Picky Quotes

“The idea that young children were naturally “much better nutritionists than the average mother” became a central part of American children’s food messaging in these years. But there was a problem: that wasn’t what [Clara] Davis had said. Yes, the children in her care got to choose what they ate. But they were only choosing between unprocessed whole grains, meats, fish, eggs, fruits, and vegetables. Davis’s real conclusion was that when a handful of young children were presented with a small range of healthy options, they’d make remarkably balanced choices. She knew her experiments looked nothing like the meals in real American homes, and she understood that no parent was going to present a buffet of ten individually cooked foods to their own children three times a day. At the same time, American kitchen in the 1940s and 1950s were filling up with highly processed foods, and Davis had said nothing about what might happen if children’s options included Cheez-Its, Kraft Mac & Cheese, Wonder Bread, Oreos, and Twinkies.”
― Helen Zoe Veit, Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History

“New emphasis on color and texture also came in part from the era’s interest in Freudian psychology, and specifically from the work of Anna Freud, Sigmund’s daughter and a famous psychiatrist and child-rearing authority. In the late 1940s and early 1950s she gave lectures around the United States arguing that eating was a psychological minefield for children. According to her, children were wary of texture and color because they went through toilet training at the same time they acquired food habits. In Western cultures, she claimed, toddlers learned to feel shame about excrement, and as they did, the mushy foods they’d recently loved to smear and the brown and green food they’d eagerly eaten as babies all started to remind them of the feces they were learning to secretly expel. Children raised in more natural cultures might never dislike any textures or colors, Freud speculated, but overzealous toilet training undertaken by hygiene-obsessed, Western mothers socialized to think of gloopy textures and brown and green foods as disgusting.
Most of Anna Freud’s claims about the psychology of children’s food didn’t stick (she also declared that gingerbread men stirred up fears of cannibalism and hot dogs induced anxiety about genitals). But her theories about texture and color did stick, even as the argument about feces fell away. (173-174)”
― Helen Zoe Veit, Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History

“Consider, too, that “playing with food” had very recently been one of the most central taboos of American table manners, for children just as much for adults. But marketers told parents to throw those old rules out the dining room window. Otherwise, meals might be boring! The historian Peter Stearns notes that Americans in earlier generations had mainly thought of boredom as a “character issue”, and parents had taught children not to be boring. But in the mid-twentieth century, I’m bored became “a legitimate childish complaint” as “boredom shifted to a state for which someone else was responsible, beginning with parents.” Far from telling children not to bore other people, postwar parents started working to prevent children’s own ennui at meals as much as at other times. (142)”
― Helen Zoe Veit, Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History

“As a tidal wave of factory food washed over the country, advice never to urge children to eat particular foods shunted them toward highly processed products that were bluntly palatable and didn't require repeated exposures to appreciate. And this happened at exactly the same time that vegetables and other whole foods were less fresh, tasty, and flavorfully cooked than they'd been in the past. Without being pushed to keep trying more challenging foods, children stopped acquiring diverse tastes in childhood. And Americans as a whole started to forget that children were capable of acquiring diverse tastes. Any taste that had to be acquired became an "adult food", a new concept in its own right. (138-139)”
― Helen Zoe Veit, Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History