Free First Bite: How We Learn to Eat by Bee Wilson

About It?” nutritionists interviewed sixty Australian parents about their children’s likes and dislikes. They found that parents of children who had unhealthy eating habits were much more likely to think there was little parents could do to influence their offspring’s tastes, because children were just born to be difficult eaters or not.
    The parents of healthy eaters made very different comments. They talked about how a child’s tastes were not “set in stone.” One of the mothers said it was possible to “educate” the taste buds of children by exposing them to lots of different foods. Compared to the parents of unhealthy or neophobic eaters, parents of healthy eaters had a much stronger beliefin their own power to influence a child’s likes and dislikes. Because they believed their actions had an impact on the children, these parents did their best to create a food environment where the children could develop enough healthy likes for a “balanced diet.” Conversely, the parents of the unhealthy eaters thought there was nothing they could do; and so, from the sound of things, they had more or less given up.
    You could, of course, read this study in a different way. Not all children are equally easy to feed, and there is undoubtedly a temperamental (and genetic) aspect to neophobia. Some toddlers are very much more reluctant to attempt new foods than others, no matter what parenting they receive. Maybe the parents of the healthy eaters chose to attribute their child’s good habits to their influence when really it was just luck (or genes). It’s easy to believe there is no such thing as genetic fussiness when your children eat well. When you are trapped in daily battles with a finicky toddler, enduring porridge thrown in the face and cauliflower on the floor, it can be irksome to listen to the smug parents whose children will “try anything—celery root’s her favorite!” Maybe the neophobic children really were harder to influence than the non-neophobic healthy eaters.
    Nevertheless, there is strong evidence that the parents of the healthy eaters were right. Even if some of us take longer to warm up to vegetables than others, likes and dislikes are not predetermined. In most cases, it is perfectly possible to persuade children not just to eat vegetables, but to love them.
     
    Dr. Lucy Cooke spends her days trying to figure out how children’s dislike of vegetables can be reversed. Cooke’s research—in collaboration with colleagues at University College London, notably Jane Wardle—makes her hopeful that our genetic inheritance for food preferences can be overcome. After all, she herself was once a child who didn’t like vegetables, and now she is a slim, confident person who positively enjoys healthy eating, although she tells me one day at an outdoor café over toasted teacakes and mint tea that she does sometimes feel deprived to think of all the foods she could eat and doesn’t. “But one mustn’t say that!”
    In Cooke’s view, the enterprise of weaning children onto solid food should be managed with a view to setting them up with healthy likes for life. When children actually enjoy vegetables—plus a range of whole foods from all the other nutrient groups—half the battles over dinner disappear. Most parents see the aim of feeding as getting as much wholesome food into a child as possible. We focus too much on short-term quantity—kidding ourselves that if they are pacified with enough baby rice they’ll sleep better—and not enough on building long-term tastes. “The only mums we see who talk about developing a child’s palate are French,” in Cooke’s experience.
    From four to seven months, it seems that there is a window when humans are extraordinarily receptive to flavor, but by following current guidelines on exclusive breastfeeding, parents tend to miss it. Several studies have shown that when vegetables are introduced at this age, babies are more open-minded. It takes fewer