This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - The Surprising History of Picky Eating & Raising Adventurous Eaters with Helen Zoe Veit | 423

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Starting point is 00:00:48 I am Nicole Khalil and you're listening to the This Is Woman's Work podcast. We're together. We're redefining what it means, what it looks and feels like to be doing women's work in the world today. And if there's one area women hear the most noise, give and receive the most judgment, and the least grace, it's in parenting. So before we get into this episode, I'm going to ask that you listen first with curiosity. As hard as it might be, I'm going to ask that we set aside judgment of ourselves and others and watch when feelings of defensiveness pop up. Let's give every parent the benefit of the doubt that we are all doing the very best that we can with the information that we have. And when we get new information, which is exactly what today's episode is about, the best that we can do is take it in, sit with it, and decide from there. Because here's what I know. The parenting expert

Starting point is 00:01:52 industry, and I say industry on purpose, because make no mistake, it is designed to feed off your fear and your worry for profit. And it is loud, it is relentless. And based on my observation, much of it isn't actually serving our kids. We've been. handed philosophies and frameworks and entire ideological movements, and somewhere in all of that noise, we stopped trusting ourselves. And we also stopped expecting much from our kids. So today, we're talking about the nightly standoff, the hostage-level negotiation, the bribing and the exhaustion of dealing with picky eaters. And here's what jumped out to me when I started digging into today's topic. Picky eating in children is not ancient. It's not by a

Starting point is 00:02:38 biological, it isn't inevitable. It is historically speaking brand new, like embarrassingly recent. For most of human history, children were considered adventurous eaters. They were the curious ones, the ones who would try anything. In the 19th century, eating like a child meant being enthusiastic and undiscriminating, not refusing anything that touched something green on the plate. Kids ate spicy food, vinegory pickles, bitter greens. They spent their allowances on raw oysters. They even had their daily coffee, which is sending some mom out there

Starting point is 00:03:14 until full panic right now. Because somewhere in the last hundred years, we decided children had special, fragile palettes that required their own separate menu. We decided that expecting kids to eat whatever was on their plate was psychologically damaging. And listen, I get it.

Starting point is 00:03:31 By 6 p.m., most of us are so depleted. that avoiding a meltdown feels like a legitimate survival strategy. Or maybe we got so obsessed with what they should eat that we stopped letting them discover what they could eat. And then chicken nuggets became the whole menu. And I'll be transparent. I have one kid and our rule has always been, you have to try it, but you don't have to like it.

Starting point is 00:03:55 And maybe it's luck or maybe our rule worked, but this kid will eat just about anything, which I'm grateful for because my primary goal, really my only goal when it comes to her eating habits has been to raise a kid with a healthy, curious relationship with food because society, advertising, and all of the medias are going to do their very best to try to break that relationship. So for you and for me in the next generation, we're going to explore the concept of picky eating. Our guest is Helen Zoe Veit, an American historian, associate professor at Michigan State University,

Starting point is 00:04:34 and the author of Picky, how American children became the fussiest eaters in history. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the Washington Post, and she directs two major national endowment for the humanities funded projects on American food history. So, Helen, thank you for being here. And I want to kick us off by exploring

Starting point is 00:04:56 this sort of historical reality that children were not picky eaters until very, recently. So is that true? And if so, what happened and what actually shifted or changed in the last 100 years? Yeah. It's so difficult to imagine. It almost sounds like science fiction today to think about a world filled with cheerfully good eaters, kids who liked to try lots of different things, who happily ate with their parents' aid. And yet, looking at the historical sources, that's really what used to be the norm in this country not very long ago, as you said. Back in the 19th century, if you'd asked an average American, what's, what's it mean to eat like a child? People would have said, well,

Starting point is 00:05:40 if you're a childish eater, you're curious, you're undiscriminating, you're wide ranging, you're over-eager, if anything. Back then, kids were eating broadly for a lot of reasons. When we think today, well, why were kids in the past eating lots of things, we almost always assume, two things. One, we assume it must have been harsh discipline. The parents must have forced the children to eat food they didn't want at every meal. Or we think, well, it must have been scarcity. There couldn't have been enough food to go around. So children ate vegetables and other unpleasant foods because those were the only alternatives to starvation. But when I started looking into the sources, it turns out that neither of those is true. For one thing, Americans in the past

Starting point is 00:06:23 hardly talked about discipline when it came to food. They did in the 20th century. And And a lot of us have memories, you know, in older generations of parents having these kind of harsh methods, you know, you've got to sit at the table until you've finished. Not so in the 19th century. Americans hardly talked about discipline because they assumed Americans were eager eaters. But, and another thing we assume is that it was scarcity. What is so interesting is that the lack of pickiness in the 19th century was a cross-class phenomenon, meaning, sure, poor kids were not picky.

Starting point is 00:06:56 And there were plenty of poor kids who didn't. get enough food overall. They were desperate to eat. They were not discriminating. But neither were kids in the wealthiest households. Neither were children on prosperous farms. Neither were indigenous children who had plenty of food and plenty of choice. These children weren't picky either. So why? One thing that I realized in doing the research was that even though scarcity was not the main reason for lack of pickiness, hunger was really important. Kids were much more hungry when they came to their meals back then, than kids typically are today, for a variety of reasons. One is that there was just so much less snacking.

Starting point is 00:07:35 Snacking was logistically hard. There weren't shelf-stable snacks. There wasn't refrigeration. There wasn't a lot of cooked foods available. At the same time, kids were moving their bodies much more. They were doing much more chores. They were walking long distances. They were playing outside more.

Starting point is 00:07:51 So the average kid coming to a meal in the 19th century often had a roaring meal-time appetite. And I always say if you've ever gone grocery shopping on an empty stomach, you know how much a good appetite helps you to take an interest in new foods. And I came to think that there really is ancient wisdom in these phrases like bon appetit, which really means, I hope you're hungry, because we know how much hunger can help us appreciate new foods. Okay, so I'm going to have a hard time articulating this, but I feel like we often think, okay, great. But, you know, back then we didn't have as much variety or food wasn't as healthy back then or we weren't as conscious of healthy food back then. And now with the resources and the plenty that's available to us, I want to do

Starting point is 00:08:45 what's best for my kid. I want to make sure they're eating the right amount of protein and the blah, blah, blah, and like all of this stuff. But the reality is food was most likely healthier back then. It was coming straight from the ground. And we didn't have ultra-processed crap like we do today. As you mentioned, kids were moving. They were outdoors. So I guess my question is, what would you say to the person who it has the frame of,

Starting point is 00:09:16 but we know more today. and that's why we're, and I'm just putting air quotes, doing better about focusing on what our kids eat. Yeah, there are so many ironies in this story. So it almost came like every chapter had some central irony. And one of the ironies is that as we became more knowledgeable about nutrition, nutrition science, as we know it, really emerged in the early 20th century a little more than 100 years ago. This is the era when concepts like vitamins and calories and calcium and protein and lipids, all of these became part of everyday Americans' vocabularies.

Starting point is 00:09:58 And in some ways, modern nutrition science undoubtedly improved health. It gave us knowledge about the fact that different foods contain different levels of nutrients and different levels of energy. These are all invaluable in helping to shape a healthy diet. And yet, when it came to children's food, middle-class parents who were educated, about nutrition back, you know, let's say in the 1900s, 1910s, they started focusing a level of scrutiny on their children's diets that no one had ever thought to do before. They started measuring their children's meals in terms of ounces. They started feeding them certain amounts

Starting point is 00:10:35 of vegetables and boiled fish. It was also mixed up with a lot of pseudoscience at the time. Back then, it was widely believed that children had really delicate stomachs, that children's digestive systems were just different that they couldn't process the kinds of strong meats or rich desserts or flavorful sauces or condiments that adults could. So starting, and this was new, actually, this was considered super modern, but starting around 1900, middle class and wealthy parents started purposely feeding their children bland food and expecting them to eat it and in fact getting nervous if they didn't. At the same time, all by itself, nutrition science really promoted milk drinking. And I like milk. I think milk can be a wonderful and delicious part of your life

Starting point is 00:11:23 if you're able to digest it. But they started pushing large amounts of whole milk for young kids. The standard recommendation was that kids starting at age two should have a quart of whole milk a day. And that's a lot of material going into these little stomachs. And it was really tamping down meal time appetites. So at the same time, these middle class kids are coming to their meals less hungry than they've been. Life is getting more sedentary. A lot of people are moving to towns and cities. There's less of that outdoor play and chores, I just mentioned.

Starting point is 00:11:55 They're drinking more milk. They're coming to meals that for the first time, really, in some ways in history, in large numbers, kids are eating these children's meals that are supposed to be just for them. They're mild. And some kids start being reluctant to eat. And parents, for the first time, are like, whoa, she's not eating her spinach. What's going on? This is a problem.

Starting point is 00:12:15 You know, in this we can see some of the origins of mass pickiness. It's far from the only reason. But, you know, this is one of these ironies that our new attention to children's nutrition actually pushed children further from the kinds of organically evolving broad tastes that we saw just a generation earlier in the 19th century when kids were eating large numbers of vegetables. They were eating just what their parents ate for the most part. And we actually see kids, you know, becoming more reluctant to eat. eat the kinds of foods that we now know are healthier. Sorry to break in, but this part matters. Rate the show, share it, and support the sponsor so I can keep making episodes worth interrupting you for. If you've spent more than five minutes going down the health and wellness rabbit hole, you know there are about 7 million opinions on what you should eat, drink, avoid, or buy.

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Starting point is 00:14:44 And I believe that it's with the best of intentions. we really want our kids to be healthy and we want to apply the information we have now so that they can live healthier lives. So I'll speak for myself. I had an eating disorder when I was in my late teens and 20s. I have struggled the bulk of my teen to adult life with focusing on how my body looked over how it felt. And that's something I've had to repair over the last decade of my life. And so I bring that up because a lot of what I want for my daughter and a lot of where I come from when I think about food

Starting point is 00:15:26 and what she eats is because of the fear of I don't want that for her. And I think we all do that as parents. But we often end up then creating a different damage. Like, I don't know what it'll be. My kid will eat anything. And maybe she will be more body positive than I was. I don't know, we'll see. There is some other inadvertent unconscious damage that seems to come from when we over-rotate

Starting point is 00:15:53 and over-obsess about anything like you gave the example. Yeah, that's so complicated. You know, when you in the introduction were saying, you know, if there's one issue where women are given, you know, the most judgment and the least grace, and, you know, you went on to say parenting, but I thought you were going to say food. Because it's almost, I mean, I think the. these two issues, and that is one reason that this issue, this combines them both. How do we feed our children? What do children eat? It is so incredibly loaded for parents and for mothers. It's so

Starting point is 00:16:27 emotional. We feel so much judgment. And many of us just feel like we're in an impossible position. Because on the one hand, we're told, you know, you got to be careful about what your kids eat. Children's food is really important. It affects their health and their growth and their development and children are developing, you know, obesity in high numbers. There are health problems like type 2 diabetes and heart problems and high blood pressure and things that children didn't deal with in the past. So on the one hand, parents are worried about health. On the other, they're told don't worry too much because your worry itself could be problematic. Your stress could cause emotional or psychological issues in your children. If we push our children too hard to eat, they might

Starting point is 00:17:12 develop aversions to that very food. If we reward them for eating, let's say, you know, if we say you have to, you don't get dessert unless you have your vegetables, they'll associate dessert with love and rewards. They'll overeat dessert. If you push too hard or say the wrong thing, you could cause your child to develop a dysfunctional relationship with food, even in eating disorder. Parents feel paralyzed. Yeah, it's a mind fuck. Yeah, it really is. It's so awful. I mean, I think for many parents, this is the worst part of parenting is how do you, How do we parent around food? And, you know, what you said about it being a case of good intentions, that's maybe the

Starting point is 00:17:48 biggest irony of all in this whole book, is that through just the best intentions in the world and wanting to do right by our children and trying to take in all of these conflicting pieces of advice, we are trying to do the best we can. And yet in many ways, children are eating as a group worse than they've ever eaten in terms of having a much narrower range of foods they're willing to eat, in having. a complicated relationship to health in their bodies, in often not being able to easily or joyfully eat with other people. These are all new problems. These are things that didn't exist in the past. And another irony is that, you know, we're so scared of causing our children to overeat or to be

Starting point is 00:18:31 overweight or we're scared of them developing an eating disorder or these dysfunctional relationships with food. And the amazing thing is that when we look in the past, none of these problems were common. In fact, they were all vanishingly rare. Most Americans in the 19th century had pretty healthy relationships with food and their body. Overweight and obesity were quite rare. And so this idea that if you do these older methods, you'll mess your kid up, it's actually there's not evidence supporting that. In all of the psychological advice we've been given, most of it, for the most part, isn't actually based on evidence. That we hear all these psychological warnings about the damage we might do. And yet there's never been a single, large, rigorous, comparative study, comparing the different

Starting point is 00:19:17 psychological outcomes of children raised with different feeding methods. And so that, in fact, is good news. It's actually excellent news. You know, we have these models of not just how parents in the past used to work with food in a totally different way, but how people around the world did it differently. Every culture we know about in the history of our species for 300,000 years didn't produce picky eaters in this same way. picky eating is very new. And they weren't having these other terrible effects. So we really could be in a position where if we can make, you know, really free ourselves of these myths that we've inherited, there might be a new way where we enter this virtuous win-win cycle. Okay. So let's talk about what that might look like. Because I think for many of us, we were raised. Everywhere we look, we get these mixed

Starting point is 00:20:03 messages. And one of the things I've often said is I needed to repair my relationship. I needed to unlearn and relearn because a lot of it felt ingrained. And so I guess what I'm asking is if we are to simplify and sort of go back to the way it was or inner knowing sort of like just sort of trusting ourselves and not overcomplicating, overthinking, overfearing, overwaring, all the stuff, what does that even look like? I think if there's one word that sums up, what we can do to just create a new culture around children's food, it's confidence. Parents today are not confident that their children can learn to like anything because we have been told the opposite. And it's not just that we've been told. You know, this isn't just some

Starting point is 00:20:55 top-down story. Although there are, you know, with marketing and other things, we have gotten messages, but also many of us have experienced this firsthand. We may have been picky eaters ourselves as kids, or we're raising kids, maybe we're raising multiple kids, and one seems like they're obviously a biologically picky eater and their sibling is not at all. Those are really powerful personal experiences that can lead someone to say, well, it does seem biological to me. And I totally get that. And yet, when we look around the world and when we look in history, we do not see large numbers of children being picky around food. So what's going on? One thing that, you know, became obvious to me is that I'm sure.

Starting point is 00:21:35 sure that there are biological reasons that it's harder for some kids to like new foods than others. You know, this seems to be a pretty universal experience that parents will say, one of my kids wanted to eat everything and the other one, you know, didn't at all. When we look at animals, we see that animals, a lot of animal species, when they're learning to eat foods, go through a period of neophobia. Neophobia means being scared of new things. Back in the past and around the world, humans also go through. through neophobia, where they're presented with a new food and they don't want to eat it, and that's probably evolutionarily protective. The problem is in modern America, we've been

Starting point is 00:22:13 confusing neophobia with pickiness. And if a child refuses something a few times, we say, oh, they don't like it. This is one of the many foods they don't like, and we don't continue to try because we've heard that's bad. And yet, in the past, and also with animal species, we see that with repeated positive exposures, neophobia can often be overcome really quickly, like even a matter of minutes. And with my own children, I have three children who I raised while writing this book, you know, I was coming home with so much confidence because I was spending my work days in a totally different food culture. I was spending my work days immersed often in the 19th century and I would come home. And if my children were reluctant to eat something, as they often were,

Starting point is 00:22:56 They were often neophobic. I didn't think of it as, you know, a huge obstacle or a necessary long-term problem. I said, keep trying it. You know, I really think you can learn to like it. I would enthusiastically describe the food. And I wouldn't be scared even to give them what many Americans would think of as unlikable foods by children, you know, spicy foods or really bitter greens or all sorts of funky, you know, combination foods, tons of vegetables.

Starting point is 00:23:24 And I would lovingly encourage them to eat it over and over. and over and over and over again. I mean, this is really breaking parenting rules, because we're told not to push. We're told not to do this. And yet I knew that in the past, that had just been the logistical situation for most people because there hadn't been alternative foods.

Starting point is 00:23:41 Before the days of shelf-stable snacks or packaged foods or breakfast cereals or box mac and cheese or refrigeration, for most parents and most families, there had been no alternatives. There had been literally even families who had lots to eat. There weren't edible foods. The foods in the house would have been things like dried cornmeal or dried beans. So I took that older idea and I put it into my 21st century parenting with love and enthusiasm

Starting point is 00:24:07 and humor and a lot of joy for the pleasures of eating. I love to eat and I love to cook and I wanted to give that to my daughters. And, you know, what I found over and over again is that when lovingly and persistently offered the same food, even if they refused it multiple times, by the end of the meal, I could get them loving something, or at least accepting, not always loving, but often accepting and eventually liking, a food they'd rejected like 15 times at the start. I also, and this is the hardest thing, I think, for modern parents to hear, is that I didn't offer alternative foods. You know, I knew that this had been the norm for our species, hundreds of thousands of years. Again, this is confidence. And I would say,

Starting point is 00:24:48 I'm sorry you're still learning to like this food. You know, this is dinner. We don't have another dinner. But I'll tell you what, you don't have to eat. But I'm going to refrigerate. your food. And if you get hungry in a little while, just come back. I'll warm it up in the microwave. And if you have a couple bites, we'll say that's dinner. And for me and my children, that worked every single time. A child would, you know, occasionally, and this wasn't the norm, but occasionally wouldn't eat. You know, if I kept the food for them, they'd come back in a little while and say, I'm hungry. And I'd say, oh, that's great. Try the food again. Two bites. They would eat it. And then I'd say, now you can have a snack. And that, for me and my family, again, and I'm not

Starting point is 00:25:23 trying to universalize, but just to share personal experiences that worked for me. It was really, really effective. And so by the time my own children were, you know, two or three, they were wildly unpicky. You know, they were eating the crazy thing. We lived in France for, you know, a year, a couple years during my kids' childhoods. And they were eating the funkiest blue cheeses and snails and kimchi and, you know, all sorts of spicy, weird foods and coffee. They really like coffee. I just think so much more is possible than we have been told, and that many of us have learned. You know, as you've said, we've learned, we've inherited these things,

Starting point is 00:25:59 and we've often internalized them. And that's where I think history is so powerful in giving us this vision of an alternative past that might be a potential future. Yeah. There were so many good things in there. It triggered, I'm going to kind of pepper you with a few questions, and I'm sure they're popping in my mind.

Starting point is 00:26:19 I'm sure our listener is probably, thinking the same. I'll give you the example. I said in the intro, one of our rules was you have to try it, you don't have to like it. And that didn't mean try it once. Anytime the food was there, you had to try it. You don't have to like it. Right. And so that was our thing. And so given that that was our rule, I had to follow the same rule. I do not like seafood. I keep trying. I would love to like salmon. It is so healthy. My family eats it every day. My daughter loves it. I genuinely have tried it. I can't even tell you how many, I don't like it. So what about like the, I just don't like that? Is that, I mean, I'm not talking about pickiness, but I'm just, is it reasonable that there are

Starting point is 00:26:59 just going to be some things that we don't like? Yeah, I mean, even in the 19th century, Americans talked about personal preferences. And that was something that people recognized as part of our individual makeups that some people had personal preferences, but they didn't associate it with age. You know, they thought that, you know, personal preferences were something that might follow you through life, but they didn't think, you know, children were more likely to have them. There's actually a hilarious scene in a Mark Twain novel where he hates turnups as a grown-up, and he's a grown-up, and he's kind of forcing down turnips to be polite to a host, whereas the host children are surrounding him, and they really want to eat the turnips because they love it.

Starting point is 00:27:36 You know, it's just like a different world. So personal preferences, you know, to be honest, it is as a food historian, it's a little weird because there are cultures where they don't see personal preferences in quite the same way. But, you know, I think personal preferences are very normal today. And maybe there are some things going on psychologically, biologically, I don't know, that make us more prone to dislike certain foods than others. My next question is around ultra processed foods and sugar. I don't know that any of what we're talking about there existed in the time that you're talking about.

Starting point is 00:28:10 So what are your thoughts on exposing, not exposing, eating, not eating? Like, you know, my kid has craft macaroni and cheese every once in a while. She certainly eats sugar probably more often than I would like, but what are your thoughts on these sort of current realities that we have? Yeah. I think the dose makes a big difference. I'm not a purist in any way. I'm wary of having too much highly processed foods in anybody's diets,

Starting point is 00:28:39 you know, just because there's mounting evidence that diets with a lot of highly processed foods have poor health outcomes. And by the way, American kids, it's now two-thirds of what they eat is highly- processed. And partly that's because the exact foods that are marketed as children's foods tend to be packaged and branded factory products. So there's a natural relationship there that's built in by industry to encourage us to think of these kinds of foods as natural children's foods, which of course is so ironic. You know, another irony, you know, like we know that cocoa puffs and luncheables and fruit gushers are not timeless. We know they're modern when we think about it. And it's

Starting point is 00:29:15 just so funny that they're marketed as this kind of natural, biological, inevitability when they were, you know, most humans were not, you know, never had anything like that. I think you do your children a favor when you guard them from too much highly processed food and probably too much sugar too. At the same time, those things are just a part of our landscape today. They can be really fun. They can be delicious and certainly treats. I mean, I'm all, I love dessert. And I think dessert can be a really wonderful part of life. I would never be someone who's like, never feed your kid sugar or never feed them salt. Those, like, those adds so much pleasure to our diets and they're part of our culture and we want to be able to participate in our culture.

Starting point is 00:29:57 But the more you can cook, like cooking really can help. And of course, that's for parents who are busy, you know, like that's maybe super hard to imagine. Like that's one of the problems. Convenience foods fit so well into our culture of busyness and they allow us to do things we want to do. Although sometimes sometimes what we'd really want to do maybe is sit down and you, need a home-cooked meal with our family, but it just feels impossible. So, you know, this led to bigger questions about our work-life balance and how much of that, you know, how much is cultural, how much is what we really want? And I'll just say personally, I don't have the answers to this. I'm a working mother of three. You know, time is like the most precious commodity, as you say. But I will say,

Starting point is 00:30:37 if you have kids who are not picky, that can solve so many problems and get rid of so much stress, actually. So there are really positive outcomes that can come from an initial push to try to get to this. Okay, I have so many more questions. So I'm going to try to pepper a few in here. You had mentioned obesity is something we're very worried about today, but wasn't really a problem back in the 19th century when we were eating in a way that probably would horrify us today for whatever reason. What about allergies? Is something we're very worried about today? Was that a problem back in the 19th century? What are your thoughts? I don't talk much about allergies in the book, in part because You know, what I'm so interested in is taste and preferences, and allergies are somewhat apart from that.

Starting point is 00:31:22 But allergies, as far as I know, food allergies have gotten much more common. You hear about them very rarely in the 19th century and the 20th century more. There's one fascinating source I read where a doctor was describing what to us is like, blinking red light, like it was a strawberry allergy. But he'd actually never seen anything like that before, and he was confused about what it was. So, you know, again, I'm not an expert on the allergy question. It's definitely gotten much more common, though. And the degree to which it's a product of our environment, that's something we're still figuring out.

Starting point is 00:31:52 There's, as far as I know, still a lot of ongoing scientific debate about that. Okay. One thing that didn't exist, couldn't have existed in the 19th century, is exposure to different cultural foods as we have today. Like, I mean, I can eat Indian tonight, Mexican tomorrow, Italian the next day, Chinese. I mean, it's never ending. Any thoughts on that? relates to picky eating? Is this a benefit? We're exposed to more. Is it a challenge? We're exposed to more. Thoughts there? Yeah. I think it can be a great benefit that, you know, we have such a potentially

Starting point is 00:32:27 diverse food scene. What's so interesting is that, you know, that diversity has really gotten segregated by age for a lot of people. So a lot of, you know, if you ask an average American, like a spicy curry, they'll think, well, that's an adult food, you know. And but, you know, it doesn't have to be. If you, if you look at places where spicy curry are, you know, are more normalized in the culture, you'll often see kids eating them too, especially historically. You know, those kinds of foods are just, you know, foods that children can eat as well. So I think it's a wonderful opportunity. And, you know, you even see, you know, I think things may be changing a little bit, you know, looking at recent cookbooks aimed at kids. You know, I'm seeing more

Starting point is 00:33:06 interesting foods pop up. And I hope the kids, you know, parents increasingly just, again, have that confidence to offer kids the most interesting foods and most delicious foods they can. can and have a sense that kids can learn to like them. Yeah, it's interesting that you say that. My daughter has a friend whose family moved here from India. And at nine or 10 years old, she was eating food that like burned my face off, like the spiciest of spicy foods. And she loved it. And I remember thinking, oh, I might have done my daughter a little bit of a disservice because we would say, oh, that's too spicy. We didn't apply that to our you have to try it, don't have to like it, or we kind of like governed that for her. I think that's one

Starting point is 00:33:48 thing that, you know, if I could urge parents not to do something, it's, unless you think it's really harmful, like alcohol, you know, I don't encourage alcohol. I actually think it's okay. In Europe, they have children. Yes, there's more drinking of alcohol to kids, you know, and so it's not necessarily bad, but I, in general, you know, let's leave alcohol off the table for a minute. But I would say, you know, I would encourage parents not to ever say to a kid, you're not going to like that. You actually hear that a lot, parents saying, you know, oh, you won't like that.

Starting point is 00:34:16 You won't like the spicy food. You won't like the coffee. Oh, that's not for you. You know, and I remember even like I was chopping a raw onion once, and I'm not the biggest fan of raw onions. I like them in moderation, but I was, I had a toddler nearby, and she grabbed a handful of raw onions, and I almost said like, oh, don't eat that. You're not going to let.

Starting point is 00:34:32 And I was like, oh, oh, and she ate it. She liked, you know, she was fine with it. It's just we have so many preconceptions. We don't even realize how much we are, we're, we're, conveying this culture of mass pickiness to our kids inadvertently. You mentioned this a little bit, and this is probably exposing one of my own judgments when I say this. But it sounds like some of what triggered this is that middle class, wealthier class Americans, you know, getting more particular, having more options. And my observation today is wealth and privilege does seem to play a part.

Starting point is 00:35:10 in this sort of heightened pickiness. I don't know if it's entitlement. I don't know if it's like, oh, my kid is special and I can afford to or whatever. Again, clearly I have judgment about this. And it's fear too. We are financially very well off. And what I don't want as an asshole entitled kid

Starting point is 00:35:29 who thinks that just because her parents have money, she can be and do and have whatever she wants. So again, a fear that I am trying not to do damage that way, but probably inadvertently doing damage in another way. So all of that to ask, where is wealth and privilege playing a part in pickiness in America? Yeah, in a complicated way, actually. A lot of poor kids and children of working class families, you know, they don't have fabulously diverse diets either, like including their tastes. Like a lot of really poor kids today are very picky. And in fact, sometimes

Starting point is 00:36:01 even more picky than a middle class kid who might just be getting exposed to more stuff because their parents can afford the time to cook, the time to buy diverse food. And, and in fact, and have access to the kind of, you know, food cultures where they're trying different stuff. Up until the 1960s in America, if you'd ask most Americans, you know, which kids are picky? They would have said, oh, well, it's wealthy and middle class kids. Poor kids were seen as especially unlikely to be picky. I think it's muddier today. You know, like, in fact, I've seen articles saying things like because poor parents don't have the

Starting point is 00:36:34 luxury of offering a child a food and then throwing it away if they don't eat it, poor kids are especially likely to be picky. So it's really complicated today. The less money you have, often the less time you have to cook and the less access you have to healthy, diverse foods, whether it's like actually getting to the grocery store or the money to buy them because we have a really messed up food system now where the government subsidizes corn and wheat and soy and other foods that have become the basis of processed foods. So processed foods are artificially cheap, making it, you know, really that's like the first go-to for many poor and working class families as these highly processed, not very nutrient-rich foods.

Starting point is 00:37:12 Okay. I'm going to ask my final question, though. I was so desperately want to dig more into a few other things. But as a parent who's listening and likely feeling equal parts enlightened and maybe some guilt, right, as we tend to do as parents, what is our best path forward? What should we carry that we did in the past that we can realistically do now? I think a guide post and an ideal is that kids are capable of eating the same food as their parents. That is how our children and our species have eaten in every human culture we know about for hundreds of thousands of years.

Starting point is 00:37:50 Of course, the ideal is that the parents are eating a fabulously diverse and interesting home-cooked meal. And of course, that's not always the case for many parents. But you don't have to feed your kids different foods. And obviously this probably sounds so simplistic to people who if their kids are established picky eaters and they have a way of working in their family, doing this might seem impossible. But I think even with kids who are established picky eaters, there are all sorts of things that we can do to push back, starting with the expectation that they really can try to eat foods, with the idea that we're going to try to protect their meal time appetites by not having too much snacking or sipping, not too much milk or juice or other things. You know, I think parents can think about the idea of not offering alternative meals. I realize that's really difficult for a lot of parents, but that's a very powerful tool. Parents are willing to try that. And just trying to convey joy to our children, you know, the joy of eating and that learning

Starting point is 00:38:51 to like new foods is not a punishment. This is a potential huge source of expanding joy in your life, the joy of those flavors and textures, but also the joy of being able to move. through life with more ease and confidence in to share food with others. That's one of the most foundational pleasures that humans have. And I would love to see children partake of that pleasure more. Well, I think children, adults alike, if joy were the most commonly associated emotion with food, we would just have entirely different experiences. I don't think as an adult woman, most of us would say joy is the first. And I would love that.

Starting point is 00:39:32 for us and for our children. So Helen, thank you for doing the research, for writing this book, for being here today, and for having what is probably a hard conversation for people to hear, but so valuable and so important in doing it in a way that we can be open about it. So thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Nicole. It's really great to be here. And I appreciate you digging into the difficulties of this because it is a really difficult subject. Yeah, yeah, for sure. My pleasure. And listener, I know you're going to want to get this book. It's called Picky available on Amazon or wherever you buy books. But let's keep our local bookstores in business, please. And you can find more about Helen and her work on her website, helenvite.com. We're going to put all the links, all the ways to find and follow Helen in show notes. And let me close out with this. Let me check in with you. How are you feeling? Because picky eating may not be my particular parenting challenge, but I know we all have them, and it's really hard to talk about them without feeling guilt, shame, defensiveness, or, you know, all the feelings. And I'd argue that in most cases, our unique parenting challenge

Starting point is 00:40:41 has a lot to do with being so afraid of doing the wrong thing, so afraid of doing damage to our kids, that unconsciously we end up doing a different kind of damage. And that does not make you a bad parent. It's just what happens to all of us when fear gets louder than trust. But here is what we're what history actually shows us. Kids are capable of so much more than we've been giving them credit for. So try the thing. Put it on the plate. Hold the line because more often than not, it's the more kind and caring thing to do than giving in is. And listen, we don't negotiate with terrorists, certainly not ones who can't tie their own shoes. So let's raise humans who are willing to try new things because curiosity, like most things that matter, is a learned skill. And the world needs

Starting point is 00:41:29 more curious humans. And raising curious humans, not just women's work. This is all of our work.

This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - The Surprising History of Picky Eating & Raising Adventurous Eaters with Helen Zoe Veit | 423

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