How Children Learned to Hate Food

On the origins of pickiness.

(Composite / Shutterstock)

Picky
How American Children Became
the Fussiest Eaters in History
by Helen Zoe Veit
St. Martin’s, 304 pp., $25

WHEN YOUR 4-YEAR-OLD REFUSES everything on his plate, a history book is probably not the first thing you reach for. But Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History, by Michigan State historian and consultant for HBO’s The Gilded Age Helen Zoe Veit, offers a history lesson that parents might not know they need. The fussy-eater child has been so thoroughly baked into our cultural imagination that it’s easy to assume children have always been pernickety about their food, that negotiating with a child over dinner is as timeless as sleepless nights and dirty diapers. Maybe George Washington may not have been raised on string cheese and pizza rolls, but surely American parents have always had to wrestle with children and their supposedly hardwired preference for sweet and savory. But Veit not only dispels that assumption, but convincingly demonstrates that picky eating is a recent—and quite American—invention.

Veit shows that from the colonial period into the Gilded Age, children ate a wide range of foods. “Well into the twentieth century,” she writes, “most human cultures didn’t have something called ‘children’s food’ and something else called ‘adult food.’ Almost everyone on Earth—including Americans—used to take it for granted that young children could learn to enjoy the same foods as everyone else.”

Drawing on memoirs, slave narratives, children’s cookbooks, medical treatises, and periodicals like Prairie Farmer, she reconstructs just how diverse (and adventurous, by our standards) American children’s diets could be. For example, a Massachusetts boy in the 1810s relished clams and described the eels he caught with friends as “superb.” Edith Wharton, raised amid Gilded Age abundance in Manhattan, delighted in a “salad made entirely of tiny little crabs she ate by the spoonful, shell and all.” Black Elk, growing up on the Great Plains in the early 1870s, savored raw deer liver as a delicacy. Children across the country happily consumed turnips, codfish cakes, corned beef, and even jellied pork brain and bison tongue, as well as plenty of vegetables and a whole lot of hot coffee.

Upon reading such examples from early America, one might assume this dietary diversity and willingness to eat broadly stemmed simply from necessity. While that was somewhat true for the extremely poor and for enslaved communities, as Veit makes clear, Americans across the socioeconomic spectrum ate widely and enthusiastically. Some of this openness was rooted in the basic reality of hearty appetites, as children in the nineteenth century worked alongside their parents in kitchens, factories, and fields, doing physically demanding labor that left them hungry. But children also simply ate what adults ate and followed their parents’ lead.

So what changed? Much of what has brought American children to their picky diets, according to Veit, is the outcome of undeniable agricultural improvements and technological advancements, though with unintended consequences. Refrigeration, for instance, was a breakthrough in public health, because “before refrigeration, pathogens flourished in food that was always stored at room temperature. As a result, children got sick all the time, and about one in four died before age ten.” Milk, now a staple children’s food, provides a ready example—and a relevant one, given the renewed interest in raw milk. For most of American history, fresh milk was difficult to store, spoiled quickly, and carried real health risks. But beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, early nutrition scientists championed milk’s benefits for growing bones just as the mass adoption of refrigeration made it possible to keep milk for days or longer. But milk’s filling and fatty nature began quietly crowding out other foods, satisfying children in ways that dulled the broad appetite previous generations had always known.

Likewise, with the decline and eventual outlawing of child labor, children began spending far more time at home or at mandatory, universal schooling—another relatively recent invention—rather than engaged in physically demanding work. As a result, they often arrived at mealtimes less hungry. This shift coincided with a new domestic environment shaped by modern abundance: Ready access to shelf-stable pantry foods and leftovers stored in the refrigerator meant that children could eat whenever they pleased. Rather than coming to the table ready to eat, many had already been eating throughout the day. The boundaries between meals and snacks began to blur, making it far easier to reject full meals altogether.

Veit shows that these shifts were accentuated by the expansion of supermarkets stocking cheap canned and frozen foods; the rise of nutrition science and pediatric medicine, which promoted the idea that children needed bland and carefully managed diets; the gradual demonization of vegetables by popular-culture; new myths about child psychology popularized by figures like Dr. Benjamin Spock, who taught parents “that children’s instincts would naturally prompt them to make healthy food choices and that it was psychologically risky to urge children to eat any food they didn’t immediately want”; the explosion of targeted advertising that arrived alongside television; and ultimately the dominance of ultra-processed foods.

Veit tells the story of picky eating as an unfortunate side-effect of genuine progress. After all, no one would want to go back to a world without canning, refrigeration, and pasteurization (well, almost no one). But Veit doesn’t villainize parents who followed the prevailing wisdom of their era—they were doing the best they could with the information they had and the budgets they could manage.

Yet one of the more quietly compelling themes of the book is the recurring bewilderment of older generations watching younger children grow more and more difficult to feed. Veit captures this vividly in the story of Gertrude Borgeson, a Columbia-trained child development expert in the 1930s who, after hearing repeated complaints from mothers about their children’s growing “finickiness,” began studying the problem only to realize that children simply hadn’t eaten this way when she was growing up.

The 1930s seem like an unlikely time for an onset of pickiness. After the stock market crash of 1929, the world had plunged into the Great Depression. Large fortunes and small savings alike were lost, unemployment shot up, and want and worry—which poor Americans had endured before the Depression, too—became much more common. It was in this very era when American parents first started to see childhood food rejection as a group phenomenon and to use the word “picky.” . . . Picky children picked at their food like birds because they weren’t very hungry. The solution was to make them hungrier. Advice to make children hungry flowed to middle-class parents throughout the Great Depression, even as poor children across the country were suffering from real hunger their own parents were desperate to satisfy.

Mid-century mothers sensed the same shift. Many had been raised in households where children were expected to eat “everything our mother put on the table,” yet were now being advised by experts not to pressure their own children to eat anything they resisted. The result is a tension that still feels familiar today as parents sitting at the dinner table, negotiating with a child who will only eat chicken nuggets or mac and cheese.

If there is a villain in Picky, it is the rise of snacking, especially the explosion of small, sugary, ultra-processed, portable snacks engineered for children. Unlike the other forces Veit traces, snacking did not arrive as an unintended consequence of scientific advancement, but as a product deliberately designed and aggressively marketed to be irresistible to children. Where earlier generations who experienced hunger as they worked, played, and studied simply waited for meals, snacking disrupted that rhythm entirely. It diminished children’s appetites at the table while simultaneously training their palates to expect food that was intensely sweet, salty, and instantly gratifying. With their long shelf life and easy portability (in pantries, cars, handbags, and backpacks) these snacks have become a constant presence in children’s lives, and parents often find it difficult to refuse a child who’s even mildly hungry. Perhaps more than any other factor, snacks’ constant availability, combined with parents’ understandable willingness to offer snacks at the first sign of hunger, has helped to make American children, according to Viet’s subtitle, “the fussiest eaters in history.”

Picky is a work of history, not a parenting manual, but Veit offers a few lessons that earlier Americans might teach us. Chief among them is that children need to experience genuine hunger, not to the degree of malnutrition but in the sense of a growling stomach. That means protecting mealtimes and cutting back on the steady stream of snacks. The family meal should be the meal, and that simply won’t happen if children have been grazing all afternoon. If a child hesitates or refuses, Veit argues, parents should not rush to offer alternatives, and if dinner goes uneaten, it should not be replaced by snacks afterward.

Echoing much of what Leonard Sax and others have long argued, Veit believes parents need to reclaim their confidence at the table. This means setting expectations and leading by example. She pushes back against the mid-century psychological myth that encouraging or rewarding children to try new foods causes lasting harm, pointing out that this theory was never backed by evidence and that generations of children ate widely and happily simply because their parents expected them to. Perhaps most importantly, Veit urges parents to reframe healthy eating not as discipline or deprivation but as a smart investment and a genuine pleasure. She encourages parents to talk openly and enthusiastically about all kinds of food and to trust that their children are more capable of acquiring broad tastes than modern culture has led them to believe.

I probably won’t be serving my 4-year-old eel anytime soon, but Veit’s evidence and narrative convinced me that my son is capable of better eating than I thought. In the week since finishing the book, I’ve already started holding the line and offering fewer snacks when informed with great urgency. “Dad, I’m hungry.” I now insist he wait for dinner instead, much to his frustration. At the table, he has been less than thrilled. But once it became clear that the dinner on offer was the only option, he ate it. Yes, there were tears (at least this time), but it worked. Veit makes no promises, but if the past is any guide, we can teach our kids to be less picky.