In 1915 a worried mother from Maine wrote to the United States Children's Bureau to ask why her son was rejecting a variety of foods. Could it be that he did not like them? The expert at the federal agency wholly dismissed that idea and suggested she take him to a doctor. It must be stomach trouble. After all, voluntary food rejection was almost unheard of in America at the time. Children ate what their parents put in front of them. They even asked for seconds and probably said "please" and "thank you". (Parents, eat your heart out.)
Today American children have become "the fussiest eaters in history". In a new book, Helen Zoe Veit, an associate professor at Michigan State University, decries changes in adults' behaviour and thinking over the past century that "allowed picky eating to hijack American childhood".
Before the 20th century, there was no such thing as "children's food". Youngsters had wild, boundless appetites. Edith Wharton, a novelist, was mad about eating turtles and tiny crabs. Mark Twain, another writer, extolled the "sumptuous" meals of his childhood, which included "venison just killed" and butter beans. Children, like adults, worked up appetites because they used to eat only at meals. The rise of snacking (resulting in a lack of hunger) is one of the modern culprits for children's finicky eating habits at the dinner table, the author contends.
Two other things changed in the past century. One was attitudes concerning children's independence to make their own food choices and new views on the downside of forcing children to eat certain things. An influential study, popularised in the 1940s-50s, had tracked children eating whole foods in hospitals and observed that they made nutritious choices when left to their own devices. (Modern junk food was not on offer.) This research was popularised in parenting books, including a famous one by a doctor, Benjamin Spock, which convinced parents that children should be entrusted with more autonomy to choose what and how much to eat.
Meanwhile, the proliferation of Freudian psychology, which contended that mothers were traumatising children by pushing certain foods, changed parents' attitudes about children's meal preferences. Marie Antoinette's supposed quip — "let them eat cake" — was adapted and contorted: children should not be denied cake, some psychologists argued, because banning treats would only underscore their status as a prize.
The second thing to change was the rise of supermarkets and processed foods. By the mid-1960s the average American supermarket stocked 7,000 items — ten times as many as in the 1920s. Advertisers began targeting children directly for the first time. "In the old days children ate what their mothers bought; now the kids tell their mothers what to buy," one advertising executive at Kellogg's, a food company, said in 1953.
Ms Veit blames adults for treating food differently from toothbrushing or seat belts. Toddlers may say they do not want to brush or buckle up, but adults overrule them because they know best. Why not so with spinach or fish? "Picky" includes suggestions for fighting finicky eating at home, such as feeding the whole family the same meal and continuing to introduce a food repeatedly even after a child has rejected it. Unfortunately, the author does not venture to other countries' food cultures, which might have made her argument about American exceptionalism even stronger and more rich. Still, "Picky" is a sensible, succinct and easily digestible story of good intentions gone wrong.