How to Get Your Children to Eat Their Vegetables
Your adorable little boy refuses to eat anything other than chicken fingers, French fries, and Cheetos. Helen Zoe Veit Ph.D. ‘08, Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University, has some advice for you: don’t provide those things, and then see what he’ll do.
Speaking at the Leitner House in Pierson College on Thursday, April 19 about her upcoming book, tentatively entitled Picky: A History of Children’s Food, Veit argued that “children’s food” and picky eating is a historical construction. Across many cultures and epochs, children simply eat what adults eat. The notion that kids are “picky eaters” is not universal. This turns out to be a rather controversial contention. “I have never presented my topic without some detractors,” Veit said. “If you are one,” she then added, “I welcome you.”
Before beginning her argument, Veit established that children’s food is a concept. “When I say children’s food, everyone thinks Gerber, of baby food,” she said.
Actually, children’s food is the bland stuff adults think they need to make to accommodate their tastes. It is the children’s menu as opposed to the regular one. It is the idea that vegetables, coffee, tea, and spicy foods, with their more complexly appealing flavor, are for adults. In fact, liking these things becomes a proof of maturity, so that those who cannot eat those things are sometimes even stigmatized for their “infantilized taste.”
The idea of immature taste is so ingrained that in our culture it seems to be biological. As Veit notes, however, “if it is biological, it has to be true across space and time.” It is not, her research suggests.
In her research on the 19th century, Veit found that children were the opposite of picky. In fact, they were considered overly curious, and children’s mortality was even attributed to eating habits that were too omnivorous.
She also looked at other cultures, finding that there was no category for children’s food. Many of our food quirks turn out to be much less than universal. For example, in India, cilantro is ubiquitous, and not the polarizing food that it is in the United States.
Veit posits that it is the extreme variety of food available in our country that creates pickiness. It first arose among the middle class and wealthy, those who had the resources to offer food choices to their children. “When we are in conditions of abundance, preferences emerge,” she said.
In the past, there were no alternative foods to turn to. It was the food on the table or nothing. “If children didn’t eat something, they would be grateful to eat it later,” Veit said. Through this process, children learned to enjoy a wide variety of tastes.
Veit noted that her argument was controversial because it implicitly accuses parents with picky children that they did something wrong. “People are going to be very offended,” she said.
