by Wilson, Bee
At first, I saw these transactions at the train station mainly in terms of my own appetite and the happy carb rush I was seeking. “Mmm, fattening!” in the words of Homer Simpson. Later, it got more complicated. Around the age of sixteen, I became self-conscious about my increasing weight. When the moment came for my father to offer me “one more thing,” a voice in my head would tell me to say I wasn’t hungry, or to ask for a Diet Coke. But I hardly ever managed it. The prize of the treats was too great. It wasn’t just the taste. It was the feeling of merit; if you are being rewarded with food by a grown-up, you must have done something good. For years afterward, whenever I found myself traveling by train, my automatic reaction was to buy myself some indulgence or other.
It was only much later, as a parent myself, and rather too eager to dole out platefuls of cookies and milk whenever my children had friends around, that I realized the person my father was rewarding was primarily himself. He agonized about the divorce. To cast himself in the role of the bringer of treats, the generous provider, could make the good-byes less painful for him, as well as for me. To give a child the things she loves to eat bestows a heroic glow. It feels almost as wonderful as eating. Seeing a child fed reassures you that you have done your duty as a parent, like a mother bird ferrying worms to the nest. During the years following the divorce, my sister was for the most part refusing offers of food, treats or otherwise. The only child remaining to be plied with goodies was me, and I was happy to oblige, beak open.
Much of what we learn about eating comes from the way our parents feed us. As a child, you assume that the grown-ups know what they are doing. But they are mostly just figuring things out as best they can, meal by meal, drawing on the convictions and prejudices they inherited from their own upbringing. Some parents use food as a pacifier, to keep the little ones quiet. Some withhold treats for bad behavior. Others fret about foods that are too rich or too strange for tiny stomachs, and pass on a generalized anxiety about eating. Trends in food change from decade to decade, yet our default patterns of eating are largely a response to an older generation’s own complicated attitudes toward food. Almost all parents want the best for their children, but they are frequently too hung up on the indignities of the past to see the real problems in front of them or to separate a child’s needs from their own urges. A parent who was forced to eat vegetables in an atmosphere of repression may take joy in seeing children enjoy anarchic TV dinners of whatever they please. Likewise, any parent who remembers hunger will have a special stake in seeing a child eat. Feeding, like eating, is a learned behavior, and the methods that most parents absorb for doing it are based on the values of former times when a child needed to be protected from scarcity rather than plenty. Urging a child to take one more bite is no longer the way to keep them safe.
Not all children are overfed. When a child is neglected, one of the surest signs is underfeeding. As many as 5 to 10 percent of all children in the United States aged two through five show poor growth related to scant feeding, rather than to some organic cause (such as celiac disease). The medical term is “failure to thrive,” meaning that an infant is not getting enough food to grow and develop properly. The single greatest risk factor for failure to thrive across the world is poverty. In cases stemming from poverty, the poor feeding is unavoidable, or at least unintentional. But there can be other reasons for the condition as well. Feeding is a complex interplay between parent and child, and sometimes failure to thrive is caused in part by avoidant eating behavior in the child, which in turn makes the parent more anxious about feeding. And in some cases, failure to thrive is a sign that other things have gone deeply wrong in the child’s care. One study suggests that up to 80 percent of mothers whose babies failed to thrive due to nonorganic causes had experienced a history of abuse in their own past. The fact that a child is not getting enough to eat is often a sign of a home where there is alcohol or drug abuse or domestic violence. In the worst cases, a parent may intentionally withhold food from a child. This is such a chilling thought that it’s no wonder we sometimes act as if feeding were the same as love.
Feeding children is an immense responsibility. To take on the burden of someone else’s nourishment until they are old enough to do it for themselves is an expensive, thankless, and often unwelcome task. In times of scarce resources, having another mouth to feed can entail sacrifices and adjustments from everyone else in the household. (The scandal of baby formula being marketed in the developing world is not just that bottle-feeding is dangerous when water is unclean. It is that it costs families so much. In Bangladesh, a factory worker might spend as much as a third of his or her income to buy formula for a baby.)
When food becomes affordable and plentiful, the emotions associated with feeding children start to look rather different. Okay, it’s still not fun having bowls of spaghetti upended, and no chef has to endure the crushing ego blow of having a lovingly cooked casserole spat out as “too lumpy.” Standing at the toddler swings in the park, parents are constantly swapping gripes about feeding. We bemoan the tedium of carrying “healthy” snacks around until a bag becomes a mess of rice-cake debris and squashed dried apricots. It maddens us when a child picks at his lunch, then claims to be hungry half an hour later. And the meals never stop coming. “Didn’t I already do this yesterday?” you think when another breakfast has to be produced, so soon after the last one.
In all this companionable griping, however, you hardly ever hear anyone whisper the secret truth that feeding children—especially giving them treats, where the question of likes and dislikes does not weigh so heavily—can be pretty fun. It feels like parental affection in its purest form. Some of us get our kicks at the school gates doling out hugs and pain au chocolat. It’s a thrill to see eyes light up on the arrival of a birthday cake or to be the one buying when you visit an ice-cream stand on a hot day. After you’ve spent a decade or more fantasizing about the cotton candy of childhood—that warm fluffy halo of sweetness—it feels exhilarating to have a reason to buy it again. When something is easy, we say it’s like “taking candy from a baby.” Actually, the fingers cling on pretty tightly, I’ve found. The truly easy thing is giving the baby candy in the first place.
Feeding can be a cheap thrill, something so enjoyable that even children themselves aspire to do it, acting it out for fun. No less than eating, feeding can be a compulsion. To see small creatures gobbling up treats is very rewarding. The pleasure of keeping pets, for example, is largely about bringing home the food the animal likes and watching it vanish, whether it’s goldfish flakes sprinkled in a tank or hamster muesli scoffed up and stored in cheek pouches. We often assume that the urge to push food into another mouth is part of a deep maternal (or paternal) instinct and that the act of feeding others is a form of dutiful sacrifice: you are putting someone else’s needs before your own. And often it is so. But we still need to account for the fact that feeding is seen as an enjoyable activity by some of the least maternal and self-sacrificing people you could meet. I am talking about video game players.
In 1980, Pac-Man launched in arcades in both Japan and the United States, and was an instant hit, changing the whole video game industry. It took its name from the Japanese phrase paku-paku, referring to the sound a mouth makes when it opens and shuts. If you play the game for long enough, cherries, strawberries, oranges, apples, and grapes appear on the screen. When Pac-Man eats these fruits, they work as a “power-up,” which means that for a while afterward, he scores more points for every dot he consumes. Pac-Man is not eating food in any normal human sense. Nevertheless, the game’s basic appeal, which has been replicated by many other games since, is the hypnotic pleasure of seeing a small creature consuming rewards.
Among video game designers, there is a common language of treats. Whether you are playing the game in Mexico City or Moscow, there are items that are instantly recognizable as good things to feed the characters onscreen. It might be a hamburger or a hotdog crisscrossed with ketc
hup, but most likely it’s something sweet: a rectangle of chocolate, an ice cream sundae, a glazed doughnut. “One thing that everyone knows in every culture in the world is that sweet things are awesome,” says Luis Gigliotti one autumn morning sitting in a coffee shop. Gigliotti is a creative director in the games industry with twenty years of experience designing games for pretty much every platform—from consoles to online games to mobile tablets. I first met him in this same coffee shop when I overheard him having an intense conversation about how “cool” it would be to see a dog eating peanut butter. Gigliotti, who wears earrings and an LA Dodgers baseball cap and has heavily tattooed arms, goes by the name of “Lu” or sometimes “Dumpsta.” He has worked on games from Grand Theft Auto and Devil May Cry (a “hack-n-slash” fantasy) to smaller free-to-play “addictable” games with cute characters and speedy payoffs.
Gigliotti sees gaming potential everywhere. When he looks at a pastry, he sees a symbol of happiness. “Why are these displayed on the counter?” he asks, gesticulating at an assortment of sticky buns and croissants. “They are trying to make us hungry.” Over the years, Gigliotti has developed a clear understanding of what players will accept as treats “foodwise.” Color is important, for example. “Pink’s nothing but good,” he says (whether the player is male or female); red and even blue are appealing, too, but not usually green, because we associate it with sickness. This is one reason—albeit not the only one—that you won’t often see leafy greens used as a treat in computer games. It is simply not as rewarding for us to see characters eating green spinach as it is when they eat pink cake. Dark brown roasted things, on the other hand, work very well. “A brown turkey or the side of a beautifully roasted chicken steaming up with all the fixings. It’s synonymous with a feast.” But the quickest way to signify “treat” is to go for something sweet.
Feeding a computer character with treats is—evidently—not the same as feeding a real child. Often, you are so strongly identified with the hero, it is as if you are eating the treat yourself. But while neither the food nor the character is real, some of the payoff is the same. You want to see the treat vanish and the happy face appear, and when this happens, you feel great about yourself. The key thing with any game, says Gigliotti, is to create a connection with the main character and their world. The feelings are real, even if the images are not. “Once you’ve created empathy, then all the normal things that give you joy or grief will now apply to what happens to that character onscreen.”
When I met Gigliotti, he was working on a new game about a character called Shark Baby. She is an endearing little girl with pigtails, but when she sees something she likes, her eyes flip back and she turns into a shark and devours everything in her path, edible or not. It’s the player’s job to try to placate Shark Baby with treats so that she doesn’t wreak too much havoc, to herself or others, on her adventures. In one scene, Shark Baby is trying to cross a dangerous ravine. Her friend, a make-believe tiger, has a magical sack containing “yummy cakes,” which will help her get across to safety. It is our role to take the cake from the sack and use it to guide her over the ravine. By giving her cake, we make ourselves heroic. The emotion we will feel when we do this, suggests Gigliotti, is very similar to the feeling of supporting a charity or helping a stranger.
In his own life, Gigliotti does not subsist on pink cake, nor is he friends with make-believe tigers. He and his wife have a toddler whom they feed “organic everything.” His wife disapproves, he says, of those parents who buy their kids fast food every day. But when designing games, he taps into a different value system. Gigliotti was born in Argentina to an Italian mother, a very good cook. Money was often tight and meat was a rare luxury. They only moved to the United States when he was nine. Once they built their new American life, his mother couldn’t understand when her son brought home vegetarian friends. Meat was the thing you aspired to, so why would you willfully reject it when it was there in front of you?
When he dreams up his games, Luis Gigliotti thinks like his thrifty Italian Argentine mother, for whom overfeeding was not the kind of problem you could ever imagine having. The reason we want to feed characters with sweet things in games, he tells me, is that they are “not an everyday thing. Why is dessert at the end of a meal? It’s a reward. Sugar is a luxury item. If you are poor, you don’t eat sweets. If you can afford sweets, you are living the good life.” He smiles his wide white California smile and we look again at the piles of treats on the coffee shop counter, which both of us can afford, but neither of us is eating.
The way we reward children with food is based on folk memories of a food supply that has not existed in the West for decades, when white sugar was so rare it seemed to sparkle like snow. Our impulse to make children happy with food is a loving one—sweets for my sweet—and because the motive is generous, it can be hard to spot that what we are doing no longer makes much sense. In Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, a family friend, Mr. Edwards, risks his life to cross a stormy creek to bring Christmas candy to Laura and her sister Mary. These girls only taste candy once a year, and when they see the sticks of striped peppermint candy, and little heart-shaped cakes “made of pure white flour, and sweetened with white sugar,” they are overwhelmed with joy. “Think of having a cup and a cake and a stick of candy.” Laura cannot resist taking one lick of the peppermint candy. “But Mary was not so greedy.” A treat cannot possibly have the same meaning in an era when white-flour cakes are everywhere and candy canes are sold by the dozen for less than the price of a loaf of bread. Modern children have so many forms of sweetness offered to them that, in my experience, a common reaction to a candy cane at Christmas is not joy, but mild resentment that the sugar rush is tainted by the minty flavor of toothpaste. The problem now for many parents is not the fear that there will be no Christmas candy, but that when the Christmas candy arrives in the house, the children still won’t have finished up the last batch, from Halloween. And yet the loving spirit of Mr. Edwards endures.
We still believe we would do “anything” to give children their treats, even though we probably do not need to swim through stormy creeks to obtain them. There continue to be families where the grown-ups sacrifice their own pleasures to see the children fed. In China, many children are looked after by their grandparents while the parents go out to work. In the cities, the percentage of children being looked after by grandparents may be as high as 50 to 70 percent. For the sake of their families, the grandparents have given up the leisure they might have expected in old age. Without their selfless child care, many households could not function, and the Chinese economy would grind to a halt. There is a Chinese idiom, “Han yi nong sun” (to play with grandchildren with candies in mouth), that conjures a blissful grandparenthood in which the grandparent relaxes with a sweet while watching a grandchild play. In reality, it is more likely the grandchild eating the sweet, while their elderly relatives toil. A 2009 study from urban Xiamen, a large city on the southeast coast, found that, after a lifetime of work, those in the older generation were often now working harder than ever: doing laundry, supervising homework, ferrying grandchildren to and from school.
The grandparents are generally the ones responsible for buying and cooking the food. When it comes to their own consumption, the norm is frugality. One Xiamen grandfather told researchers he eats cheap preserved vegetables to save the money for his nine-year-old grandson’s education. Grandparents are far less parsimonious, however, when it comes to feeding the grandchildren, and the one-child policy means that all of the treats in the household go to a single mouth. In 2003–2004, a team of public health experts from Sweden and China interviewed the parents and grandparents of children attending four kindergartens in two different districts of Beijing. The grandchildren tended to have the same food preferences as their grandparents, whether for saltiness or sugar, wheat noodles or rice. The quantities they ate were also determined by the grandparents, who expressed “love and caring” through
food. What this meant in many cases was that they drastically overfed the children.
This overfeeding was not accidental; there was a rationale behind it. All of the Beijing grandparents interviewed had vivid memories of food shortage and hunger. As we have seen, such memories will inevitably color a person’s long-term relationship with eating. One grandmother said, “Happiness in life is to eat what you want, to eat the amount you want, and to eat whenever you want to.” Another grandmother spoke of the exquisite pleasure of watching a child eat. “My granddaughter has always had a very good appetite. She always opens her mouth whenever I feed her. I enjoy feeding her so much.” There was a sense in these families that a child’s desire for food must be satisfied at all costs, that it was worth paying a lot of money to buy enough meat to make a child “strong.” Some brought along snacks every afternoon when they picked up the beloved child from kindergarten. Others used food as a reward for achievements. A prize in a piano competition was, for a grandmother, a reason to buy “a lot of chips.”
More than half of the children studied—who had an average age of four and a half—were obese. Several of the grandparents expressed the view that it was good to be a heavy child because a fat child will grow up to be strong and tall. This belief was based on their memories of hungrier times, and in previous generations, they would not have been wrong to think about fat in this way. Across the world, puppy fat has been seen—and in some places still is seen—as a kind of insurance policy against malnutrition in a growing child. The French had a proverb: “Pour avoir assez, il faut avoir trop” (to have enough, you must have too much). In 1912, a British doctor argued that overfeeding a child was far less of a danger than underfeeding, even if it risked “a certain amount of excess.” Any plumpness would soon be shed during the next growth spurt, for “while it is only too easy to overfeed the adult, superabundant nourishment is almost impossible in those still growing.”