Whether you’re a first-time or long-time reader of this series, you know the main connecting points for me are policy and political questions around kids and families. In my own writing that means focusing on the big issues around resources, attention—and attacks—on education, child care and other important investments.
But when I talk to other authors or to public figures, I’m interested in how they are working on different problems within that same larger connecting space of family policy and well-being.
I was absolutely fascinated by a new book from the historian Helen Zoe Veit, who like me also teaches at Michigan State University. Helen specializes in the history of American food, has consulted on a variety of major media projects on the topic, and recently had a piece in the New York Times outlining the work from her new book.
That book, Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History is out now. This week, I sat down with Helen to talk about Picky, food policy, and even the MAHA movement in American politics.
A Conversation with Helen Zoe Veit
So let's just start at the top. You’ve written this book, and you're a historian of food in the United States. I'd love for you to tell us a little bit about that. But Picky is also something new. Are you trying to solve a puzzle or tell a story?
I think there is a puzzle at the center of American children’s food. Which is that a lot of the food that we feed our kids today is not that healthy. About two-thirds of the food that American children eat is now highly processed.
There’s a growing body of good evidence suggesting that diets that have a lot of highly processed food are not that great for us. They’re correlated with a lot of health problems, they’re correlated with high obesity rates—and obesity has quadrupled since the 1970s, just among children in America.
At the same time, all sorts of health problems that never used to be an issue in childhood like high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, heart problems—these are starting to be regular parts of childhood.
This is all really, really new. So there’s this sense that there’s something that’s not right with the way that we’re feeding American kids.
And at the same time, there’s broad acceptance of the idea that children are naturally picky, that there’s something natural, biological, or evolutionary that makes children narrow eaters that makes them the perfect audience for these highly processed products.
As a result of those two things, there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance. Parents know that Lunchables and Cocoa Puffs and Fruit Gushers are not the natural food of our species, and yet at the same time, we’re told the pickiness is natural and inevitable, and that they shouldn’t try to do much to change it.
So, yeah, the book is an attempt to explore this puzzle and this contradiction by looking to the past, where people had really not gone before to talk about children’s food, and where children used to eat totally differently than children do today,
And with vastly more pleasure.
How does Picky differ from a book, say, a nutritionist would write on the same general theme?
I think there’s a reason that this topic was written about by a historian. It could have also been written about by an anthropologist.
There have been books about children’s food written by people who are nutritionists, doctors, and psychologists. But the problem is that we are all products of our own historical period, of our own culture. And it is so dominant in our culture, this idea that children need special diets, that they have special, requirements around food, that things that please adults are not pleasing to children.
This is so dominant that most people start with that presupposition when they even talk about children’s food: the idea that children have special needs.
Whereas, what history shows so compellingly, and shows so strongly, is that in the past, there was no such thing as children’s food. There was no sense that children were incapable of loving exactly the same foods as their parents.
In the 19th century, children, if anything, were seen to be uniquely omnivorous, uniquely wide-ranging, curious, eager, even greedy eaters. That’s what it meant to be a childish eater back then.
This is totally countercultural. And so I think, for that reason, what historians do, and also what anthropologists do, is that we leave our current culture. We go to different time periods or different places, and we see how people, you know, do things totally differently.
Now, of course, there are really strong biological aspects to this story, too. As a historian of science, that’s what I find so incredibly fascinating, is this intersection of biology and culture. But I think the countercultural nature of this book needed a perspective outside of our own culture to get, really, the wedge into it. And that’s, I think, one of the benefits of approaching it historically.
“Our model of feeding children has actually resulted in such a constriction of children’s pleasure, in such a narrowing of the foods they take pleasure in, and it’s been incredibly stressful for parents.”
—Helen Zoe Veit
The story is temporal in that it’s history and moves through time—you’re a historian after all. But is there something first, that’s specific to the US here? You do bring in some comparative pieces but I’m trying to get my head around the American-specific development. And then, second, is there something different about our relationship to food and how that’s changed over time as opposed to, say, our attention spans, reading, fitness, labor, and so on?
Well, it’s been a really long rollout of childhood pickiness. Although I think there are some unique things going on today with children’s pickiness, and some things that are specifically indebted to social media—especially the rise of a new eating disorder called ARFID, which stands for Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder.
There’s been an explosion of diagnoses, in part just because more people are hearing about it. So I think there’s something very modern going on about this new eating disorder. But in fact mass pickiness, and one of the reasons that it’s been so naturalized and normalized, has really emerged over generations.
We first start to see Americans talk about children as picky eaters almost 100 years ago, in the 1930s.
At the time, nobody thought it had to do with children’s taste, or textures, or things like that. People said it had to do with children’s levels of hunger, that some children just weren’t hungry enough—you had to try to increase their appetites.
By the 1940s and 50s, there was a much more psychological explanation for pickiness. The idea was that children are natural rebels, so they want to, you know, assert their independence through food, and that others, especially, should stay out of their children’s food choices.
This actually surprised me doing the research. You don’t really see people talk about taste buds or texture until really the last quarter of the 20th century, as the dominant explanation for why children need special food.
So it’s been this really long development which, again, has made it really powerful, because people have lost the lived experience of: well, I grew up in a world where nobody was picky. No one can say that today. I mean, unless they from a different country.
In fact, I’ve heard from a lot of immigrants writing this book, or people in other countries, who have said: you know, I had a totally different experience at the same time. Childhood pickiness is now spreading around the world, which is one reason that I think there’s some urgency here.
Building off that last part of the question, this is also a story about poverty, race, class, and geography. How has food and our relationship to it differed over time with respect to those elements (poverty, race, and so on) as opposed to leisure or education or the workforce? What’s uniquely food-specific about, say, racial or income inequality?
I think the most obvious thing that’s changed is that, until the 1960s, poor children, children growing up in economically disadvantaged households, were the least likely to be picky. And people just took that to be natural: well, of course poor kids aren’t picky because they have to eat what they’re given, there’s not enough food.
We’re in a really strange situation today where often—and I don’t know if there have been studies of this, but anecdotally, you hear it a lot—children in food-insecure households, children who don’t have enough to eat, or where food is scarce, or where there’s just general hardship in the household are often the most likely to be picky about their food.
And the explanations have been that, well, the parents in those households don’t have the luxury of buying food, offering it, and then throwing the food away.
But that, historically, is a very strange model. That’s a very modern way to approach child feeding, the idea that you would offer a food and if it’s not eaten, you would discard it.
People in the past never did that. They would just keep offering the food until it was eaten, or another family member would eat it.
This also gets to one of the questions that’s at the heart of this book. When we hear that children in the past didn’t used to be picky, most of us assume that it was because of scarcity.
We think children in the past, they ate broadly because they had to, that there wasn’t enough food to go around, so they forced down vegetables and other hated foods because those were the only alternative to starvation.
But one of the fascinating things about this history is that when you look in the past, you see that children’s lack of pickiness was a cross-class phenomenon in the 19th century.
Poor children, for sure, were eating eagerly and indiscriminately then. But so were children on prosperous farms, so were indigenous children living in situations of abundance, so were the wealthiest children, who were the children of tycoons in the Gilded Age,
None of them were picky. The idea that children can eat broadly was affecting all children, and in part, it did have to do with hunger. It was because even children who had plenty to eat overall tended not to snack very much between meals.
They tended to get much more exercise and physical activity than children do today, so they would come to meals with a roaring appetite, the kind where if you’ve ever gone grocery shopping on an empty stomach, you know that all kinds of food just suddenly looks so good to you.
That used to be the basic model for how people approached meals.
At the end of the day, I’m a political scientist who writes about problems of policy—especially concerning kids and families. So I read you book and my question goes to: do we have a policy problem here? If so, what are some solutions?
I think there are lots of policy implications here. I will say for any listening parents, if you have the ability to do so, you don’t have to wait for policy.
I think there’s incredible power that can be created through family culture to create environments that are similar to those in the past that can encourage children to try new foods, not to offer alternative foods, to avoid snacking, to be enthusiastic about food, to reward kids for eating vegetables. There are all sorts of things that families can do.
However, on a bigger scale, policy changes would be incredibly important for changing the larger structures that families operate within. On the biggest bird’s-eye view imaginable, one is trying to create more reasonable work schedules for parents, and maybe for all Americans. You know, work-life balance is tragically out of whack for many people.
People just don’t have a lot of time to spend with their families in many cases. We also live in a culture of busyness, even among often middle-class parents. Kids are highly scheduled, parents don’t often have time to eat with their kids, that can all contribute to more pickiness.
I also believe strongly and have for my entire career, in the power and potential—really landscape-changing power—of teaching cooking in public schools. For years, I have been an advocate of returning Home Ec to public schools.
We don’t have to call it Home Economics. It doesn’t have to include sewing, as far as I’m concerned. It should certainly be for all children and not gendered, as it often was in the 20th century.
But I think teaching cooking in public schools is one of the most important things that we could do. Both to improve public health in general, because cooking is such a potent tool in getting people to avoid highly processed food and fast food and other food that’s not great for our health. But also, cooking in public schools could be a mechanism of teaching children to enjoy a range of foods that they might not have tried before. It can be a way of inculcating taste and an awareness of foods that can be a source of pleasure for kids.
So that’s a very important area of policy. The one other thing I’d say that’s the low-hanging fruit here is to change the way our subsidy system works.
Currently, farm subsidies disproportionately, overwhelmingly, are supporting things like corn and soy, which, in practice are the basis of processed and fast food. You go into the middle of the grocery store, the package sections, you know, the majority of it is made with subsidized corn and soy products.
It does not have to work this way. We can subsidize vegetables, we can make vegetables more affordable to working families.
There are all sorts of policy things we can do to try to get healthier food to make it easier to buy it, easier to cook it. And I would love to see programs that are teaching people to love these foods.
Because one of the things is that if we’re just working within the family, and if the model is children should eat what their parents eat—and generally, I think that’s an excellent model—if the parents have really narrow palates, they have narrow diets, they’ve grown up with really limited foods, and may be picky themselves, then there’s limited benefit that will come from that.
Trying to teach people to like new foods is something they’re experimenting with in Europe and other places. I think there’s a lot of really interesting things that could come of this.
“Teaching cooking in public schools is one of the most important things that we could do.”
—Helen Zoe Veit
There are a few pages devoted specifically to milk. I have to ask: what do you make of MAHA [RFK Jr’s Make America Healthy Again initiative]? Should we be drinking raw milk? How do you make sense of our relationship to food and nutrition today or, if you prefer, how do you think future historians or even your future self looking back and writing 20 years from now will look at today?
I think the MAHA movement is a fascinating movement as a scholar. It’s really a big tent movement that I think is a sign of a larger sense across American culture that things in our food system are not working as they should. They’re not ideal. There are so many diseases, chronic diseases related to obesity and to other parts of our food system are now the leading killer of Americans.
It’s a growing problem that I think people are only increasingly aware of: the many, many problems in our food system.
That being said, certainly as a historian, there are parts of the MAHA movement that are very troubling. For example, I have never met a 19th century U.S. historian who is anti-vaccine.
You don’t have to spend a lot of time in the 19th century to realize that whatever risks vaccines may pose, an unvaccinated population is cataclysmic for children—about a quarter of children died.
With milk, you know, in the book, I talk about milk because the push to get children to consume large amounts of milk was so important in making them less hungry and less eager to try new foods, and less appreciative of new foods.
Today, the claims about raw milk are similar to some other claims within MAHA, which is to say they’re not well-substantiated with research. There’s a lot of really exaggerated claims about what raw milk can do.
That being said, I’m part French, by marriage, my husband’s part French, so I’m a French citizen. I’ve spent a lot of time in France, and I’m a huge proponent of changing US laws around raw milk cheese, having nothing to do with health, but having everything to do with taste and pleasure.
Our current US laws around cheese are really limited. In most states, you can’t buy fresh raw milk cheese because of potential risks from bacteria, which are real risks—there are all sorts of potentially negative bacterias and harmful bacteria in cheese, just as there are in raw oysters and sushi and other things that are perfectly legal.
But the problem is that cheese is made of bacteria and when we have to pasteurize the milk, you kill much of the wonderful bacteria that creates all these wonderful tastes. So, in terms of cheese, I would love to see those particular laws changed.
“When people hear about trying to teach children to eat more broadly, most people they bring out the battle metaphors. They talk about standoffs and battles and showdowns at the dinner table and that is not how it has to be.”
—Helen Zoe Veit
Last question. What haven’t I asked you about? What else do you want readers to know about the book?
I think if there is a through-line in my work as a historian generally, and if there’s a theme in this book, it’s pleasure.
That can be surprising to people, because when they hear about trying to teach children to eat more broadly, most people they bring out the battle metaphors. They talk about standoffs and battles and showdowns at the dinner table and that is not how it has to be.
Parents in the 19th century rarely talked about discipline or anything like that when it came to food. They just talked about children as joyful, omnivorous eaters.
All the talk about discipline really came into being in the 20th century, when mass pickiness was emerging, and 20th century parents just often didn’t know what to do. So they often tried some kind of ham-handed, draconian methods to get their kids to eat. You know, you stay at the table till you finish.
With my own children, raising them from birth with this very different countercultural model around food, we didn’t have much conflict around food at all. It was mainly about teaching them to love food from an early age. Structure was necessary, including not offering alternatives, which is something that’s very difficult for many Americans to hear today, because they’ve been told that it’s psychologically harmful.
I mean, that’s kind of the crux. Parents today are just trying to do the best they can. They’ve been told that if you push your kids too hard, if you don’t offer alternatives, that’s cruel, that’s psychologically harmful, there’s no evidence for that. Literally, there has never been a rigorous comparative study of the psychological outcomes of children raised under different feeding models.
This is all kind of these Freudian rumors that have been circulating for 75 years now. We’ve been told that children’s food, as packaged and sold in supermarkets, is child-pleasing. But the great irony is that that model of feeding children has actually resulted in such a constriction of children’s pleasure, in such a narrowing of the foods they take pleasure in, and it’s been incredibly stressful for parents.
And so, I think there’s a lot of good news in this book, because we have these models of how people used to parent in the past, how children used to eat, that resulted in vastly more pleasure and vastly less stress for parents and children alike.
Once again, the book is Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History, by historian Helen Zoe Veit.
