by Wilson, Bee
Jim,a age three and a half, was an autistic boy with serious eating problems by the time he arrived at the Penn State Hershey Medical Center. He ate only two foods, toasted cheese sandwiches and hotdogs, supplemented with frequent glasses of milk. In addition, Jim tended to be disruptive at mealtimes: he had tantrums, cried, acted out, and refused food from even his limited repertoire.
But Jim was doing well compared to Kim, a five-year-old autistic girl referred to the same clinic. For a while, Kim, too, had eaten a limited diet of hotdogs, peanut butter, bacon, chocolate, eggs, and toast. She, too, would cry, tantrum, and throw food at mealtimes. After an illness, though, she stopped eating altogether, and for six months she had been completely dependent on feeding through a gastrostomy tube.
Most parents would feel overwhelmed at the thought of feeding these children and somehow broadening their horizons. I know I would. Food refusal is demoralizing at the best of times; all the more so when you are dealing with the other challenges of caring for an autistic child. If a child dislikes most foods to the point that they provoke tears and rage, it is very hard to bring yourself to do anything other than sigh and make another toasted cheese sandwich.
Jim and Kim sound like two hopeless cases. But they weren’t. Within two weeks of intensive treatment at the center, Jim’s repertoire of foods had increased from three to sixty-five. Kim, meanwhile, would now eat forty-nine different foods and no longer needed the feeding tube. This huge increase in “likes” (and decrease in “dislikes”) was achieved not through any magic, but simply through a more systematic and intensive version of Lucy Cooke’s “Tiny Tastes” system.
Therapists at the clinic engaged the children in many repeated taste sessions to expose them to pea-sized amounts of novel foods in the course of each day. Unlike with “Tiny Tastes,” the therapists added in an “escape prevention” element: the child was told “when you take your bite, you can go and play,” and was not allowed to leave the room until the bite was taken. If a child screamed or cried, this was ignored, but a child who ate the pea-sized bite was praised. There were also “probe meals” at which larger quantities of the new foods were offered—three tablespoons of three different foods—with a ten-minute time limit and no requirement to eat the food.
The results of this experiment have been astonishing. To go from being fed by a tube to being able to eat forty-nine different foods is life changing for the whole family. A three-month follow-up showed that Jim and Kim had not lost the majority of their new likes at home. They had not slipped into the old unhappy mealtimes of before. Food was no longer a trauma to them. Both sets of parents were continuing to offer the children taste sessions outside of mealtimes. Jim’s range of foods was now fifty-three. This large repertoire was all the more impressive considering that Jim’s parents had decided to become vegetarian since the start of the intervention, the sort of change that autistic children often find unsettling. Kim’s range of foods was still forty-seven. In place of a tube, she was now enjoying many different flavors and textures, without tears or rage. Autism goes along with restricted social interaction. Yet Kim’s new likes placed her back in the social world of the family dinner table.
Similar work is being done by therapists at specialist feeding clinics across the world, although Keith Williams, head of the Feeding Program at the Penn State Hershey Medical Center, says that these methods are by no means standard practice. Too many feeding therapists still treat limited eaters such as Jim and Kim by offering them whole platefuls of disliked food and hoping they will suddenly decide to eat it. But when these interventions succeed, they show the huge potential there is for changing our likes and dislikes for the better through a change to our eating environment. No one is doomed to like nothing but cheese sandwiches and hotdogs. If it’s possible to train a severely autistic three-year-old to love fifty-three different nutritious foods, there’s hope for us all.
The trouble is, though, that most of our food environment influences us in an opposite direction. Every day, children are exposed to messages—whether on giant billboards and TV ads or from looking in friends’ lunchboxes—telling them they should like the very foods that will do them the most harm.
Psychologist Karl Duncker’s 1930s experiments on children’s likes and dislikes are not as well-known as Clara Davis’s feeding orphanage. But they offer just as great an insight into how our tastes are formed, almost in spite of ourselves, by forces of which we are only dimly aware. While Davis was interested in what tastes looked like stripped of the normal social influences, Duncker wanted to pinpoint how those influences actually worked.
In 1936, Duncker (born in Leipzig in 1903) was a promising young Gestalt psychologist exiled from Nazi Germany—where his parents were prominent communists—to Britain, where he continued his work. One of his great philosophical interests was pleasure and what causes it. His definition of the pleasure of anticipation was a child who “has been told that he is soon to have a piece of candy . . . glowing all over with happiness.” In one of his papers, Duncker asked why eating a fine juicy beefsteak could cause such delight. He decided that it wasn’t just that it took away the pain of hunger; it was the sensory enjoyment of biting into the steak, and the feeling it gave that “life is grand.”
Upon arrival in Britain, Duncker set himself the task of investigating the role of social suggestion in forming food preferences. Given that likes and dislikes varied to an “astounding degree” among different cultures, he realized that there must be a process of social influence at work. His mission was to unravel the psychological processes by which likes were formed.
Duncker’s experiments involved children from Somers Town nursery school in London NW1, which was then a poor district of the city. The first experiment was a simple one. Boys and girls aged between two and five were asked to make a food selection from carrots, bananas, nuts, apples, bread, and grapes. What Duncker found was that children were far more likely to select the same foods as one another if they made their choices in the presence of other children than if they were alone. For children younger than twenty-seven months, there was a wonderful “social indifference”: “When they had fixed their minds upon the food, nothing else seemed to exist.” Above that age, however, there was a marked tendency to copy the likes of other children, especially if the child who selected first was just a little older. There was one pair of girls where one was an extroverted five and the other a shy four. Before choosing her food, “B would always send some furtive glances over to A as if for reassurance.”
We’ve all seen this kind of peer influence at work. If you offer a snack to a group of young girls, they will often tie themselves in knots second-guessing what the others will go for before making their own minds up. You don’t want to be a lone wolf eating popcorn when everyone else has opted for toast. Duncker’s findings about social suggestion when eating have since been confirmed by at least sixty-nine separate experiments. This is a very robust phenomenon. Depending on the influence of those who share our meals, we may eat faster or slower; we choose different foods; we manage larger or smaller portions.
Duncker’s second experiment was more dramatic. He took two substances. One was a white chocolate powder flavored with lemon—a very luxurious commodity in 1930s Britain and “decidedly pleasant.” The other was valerian sugar colored brown, valerian being an herbal root traditionally used as a sedative: it has a very bitter and medicinal flavor that Duncker called “rather unpleasant.” He then asked the nursery teacher to read the children a story about a hero, Micky, a little field mouse, who hates one food—“hemlock”—and loves another—“maple sugar.” When Micky discovers maple sugar in a tree, he realizes he has never “tasted such good stuff before.” But the hemlock bark is “sour and disgusting.”
After the story, the children were then asked to taste some actual “hemlock,” which was really the delicious white chocolate powder, and some “maple sugar,” which was really the unpleasant
valerian sugar. The deception did not exactly work. Many of the children recognized that the “hemlock” was really chocolate. Yet when asked to choose which substance they preferred, 67 percent of them opted for the nasty-tasting “maple sugar,” because of the positive associations in the story (only 13 percent chose it in a control group with no story).
Can our likes and dislikes really be so easily influenced? Apparently so. Duncker’s experiment shows that a simple story is enough to make children forget—for a time—that they like chocolate. For Duncker himself, having witnessed Hitler’s rise to power, it was no surprise that human beings are suggestible in their “likes,” or that social forces can make them suppress their natural impulses. At the time Karl Duncker was doing his peaceful experiments with children and chocolate, his younger brother Wolfgang was living a precarious life in exile in Moscow; he was arrested during the Great Purges of 1938 and died in the Gulag. Duncker himself had lost his academic position in Berlin in 1935 for having once been married to a Jewish woman. “If educated adults,” wrote Karl Duncker, “can be made to discard their ingrained preferences because the leader has contrary ones, why should children prove [harder to influence]—even in such a vital domain as food?”
Given his background, Duncker had a strong sense of how those with power manipulate the powerless. To him, a child being manipulated to change ingrained food likes was in a position similar to that of the population of Nazi Germany.
Duncker’s findings are deeply worrying. If just one story about a not-very-inspiring mouse hero could make children change their likes to such a degree, what are the effects of a daily barrage of advertising stories, in which godlike athletes are shown drinking sugary beverages, and the least nutritious cereals are those with the cutest characters on the box? “Don’t trust that tiger! He’s a bad tiger!” I used to tell my son as we walked down the cereal aisle.
What can any one of us do in the face of such social pressure? Duncker offered himself up as an example of how individuals could train themselves to have new likes, despite their social prejudices and circumstances, through a kind of “inner reorganization.” When he arrived in Cambridge from Germany, Duncker was appalled by the prevalence of something called “salad cream”: a sharp condiment beloved in the British Isles that has the texture of mayonnaise but the acrid taste of spirit vinegar. Like many mass-market foods, it has a devoted following among those reared on it, but to Duncker, who wasn’t prepared for the taste, salad cream came as quite a shock:
Suffice it to tell just one personal experience. When I first came to England, I was made to understand that raw green salad leaves could be made into “salad” with the aid of a bottled substance of yellowish color, called salad dressing. It looked like mayonnaise; I expected mayonnaise—and I dare say I was deeply disappointed. No, I did not like it. But as I did not like raw leaves either, I was therefore prompted to adopt the most favorable and adventurous attitude. I tried again, and I still remember the day when suddenly I discovered that this was not an unpleasant variant of mayonnaise but a kind of mustard which was not unpleasant at all. Thus by accentuating the mustard potentiality and suppressing the non-mayonnaise aspect, I came to like it.
Like Lucy Cooke, Duncker knew that there is huge scope for changing our likes and dislikes: not all of them, for sure, but enough to make the difference between a good diet and a bad one. Whether you are a PROP taster or not, autistic or not, neophobic or not, fussy or not, a foreigner or not, genes are never the final reason for why you like the particular range of foods you do. When a boy likes nothing but cornflakes, it says less about him than it does about the world he lives in.
It would help if we stopped seeing our personal likes as such a deep and meaningful part of our essence. There are many things about ourselves we cannot change, but the majority of food likes do not fall into this category. Our tastes are learned in the context of immense social influences, whether from our family, our friends, or the cheery font on a bottle of soda. Yet it’s still possible, as Duncker showed, to carve out new tastes for ourselves. We can put the impressionable nature of our likes to good use. If we expose ourselves enough times to enough different foods, we may find, like Duncker, that the flavors we once disliked have now miraculously become likable.
In Duncker’s case, sadly, taking what he called a “favorable and adventurous” attitude to food was easier than taking a favorable attitude to life. By the time he was doing his experiment with children and white chocolate, he had been suffering from deteriorating mental health for the best part of a decade. Duncker missed life in Berlin, but knew he could never return while the Nazis were in power. Unlike his tastes in salad, this situation was intractable. In 1938, he emigrated from Britain to the United States to take up a job at Swarthmore College. It was there he committed suicide in 1940, at the age of thirty-seven.
a Names have been changed to protect privacy.
Every culture seems to have certain challenging vegetables that children find hard to love at first bite. And at second. And third. In Brazil, it is okra (the sliminess). In France, it may be turnips (the bitterness). In lots of countries, it is beets (the purpleness).
There are plenty of reasons to find beets off-putting. There’s the curious taste, reminiscent of earth and blood (the culprit is a chemical compound called geosmin). Also the texture, which in its cooked form is neither crunchy nor soft, but fleshy. Most of all, there is the shocking color that bleeds inescapably over everything on your plate.
Yet among sophisticated adult eaters, beets are often a special favorite. It thus offers a case study in how we can learn new tastes. It’s not just that people learn to tolerate beets; they switch from dislike to adoration. Since the 1990s, beets have been a beloved item on restaurant menus, often paired with goat cheese. Adult beet lovers enjoy the very qualities that children find so awful: the earthy taste and meaty texture and, most of all, the bright crimson pigment, which can dye a whole pan of risotto a joyous pink.
Between the beet haters and the lovers, there is a gulf. Some of it can be explained—as with many other dislikes—by the form in which we first encounter the outlandish purple vegetable. Childhood memories of vinegary pickled beets do not help. When someone learns to love beets, it is often because they have been given a taste of these roots in a new and more appealing form when eating out: a fresh and vibrant beet and orange salad, say, or a tasty deep-fried beet chip.
Regardless of cooking method, however, there does seem to be something in strong vegetable flavors such as beetroot that people take longer to hit it off with. In one study, seven- and eight-year-old children from the Netherlands were given tastes of pure beet juice every day for fourteen days, the kind of “exposure” that in theory should lead to liking. But at the end of the fortnight, they continued to find the taste “too intense.”
Maybe it is the sense of achievement in having conquered an aversion that makes adult beet fans flaunt their enjoyment so overtly. Foodies trumpet their love of the hated vegetables of childhood: cauliflower and Brussels sprouts join beets as dinner-party favorites. But beet-eaters are not just showing off. It is possible to reach the point where these complex, bitter flavors deliver more pleasure than the simple blandness of mashed potato.
The psychologist E. P. Köster has shown that one of the beneficial things that happens when children are exposed through “sensory education” to a wider range of flavors is that they start to love complexity and be bored by simplicity. Given time and enough attempts, we actively seek out those foods—like beets—whose charm is not at first obvious.
2
Memory
The women have a lot to talk about;
they remember their homes,
and dinners they made.
Eva Schulzova, age twelve,
from a poem written in the
Terezin concentration camp
When Abi Millard was four, her mother, Dawn, started to notice that she
was acting strangely at mealtimes. Abi seldom seemed hungry, and she often put her fork down after a bite or two. Though generally happy and well behaved, Abi was, in Dawn’s words, “a nightmare” when the family went out to eat with friends, “messing around and not eating her dinner.” They took her to the doctor, who diagnosed congenital anosmia: an inability to smell, which also means an inability to taste food properly, given that almost all of what we call “taste” is really flavor perception through the nose.
To consider anosmia is to see how central food memories are, both to the way we learn to eat and to the way we relate to the world. When I met her, Abi Millard was nine. In most respects she is a self-assured, happy girl. She likes swimming and Tae Kwon Do. She lives with her mum and dad in a rural village and goes to the local primary school. Yet her experience of life is different from most. Without the ability to smell or perceive flavor, Abi experiences food more or less as pure texture. Blindfolded, she can’t tell the difference between hummus and strawberry yogurt. Salad leaves tickle her throat and tomatoes are slimy, though she will eat broccoli and carrots and peas. She has few of the drives that motivate most people to seek out certain beloved foods, because she lacks the memories that would make her expect them to be rewarding. Dawn says Abi lacks any real enjoyment in food—except for one time when they were out at a restaurant, and Abi, eating a gammon (ham) steak, said it was “lovely,” perhaps because it was intensely salty. (Abi can detect strong concentrations of salt or sugar on her tongue, but without any of the flavor nuances.) Dawn worries that when Abi is grown up, she may forget to eat. The condition is also isolating: when Abi’s friends at school talk about favorite meals, it’s hard for her to join in. She has no idea what a batch of warm vanilla shortbread smells like, or chocolate, or garlic. She has no memory of the taste of her own mother’s cooking.