Are We Raising Picky Eaters? - Helen Veit

0:00Hunter Clarke-Fields:Hi, it's Hunter Clarke-Fields, author of Raising Good Humans. If you've ever thought, I wish I could help other parents the way I've been helped, this is for you. The Mindful Parenting Teacher Certification Program is now open for enrollment. You'll deepen your mindfulness, learn to lead powerful parenting groups, and join a supportive, heart-centered community. Are you ready to make a difference? I only take a very limited number of people into this program, so apply now. Visit mindfulparentingcourse.com slash teach. You're listening to the Mindful Mama podcast. Today, we're talking about this important question.

0:34Hunter Clarke-Fields:Are we raising picky eaters with Helen Zoe Veidt?

0:41Hunter Clarke-Fields:Welcome to the Mindful Mama podcast. Here, it's about becoming a less irritable, more joyful parent. At Mindful Mama, we know that you cannot give what you do not have. And when you have calm and peace within, then you can give it to your children. I'm your host, Hunter Clarkfields. I help smart, thoughtful parents stay calm so they can have strong, connected relationships with their children. I've been practicing mindfulness for over 25 years. I'm the creator of the Mindful Parenting course and teacher training, and I'm the author of the international bestseller, Raising Good Humans, Raising Good Humans Every Day, and the Raising Good Humans Guided Journal.

1:20Hunter Clarke-Fields:Welcome back to the Mindful Mama podcast, and a big welcome to you if you are new. This is such a cool episode for you to jump into. I found this so interesting. We are talking to Helen Zoe Veit, an associate professor of history at Michigan State University who specializes in the history of American food and is author of the fascinating history book, Picky. And I zipped right through this book. I thought it was so, so fascinating. you're going to discover that we have basically manufactured kids' pickiness in this country. It is amazing. We have all these changes that led to mass pickiness, which is so fascinating.

2:02Hunter Clarke-Fields:So if you've ever struggled with mealtime battles, maybe you're short order cooking for your kids, or you're worried about their limited diet, this episode is going to change your life and completely shift your perspective. So I can't wait. definitely please share this with a friend share it with a friend who could use it I know we got them we got to spread the word on this so do share it invite them to subscribe and that's all I got to say okay on to this episode Helen thank you so much for coming on the mindful mama podcast Yes. I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for asking me. Well, like I said, I really loved your book, Picky.

2:50Hunter Clarke-Fields:It was so interesting. But it's all about kids' pickiness. And you experienced your own kids who you now have a teenager. You experienced them hesitating at new foods and clamping their jaws and making all the faces and stuff. Is that what inspired you to write the book, Picky, as a food historian? Yeah. So actually, this book took me so long. I had actually started thinking about this as something I wanted to write about even before I had children. And then I really started working on it when my oldest was a toddler. So I was parenting around their early reactions to foods already having been immersed in the research, which changed the way I parented, actually.

3:36So I had been thinking about wanting to write this book for a long time, in part because I had already written another book about American food history, and I just kept bumping into sources describing children in the past eating in totally different ways than what we think of as natural or normal today, and also describing kids eating foods with just enormous pleasure, like much more than we're used to thinking about. So that was the original spark for the book.

4:06Hunter Clarke-Fields:Yeah, it's so interesting to think about that it could be entirely different. But you also write about that, about the way we feed children now. And you write that the way we feed children now is bizarre, harmful, and unnecessary. And I think it's really fascinating. You're very like direct in the book and in the intro about this. And tell me about what's going on with how we are feeding children now. Well, I'd say the number one, the number one thing about how we feed children today is good intentions. It's not that anybody wants to do wrong by children or by parents. It's this enormous effort on the part of parents, and often it really is an enormous effort.

4:49It's a lot of work to feed kids today to try to both get kids to be healthy and to make them happy around food. But we're parenting according to this set of rules that we've inherited, which it turns out really produce picky eaters. Nobody wants this. Parents do not want this. Parents are trying to be good parents, and they've been told not to do exactly the things that parents in the past used to do to produce these food-loving kids who quickly learned really quickly in toddlerhood to like the same foods their parents were eating. So, you know, I think a typical parent today, you know, thinks that, for one thing, it's obvious to most parents today that kids to some degree are naturally picky.

5:38We might think, you know, some kids are pickier than others, and some kids are very, very picky. That's something that we think today. And we're not sure if that's because of genetics or sort of sensory issues or, you know, or is it psychology? It's not clear. There's not like a really coherent explanation for childhood pickiness today or taste buds. But we generally have this sense in our culture today. Kids are naturally picky. And to be a good parent is to accommodate that to some extent. You know, there's a huge genre of food that's now called children's food. A lot of it is prepackaged. It's marketed to kids and it's marketed to parents as essential foods for kids, foods that kids naturally like and want.

6:24food that's fun or entertaining. And to be a good parent is to have some awareness of that, to buy kids food or to make kids food. Some people are really making their own food, but they're still aiming it at what they think of as children's natural likes and dislikes. And a lot of parents really want their kids to eat broadly and they offer them vegetables or fruits or grains or other things that they're eating. But when a child doesn't like a food, is clearly rejecting it, we usually end up giving them something else. That is good parenting today. That is what is seen as nice parenting. The problem is that it's causing work and worry and problem eating on a population level that would have been unimaginable to people in the past.

7:09People in the past didn't think of children as problem eaters. They didn't think it was remotely impossible for them to learn to like the same foods as their parents.

7:18Hunter Clarke-Fields:Yeah, it's fascinating to think about that. That are the way we think these things that we think are so I mean, I found your book so fascinating because the way we think how kids are naturally picky. I mean, I remember talking to my neighbor about this, the whole idea that, you know, toddlers might naturally reject bitter foods because they're then walking around and they could, you know, if they're gathering, they could, you know, reject things that are poisonous to them. And it's such a given. I love how your book really overturns this very idea that we think of very natural and very given that kids are going to not like all of these foods.

8:09Hunter Clarke-Fields:So let's just take the listener back because it's so, so fascinating to see. Can you paint a picture for us about what a typical child's diet looked like in 19th century America and some things they might of eating that might surprise parents. Yeah, sure. And if it's okay, I just want to start by talking about those evolutionary myths that you were mentioning. Because a lot of parents think that they think children are naturally picky because it's evolutionarily protective. If kids weren't natural rejecters of bitter foods or new foods, foods they didn't know, they would just, especially our ancestors, our hunter-gatherer ancestors, would have gone around shoveling poisonous berries or poisonous mushrooms or toxic leaves into their mouths, and then they would have died out.

8:56So we tend to think that pickiness is evolutionary.

9:00Hunter Clarke-Fields:But the problem is, when you look at how our hunter-gatherer ancestors actually ate, there were no caches of Cheerios or Lunchables or even apples or grapes or baby carrots in the past. None of those foods existed. Even things like modern supermarket vegetables. Those are all the products of domestication and breeding over the last few thousand years. What our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate over about 300 ,000 years, that's how long Homo sapiens have been on Earth, they ate undomesticated leaves, roots, shoots, sometimes things like grubs or reptile eggs or bird eggs. But I mean, it looked nothing like kids' food today.

9:42And the bigger lesson is that we may have neophobia. Neophobia means you're scared of new stuff. And neophobia might be natural, where a child hesitates to eat a new food, is initially reluctant. And that does make sense that that would be protective. And we see that in a lot of animal species. But what we see in culture after culture and millennia after millennia in our species is that kids can quickly learn to like foods if a trusted adult says, no, this one's okay. It may be bitter. It may be green, but this is fine. You can eat this. Kids are capable of learning to like it.

10:21Hunter Clarke-Fields:Stay tuned for more Mindful Mama podcasts right after this break. I'm away on vacation right now, but I don't have to worry about my kitties at all. Someone's going walk the dog but the kitties are taken care of because of the whisker litter robot it is so great to have the litter robot and so nobody is stressed about cleaning the cat's litter our lives are busy if you have sleepless nights or diaper changes and all that stuff you don't need to be worrying about litter the whisker litter robot automatically cycles after every use you're not handling waste or scooping daily which is especially important of course during pregnancy see if that's happening for you.

11:03Hunter Clarke-Fields:Maintain your cat's litter while focusing on your growing family. Learn more about Whisker Litter Robot Models starter kits today and get set up before your new baby arrives. That's in the cards for you and you can take an additional$50 off bundles with the code hunter at whisker.com slash hunter. That's an additional$50 off bundles with the code hunter at whisker.com slash hunter that's like actually i just want to say that that's like um when i taught my kids to that they could eat um daylily uh flowers before they open they're they're spicy and weird tasting they're like oh this is neat you know so they just eat it because it's novel and interesting i don't know yeah that's that is super cool i've never of anyone.

11:54I love that so much. That's awesome.

11:55Hunter Clarke-Fields:My aunt taught me. Wow, that's cool. Yeah, you won't get a flower. So you may not want to eat all your daylily flowers, but you know. Some of them are. Oh, that's so cool. I love it. In the 19th century, kids were eating much closer to that. So all Americans in the 19th century generally ate many more plant and animal species than we do today. You know, you go into a modern supermarket and there are literally tens of thousands of choices. There are flavors and sizes and different options and brands. But the truth is the number of species in a modern supermarket actually isn't that large. Whereas in the 19th century, people were eating many more, like different kinds of animals, you know, all kinds of different birds and different kinds of fishes and shellfish and different kinds of mammals.

12:47I Americans routinely were eating things like possum and squirrel and rabbit and deer in addition to, you know, pigs and cows and chickens. But they were even among those, there were many more breeds and different kinds of heirloom varieties and all sorts of different fruits and vegetables, you know, some of which we don't think of as, you know, aren't really on the menu today at all. And that was true of children too. At the same time, food was much less centralized. You know, there wasn't much factory processing in the 19th century. There was a little bit starting in the 1860s. But mainly it was people making things at home with their own variable recipes.

13:27And there was no refrigeration. Because there was no refrigeration, it meant that people had to preserve food at home, doing things like smoking the food or pickling it, fermenting it, salting it. And the result was some really funky flavors. So kids just routinely were sitting down to meals that would have been much more diverse, lots of vegetables and plants, meat when their family could afford it, but all sorts of different kinds of meat, and lots of fermented sauces and condiments, lots of spices, not a whole lot of chilies in mainstream American diets, although indigenous kids were eating lots of chilies, actually.

14:09And generally, they ate it with pleasure. Now, this, When we hear that today, we're like, well, kids in the past ate anything. Almost the first thing everybody thinks is, oh, well, they were so hungry.

14:20Hunter Clarke-Fields:They were starving. So if they hadn't eaten, they would have wasted away. And so they just forced down these foods. Or we might think parents in the past were such harsh disciplinarians that they forced their miserable kids to eat food they didn't want at every meal. And it turns out that neither of those things is true. For one, parents hardly talked about discipline around food. Undoubtedly, sometimes kids probably hesitated to eat, and a parent might have said, like, you've got to eat it. But generally, no one was talking about that at all. They were talking about what incredibly eager, omnivorous kids were.

14:58They really wanted to eat the food. People thought of kids, in fact, as being uniquely curious and eager and undiscriminating around food. And as I researched, it became clear that a big reason was hunger. Now, that's different from scarcity. So most Americans in the 19th century had enough to eat. Some people didn't. Some people were desperately poor, and those kids also ate eagerly. But even people with plenty to eat, even wealthy families, the children were often really hungry when they came to meals for two reasons. One, they were moving much more. There was much more walking. There were many more outdoor chores.

15:42There was much more playing. There was this kind of sedentary childhood that many kids today have in the U.S. That was really rare. Kids weren't sitting all that much except, you know, some hours at school for many of them. So they were using lots of calories. And two, there was relatively little snacking. Kids sometimes might have had a little bread between meals or sometimes they might have picked fruit outside. but snacking was generally frowned upon and it was logistically difficult for most people. There weren't shelf-stable snacks. There weren't like goldfish crackers or bananas or, you know, there was no refrigerator, so there was no refrigerated stuff.

16:19So generally kids were arriving at meals with big appetites. And I always say, if you've ever gone grocery shopping hungry, you often come home with all sorts of questionable things that just at that moment looked so good. And I think Americans in the 19th century really appreciated how much pleasant pre-meal hunger could help kids genuinely learn to try and to like new foods.

16:47Hunter Clarke-Fields:Yeah, I mean, hunger is the best sauce. That's a saying for a reason, that it's like when you're hungry. Yeah, when my kids were little, that's when I would, when they were like toddlers and stuff, that's when I would put out a bunch of like little vegetables. because I knew that they were hungry and they wanted to eat right before dinner. They could smell the cooking. So I would put out the ice cube tray with peas and carrots and cashews or whatever. That's a great tip right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I was like, they're hungry. Now is when they'll eat it. But I think that's so fascinating to just even contemplate that world.

17:27Hunter Clarke-Fields:Like, okay, there are only these three meals a day because probably a woman in the house is like, cooking breakfast, lunch, or dinner. And so you have to be there. You have to be, then you're also there with your family. You're having this social interaction, and you are out in the world doing things. And yeah, there's no kind bars. No. And there's no alternative food too. And that can be one of the hardest thing for parents today to contemplate because we really deeply think like, if you're not providing an alternative meal to a reluctant eater, that sounds like corporal punishment today. Absolutely.

18:08It sounds like physical punishment. And I think it could be if children were really incapable of learning to like the foods. But in the 19th century, it wasn't that much about philosophy, although I think parents would not have seen it as good parenting to provide an alternative meal. But for most parents, it was just about logistics. There was not some alternative edible meal. The edible meal was what was on the table. Even for families who had really full pantries, the pantries would have been full of things like dry beans, raw rice, cornmeal, saltfish, you know, things that you couldn't just in a moment eat them.

18:44Hunter Clarke-Fields:Yeah, yeah. And it's so interesting to think that adults thought of children's eating as children are the ones that are just will eat anything. And that also made me think, I grew up in Rhode Island and there was a fisherman who lived in the apartment above me and you know they had a party and so like as a kid in a place like that where people eat a lot of shellfish and there's all these fishermen around and stuff like I had my first raw shellfish when I was like seven you know at a party and it was fine it was great like that happened pretty regularly and I don't know if that happens now but like this is like you describe kids it's so interesting because you have so many so many like exact and uh you know records of what people were eating and the kids were drinking coffee and eating shellfish and, and, you know, whatever, anything, it was all whatever the adults were eating, the kids were having that too.

19:39Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Coffee is another surprising one to people, but that was like when kids could get coffee, they loved it. And people knew coffee was stimulating, but that seemed like a good thing for children as well as adults. It woke people up. You know, I think today, you know, you don't want anybody to have excessive amounts of caffeine, but there's really no good research showing that we shouldn't give a little bit to kids if they like it. It does not stunt growth. That's a myth, it turns out. And there are still places in the world, like South America especially, where kids regularly drink coffee for breakfast.

20:13Hunter Clarke-Fields:Yeah, we have this. When I think of coffee in kids, it sounds really weird, but actually I grew up drinking tea, like black tea because my grandmother was British, you know, so we would have tea with milk after dinner. and um and actually it was there was this one terrible night where we all considered this relaxing drink and I didn't realize it had caffeine in it and so at one point like when I was 12 I couldn't sleep a night so I made myself a cup of tea and then I I went back to bed I still couldn't sleep I made myself another cup of tea and my dad my dad shot up in the middle of the night's like Hunter what's wrong you was like I can't sleep I don't know what's wrong I made myself I ate all the tea.

20:53Hunter Clarke-Fields:Relaxing tea. That's hilarious. It's so funny. Okay. But then it's so interesting because then things change. And it has to do with these really, these people who are reformers and want to make things a better place. So they want to do good for children. So talk about how things start to change between kids just eating whatever parents ate in whatever culture to starting to change to what it is now. Yeah. So we look at children in the 19th century eating vegetables and organ meats and everything else, and we're like, wow, what fantastic eaters. But actually, that was worrying to some people at the time.

21:33Children's mortality rates were really high in the 19th century. The number one cause of death was epidemic diseases, and children were especially vulnerable. But people did not know about germ theory. They didn't know how contagion worked or how viruses worked. And so a lot of people said, maybe it's the food. Kids' food is just too stimulating. It's too exciting. And this group of reformers, it was not even really a group. They weren't that coherent. But reformers here and there started saying, kids should have really simple food. They should have just bread or just oatmeal. They shouldn't have meat.

22:11They shouldn't have coffee. They shouldn't have rich desserts. They shouldn't have raw fruit. Nobody knew about vitamins yet. So they're telling kids not to eat fruit or vegetables or not to eat them if they're raw or unripe. And not that many people listened in the 19th century. These were kind of fringy theories. But they started to pick up steam in the early 20th century. More people start to listen. They're less worried that exciting food is going to hurt or kill children. They no longer think it's going to cause diphtheria or scarlet fever because now they know about germs. But by the early 20th century, there's new obsession with digestion.

22:49This idea that kids' stomachs are really small. Back then, they thought that digestion worked almost like mechanistically, like a machine. They thought stomachs literally had to grind the food physically. And so they were telling parents, kids should have bland food. Nobody said kids like bland food. It was not about kids' tastes or preferences, but it was about protecting their digestion and their health. And middle-class parents and wealthy parents, people who were literate and better educated, started feeding their kids a more bland diet. And they started feeding them, crucially, different foods than what they themselves were eating.

23:29This idea of children's food as this separate category is really born in the early 20th century. Tons of poor kids, children of immigrants, children of sharecroppers. A lot of kids are still eating exactly the same foods their parents are eating. But it comes to seem modern and scientifically advanced and helpful to feed kids this bland, separate diet. And now some kids, when they're fed, and they're literally being fed things like creamed spinach and a plain custard and a glass of milk, and some kids start to say, I don't want this food. Like, I want what you're eating. I want something different.

24:12And people started to talk about kids as, you know, reluctant eaters or conservative or procrastinating. You know, there was a sense that children will eventually eat, but they're more reluctant than they used to be among these middle-class and wealthy parents. Because the food tastes bad. Yeah, I mean, it's purposefully unseasoned. Like, it's often really plain. And there's this new emphasis on dairy, especially milk. And this is actually really important because milk, there's been like all these advances. There's been pasteurization. There's been refrigeration. There's been bovine tuberculosis testing.