eating disorders. But here is where a historical perspective is helpful. None of those problems were at all common in the 19th century.
Instead, back when American parents had expected children to share their meals, most people grew up to have healthy body weights and healthy relationships with food. Issues like obesity, eating disorders, and other food dysfunctions only became common in the second half of the 20th century, just as mass pickiness was exploding and parents increasingly served kids special food. This doesn’t mean that modern parenting necessarily causes these problems, but it’s nonsense to suggest that older parenting methods did.
4. Mass childhood pickiness is correlated with mass childhood obesity.
Before the 1970s, few children around the world were picky, and even fewer were obese. Since then, childhood pickiness has spread around the globe and childhood obesity has risen more than tenfold.
“Before the 1970s, few children around the world were picky, and even fewer were obese.”
Pickiness and obesity are also correlated with ultra-processed food, which now makes up more than two-thirds of American children’s diets. And as highly palatable, heavily advertised, calorie-dense processed food has spread around the world, a set of ideas has spread with it: children’s food should be instantly likeable or not eaten at all, that children are biologically incapable of liking most things, and that it’s cruel to try to teach them to like the same food as their parents. These are all ideas that were born in the United States.
5. Mass childhood pickiness is discrimination hiding in plain sight.
Like other forms of discrimination, it’s all the more insidious for masquerading as a natural phenomenon and for being internalized by the people it hurts. This doesn’t mean that individual parents are choosing to discriminate against their children. But it does mean that our culture teaches us to profoundly underestimate children’s ability to learn to like new foods.
The myth of children’s inferiority as eaters causes real harm. It limits kids’ ability to eat with others, causes enormous work for parents, makes meals stressful for everyone, and contributes to childhood obesity and other health problems. A child’s pickiness can also lead the whole family to eat junkier meals, leading to weight gain in adults. But more than anything, pickiness deprives children of enormous amounts of pleasure.
Enjoy our full library of Book Bites—read by the authors!—in the Next Big Idea App:
