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

Cooke and colleagues found that even with school-age children, there was a great deal that could be done to change apparently fixed hatreds of certain foods. Their first revelation was that much of what manifests as fussiness is a response to the stressful situation of mealtimes. It can get to the extreme point where lunch itself is a “dislike”—the pressure, the heightened emotions—no matter what is served. Cooke found that if parents could do tasting sessions with children outside of meals, it could take emotion out of it. In addition, they only asked children to try pea-sized amounts of food, which reduces the feeling of pressure. “The demands on the child have to be very low.” A whole plate of cauliflower is a horrible prospect if you don’t like it. A minuscule fragment might just be okay.
    Cooke helped devise a new system for encouraging more vegetable “likes,” called “Tiny Tastes.” It was trialed in both schools and homes and has proved remarkably effective in making children actually like raw vegetables such as carrots, celery, tomatoes, red peppers, and cucumbers. I used the scheme on my own youngest child—then aged four—and was startled how quickly it turned him from someone who said “yuck” when he heard the word “cabbage” to a happy nibbler of raw green leaves. It works like this: The parent and child together select a vegetable that the child currently moderately dislikes (as opposed to feeling deeply revolted by). Each day for ten to fourteen days, not at dinnertime, you offer the child a pea-sized amount. If she tastes it—licking counts, it doesn’t have to be swallowed—she gets a tick in a box and a sticker. If not, it’s no big deal; there is always tomorrow.
    The usefulness of “Tiny Tastes” is that it provides a non-stressful way to enact the multiple exposures that we seem to need to develop new tastes. In our house, it changed the whole conversation around mealtimes, from one of stress and anxiety to something—mostly—more positive and mellow. Because he chose the vegetable himself, my child seemed to feel less trapped. Plus, he really likes stickers. Lucy Cooke said that before she and her colleagues started using stickers in their experiments, there would always be a few children who would refuse to take part; with stickers, participation went up to 100 percent. Cooke’s research overturns theprevious orthodoxy that offering rewards for eating would make children like the food even less. Her hunch is that rewards only work, first, when they are not themselves food, and second, when children feel they have genuinely worked for them. If you reward children for eating healthy foods that they already like, it confuses them. But it takes a real effort for a child who dislikes raw red pepper to put that first morsel into his mouth; hence, he feels he deserves the sticker.
    This approach to creating new, better likes sounds almost too good—too simple—to be true. For one thing, it only addresses vegetables, which is a good place to start, but there’s a lot more to a healthy diet than just greens. For many children, it is the protein foods—eggs, meat, fish—that are the hardest to love. “Tiny Tastes” also presumes that a child will willingly cooperate, once stickers are proposed. What about the hard-core food refuseniks? Some people have very definite dislikes with their roots in complex conditions, which surely can’t be wished away with a sticker.
     
    When children have learning difficulties or other disabilities, one of the many daily tasks they often tussle with is eating. Children who are slow to speak also tend to be slow to master the skills of eating, because there is a strong relationship between the muscle control needed for language and that for chewing and swallowing. Eating can also become a problematic business for those whose condition involves rigid behaviors and routines. Those on the autistic spectrum are far more likely than other