by Wilson, Bee
This was sound reasoning at the time. Those most likely to have survived famine were those who were fattest to begin with. Between 108 bc and ad 1911, there were over 1,800 major famines in China. Then Mao brought fresh waves of hunger. The Beijing grandparents had survived the hungers of the 1960s, and perhaps they remembered being fat children themselves. It is hard for anyone to stay alive in a famine, harder still for a child. “Children seem literally born to die,” said one observer of the Irish Catholics in Boston in the 1840s, who escaped famine at home only to be met with new shortages in America. Unless parents built up a child’s reserves of adipose tissue when food was plentiful after a harvest, the child would struggle to make it through the “hungry gap” when stores ran low in the spring. In a bad year in modern-day Gambia during the “hungry season,” adults may lose ten or twelve pounds, or 50 percent of their body fat; a child who lost that much would probably die, unless he or she had a little extra padding to begin with. Given that periods of feast and famine were the norm for our ancestors, those of us who came after seem to have inherited what biochemist C. Nicholas Hales and epidemiologist David J.P. Barker christened “thrifty genes,” good at conserving fat. We are all descended from survivors, and survivors were the chubby ones.
“At least it means that I treat the child well . . . if the child is fat,” said one Chinese grandmother. Another grandmother felt “sorry” for her own thin granddaughter. This mismatch between a child’s weight and what a grandparent sees is not unique to China. The view that a plump child is a healthy child is common among the older generation in many ethnic communities. Baldeesh Rai is a dietician working to persuade South Asian families in Britain to adopt healthier diets. As in China, she finds that the cooking for the whole family is often done by the mother-in-law. When Rai gently suggests that a child is overweight, she often encounters resistance from the extended family, for whom it is a good thing—no matter what science or medicine may say—when young ones have adorably chubby cheeks, ripe for pinching.
Among the Beijing families, many parents expressed frustration at not being able to influence how the grandparents were feeding the child. But since they were out at work all day, there was little they could do. One mother told her son not to eat candy, only to be told, “Okay, I will have it when you leave.” A father begged his mother not to feed his daughter so much, but was told that she knew how to feed children because she had brought up three of them. In the most extreme scenario, one of the mothers said that she and her husband had decided to move out from her parents-in-law’s house. “This is the only way I can avoid my mother-in-law’s overfeeding my child.”
A generation ago, it was rare to be overweight in China. Not anymore. The country’s dizzying economic growth over the past three decades has been matched with a rapid growth in the weight of its citizens. As of 2010, official statistics indicated that there were 100 million obese people in China, more than five times as many as in 2002. As a percentage of the overall population, obesity is still much less prevalent there than in the West. In 2010, only 4.1 percent of men in China had a BMI over 30 kg/m2, the number defining obesity, compared with 30.3 percent in Greece and 44.2 percent in the United States. Yet the worry, as journalist Paul French and statistician Matthew Crabbe explored in their 2010 book Fat China, is that rates of obesity are growing much faster than anywhere else in the world, particularly in the cities. Because of China’s size, the country now contains a fifth of all the obese people on the planet. “Famine to gluttony in two generations is quite an achievement,” as French and Crabbe put it.
In some ways, China’s obesity crisis looks like a speeded-up version of that of the West, a consequence of the modern food industry, changing diets, and sedentary lifestyles (the bicycle has made way for the car, and a competitive education system leaves many children with no time to exercise). Traditional Chinese cuisine—with its peerless balance of flavors and textures—always seemed like a good way to eat, whether for pleasure or health. But in the past thirty years, new foods have arrived, and with them, new tastes. Rising incomes for city-dwellers and the opening up of markets mean that the Chinese can buy food in both quantities and varieties that would have seemed alien to previous generations. China has developed a penchant for many novel things: fried chicken, supermarkets, beer, frozen foods, burgers, French fries, cook-in sauces, TV dinners, sugary sodas, breakfast cereals, jam, and pizza. Perhaps most surprising has been the success of the big coffee franchises in persuading a nation of tea drinkers (calories in black tea: negligible) to swap to milky coffee (calories in a grande mocha with whipped cream: nearly four hundred).
Given the influx of these strange new items, it would be easy to blame China’s new weight problem on a move away from a traditional diet. “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,” is one of Michael Pollan’s rules for healthy eating. A Chinese child eating blueberry muffins and drinking a milkshake has definitely broken this rule. But we shouldn’t be too quick to attribute China’s weight problem to modernity. While many of the foods may be new, the attitudes toward feeding are the old peasant ones: if you find yourself in a state of plenty, the right thing to do is to gorge, to set yourself up for the lean times. Among the urban grandparents studied by a group of researchers from the National Center for Women’s and Children’s Health in Beijing, certain thoughts about feeding were universal: children should ignore whether they were full or not and leave nothing behind in the bowl; waste was anathema; and good behavior merited treats. In some ways, China’s obesity is a symptom of the fact that attitudes toward eating have not changed fast enough to adjust to a new situation. Your great-grandmother would not have known how to feed children in these times, because she never encountered such abundance. Like the rest of us, she would have had to muddle through and—with luck—adapt. The Chinese situation is a more extreme version of what is happening all over the world in places where the new food supply is colliding with an outdated body of knowledge about feeding.
All of these feeding practices come from a desire to protect the children and see them flourish. These grandparents, survivors of hunger, want their descendants to enjoy the things they never had. Yet the researchers who interviewed them concluded that the grandparents’ generous patterns of feeding were pushing their beloved grandchildren to gain weight. These obese preschoolers were not suffering from any lack of affection. They were not neglected. If anything, they were loved too single-mindedly.
What the Chinese case tells us is that we urgently need to invent new models of generosity. We need to find a way for a small portion to feel as much like love as a large one. The longing to protect our children through food—which is one of the most potent forms of affection—now requires new manifestations. “Comfort me with apples” says the Song of Solomon. It is such a magnificent feeling, to feed someone with love, no wonder we place great faith in it. This love plays out in all kinds of ways. In an ideal scenario, you love a child by giving him carefully chosen foods that are good for him. It makes you feel cozy, knowing that your child has a thermos of homemade soup on a cold day, particularly if you experience guilt that you won’t get home from work in time to make a hot dinner. But expressing parental love through food does not always work so well. A parent’s enjoyment in feeding feels so right, we think it will lead us inexorably to a child’s true needs, when often it takes us somewhere else.
Through the ages, children have been traumatized by the injunction to leave a clean plate. For some, it becomes a miserable battle of wills: a child sits for hours in front of a congealing plate of food as a parent or teacher urges the child to eat the hated meal. This is a setup that can never end well for either party, especially when the child undergoes genuine revulsion for the food forced upon him.
The philosopher Charles Fourier grew up in provincial France in the late eighteenth century. He was a delicate boy with very strong likes and dislikes, and his childhood memories were dominated
by the “tyranny” of schoolteachers and parents in matters of taste. “How many canings did I not receive for refusing to eat turnips and cabbage, barley, vermicelli, and other moral medicine that caused me to vomit, not to mention my feelings of disgust,” he lamented.
Fourier remembered that when eating with his schoolteacher, he was often required to eat turnips, which he loathed. One time he tried to throw his turnip away, only to be discovered by the teacher and forced to eat it, now covered in dust.
At home, likewise, Fourier was often forced by his father to finish food that he did not like. On one occasion, his father compelled him to eat leeks until he was violently sick. The memory left scars. Later, as an adult, Fourier worked as a traveling salesman, in his spare time writing books of social theory. The foundation of his philosophy was that no one should ever be forced to do anything that went against his inclinations. He dreamed up a utopia—Harmony—in which bread, instead of being the staple food, would be replaced with a mixture of fruit and sugar, more to children’s tastes. For him, forcing someone to eat food they could not stand was a form of child abuse.
Fourier’s older sister Lubine remembered things slightly differently. Charles was the baby of the family—he had four older sisters—and, as Lubine told it, he was his father’s favorite. Lubine recalled that their father’s strictness, when it came to whether Charles finished up his food, was a sign of particular fondness. She observed that her brother was “very delicate about his food.” Her papa’s aim in getting him used to “cleaning his plate” was the thought that “no one knows the situation in which he may find himself placed in life.” He bullied Charles to eat in the hope of toughening him up for a cruel world, since he “loved him as one loves an only son.” According to Lubine, as soon as he saw his beloved child vomit, he regretted his actions and promised to let the boy “do as he chose in the matter of food.” But for young Charles it was too late. He would never forget his father’s cruelty, and he would never be able to eat leeks.
How many parents and children have been locked in such battles over the years? It starts with a delicate child who is reluctant to eat. This makes the parent anxious that the child is not getting enough good, nutritious food—in this case, turnips and leeks. They try to force matters, which only increases the child’s reluctance, turning suspicion of the healthy food into an active loathing. Whether the food is eaten or not eaten, no one wins in the end.
It does seem a crazy way for parents to behave, but throughout history it has often been driven by a genuine fear of scarcity. For anyone lucky enough to know only postwar plenty, it is hard to reconstruct just how great was the horror of waste to earlier generations. The sight of nutritious food being pushed to the side of a plate is never enjoyable, but in a time of world war, or economic depression, it began to seem to some like a selfishness akin to crime. In 1940, The Times published an editorial calling for it to be made “an offence” to waste food. My granny was born in 1908, and whenever we ate a baked potato in her house she used to recite this rhyme (half sternly, half in jest):
Dearly Beloved Brethren
Is it Not a Sin
To Eat a Baked Potato
And Throw Away the Skin?
Skins Feed Pigs
Pigs Feed We
Dearly Beloved Brethren
One, Two, Three.
Luckily, I thought the skin of a baked potato was the best part, particularly if there was a raft of butter to spread into the crispy crevices. Plus, I was the kind of child who never needed to be coerced to finish. But maybe I’d have enjoyed the skin even more without being told it was sinful not to eat it.
The clean plate—and coercing children to eat against their will generally—is one of a range of traditional feeding techniques founded on a fear that food shortages are just around the corner. These techniques were impatient ones devised by parents who did not have time to sit around fussing about likes and dislikes (though, ironically, a determination to wait with a child until she cleans her plate can make a meal go on all day). In rural Nigeria, it is still the norm for mothers to hand-feed children on diluted, fermented maize called eko. Mothers give the eko from hand to mouth because it is quicker than a spoon, no small matter when the mother works eight hours a day as a market trader. If children resist being hand-fed, mothers resort to force-feeding. Observers have watched as the mother covers the child’s nose with a cupped hand so that they cannot breathe, forcing them to swallow the maize porridge.
The assumption underlying such techniques is that a parent knows better than the child what his stomach needs. The psychologist Leann Birch has identified a series of “traditional feeding practices” all based on protecting children from scarcity. These include:
Feeding children frequently
Offering large portions
Offering food as a first response to crying
Coercing children to eat when food is available
When food is short, such strategies may be a way to protect a growing child. But when obesity is more of a threat than famine, they lose their logic.
Birch has led many experiments whose results suggest that these traditional feeding methods are actively damaging in the modern world, resulting “in overeating and accelerated weight gain” as well as bad feelings around mealtimes. Feeding children too often can make them forget what their own hunger feels like. Large portions lead to overeating. And giving food to calm a distressed child teaches the child that unhappiness is a reason to eat. This last one explains a lot. If your mother interpreted all your cries as a cry for food—rather than for play or sleep or a fresh nappy—then it stands to reason you would feel inclined to treat yourself the same way as a grown-up, silencing your sadness with sugar.
As for coercing children to eat up, it teaches many things, and none of them are very helpful. If you are disgusted by the thing you are being forced to eat, it makes you fear the food on your plate and the person giving it to you. A study of 140 college students found that their strongest food aversion very often went back to an incident of “forced consumption.” Even if you are not disgusted, force-feeding trains you to obey the plate and not your own appetite. You learn to measure when to stop eating not by what your body is telling you, but by external forces.
It wasn’t as if people—at least child-rearing experts—were ever unaware that force-feeding was a bad idea. Manuals on feeding infants and children repeatedly warn against pushing food on a child who does not want it. In 1923, the pediatrician L. Emmet Holt insisted that “children should not be continually urged to eat if they are disinclined to do so at their regular hours of feeding or if the appetite is habitually poor, and under no circumstances should a child be forced to eat.” Holt argued that the result of force-feeding was that the child “has less and less desire for food and may even have attacks of vomiting.” Likewise, an article on feeding from a nursing journal in 1944 noted that forcing food, and “too great concern on the part of the adult” about a child’s food intake, could “hinder a child’s progress” in eating.
But force-feeding can be a tempting strategy, nevertheless. I know, because, to my great shame, I did it to one of my children. L. Emmet Holt is right when he says that it begins “in despair” because the child’s appetite “is not keen.” Or at least, this was the case for me. My third child was born with a cleft palate, making it harder for him to swallow. When he was tiny, each feed could last an hour or more, at the end of which, much of the milk often gushed back up his nose and was lost. Before he had the operation to repair his palate at six months, I fed him through a combination of breastfeeding and expressed milk, which I gave him from bottles with special nipples. Even though it felt as if the whole day was dominated by feeding and expressing, he stopped gaining enough weight. The cleft nurses were worried. When I look back now at photos of him at the age of three or four months, I am startled by how skinny he looks, a little pale skull with wide, trusting eye
s.
Once he switched to a mix of formula and breast milk, he did gain weight. Following the nurse’s advice, we spoon fed him on purees for two months before the operation. He took to them easily. It seemed to be a relief to him to be eating something thicker than milk. He loved carrots, mashed banana, all sorts of gunk. The operation at six months went fine and now he could swallow like anyone else, thanks to the embroidery of stitches on his palate. The nurses said he could go home as soon as he was eating enough. He learned to eat porridge and broccoli and beef stew and many sorts of dal. He was fine.
It was me that was the problem. Looking back, I see that I never lost the early anxiety about his feeding. At the age of eighteen months, he developed the classic balkiness about food that most toddlers go through. It got worse when we all traveled abroad for ten weeks for my husband’s work. Our toddler was fussier than his older siblings had ever been. Foods he had once adored he now spat out. At the same time, he became fixated on sweet foods, begging for sugary fromage frais and gingerbread men. He called these “Run Runs” because of the story “The Gingerbread Man”: run, run, as fast as you can. Maybe he envied the way the gingerbread man could escape. In his own case, it wasn’t being eaten that he wanted to run away from, but being fed. Instead of sitting back and riding things out—as all the baby books advise, not to mention my common sense—I started to force matters.
At first, I would make him take “just one bite,” ramming in the tiniest spoonful of something that I “knew” he liked, saying “Mmmmm” in a pantomime voice. To start with, this worked. After the first taste of spaghetti bolognese or whatever, he remembered it was okay and carried on eating by himself. But increasingly, I found that he was still wildly shaking his head after the first taste. The thought of him skipping a meal was horrible. Maybe he needed another taste, I thought, forcing my spoon between his little clenched teeth. “Remember! You like carrots!” But he didn’t remember.