by Wilson, Bee
If we consistently eat less sugar, it actually changes our sense of sweetness. In the late 1990s, biologists at Clark University in Massachusetts started experimenting to find out whether being intensively exposed to fructose or glucose could affect an individual’s ability to perceive low concentrations of other sugars. They found that just five short exposures to glucose over a few weeks could make individuals more responsive to sweetness in very weak sugar solutions. The good news, however, is that the effects were reversible. After the experiment was over, the subjects returned to their normal responses to sugar after just a few weeks. This suggests that, if we could only take a fortnight’s holiday from sugar, we might return to it less fondly.
The same is true of salt. Experiments suggest that reducing salt in the diet for a period of just eight to twelve weeks is enough to reduce the pleasure of eating very salty foods. Interestingly, it seems to take hypertensive (salt-sensitive) people longer than others to kick the salt habit, though it is not clear why this is so. But a study of both normal and salt-sensitive adults found that after three months on a low-sodium diet, “a significant hedonic shift occurred” in all of the adults. Before the experiment started, they all rated salty foods as more enjoyable than non-salty ones. After twelve weeks, this changed. The subjects no longer found reduced-sodium versions of chicken broth, potato chips, and crackers any less pleasurable than the “normal” high-sodium varieties.
By making enough of these tweaks to our diets, we may reach the happy state where the foods we crave the most—give or take the odd French fry—are ones that do us good. It is possible to go back to learning to like basic healthy foods just as we did when we were children. As Dr. Spock wisely remarked in his best-selling Baby and Child Care from 1946, “feeding is learning.”
My daughter has a friend called Lily. She used to be one of the fussier children we knew. She couldn’t stand “mixed-up” food or anything that came in a sauce. The main things she liked were meat and potatoes and plates of plain cut-up cucumber. Not only could she not stand to eat a tomato, she couldn’t bear to have so much as a trace of a tomato on her plate. This prevented her from trying most pasta dishes, and salads, and curries, and stews, and her mother’s homemade pizza. She also wouldn’t eat any fruit, except for raspberries. This was difficult both for Lily and for the rest of her family, who are adventurous eaters and lovers of spicy Indian dishes, such as sag aloo made with spinach, potatoes, ginger, and tomatoes. Often, she ended up eating separate meals of fish sticks and fries. There seemed to be no way out of her limited diet.
Then, aged ten, she was casting around for a good New Year’s resolution and suddenly decided to do something about her restricted tastes. The idea was her own; her parents did not pressure her into it. Lily—a sunny, chatty person—set herself the task of trying one new food each month. At the end of the month, she still might not like the new food, but at least she would have given it a go. Somehow, the spirit of fun and adventure in this little project made it possible for her to put foods into her mouth that previously she would have recoiled from. It was the opposite of most grown-up New Year’s resolutions, which tend to involve cutting things out rather than adding them. Whenever we saw Lily that year, she was excitedly talking about the food of the month. The very first month, she successfully taught herself to like homemade pizza, despite the fact that it combined cheese and tomatoes, two of her no-go foods before. In subsequent months, she learned to eat chicken curry and apples and spaghetti bolognese and meat in sauces. By the end of the year, she still wasn’t crazy about bananas or salads, or any kind of fish except for fish and chips. But in just twelve months she had vastly expanded her repertoire of foods, and had also proved to herself that it was possible to enlarge her world of eating, whenever she needed to.
Because we live in Britain, Lily’s yearlong resolution was seen by her friends as rather unusual, maybe even a bit weird. In Finland, however, this kind of sensory exploration has now become a basic part of every child’s education. Lessons on taste are also given in schools in Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and some parts of Switzerland and France. This education in eating is part of the growing “Sapere” movement. In Latin, sapere has three meanings: “to taste,” “to be able,” and “to know.” The idea behind Sapere—and the Sapere Association that promotes the Sapere Method of food education throughout Europe—is that it is possible to educate children in the pleasures of food, and that doing so will set the children up for a lifetime of healthy eating. Feeding is learning.
The inspiration behind teaching children about taste—which may not amaze you—is French. In France, more than elsewhere, there has long been a deeply cherished belief that a child’s education involves being “civilized” in the pleasures of the table. In a famous experiment in the nineteenth century, Dr. Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard brought a wild boy into his care. He named him Victor. For twelve years, Victor had been living in the woods of Aveyron, and at first he only wanted to eat the fruits of the forest, to which he was accustomed. Over time, Itard succeeded in “awakening” new tastes in the boy for “a whole quantity of dishes he had hitherto always disdained.” Itard indoctrinated Victor in the joys of French cuisine, which he saw as a passport to civilization.
More than a hundred years later, another French scientist, Jacques Puisais, had a similar idea. Puisais, born in 1927, is a chemist and wine obsessive who believed that children should and could be trained to become more discerning gourmets. He worried that new generations were growing up without the ability to respond to complex flavors or to appreciate the finer points of cuisine. He founded the French Institute of Taste, and in 1974 he started the first “taste education classes” in French primary schools: les classes du goût. A typical program in French schools based on Puisais’s ideas would start with the five senses, move on to knowledge of French regional specialties, and culminate in a grand “festive” meal at a fancy restaurant where pupils would learn table manners and the art of savoir vivre.
You can see why this very French vision of food education did not immediately catch on elsewhere. Outside of France, to say that someone is not “educated” because they do not know how to sit at a table and eat a three-course restaurant meal with the right cutlery might sound ever so slightly . . . How shall I put this? . . . snobbish. But nutritionists and educators elsewhere in Europe took Puisais’s original vision and developed it in ways that were more democratic and more directly aimed at improving health. The Sapere Association, established in 1994, was the result. Schools in Sweden started offering Sapere’s classes on “food for the senses” in the 1990s; the Netherlands followed suit in 2006. But the country that has most fully embraced the “Sapere Method” is Finland. From 2009 to 2014, the Finnish government took the ambitious step of funding Sapere food education in all the kindergartens in the country. There are now more than 7,000 professionals in Finland trained in the method. This is by far the largest experiment ever conducted in changing children’s tastes for the better.
The Finnish engagement with Sapere was prompted by a national alarm in the early 2000s about children’s eating habits. Finland had notably higher child obesity levels than the country’s neighbors, Norway and Sweden (9.2 percent of Finnish boys were obese, as against 5.1 percent in Norway and 4.2 percent in Sweden). Nursery-school teachers noticed that many of the children in their care were consuming large amounts of sweet foods and drinks, and not many fruits and vegetables: this now familiar story. They feared the children were facing a future of health problems. Nursery staff also noticed that the children’s eating habits were heavily influenced by their family background. If a change was going to come, it would need to be from the school rather than the home.
Sapere was first tested in Finland in the rapidly growing city of Jyväskylä, a lakeside city where the winters are long and cold and it’s tempting to stay inside eating sweet cardamom buns filled with jam and whipped cream. In 2004–2005, the kindergartens of Jyväskylä
received funding to give all children in the city aged one through seven lessons in nutrition and “varied food habits.” The goal was to create a “positive and natural relationship with food and eating.” A team of nutrition researchers advised the kindergartens that to do this, they must abandon the dogmas their own parents taught them, such as “Eat everything on your plate,” or “Don’t play with food.” Instead, children would be positively encouraged to play with their food by exploring ingredients with all their senses: the hard crackle of rye crispbread, the soft fuzz of a peach, the puckering sourness of raw cranberries. This sense of exploration continued in what they ate at lunchtime. “Pedagogical” menus were served, composed of the foods that the children were learning about, with emphasis on vegetables and fruits. Nursery workers found that small children would eat many more vegetables if they were allowed to pick them up with their fingers.
The results from Jyväskylä were so promising that Sapere was extended across all Finnish preschools. Teachers reported that by including food in the children’s education each day, their attitudes toward eating could be radically altered. During the Sapere project, children “dared to test stranger foods” than before. Parents were surprised to find that their children had acquired new knife skills, more varied tastes, and fresh attitudes. Instead of being disgusted by beets, the children were now fascinated by the question of how they turned the cooking water purple. The children were more conscious of what they ate, and more attuned to whether they were hungry or full. Most strikingly of all, there are hopeful signs that Sapere has led to a reduction in the incidence of child obesity in Jyväskylä.
This happened not through explicit lectures on nutrients, but by channeling the children’s natural curiosity. The change was largely unconscious. Arja Lyytikäïnen, a nutritionist who oversees the Sapere program in Finland, says it is all about “learning by senses, learning by playing.” Some days, the children might go berry-picking; other times, they make bread, chop fruit for fruit salad, or draw pictures of vegetables. Most of the time, they are hardly aware they are learning at all. Sometimes, they play the “lemon thief game,” where one child leaves the room and another child rubs lemon on his or her hands. The “detective” comes back in and has to say who has been stealing lemons from the garden. Many of the Sapere sessions take the form of open-ended sensory games, where the children describe the sight, taste, and smell of different foods. They discuss whether they prefer to eat carrots raw or cooked; whether they enjoy bread more with garlic, with butter, or plain. In one Sapere session in Jyväskylä, a child observed that white pepper “attacks the nose.” Another said that blue cheese was “soft, white and green . . . just like a ghost.”
In earlier generations, criticizing food like this would have been seen as bad manners. But the prospect of saving a generation of children from bad diets and ill health trumps any niggles over etiquette. The aim of Sapere is to get children to know their own authentic tastes. “Everyone has his own preferences” is one of the mottos another is, “Matters of taste are not argued about, but discussed.” The children are encouraged to design their own birthday cakes, including the fillings and decorations they love the best. Like Dympna Pearson, the Sapere teachers in Finland have found that dietary change comes not from forcing people to eat what they do not like, but in helping them to discover their own passions. In a Sapere-run kindergarten, the children have many different tastes. Some prefer blueberries, while others like lingonberries. Some gravitate toward sour; others like saltiness. But, like the children in Clara Davis’s experiment in Chapter 1, all of them end up with a set of taste preferences varied enough to enable them to eat well when they are older. What Sapere shows is that any child can learn to eat better, given the right encouragement, as well as access to a variety of good foods.
The changes to eating behavior set in motion by this type of “sensory education” are profound. It is not about learning to like this or that vegetable, but about developing an overall attitude toward eating that is more open to variety and less governed by the simple sugar-salt-fat palate of junk food. Like the successful weight-loss maintainers, Sapere children no longer respond to the simple sweetness of candy and soft drinks in the same way. They start to hanker after the “feistiness” of lemon and the earthy taste of rye crackers. A series of studies by the psychologists Hely Tuorila, E. P. Köster, and others has shown that giving sensory education to children at the ages of around eight to ten can leave them with much more positive responses both to novel flavors and to complex ones. Köster has demonstrated that one of the effects of a sensory education is to give children a taste for more complex foods. They start off preferring simple flavors, but after the sensory education, the complex flavors—what children call “mixed-up” food—tend to be the ones that are loved best of all. They start to prefer mashed potatoes with celery and nutmeg to plain unseasoned potatoes.
Best of all, a sensory education seems to have the potential to free a child up from many of the old barriers to trying new food. Tuorila—who advised the Finnish government on Sapere—has done experiments showing that sensory education can make children feel much more favorably toward all unfamiliar foods, not just the ones they tasted during the lesson. Tuorila notes that neophobia is usually considered to be a personal trait that will never alter. Around 40 percent of Finnish adults say they do not like many vegetables because they have never tried them. And yet this attitude can and does change, even with those who have an individual disposition—like my daughter’s friend Lily—that makes them inclined to reject new and complex flavors. According to Tuorila, a Sapere-style education shows that it is possible for children to learn to improve their eating skills in ways that will automatically lead them to a healthier diet.
No person is destined by genes to eat badly (they may be trapped by poverty or neglect, but that is another matter). Nevertheless, many of us do seem to be stuck when it comes to food. We are stuck in habits and attitudes that seem impossible to break. We are stuck thinking food is love. We are stuck with guilt about food because we are female, or stuck not liking vegetables because we are male. We are stuck feeding hungers that often exist more in our brain than in our stomach. We are stuck in our happy childhood memories of unhealthy foods. But the biggest way that we are stuck is in our belief that our eating habits are something we can do very little about. In fact, we can do plenty. The first step is seeing that eating is a skill that each of us learns, and that we retain the capacity for learning it, no matter how old we are.
Sapere shows how changes to personal eating habits can happen in tandem with changes to the national food culture—such as those in Japan described at the start of this chapter. In an ideal world, other countries would follow Finland’s example and recognize that learning to eat a good and varied diet is a key part of every child’s education. Arguably, the consequences of not learning these skills can hamper a child’s future as badly as growing up illiterate and innumerate—or could be worse, factoring in the damage to health. Early childhood, as we have seen, is the time when we are most receptive to developing new tastes. I asked Arja Lyytikäïnen, the main nutritionist overseeing Sapere in Finland, what the optimal age is for offering this type of food education, and she replied that they have found it works best with children aged one to six, or maybe as old as ten. The bitter and sour tastes are easier to acquire when you start young, and the younger the children are, the greater the chance that their own education in food will help their families improve the way they eat, too. There’s also the fact that children are more open to learning.
But it’s never too late. Arja Lyytikäïnen says that in Finland they have had some very positive results using versions of Sapere with adults. Mental health clinics have used sensory food education during group counseling; it has also been used to help teenagers with type 1 diabetes to improve their diets. There have even been small experiments in Scandinavia with “taste schools for the elderly,” in which, just like the preschoo
l children, those nearer the end of life learn how to explore new foods. Beyond the Sapere system, interventions with the elderly in Canada have suggested that taste workshops are a more effective way to teach about nutrition than other methods, such as leaflets or lectures, which can make older adults feel patronized. As many as a third of those in care homes are malnourished; inadequate intake of protein, vitamin D, and fresh vegetables is a particular problem.
In old age, without the distractions of work to fill the day, food becomes an ever more central preoccupation, yet the barriers to eating well only increase. Impairment to the sense of smell and taste can make meals seem insipid. Difficulties with swallowing are very common. Poor handgrip and frail arms may impede cooking. Yet the greatest obstacle remains the old familiar one, unchanged from childhood, of summoning the appetite to fulfill nutritional requirements. A 2004 study of older British men living on their own found that only 13 percent managed to eat the recommended “5-a-day” of fruit and vegetables. One participant, aged seventy-nine, remarked, “I don’t eat greens or fruit, I hate them, I hate greens.” It horrified this widower to set foot in a fruit shop, though his grandchildren wished he would try. He had eaten vegetables from a sense of obligation when his wife was alive; now that she had died, he bought no vegetables “whatsoever.” He seemed to think of his hatred of greens as something immovable.
Just like people with eating disorders or weight problems, the elderly often need to relearn their responses to the foods that will nourish them. Nurses and other health-care professionals working in geriatric care are inclined to dismiss the undernutrition of the elderly as something they are powerless to change, precisely because it is so common. In 2006–2007, however, a group of Swedish researchers decided to test whether it might be possible to increase the enjoyment of healthy food in old age. The initiative was carried out in Skåne County in southern Sweden. A cookery teacher offered Sapere-style education to a group of twelve people with an average age of seventy-five: there were eight women and four men, all of whom lived alone. The idea was to “increase their lust for cooking and enjoyment of healthy meals.” They were also taken on guided walks by a physical trainer.