First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

by Wilson, Bee

  What children really wanted was to be treated as older than they were. A market researcher who worked with an average of 4,000 children every year found that their single greatest wish was for “control.” The more a product could answer their aspirations to be treated as more grown-up than they were, the greater its chances of success. This wish for autonomy over the food supply partly explains the success of breakfast cereal as a children’s food. “Even the simple act of pouring out a bowl of cereal and adding milk gives the child control,” the market researcher noted. Likewise, ketchup became a beloved children’s food partly because it is one of the few elements in a meal a child can add themselves.

  As of the mid-1990s, 77 percent of French four- to seven-year-olds had the power to choose which breakfast cereal the household bought, and 58 percent could choose their own yogurts. And this is France, where—or so we imagine—parents still have a tighter grip on family cuisine. But how can wholesome nursery food compete with hundreds of new and heavily advertised concoctions calculated to appeal to a child’s sense of novelty? The labels have plenty of messages designed to assuage any sense of parental guilt. There are pediatrician-approved sweet biscuits and dentist-recommended sugar-free fruit drinks, not to mention the endless “calcium” declarations on sugary yogurts and processed cheeses, which can make you feel you are actually neglecting your child’s health by failing to buy them lurid orange cheese-like slices.

  The sense that children need their own special foods that are uniquely appealing and altogether different from a mainstream human diet—like pet food—starts early, with commercial baby food. It is easy for anxious new parents to get the sense that they are doing the right thing by turning to packets and jars to feed their growing babies, rather than mashing up home-cooked foods for them. A survey of 5,000 British mothers found that only 35 percent had offered the baby anything they had prepared themselves on the previous day. Eighty-two percent had offered food from jars, which, despite the various nutritional claims on the labels, is likely to be far less nutritious than home-cooked purees. An analysis of “fortified weaning food” showed that it was less rich in vitamins and minerals than the old nursery-food staple of sieved potato with an egg yolk stirred in. When choosing what to feed a preverbal baby, parents cannot pretend that they are being controlled by “pester power.” But they may still have a sense of being pestered by the dream babies on the baby-food boxes, who look so pink-cheeked and contented to be eating their apple and strawberry dessert.

  Parents tell focus groups that one of the reasons they give in to “pester power” is cost. Even when a child is not actually there with you, sitting in the supermarket trolley, grabbing things and going red in the face with anger if you do not buy the Thomas the Tank Engine fromage frais now, now, NOW, there is the worry that if you don’t buy foods with child appeal, you will make expensive mistakes that go uneaten in the cupboard. A US research company, Langbourne Rust, followed mothers as they went grocery shopping and found that even children as young as one year old could influence what was bought. Parents would deny their child’s request for specific foods only one in three times. This finding tallies with the experience of Dr. Keith Williams, director of the Penn State Hershey Medical Center’s Feeding Program. “While it should be the case that ‘children eat what their parents serve,’” says Williams, “our clinical experience tells us that ‘parents serve what their children eat.’”

  It is by no means true that all parents now feed their children on “kid food.” The past decade has seen a modest backlash against the unhealthiest children’s menus. Even McDonald’s now serves organic carrot sticks on its kids’ menus. A 2009 survey unearthed growing numbers of vegetables—not all of them fries—on US kids’ menus. Thanks to the efforts of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, in 2005, school meals in Britain were reformed again, with “Turkey Twizzlers” and similar forms of shaped processed meats eliminated from the menu. In the United States, First Lady Michelle Obama promoted healthier diets for children through her “Let’s Move” program. In both Britain and the United States, the introduction of healthier school meals was controversial; many of the new fruits and vegetables went from “tray to trash” untouched, as one article put it, as children who knew only “kid food” rejected unfamiliar dishes. Some took this rejection as a sign that children are naturally inclined to prefer “kid food” to wholesome home-cooked meals. The real lesson, however, is that for dietary reform to be effective, it must go hand in hand with changes in the way that individuals learn to eat. A child will only benefit from a healthy balanced lunch when he has developed a taste for healthy balanced food.

  The effort of avoiding all the junk marketed under the umbrella of children’s food, coupled with the epidemic of childhood food allergies, diabetes, and other health effects, has driven some affluent parents to become a little unhinged. There are households now where children’s food is policed more fiercely than it was by L. Emmet Holt in the early twentieth century: where kale is given as a snack and sugar is an absolute “no-no,” and anything containing white flour is treated as only slightly less suspect than hard drugs. The English journalist Zoe Williams describes “wholemeal parents” who refer to raisins as “baby-crack, to underline their impossibly delicious, contraband nature.” In alarming times, food can seem like a way to keep your child safe from danger, and admittedly, there are good grounds for thinking that children are at risk from the current food environment.

  But the way to protect them in such an environment is not to keep them in a bubble where all the foods are nutritionally perfect. What children need is to develop the skills to navigate the environment for themselves. The problem with this purist version of children’s food, just as much as the unhealthy kid food, is: What happens when they grow up? All “children’s food” comes with an assumption that one day you will stop being a child and eat something else.

  People from those parts of the world that have still not completely given in to the Western diet speak of how strange they find the concept of “children’s food” altogether. Baby food is one thing. Contrary to what people often say, babies in India are not weaned onto highly spiced foods. During the first year, they might be fed various bland mushes of well-boiled vegetables, with added ghee to boost the calories, or overcooked milky cereals. Suji kheer is thought a good food for babies. It is semolina cooked with sugar and milk—in other words, not dissimilar to rice pudding. After children are one or so, however, they move on to roughly the same variety of foods that the rest of the family is eating, in both texture and taste, though extra efforts are made to give them enough protein. In India, children’s food is just food. Depending on what family you have the luck to be born into, it might be good food or bad food; it might be enough or not enough. The crucial difference with this setup is that the food of childhood is not something you ever have to outgrow. In the West, we think we will outgrow it. But the truth is we often don’t.

  During World War II, the American anthropologist Margaret Mead was executive secretary of the National Research Council’s Committee on Food Habits. One of the questions Mead was asked to look into was the puzzle of how people could be made to change their food habits. The background was the worry about how Americans might be encouraged to accept the deprivation of wartime food shortages, particularly of meat. Mead saw that people did actually very often change their food behaviors. The pitfall was that when a diet felt constricting, people were liable to swing in the opposite direction as soon as they were free to do so. She gave the example of childhood. Families brought children up to eat less meat, drink more milk, and eat more vegetables than their parents:

  Generation after generation, children are reared with the recognition that the customary diet contains foods, some more and some less approved, and they are exhorted to make the choice of foods which are “good for you” as a matter of moral choice. At the same time, there is implicit in the forms of persuasion and reward, an expectation that most chi
ldren as they grow older, especially male children as they become men, will insist on making wilful choices in favour of foods which are not good for them.

  As Mead recognized, the concept of nursery food was based on a double standard. If it was true that there was one stage of life when it was vital not to ingest anything unwholesome, it might follow that at a later stage, these unwholesome things might suddenly be allowed or even encouraged. The most blatant example is alcohol. In many families, it was a rite of passage for fathers to get their sons drunk. By the same token, once you were a man, you could safely eat steak and shun green vegetables without anyone telling you off. If anything, it only added to your manliness. It showed that you were no mummy’s boy.

  For girls, too, the rules of food changed on the cusp of adulthood. Food writer Elizabeth David recalled the wonderful moment when she was free to leave the nursery and take tea downstairs in the drawing room with the grown-ups. Suddenly there were elegant sweet cakes and delicious small sandwiches that actually tasted of something. She would never again be made to drink milk or eat rice pudding. It was relatively easy to outgrow “nursery food,” because there was never any expectation that you would like it.

  What’s less obvious is what happens when people outgrow the unhealthy and highly flavored “kid food” of the postwar years. Or whether they do outgrow it. Have you noticed that when someone wants to express that something tastes extra specially wonderful, they will often invoke childhood? Ice cream sundaes are described as “so good you’ll think you were a kid again,” which signals not just that the whipped cream is rich and the chocolate sauce is darkly luscious, but that you are allowed to eat it without the burden of adult guilt. At David Chang’s Momofuku restaurants in New York and Toronto, they sell a dessert called “cereal milk” that is meant to taste like the milk left behind after a bowl of cornflakes. And it does: malty, milky, and sweet. You can opt to have it plain, or frozen as ice cream.

  In theory, we should all reach a level of maturity where we put our childish tastes behind us. We swap our candy habit for a coffee one. Salad becomes a part of our lives and we grow to appreciate bitter flavors: espresso, chicory, Campari and soda. Desserts are laced with spirits (tiramisu) or flavored with challenging ingredients such as cardamom, as if to render them childproof. Many fashionable dinner-party dishes involve an ostentatious adoption of once-hated ingredients: chicken-liver crostini, caramelized Brussels sprouts, fennel gratin. This is how it goes for a lucky minority, anyway.

  But judging from what we know of the world’s diet over the past few decades, it is clear that large numbers of adults as well as children have now become habituated to eating a version of “kid food” over a whole lifetime: sweet, salty, undemanding to chew and swallow, and heavily processed. The kind of menus you typically see at casual chain restaurants suggests that when adults go out to eat, they want childish comfort: sweet-salty ribs, breadcrumbed chicken, cheesy pasta.

  Professor Barry Popkin, at the University of North Carolina’s School of Public Health in Chapel Hill, has gathered data on dietary change across the world over the past few decades. Popkin found that “globally, our diet is becoming increasingly energy-dense and sweeter. At the same time, higher-fiber foods are being replaced by processed versions. There is enormous variability in eating patterns globally, but the broad themes seem to be retained in most countries.” This suggests that “kid food” has given us tastes that are enduringly narrow, increasingly homogenized, and very unhealthy. “Kid food” has a more permanent hold on our tastes than “nursery food” not because such foods as frosted cereals and cheese strings are objectively any more delicious than rice pudding, but because they are offered without any “should” attached.

  Over the past fifty years, global food tastes have progressively narrowed to what is referred to as an SFS palate: sugar/fat/salt. No matter what you order in a fast-food restaurant, from hamburgers to salad dressing to apple pie, the odds are it will be united by a common flavor: not sweet-sour, but sweet-salty, with an undertow of fat. This matters, because, as we have seen, flavor has a remarkable ability to imprint itself on our memories, and therefore, to drive our future food choices. Repeated exposures to SFS foods early in life teaches us that this is how all food should taste. This homogenized sweet-saltiness is now ubiquitous in many supposedly adult treats, from pretzel croissants to salted caramel to pulled pork sandwiches.

  The legacy of “nursery food” was to create adults who, for the most part, were only too eager to leave the constraints of the rice pudding years behind them and graduate to something more delicious. The legacy of being reared on “kid food” may be a state of arrested development when it comes to food. In 2002, a team of researchers devised a five-year study looking at seventy families to determine whether tastes for certain foods remained constant between the ages of around three and eight. Sure enough, in almost every case, the children studied continued to like the same foods during that stretch. The truly startling finding, however, was the extent to which the eight-year-olds’ tastes matched those of their mothers. Admittedly, the mothers had learned to stop disliking some of the foods that traumatized eight-year-olds: these grown-ups were braver about raw onions, for example, and green peas. But the most passionately “liked” foods of the mothers were exactly the same “kid foods” that the eight-year-olds preferred, and the list looks like a recipe for nutritional disaster. Nearly all of them, adult or child, were most fond of popcorn, soft white rolls, French fries, chocolate chip cookies, ground beef, hamburgers, doughnuts, processed cheese, pancakes, syrup, muffins, pizza, and white sugar. The only food on the list that was obviously healthy was raw apple, liked by sixty-nine children and seventy mothers.

  When parents as well as children are eating “kid food,” perhaps it’s time to call it something else. “Kid food” started off as something separate and different from normal food. Now it is close to being the new normal for all age groups. The danger is that when adults have childish tastes, it becomes very difficult for anyone to break the cycle and learn the pleasures of real food.

  In recent years, something called “birthday cake” ice cream has started popping up. It is a lurid multicolored confection with sprinkles, clots of frosting, and chunks of cake running through it. The idea is that it tastes like the lovingly iced cake your mother made for you when you were six and it was your birthday and you gave your friends slices of cake to take home, damply wrapped in party napkins. Except that you are not six anymore, and it isn’t your birthday.

  This feels emblematic of how our eating has gone wrong (see also cookie dough ice cream). Birthday cake ice cream is designed to tap into special memories of blowing out your candles and eating a once-a-year treat with your family. But if you can eat it in a cone any day of the year, on a whim, the whole point is lost. The existence of birthday cake ice cream suggests that we can no longer distinguish celebration foods from everyday ones. We are also not too sure whether we are children or adults.

  With children’s lives full of so many other sweet treats, birthday cake should have lost some of its emotional weight. If anything, though, the stakes are now higher. Birthday cake has morphed into a pure symbol of parental love. Nicola Humble, the author of Cake, says, “I swear each year that I will not go overboard on my son’s birthday cake, and each year the construction is more complicated, more ambitious, more absurd”: a treasure chest, a planet with marzipan aliens, a pyramid cake containing a secret tomb.

  Birthday cake is one of those childhood foods we find it hardest to let go of. “Don’t they carry one back to all one’s parties?” says the heroine of Katherine Mansfield’s story “The Garden Party,” looking at a plate of cream puffs. Many a diet is broken because it feels so cruel to reject a colleague’s request to share a slice of cake on his or her birthday. You don’t want to be the mean kid at the party who spoiled the games.

  It’s not birthday cake in itself that is the problem. It’s the surro
unding culture of food, where sweet treats are ever present, consumed without ceremony. In France, according to parenting author Pamela Druckerman, homemade yogurt cake is used as a lesson in delayed gratification. The child helps make the cake in the morning and has to wait until the afternoon to eat it. It’s a useful exercise—for adults, too. Healthy eating should not preclude the odd cake. But it’s good to be able to wait: if not for a whole year, at least for an hour or two.

  4

  Feeding

  His outstanding memory about his early life was his

  mother’s urging him to eat, always with a stern invocation:

  “Ess, ess, ich sterbe weg” (Eat, eat or I will die).

  Hilde Bruch, 1974 (of a middle-aged doctor in

  New York City who had suffered a heart attack

  but could not bring himself to lose weight)

  After my parents split up, my father often took me to the station to catch the train back to my mother’s house. Although we had usually just eaten lunch, he would offer to buy me a magazine and “one more thing” to eat before we said good-bye. I could choose anything. I started to see that whatever I asked for during those anxious moments at the station would be granted, even a whole box of shiny Maltesers, chocolate-coated malted milk balls, the sort of indulgence that in earlier days of family life would only have been purchased on rare trips to the cinema or theater, and carefully shared out among the four of us. Now, the rules of food had changed. On the train home, as I pored over my copy of Marie Claire, the roof of my mouth became sore from sucking the crunchy honeycomb out of each chocolate sphere, with no one telling me to stop.