by Wilson, Bee
“Stewed tomatoes,” for example, “may be given” to children, but only once they reach the age of seven or eight. It was those pesky seeds again. Holt believed in straining all vegetables until the child was three, and continuing to mash them with a fork until the age of seven or eight. Most omelets, likewise, were “objectionable” before the age of seven. Eggs should only be given if lightly coddled, poached, or boiled, never fried. Nor was Holt an advocate of rich and preserved meats, such as “ham, sausage, pork, liver, kidney, game and dried and salted meats and fish; all of these are best withheld until the child has passed the tenth year.” Still more dangerous was salad, which, being “somewhat difficult to digest,” should be avoided until the child was eleven.
Most dangerous of all in Holt’s book was any kind of pudding, pastry, or tart, especially those involving jams, syrups, nuts, and dried fruit. Some said that a little sweet stuff would do no harm, but Holt disagreed, because a little was “very apt soon to become a great deal.” The only kinds of desserts that Holt could put his faith in were “junket, plain rice, cornstarch or farina pudding without raisins, [and] baked custard.” A moderate portion of ice cream might be given once a week. Expressly forbidden, however, were “all fresh bread and rolls, buckwheat and other griddle cakes, waffles, all fresh sweet cake, especially if covered with icing and containing dried fruits. Lady fingers, plain cookies, ginger snaps are about as far as it is wise to go with children up to seven or eight years old.”
Holt was not alone in this fear of children eating fresh baked goods. It was often said by experts on nursery food that children must never be given fresh baker’s bread. The rationale—as with fresh fruit—was that it was both too tempting and too difficult to digest. Two-day-old bread was deemed safe, but if the bread contained currants it might be safer still to wait a full eight days. Ideally, it would be “staled” still further in the oven until it was crisp enough to give the teeth something to work on.
Nursery food came in two textures: very hard and very soft. On the one hand, most of the “safest” foods were the consistency of mush (“goodnight mush,” writes Margaret Wise Brown in her iconic 1947 storybook about nursery bedtime, Goodnight Moon). The idea was to make things soft enough that a child could eat them with a spoon. Oatmeal, bread and milk mushed up in a bowl, and custard puddings were all admissible. Vegetables for children must always be stewed until they were so soft they could “pulp through a cullender,” as one expert said. Much sieving went on before a food could be reckoned harmless for a child’s delicate stomach. Meat should be pounded and not cooked too hard (in earlier times, nurses pre-chewed pieces of meat in their own mouths before offering them to a child). Cereals and grains must be cooked until they became a sticky gluey mass. Legumes such as peas, beans, and lentils were sometimes deemed valuable because of their high protein content, but only if they were boiled and thoroughly strained. And even then, there was a fear that they might not be easily “digested.”
Behind these two words “digestible” and “indigestible” lay a world of anxiety about a child’s toileting arrangements and what these might mean for the prospects of a child living or dying. Milk pudding was digestible; tomatoes were indigestible. Before the nineteenth century, it was considered healthy for substances to move freely around the body. In the premodern mindset of purgatives and leeches, diarrhea in children was not a cause for concern; many saw it as a sign that the body was correcting itself. By the 1890s, however, diarrhea and sickness were finally recognized as worrying symptoms in very young children, and a neurosis sprang up about any food that might be too “opening” in its effects. The fear of the consequences of gastric upset in children was well-founded, but it led the proponents of nursery food into the realm of paranoia about anything remotely fibrous.
In 1909, Dr. Eric Pritchard of England, a pediatrician who set up the first infant welfare clinic in London, expressed terror about the “intestinal trouble” that could result from allowing a child to eat marmalade, on account of the orange peel. He also warned in the strongest terms against spinach, which he noted, slightly surprisingly, was “a highly popular vegetable in the nursery.” It was Pritchard’s finding that “if the stools of children be examined after meals containing spinach, practically the whole of the spinach will be discovered in a completely undigested state.” Today’s baby-rearing books will sometimes warn, in slightly jocular terms, of what you may find in a child’s nappy after they have eaten sweet corn, but there is never any suggestion that the child will be harmed by it. For the proponents of nursery food, though, there was peril to a child in any food that passed too quickly through the digestive tract.
All this nursery mush kept children in a state of constant babyhood. The endless sieved vegetables and slippery milk puddings were not dissimilar from the panadas and paps that formed a baby’s first solid food. At the same time, there was a view that children must be given plenty of very hard food—crisp stale toast and the like—in order that they might learn to exercise their jaws and teeth. Great emphasis was placed on mastication. The child whose food did not teach them to masticate was at risk of many “evils,” from stomach complaints to adenoids. Dr. J. Sim of the London Hospital noted that most problems of digestion arose from bad teeth; he said it was therefore very important to include plenty of “mouth-cleansing” foods in the child’s diet, such as crusts and toast and dry rusks. As with nursery food in general, the function of these jaw-exercising foods was to do the child good, rather than give pleasure.
The food writer Elizabeth David, who was born in 1913 to an upper-middle-class family, recalled the desperate boredom of nursery food in the 1920s. “We ate a lot of mutton and beef plainly cooked, with plain vegetables,” she remembered. There were “odious puddings” of ground rice or tapioca “invented apparently solely to torment children.” She “hated” the boiled watery vegetables she was given: “green turnip tops, spinach, Jerusalem artichokes, parsnips.” Everything that David was served in her nursery—devised by her mother “in league with Nanny”—was designed to be nourishing. She wasn’t expected to like “the obligatory mugs of milk.” That wasn’t the point of children’s food.
Looking back, it does seem an eccentric way to treat children: to feed them fare that no adult would countenance eating if they could avoid it. The Italian food writer Angelo Pellegrini complained about having to eat such “awful stuff ” as a boy: watery pieces of polenta dipped in “foul and evil-smelling” preserved pilchards (a kind of sardine). Pellegrini’s grandfather “sought to console [him] on such occasions” by telling him that he, too, had had to eat polenta and pilchards when he was a boy, and that it had been even worse for him, since the pilchards were hung on a string above the table and reused from meal to meal. During the nursery-school years, the awfulness of children’s food was something that each generation had to endure—before making their own children suffer as they once had.
Perhaps there are still traces of the nursery food mentality around. In some families, the injunction to avoid salt in a child’s diet for the first year spills over into a generalized avoidance of flavor, as if a ten-month-old couldn’t handle the pungency of garlic or paprika. To dine with the parents of toddlers may entail a meal of boiled broccoli and plain roast chicken with no gravy, no salt or pepper, and everything separate. A surprising number of people—even those who themselves enjoy complex flavors—worry that no child will eat a plate of pasta unless it is simply dressed with plain butter. For the most part, though, when plain meals are doled out now, the reason is not to thwart a child’s appetite but to satisfy it.
The past fifty years or so have seen a near-total transformation in our definition of children’s food in the West, and increasingly elsewhere, too. The rice pudding years are far behind us. Once wartime scarcity was finally over, the food supply rapidly industrialized. An array of new convenience products aimed at children appeared on the shelves that bore little resemblance to the old family staples. E
ach decade after the war saw new innovations in the children’s food sector. Hot milk puddings gave way to cold sweetened yogurts in individual plastic tubs. Fish—as of 1953—came frozen and ready to cook as Day-Glo orange “fish sticks.” Pies segued into Pop-Tarts (launched in 1963), slabs of jam-filled pastry that a child could put into the toaster for herself after school. Potatoes were reinvented as waffles, and sweet waffles were jazzed up with chocolate chips. Whipped cream became squirtable. And then, so did cheese.
Whereas in the past, manufacturers aimed their messages at the parents who bought the groceries, they now found that there was money in aiming products directly at children. Somehow, a new generation of youngsters were able to manipulate their parents into buying them exactly the foods they desired, which were the ones they saw advertised on TV. The fact that many parents complied was a sign of how attitudes toward child-rearing had changed, with a shrugging off of old-fashioned wartime attitudes and rising numbers of women working outside the home. The new baby-care bible in Britain was Baby and Child by Penelope Leach, first published in 1977. Leach believed—and it was a liberating attitude in many ways—that the answer to better parenting was “fun.” Dr. Spock had told parents not to keep fizzy drinks in the house, and had insisted that children should only snack on fruit. But Leach was relaxed about commercial snack foods. The “lowly potato crisp [chip],” she insisted, was “a surprisingly good source of vegetable protein.” In Leach’s view, it was unfair to say that snack foods were “all rubbish”: “A hot dog, for instance, is a nicely balanced item of diet. Dairy ice cream from a reputable manufacturer is an excellent food, and at least as good for your child as a homemade custard or milk pudding.” Leach thus absolved her readers of any pangs of remorse they might feel about buying the new convenience foods aimed at children rather than cooking them a homespun dinner from scratch.
Since the 1950s, children’s food has gone from being something nourishing but pleasureless to something whose primary aim is to pander to childish tastes. Marmalade and spinach are still not considered ideal foods for children, but unlike Dr. Pritchard in 1909, we do not fear they will do terrible things to their insides. We simply lack the imagination to think that a child might actually enjoy the ferrous taste of spinach or the bitter peel of oranges. The “kid food” of modern times is designed to please; and so, given the reinforcing power of positive exposure, it does please. “Kid food” is based on the presumption that children have a natural palate for simple carbohydrates, fat, sugar, and not much else. As we’ve seen, there is no truth to the idea that children have an innate drive that will automatically make them like hamburgers more than grilled fish or muffins more than fresh berries. But if you eat enough “kid food” meals as a child, the presumption of limited tastes may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“Kids’ menus are all about fun food,” said a report on children’s food in US chain restaurants in 2001. In other words, “Don’t expect any spinach or broccoli.” A journalist in the hospitality business trawled a database of kids’ menus for the top 500 American chains. As you’d expect, French fries were a common occurrence. Just how common is more surprising. Of the nearly 2,000 menu options at these restaurants, 710 were fries. They were on menus more than twice as often as any other single item, paired with anything from hotdogs to spaghetti. If you were a child in 2001 and your parents suggested a meal out, you could be pretty sure you would be able to order fries.
For your main course, they’d probably let you have something else deep-fried: over half of the “entrées” sampled were fried, and the rest were usually burgers or pasta. Commonest were breaded and deep-fried pieces of chicken, dolled up in various guises to make them more “kid-friendly”: “strips, tenders, bites, nuggets, chunks—even antlers.” Desserts tended to be ice cream, often with added confectionary. The Ragazzi’s chain served “Dirt for Dessert: chocolate pudding with chocolate chips, whipped cream, and a gummy worm” (only 99 cents—a bargain!).
Restaurant meals—as a special outing—may not be typical of what a child eats the rest of the time. After all, who doesn’t like to be sitting somewhere away from home, eating something hot, crispy, and fried once in a while? I often order tempura or crispy fried squid when eating out, though I hardly ever make them for myself in my own kitchen. For many children, however, the fries—and the ice cream and gummy worms—of a typical chain restaurant meal were of a piece with the food of daily life. The top three school lunches in Britain in 2000 were pizza, burgers, and chips—that is, the British version of French fries. “What does he like to eat?” I asked the mother of one of my son’s friends when we arranged a playdate sometime around 2005. “Oh, you know, normal kid food,” was her reply. This turned out to mean chicken nuggets, oven chips (that is, more fries), plain pasta, and ketchup. No vegetables.
The entire thrust of postwar commercial children’s food was to make it seem “normal” for a child never to eat anything nutritious. Parents who grew up eating rice pudding were not going to do the same to their own offspring. Children’s food products were designed to be as fun and stimulating as toys. Even potatoes had smiley faces.
There have always been children’s foods that play around with shape and color. In the past, however, they tended to fall into the category of an occasional treat: a slippery black rope of licorice shoestrings, a packet of fizzy Lovehearts. During the postwar years, however, the big players in the food industry started to see that they could lavish their visual creativity on children’s products that were—supposedly—to be eaten as actual meals. Much of the food supply now resembles candy, both in nutritional content and form.
Samira Kawash, the author of Candy: A Century of Panic and Pleasure (2013), observes that parents have become confused on the subject of sweets. There is a hysteria now in many circles about children eating actual sweets, things like jelly beans that are mostly sugar and coloring. There is a “nebulous feeling that candy may be dangerous, perhaps even deadly,” says Kawash. We know that letting our children eat too much candy makes us a bad parent, hence the pointless ritual at Halloween when parents allow their children to go from house to house accumulating a big haul of treats, only to confiscate them at the end of the night, because they don’t want their children to get cavities. Yet despite their anxiety about candy, parents will happily feed their children highly sweetened sports bars, fruit snacks, and cereals that are candy in all but name. Why is a bowl of frosted cereal loops with added rainbow marshmallows allowed to count as “breakfast” and not “candy”?
Now, foods marketed for children come in a cornucopia of shapes. Like medieval gingerbread, chicken nuggets have assumed many forms: dinosaurs, giraffes, spaceships, elephants, numbers, and Buzz Lightyear. The old 1960s standby of Alphabetti Spaghetti has been joined by canned pasta shaped like the Teletubbies, Barbie, or Spiderman. And oh, the cereals! The sugar-coated, cocoa-laced spheres and flakes and pops in happy pop-art packages. A market report on children’s food boasted that “developments in extrusion technology” were making an “increasing range of shapes and textures possible” for children’s cereal. Likewise, by the mid-1990s, traditional potato chips were losing market share to “extruded” snack products that could be given more “child appeal” by being shaped like teddy bears or ghosts.
While the form of “kid food” is more varied than ever, however, the content is far less so. Foods marketed specifically at children tend to be higher than average in salt, sugar, and fat. If you want to find an extra-sugary breakfast cereal, pick one aimed at children. As of 2000, several kids’ cereals for sale were more than 50 percent refined sugar by weight. A 2013 study of 577 food ads aimed at children found that nearly three-quarters of them were promoting foods of “low nutritional quality,” despite the fact that more than half of them also included some kind of health message.
Something strange was going on here. Marketeers spoke of a new trend for “entertaining and amusing a child with food.” Children ha
ve always liked to play with food. Maybe you used to pull a croissant apart and pretend the ends were devil’s horns, or took a bunch of cherries and hung them from your ears like earrings, or used tangerine peel to give yourself vampire teeth. Another fun game was using ketchup to dye mashed potato different shades of red, swirling it in with the tines of a fork. I’d add to this the pleasure of eating French beans by opening them up one by one, discovering the specks inside, like green pearls.
The difference with the new kids’ foods marketed from the 1990s onward was that whereas in the past, playing with food felt a little bit subversive, now the games had already been decided for the children by the manufacturers. You were meant to play, and the rules had been set up in advance. New children’s foods were twistable, stringable, or dunkable. There were cheese strings that invited the child to dismember a strip of processed cheese into finer and finer threads, and “dunking” products that included both biscuits and cheese sauce in the pack. Such products were created not with consideration for what the child’s body needed, but after extensive market research into what children wanted. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that children are not going to tell focus groups that they want more broccoli and rice pudding. Consumer panels showed that children craved products that were just “for them.” They wanted bright cartoonish colors, smooth textures, sweet tastes. They wanted foods that—unlike the old family food—did not need to be shared with anyone else. Manufacturers responded with products such as dessert in a tube, which could be torn open and squirted straight into the mouth, or yogurt with sprinkles tucked into the lid. Then there were “Lunchables” (launched by Kraft in 1988), efficiently contained meals in plastic trays that treated children as if they were passengers on a cramped long-haul flight, far from the nearest supply of fresh produce. In 2002, a typical Lunchable consisted of three separate compartments featuring minuscule hotdogs (“no need to heat”), three tiny white rolls, some cheese-food slices (“a good source of calcium”), and a sachet of ketchup. This was supposedly a complete and balanced lunch for a child, and one that required no adult assistance to eat.