Picky Eaters: Extended Cut

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Christopherkimble.substack.com. I'm Christopherkimble is this a special episode of Milk Street Radio. Today it's an extended cut of my interview with Helen Zoe White about how

“American children became the fussiest eaters in history. Her book is called "Pickie."”

Helen, welcome to Milk Street. Thanks so much. I'm happy to be here. I love this topic. "Picky eaters." Kids being picky eaters. You know, I have a number of children, two of them, are still pretty young. And I love the premise of this because you start out saying in the 19th century that kids, as you might expect, hate what their parents were eating, because no one is going to create, you know, two sets of meals. But you write favorite meal

of a New England boy in the 1850s, baked beans, codfish cakes, corned beef, salt pork, turnips, cabbage, onions, minced pie. So let's just expand on that. So kids like briny and sour, smoky and vinegary, right? Yeah. So when I started researching in 19th century sources about what children were eating, then it immediately seems like you're someplace very far away that the kids were just eating all sorts of surprising things. I mean, every vegetable that you can name,

lots of coffee, and all of these really sharp flavors, vinegary, briny, fermented. And the reason that American cuisine was so sharply flavored in this time was because people didn't have refrigeration. So to preserve food, you had to do things like smoking it or salting it or fermenting it, and this was just the normal everyday food that people were eating. And we see kids as much as everybody else getting used to these flavors from a really early age. So I have two thoughts.

One is kids have different palettes than we do. And therefore they're simply exercising their natural taste. That's on one hand. The other is, well, they have options that kids didn't have 150 years ago.

So so let's start with the first part. Let's start with kids' palettes. Is there any

“research to suggest a five-year-old's palette is substantially different than a 30-year-old's palette?”

Yeah, so the jury is really still out on that as far as I know because there hasn't been good research. What we do know, though, is that kids are wildly more capable than we've been told as a culture of acquiring tastes from a really early age. And this is a very important point actually. When most Americans today imagine why kids in the past or in other cultures eight differently, they imagine that it must have been because of scarcity. They imagine kids were forcing

down foods they hated because those were the only alternatives to hunger. But that doesn't hold up to the evidence. What was fascinating to me is that Americans in the 19th century, when they talked about children's food assumed that children as a group were naturally omnivorous. They talked about children's natural curiosity. They're natural interest in strong flavors and interesting textures. In fact, if they were going to describe any group in the 19th century as picky,

they would have said it was wealthy adults. Children as a group, even wealthy children, even children with plenty of food and plenty of choice were seen as childish eaters because they were so curious and non-discriminating. It really was the opposite of our culture's view of children's food. So where does picking us come from then? One really common explanation that you hear is that it's evolutionary, that if our ancestors as children hadn't been biologically cautious about new

that there is a stage in many animal species of what's called neophobia. Neophobia means being

“scared of new things, but neophobia is not the same thing as picking us. Neophobia does mean being careful”

that what you're going to consume isn't toxic, so approaching it with some wearing us. But neophobia can be overcome much more quickly than we've been told, both in the animal kingdom, where neophobia usually lasts just a couple of minutes, but also all evidence from history suggests that kids can overcome neophobia really quickly too under the right conditions. What we found out over the last hundred years or so is that if you give kids the wrong conditions, they can remain picky for years.

Well, if you lived in Vermont in 1850, you also were night eating in between meals probably,

and you were burning calories because even kids were helping out. And so you were bloody hungry by the time you got to lunch or dinner, unlike kids today who probably arrived at the table without a huge appetite. Yes, hunger is very important in in why picky eating comes about, even if they were really well fed overall. Many kids in the past were hungry when they sat down to eat. For precisely the reasons you just said, they were burning lots of energy. Kids typically

played outside a lot, they did outdoor chores, they walked places as transportation, and there wasn't a lot of snacking between meals. In large part because snacking just used to be much more logistically complicated. And so by the time they finally sat down to eat, they were

“often really curious and hungry. And I think there's ancient wisdom in that, the sort of bone”

apathy idea that hunger adds pleasure to eating, like almost nothing else. And our culture of grazing that developed over the 20th century really dampened kids' appetites as well as advice that kids drink large amounts of milk. People hadn't really fed kids particularly large amounts of milk in the 19th century. It was only in the early 20th that nutritionists started saying

milk is essential, it's the food of childhood. Kids have to have a court a day. Even young kids,

that was the recommendation. That's a lot of real estate for kids' stomachs. And they often weren't really hungry when they came to meals.

“I'm Christopher Kimball, you're listening to a special episode of "Mustry Radio" with Helen Zoe”

White, author of "Pickie". Coming up, how "Pickie-ness" took over America. This is "Mustry Radio" and let's get back to my interview with Helen Zoe White. So let's talk about how "Pickie-ness" actually began in America. So in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, lots of reform movements came around, especially in food. And they started focusing on the role of food poisoning in childhood death. So their answer was to restrict diets for children

to avoid disease or death, right? Yeah, so against this backdrop of kids eating really widely, you have reformers more and more loudly worrying about this kind of childhood omnivorousness. Because kids' death rates were really high, about one out of four or five kids died in childhood during the 19th century. And the number one cause of death was epidemic diseases or food poisoning. But they didn't know about germs yet. So in the absence of that knowledge,

reformers start saying, "We should feed kids' bland food. We shouldn't give kids spicy condiments. We shouldn't give kids coffee. We should make their food as plain as possible." Not a lot of people listened yet, but these kinds of arguments start to really take on some power around the turn of the 20th century and start to inform new ideas about what children's food could be. This related, it just seems to me it's related to the

perception of childhood in society because if you grow up on a farm, a child is almost considered an adult, right? I mean, you're very much part of a working family. And then you get into the Victorian period and all of a sudden kids are little angels and they have to be treated differently

Yeah, it's definitely part of what's going on. I came to think of our modern culture of pickiness as really just a profound underestimation of what children are capable of. Yeah, that's a good point. Now, I am in no way at all advocating for, you know, a return to child labor. But children are just so much more capable of being competent in a number of realms than many of us think today. And it's actually relevant. The fact that children used to work in American households

actually relates to food too. Most Americans in the 19th century were farmers. Most of the work that everybody was doing related to food in some ways. They were feeding animals or they were milking cows. They were growing grain. They were doing all sorts of food related stuff and kids were absolutely

“part of that. So another factor that I think was actually quite important in kids total lack of pickiness”

in the past was that they themselves often did a lot of work to produce food. They had a first hand

sense of food's value as childhood has changed in all sorts of ways. But one thing that struck me as I was doing this research is that we have different rules for food and children. Then we have for lots of other parts of daily life and children. For example, if a child really hesitates to eat a particular food, many parents will say, oh, they don't like it. You know, maybe they try a few times, but you know, they're pretty quick to give up. They're very nervous about pushing a child to eat a

particular food because they've heard it psychologically risky. And they, it's very countercultural today to say we're not going to give you an alternative. Now, you know, it's become so easy to offer kids, Captain Cruncher, you know, anything else that's on a shelf or a refrigerator that not offering a kid alternative food when we believe they're incapable of liking the adult food. That seems really mean. Now, at the same time, we have these special rules around food,

we often see kids resisting things in all sorts of other realms that we're still confident kids can get used to. For example, most young kids in my experience don't love having their

teeth brushed at first. A lot of kids clamp their jaws, turn their heads away, resist,

but most parents, you know, say, well, you can get used to this and they keep brushing their teeth and the kid gets used to it, or kids don't want to put sunwalk on. And parents say, you know, this is important, you'll get used to it, or kids don't want to go in their car seats. They don't want to wear seat belts. We would not think it was good parenting if the parents said, this is hard for them psychologically, they couldn't get used to it. Parents in America

used to have the same attitude about food. And it didn't seem strange or cruel. In the same way today, we don't think of ourselves as being cruel when we insist that children put on snowboots

“or brushed their teeth or wear seat belts. I agree with that. I think there's something else going”

on too is power. Like kids have very little power in the family dynamic and they're always

looking for places where they can exert some power. And the place they can exert power more than any other area is food. Yeah, I agree. I agree with a lot of what you said. Children self-identify as picky eaters from a young age because they hear people talking about it, they get attention to a certain degree. They realize they do have agency, you know, when it comes to choosing food in a way that they might not in other parts of their life. We think of this

psychologically healthy. That's been the idea since the 1940s or '50s when Freudians actually first started saying that foods a unique realm, mothers especially, they were Freudians, mothers especially can mess their kids up if they tell them what to eat or they talk too much about nutrition. And childhood has really expanded to fit this new room that's been given it

“in this way. But that doesn't mean that I think it's good for kids. In fact, one thing that”

struck me so much as I was doing the research was that kids in the past took so much more obvious pleasure in food. You know, they were often the ones, you know, cooking in many cases or helping to weed the corn or sometimes hunting, you know, really, like lots and lots of work for food, they didn't get to dictate what they specifically were going to eat, they were eating family foods, and yet over and over and over in just a source after source, what you heard Americans

got from eating. Okay. So all of a sudden, the foods that adults eat can be harmful to children. Then the next step is you get a bunch of experts, quote unquote, who jump into the fray and say,

“you know, you shouldn't be eating meat. You should be drinking a quarter of milk a day. So what was”

who were these experts? Expertise itself was fashionable in the early 20th century in a way it had

never been before. This moment oriented Americans towards a more numerical relationship with their bodies

and their food that has not left us ever since. Ever since we have been counting calories and thinking about nutrients and not thinking about things like pleasure and tradition and the more intuitive ways of approaching eating that had been common in the past and children's food really gets caught up in this. So nutrition experts start telling parents there is a right way to feed kids and there's a wrong way. And as much as nutrition often seems a bit doubty today,

nutrition seems to really cool and cutting edge back in the early 20th century. And as I said,

there were some genuine developments in knowledge that were, you know, helping people cure diseases,

like rickets or pelagra. And there was the 1906 food and drug clause. Yeah, exactly food seems newly safe. The government is now regulating things and is ensuring there won't be adulteration. All of these, it's, it's a big stew. All of it comes together to make nutrition seem really

“important. And something that middle class parents, if they're going to be good parents, should”

listen to. So middle class parents start giving their kids these very bland, supposedly really digestible food. Like a bowl of white bread mashed up with milk with slices of fruit on it. Exactly. Yeah, or, or, you know, long cooked pourages or custards, but not much meat, fruits and vegetables. Okay, but they cook them for ages. Very little seasoning. But the big message of the 1900s in the 1910s is that children's food should be different. Well, I mean, the notion that if you

are saying that children are different than adults and require a different diet. And if you look around the world and discover that children eat all sorts of things in different places around the world, you kind of have to throw out that idea, the kids somehow universally demand a simpler blender diet because it's not true. That's not how kids eat in other countries. So one of the most

amazing things to me was that, of course, the parents who were actually giving their kids these

really bland, measured meals. They themselves had not eaten like that. They didn't much more universally. And so they have only to look at their own childhoods to see this really different way of doing things. And it was, you know, the fact that child death rates were falling so much in the early 20th century was really compelling to people. A lot of people said, you know, I wonder if those diets really were hurting kids. And now that, you know, many fewer kids are dying,

you know, this, this seems to bear out. This seems like evidence that we're now doing the right thing. One interesting thing is that today, of course, you can still find lots of places where children are learning to eat the same food as their parents from toddlerhood. But that's changing. Childhood picking us is itself spreading around the world. It's correlated with highly processed food, you know, and the availability of these really palatable shelf stable things. But it's

changing cultures before our eyes. I'm Christopher Kimble. And this is a special episode of Mosque Radio. My guest is Helen Zoe White, author of Pickie. Up next, we enter the modern era of pickiness. This is Mosque Radio. Now here's the last part of my interview with Helen Zoe White. So, okay. So, we get to the mid 20th century. And now obviously we're talking about

big, egg, big food selling kids on all this junk. And supermarkets, as you say,

“you know, you'd have, I remember coin operated rides, gumball machines, things are now. The”

all the kids stuff is down, you know, two feet from the floor, not eight feet from the floor. I assume that has a huge amount to do with this? Yeah. So, back in the early 20th century or the 19th century, food shopping had

conversation. The shopper talked to the grocer asked for what they wanted and left. The supermarket

model that emerges during the 20th century by the, by the, by the 1940s and 50s, we have true supermarkets with, you know, big areas, lots of products, big shopping carts, special places for kids to sit. Those are all really new developments, and they totally change how Americans buy their food, impulse buying. That phrase was actually invented to describe what was going on in supermarkets in this era. And of course, with kids suddenly perched, you know, a foot away from their parent's

face, themselves able to see the food. There are these special areas, you know, like the coin operated rides and the kitty sections that are-- Yeah, that are designed to entice them to want to come

to, to make it easier for parents to bring them along. Kids decision-making suddenly becomes a

big part of grocery shopping, just at the same time that psychologists are saying, it's really

“important that kids get to have some say in what they eat, that they get food they like,”

and marketers, of course, they're on it. They pick right up on this, and you just see an avalanche of marketing to children and to adults, saying, we have special food for kids, kids love it, even picky eaters love it. It's really important they get this. They're going to want it. Well, the ads, I mean, I grew up in the 50s and 60s, those ads were on children's programs. Yes, yes. So sugar pops and Kellogg's cornflakes, you know, all that stuff.

Yeah, and sometimes embedded into the programs themselves. There was a lot of early product

placement. Right. They were advertising to kids because they knew the kids would get their parents to buy them that food. It wasn't the parents making a decision. It was hit. Yep. At a time when it was coming to same psychologically dangerous to say no to your kids, just just what we were talking about earlier, but this, this sense was already growing that saying no to your kids was not the sort of logical, like obvious move that had been for previous

generations that kids deserved to be consulted more and that it was that they were psychologically vulnerable in a way that no one had ever thought they were. Well, let's dig into that a little bit. So the notion that as a parent, you were doing your child a disservice by saying no,

“I would say, I don't know, I think the exact opposite. But what was going on in the culture”

were parents who were insecure about raising children to the point they were afraid to say no. Well, where did that come from? Yeah. I mean, many of these parents themselves had been raised in the early 20th century at a time when it had seemed obvious that parents setting rules and boundaries and kids for the most part obeying those boundaries that that was good for kids. That that had been widely accepted. And of course, you know, some parents in the past were tyrannical

or abusive, just as some parents are today. I don't want to romanticize childhood in the past. You know, there were there were some serious problems that that the 20th century did wonderful things to correct. Children now are less likely to be abused or neglected.

“But I think we do have some things to learn from older parenting models. The sort of”

confidence that parents had in enforcing rules that they felt were beneficial for their children in the long term. And children were expected for the most part to listen to their parents. That really gets turned upside down in the forties and fifties. The most influential voice by far was Dr. Spock. Dr. Benjamin Spock, who was a pediatrician, as well as a Freudian psychologist. He didn't talk about Freud directly in his best selling book. But he talks about him

all the time indirectly. And the subject he talks most about is food. There was this new idea in the forties and fifties and, you know, going into the sixties that food was really psychologically loaded. For one thing, Americans as a whole across the board are starting to put on weight. There was just much more abundance. There are many fewer people doing manual labor all day long. The food is getting more processed. Americans start to gain weight. Of course, they'll gain

at much more dramatically by the end of the 20th century. But a lot of people in the forties and fifties start blaming their mothers for their weight gain. This is a real common message among Freudians that too much, you know, maternal bossing around about food had confused people and made them have no

reward of dessert. And Freudians start to say, "Oh, if you reward your kids with dessert, they'll associate dessert with love and then they'll overeat and they'll become overweight." It was this kind of pop psychology explanation for why Americans were gaining weight at this time. You know, we look at it now from this bird's eye view and we're like, "Oh, it's more abundant. It's more processed. They're using fewer calories." But this idea that you shouldn't reward

“kids for eating that you should not even really talk about what the kids are eating. This really”

catches fire when it comes to children's food, especially because of Dr. Spock. I mean, his his book was a mega bestseller, a really, really big deal in terms of American parenting. And he told parents, "Don't tell your kids what to eat." Now, he did say, you know, and I actually, to be fair to Dr. Spock, he did say later that he'd made a mistake. He came out by the 70s and said, "I think I gave the wrong advice and now kids are just eating anything." It seems like there's another

undercurrent theme here, which is that parents, people in general used to rely on their own experience in education to make a decision about how to live their lives, how to raise their children. In all of a sudden, we lost our sense of self-respect and certainty and now look outside, whether that's in the supermarket aisle or the TV ads or Spock or some expert in that lack of confidence and how to live your life in the lives of your family members is really the underlying story of

“the 20th century, right? Yeah. And I think it is just eating away at many parents today. This”

deep, uncertainty about how to parent around food. Parents are just so confused and conflicted when it comes to their children's food because they've been told such opposite things. On the

one hand, they've been told, "Never force your kids to eat anything specific, always give them

an alternative if they don't want to eat anything. You could cause an eating disorder, you can cause dysfunctional relationships with food, you could cause obesity. The idea that that is deeply psychologically harmful scares parents so much. At the very same time, many parents are very worried about their children's health." So where do we stand today? You know, our kids always are going to be picky eaters, is this the inevitable future or is there any hope that things might

“change? You know, I'm actually optimistic and I don't know how warranted. Based on facts or you”

just feeling optimistic. Based on reaction to my work, my work is really triggering for many parents. Hearing the suggestion that kids aren't inevitably picky is really hard for many parents and I've been working on this book for more than a decade. But over the trajectory of that

time, I have felt the temperature of the room change a little bit. When I first started telling

people, I'm working on the idea that mass childhood picking is not inevitable. People have changed a bit from absolute skepticism and also just really like anger to be frank, but I've found just in the last couple of years much more open-mindedness culturally. Helen, it's been a real pleasure. Thank you for being here on Monk Street. Thanks so much for having me. That was Helen Zoe White author of Picking. How American children became the fussyest eaters in history. Of course, in the 19th century

American children drank coffee and ate oysters. That time is long gone, but there are some kids today who are daring eaters. We asked our listeners and friends to share their stories. One time I felt brave was when I had to first try my spicy food, so I was scared. I was like, I shouldn't do this because it's going to burn my mouth. And then I tasted and it was amazing.

And I never regretted that day. I spent like so long sniffing as one piece of eel because I was so nervous

to try it. And I ended up sniffing it for so long that it almost went up my nose. I tried it and just tasted like chicken. My mom cooked soup, but there were peas in the soup. So I just tried a little bit. And then I had two more bowls after that. My dad decided that we were going to make steamers or little necks, but yeah, and you have to take the skin off of them and like pull this

but I just kind of closed my eyes and then just let them hatch. When I was four, I did not like all

“of them, so I kept trying and trying it. Like by the time I turned five, I was like, I like them.”

My mom was making Brussels sprouts for dinner. And when I sat down, I saw them and I was like,

oh, they looked gross in my opinion. And when I ate it, it was so good. So I started stuffing more

“and more and more and more Brussels sprouts onto my plate and I couldn't stop. I did like broccoli,”

I did like rice, try it, and then take little bites. I was saying, hey, honey, have payment Marshall, and then my mom and dad said, yes, I love new food.

“Thanks to all of our listeners and friends for sharing your stories.”

Thanks for listening to the special extended interview. To hear more than 300 episodes of our show, please go to milkstreetradio.com or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us on Facebook at Christopher Kimball's Milk Street on Instagram at 177 Milk Street. We'll be back later this week

with more food stories and thanks as always for listening.

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