Picture it: 1999, suburban New York. I am eight years old, and I am at a friend’s house for dinner. (Not as romantic as Sophia’s Sicily, but please bear with me.) Among other things on the menu that night, with the chicken and mashed potatoes, are peas.
Now, eight-year-old Jonathan loved peas, so much so that his mother used to put them on various other dishes to add joy. (Pasta and tomato sauce is still slightly incomplete for me without a helping of peas.) This friend, however, is pushing the peas to the side of their plate.
“Can I have your peas,” I asked.
“No!” their mother said. “They need to eat their peas.”
“But which kid likes peas?” the father retorted. “Give Jonathan the peas.”
As I ate the peas, I wondered if maybe being a kid who liked peas was weird. That disliking peas – or, in this friend’s case, anything green – was the norm, or natural. I shrugged it off at the time – I was an autistic kid who was already “weird” – but that “weirdness” stuck with me as a fact. Vegetable-loving child.
But what if that was not true?
Picky
In fact, pickiness is very much a construct of marketing and the negative side of how we have industrialized and modernized our food system. This development – and of how “picky culture” became such an entrenched norm for how American children are thought to eat – is the thrust of Helen Zoe Veit’s new book, Picky. Veit, a historian at Michigan State University, wants to know “why American kids no longer eat broadly and with gusto.” The book is fantastically written and fascinating – such that I did not talk about anything else for a few days afterwards.
Veit takes us on a wonderful journey through how American kids ate – and how they were taught to eat. She starts in the 19th century, when children were widely considered voracious eaters – of fruits, vegetables, and just about everything. Fermented and pickled foods were norms, because refrigeration was unavailable – and most eating happened at meals. In fact, snacking was quite uncommon. But food industrialization, consumerism, and the availability of refrigeration and packaging changed how we eat. Kids were given “hyperpalatable” tastes earlier – and a hefty dose of marketing. Parents, meanwhile, were given cultural signals that claimed that pushing foods would go against the child’s best or natural instincts. What emerges, then, is a set of cultural assumptions that claim that a child is naturally picky – and that parents ought to accommodate it. Similarly, there were two big shifts in how we ate: more snacks, so kids came to the table with fuller stomachs, and that instead of everyone eating a “family meal,” different family members were increasingly eating different things.
She busts many myths along the way. It turns out that children’s taste buds are not actually that different from parents’, nor do expectations around food lead to eating disorders. In many cases, these are traceable not to science, but to marketing claims. The expectations of what children like are often based on science with shockingly blinkered assumptions. And a lack of pickiness in the past was not just because “nothing else was available.” Children often sought out the first new greens of spring, or strong salty, pickled, sour, and spicy flavors, or organ meat in the 19th century. Childhood adventurous eating was a cross-class phenomenon.
I really appreciate Veit’s deep attention to bridging class, race, and regional differences. Veit pays close attention to featuring members of different communities across the United States – including African-Americans, immigrant groups, and indigenous communities. Many of the examples are regionally bound – especially in New England and Appalachia. And she is keen to note that so much of pickiness was class-based – partly based on who had access to industrial food, and partly based on social norms. She charts how, in a strange rendition of the trickle-down effect, “picky culture” started in wealthier homes, before becoming more common at lower socioeconomic strata in the 1970s and 1980s.
She ends with some practical advice. Serve a single meal to everyone: parents and kids. Rather than offering an alternate meal, ask if a child is not hungry right now, and offer to heat up the meal later when the child is ready. Try to reduce snacking around meal times. And speak of what you are eating, as an adult, with gusto. In earlier generations, it was expected that kids could learn to love new foods, and she seeks to bring some of that back.
I thought about this advice, and Veit’s broader findings, recently. I was on a (lovely) cruise with my mother and husband and was walking through the buffet one day at sea. I overheard a young girl, maybe about six, telling her mother, “you don’t understand! Eating broccoli will do me irreparable harm.” Reader, it took superhuman effort to not burst out laughing. But what struck me as extraordinary was not simply a young child using “irreparable,” but that that was the only shocking part of the story to me – not the pushing back on what the mother offered the child, or the child not wanting vegetables at all. (Vegetables on a ship are themselves a modern miracle!) For what it is worth: I had a pile of broccoli on my plate, and it was irreparably delicious.
I do wish Veit gave more of a call to arms on creating better modern food. Modernist food has its time and place – and while Veit does acknowledge it, I think there is perhaps not enough emphasis on the fact that other paths were available for what got industrialized and how. A lot of the focus is on marketing and policy – but is there a way to create modernist food that does not breed “picky culture”?
Autism Implications
As a disability professional, and as an autistic person!, I think the implications for autistic folks are interesting. Many autistic communities assume that all autistic people have the same food aversions and preferences, and that there is a common set of dietary needs and wants, often around the foods marketed traditionally to children: boxed mac and cheese, chicken nuggets, and so on. I have written before about these topics, and how limiting they can be. Many claim to be upset when food manufacturers change ingredients. This is unhealthy. But what strikes me is how much of this stems from potential expectations set in the earliest parts of eating around what food should be or not be – hyperpalatable, industrially predictable, and texturally specific. I am autistic and love my routine, but I do not think these expectations lead to a healthy relationship with food.
And I wonder how much of “autism food” – just like many other assumptions around what autistic behaviors or expectations are – is less a product of some sort of innate “naturalness” and more related to cognitive rigidity meeting the discourse and narratives set forth in our highly capitalist society and in the general cultural milieu. There is plenty written on ways autistic folks can expand their diets, with or without help (including Bee Wilson’s excellent First Bite). But how can we maybe expand our idea on how autistic people’s tastes and preferences develop – especially as autistic folks? Perhaps Veit’s book offers a clue.
It might also be worth noting that, based on some anecdotal evidence I collected, a lot of autistic kids seem to really, really, really like broccoli. Perhaps we can take Veit’s suggestion and infuse broccoli with joy? (And garlic, I hope.)
I should note that some neurodivergent folks are really mad about this book. I actually disagree with a lot of those folks’ claims about how neurodivergent people do or do not eat…which you can read elsewhere on this blog. And I do not deny that aversions and pickiness are intensely felt! But it really is worth asking how certain aversions happen – and why they happen in such a way.
A Personal Note
And finally, it is nice to have the way my parents raised me with food to be so neatly affirmed. To be fair, my sister and I were pretty voracious and wide-ranging eaters. I remember my grandmother’s cabbage soup, a multitude of things with carrots and peas, pickled fish, and many peppery things quite fondly. My mother told me, when I asked about my childhood favorite vegetables, that I was a fiend for radishes and zucchini too. (Both are great!) But what I remember most was the fact that we ate the same thing as a family – and, by and large, there was not the idea that you could have “another option.” (Or that such an idea was on the table! Dinner was a shared experience.) Later in life, I would learn that this way of doing things was not as common in the United States as I had believed. But reading Veit’s recommendations, I felt “seen,” as the kids would say.
And, in case you are wondering: I am still in touch with the friend I mentioned in the beginning as an adult. They love peas now.
Thank you to Kate Herzlin for repeatedly chatting with me about childhood eating!
