First Foods: Learning to Eat

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So I'm just sitting with Alice at her high chair.

She's been having solid food for about three weeks now, I think.

And I'm just trying a bit of Wheatabix and

pear puree with her.

I don't really know why I chose pear.

I think it's just because it sort of seemed quite innocuous and it's quite sweet, so they genuinely like it.

Yeah, they do.

Welcome to Gastropod, the podcast where we look at food through the lens of science and history.

I'm Cynthia Graeber.

And I'm Nicola Twilley, and that was my friend Claire and her baby Alice.

Alice has just started learning how to eat.

And that brings us to the mystery we want to explore in today's episode.

How do we learn to eat?

How do we learn what is actually food out of all the weird and wonderful things we can put in our mouths?

How do we learn what flavors we like?

How do parents manage to get kids to try all these strange new substances?

And is there any way that we as adults can change our likes and dislikes?

And finally, we're proud to announce that today's episode is also sponsored in part by the Burroughs Welcome Fund in support of science communication and our coverage of biomedical research.

So I used to avoid eating cheese, any kind of cheese actually, at all costs.

I hated tomatoes as a kid.

As a kid, I hated mushrooms of all types.

I remember at one point writing an essay about how I hated onions and I couldn't stand mushrooms, which seems totally weird now because I at some point just stopped being a picky eater and those are totally normal foods now.

Peanut butter, on the the other hand, is and forever will be gross.

Do you like trying new food?

Not really.

Why not?

Because it might be lemon I really don't like.

Cornflake Boy was someone that me and my sister knew when we were growing up and he was a boy, a friend of ours, who ate nothing but cornflakes and milk.

You may recognize that last voice.

It's Bea Wilson, one of the stars of our first ever episode.

She's got a new book out called First Bite, How We Learn to Eat.

Breakfast, lunch, dinner, it didn't matter what the meal was.

And I think in a way, my sister and I were in awe of him because we would never have dared to be quite so fussy.

But when I started writing this book, I suddenly returned to him on my mind and thought of him as this fascinating case study in where do our tastes really come from?

Because I think at the time, everyone around him, including his mum, thought there was just something innate about him.

He was different.

But was that really true?

This set be off on a quest to understand whether our tastes are innate, whether Cornflake Boy was somehow different, or whether there was something else at play.

Some of it's genetic, there's no doubt about that.

We all come with different responses to food, but the overwhelming evidence is that actually whatever different genetic experiences we bring to the table, we're largely capable of overcoming them or at least adjusting them in response to learned experience and environment.

That said, there are some universals when it comes to taste.

In the 1970s, a doctor called Jacob Steiner figured out that you could measure a baby's response using its facial expression.

So if you take little swabs of sweet, sour, or bitter flavours and put them on the baby's tongue, you can see really graphically and instantly the photos are hilarious.

If you expose a baby to sweetness, they just have this dreamy look of contentment.

It does seem that all human beings have an innate love of sweetness.

Babies have some built-in dislikes too.

If you expose them to bitter flavours, they look appalled, sourness, they pucker their mouths.

So we have a pretty clear view of what babies think about the basic building blocks of flavour and these seem to be absolutely cross-cultural.

Babies in Asia, Europe, the States would respond the same.

But we all can't and shouldn't and usually don't grow up only eating ice cream and cookies.

So how do we learn to appreciate these more complex, challenging flavours?

That starts early too, before we're even born.

Scientists in Philadelphia did an amazing study that showed we actually arrive in the world pre-equipped with a taste for particular flavors, depending on what our mums ate while they were pregnant.

They got pregnant women to drink a lot of carrot juice in the last trimester, and they found that once the babies were weaned onto solid food, the ones whose mothers had been drinking carrot juice showed a marked preference for baby cereal mixed with carrot flavours.

Garlic is another one, Amniotic fluid can smell very strongly of garlic, apparently.

And just imagine what the effects would be if your mother was a garlic lover and you're swimming around in this lovely garlicky sea for nine months.

The odds are garlic is going to be like mother's milk to you.

This is most definitely me, nine months of swimming in garlic.

Now I'm picturing you as an escargot, which is strangely appropriate given the name of our podcast.

This process of flavor imprinting continues during breastfeeding this first year.

It's shaping a kid's preferences before they've ever tasted solid food.

One more thing for moms to worry about getting right.

Still, for most of this first year, the nine months of pregnancy and then the first few months of life, basically the decisions about what a baby should eat are pretty straightforward.

If it's not coming through the placenta or breast, it's formula.

But at a certain point, a baby starts to eat solid food.

Either they reach for it themselves or their parents decide it's time.

And then those parents are faced with a potentially panic-inducing question.

What in the world should their little darlings be fed?

What is the right food food for babies to start to eat?

And that is a question that is being answered in very different ways at different times for different reasons.

I am Amy Bentley.

I'm a professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at NYU.

I'm the author of the book Inventing Baby Food.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I can't remember what I call it.

Or, as her publisher would probably prefer, Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet.

In other words, how has what Americans feed their babies changed over time, and why?

According to Amy, the first foods fed to American babies in the 19th century looked very, very different from the fruit and vegetable purees we're familiar with today.

Infants were fed gruels made of wheat or barley and then beef broth.

That was because beef and wheat were seen as the strength-producing important foods of the day.

Vegetables and fruits were seen as not necessary and even could could be regarded as harmful.

This is the result of a couple of things.

One, fruits and vegetables can have a laxative effect, the fiber in it, the water in it, and you did not want your baby to have diarrhea.

There was also this centuries

old distrust of fruits and vegetables that was a holdover from Galenic theories about the body.

And a lot of fruits and vegetables were classified as wet and moist and suspect.

And even though these theories had been displaced by the rise of modern science, there was still this wariness about fruits and vegetables.

Annie Gray is a food historian specialising in 18th and 19th century British food.

She's actually experimented with making historic baby foods like beef tea and rusks.

These are two of the most popular first foods for your little ones in the 19th century.

Rusks today are still sold actually.

They're quite popular as baby food still.

But the Victorian version is a kind of sweet brioche dough which you bake as a long, long loaf and then you cut up and rebake in the oven.

So I suppose it's the original biscuit in that it's twice cooked.

Queen Victoria mentioned eating them when she was very, very ill in the 1830s.

So they weren't just baby food.

They were seen very much as the kind of food you would feed people if they were an invalid or if they were dying.

Basically, in the 19th century, baby food was just invalid food.

It was the kind of thing you'd give to someone who was a bit fragile and needed building up, like a baby.

But things changed dramatically in the 20th century.

The turn of the century is kind of this perfect storm for the development of mass-produced baby food.

And one of the elements is the rise of affordable mass-produced canned goods.

The other huge change is that people no longer considered fruits and vegetables moist and potentially dangerous.

So it wasn't really until the early 20th century when vitamins were discovered that people really understood that fruits and vegetables had important food value, not just for everybody, but maybe, wow, maybe for babies too.

So we've got the canning technology.

We're newly in love with the vitamins in fruit and veg, and then there's another factor.

Amy calls it the medicalization of motherhood.

Around the turn of the century, you have the rise of medical professions.

And so infant feeding becomes within the realm of the pediatricians.

And so pediatricians start to, in the name of science, claim authority for knowing what's best for babies and infant feeding.

And the net result was to kind of decrease the confidence of women that, okay, if I'm going to raise a child the correct way, then I better trust the authorities.

I can't really trust myself.

And now the stage is set.

Lift the curtain.

The first modern baby food is invented.

The earliest development of commercial baby food that I found was a man named Harold Clapp in Rochester, New York.

And he had a sick child.

And so he created a soup and his child improved.

Clapp felt like he might be on to a winner with this baby soup.

And in Rochester, it just so happened there were a lot of fruit and vegetable canning facilities.

It was a good fruit producing region in particular.

And so there were canneries in the region and he went around to them and finally got one to produce his soup and he called it Clapp's Baby Food.

Before that, there were a few canned goods meant for babies, but they were considered medicines and you could get them at apothecaries with a prescription.

They weren't meant to be a baby's normal food.

Clapp's baby food changed all that.

Suddenly there was this entirely new product, canned baby food, and it caught on.

And then very, very quickly after that you have the rise of others including the Gerber baby food and the same story is going on there.

This is in Michigan, another fruit producing region.

At the same time as these companies are starting up, doctors are telling moms to feed their kids fruits and vegetables.

Those have to be cooked and softened.

And just like their mothers fed them beef tea rather than a steak, this new generation of vitamin-conscious moms would cook and then sieve vegetables to make a homemade liquidy baby food.

And because this was in the 1920s, before home food processors or blenders, the whole business of sieving was a gigantic pain in the ass.

And then came Gerber.

The mythical story, there could be some

truth to it, is that the Mrs.

Gerber told Mr.

Gerber, please, would you make this in your factory?

Because I'm really tired of making this by hand.

And so they quickly started

producing baby food in 1928, 1929, and within a handful of years, it was the only product that they were producing.

It was very popular.

It was really the right product to come along at the right time.

It was seen as modern, it was seen as sterile, clean, better than you could make at home.

And it was a product of convenience that women were quite taken with.

And so even during the 1930s, the Depression years, the sales increased dramatically.

So I was curious, what did this newfangled industrial baby food actually taste like?

And basically what it tasted like is it tasted like other kinds of canned food that was being produced at the time.

That is, if you cook canned food, all canned foods, not just baby food, the high heat that you have to use to sterilize it changes the nature of the food and it changes the flavor and it makes it less flavorful and it can create some off flavors.

And so the way to combat that is to add salt or to add sugar or to add both salt and sugar.

You're trying to add back flavor.

They're also trying to add back vitamins.

They're trying to add back texture as well.

So it's salty and sweet and has some added preservatives and colorings.

And it's also really, really smooth.

Really?

What's the deal with this smooth texture?

That is really an interesting question.

I think that goes back to earlier ideas about food, the body, health, and eating.

In the 19th century, America had experienced a whole health fad around chewing your food at least a hundred times before swallowing it.

The trend was called Fletcherism after its inventor, Horace Fletcher, and it was the celebrity diet of its day.

The Rockefellers all did it.

And somehow that idea of chewing as really important

stuck.

And there was a strange technological aspect to it too, because no woman could make baby food as smooth as a machine could.

I think that smooth is a stand-in for power and national strength.

We have the technology, we have the wealth, we have the wherewithal to create food so smooth you could not make it yourself.

And therefore there's a value placed on it, I think, in this period that there isn't in other countries or there isn't in general.

Basically it was like we're a superpower.

Nobody can make baby food as smooth as we can.

Nationalism in a jar.

Our smoothness is our strength.

But this raises a disturbing question.

Did being started on this super smooth, bland mush have a lasting impact on American food preferences?

Did this set kids up to seek out and enjoy and prefer sweet, salty, highly industrialized food?

Yeah, as it happens, those first foods, they really do shape our preferences for life.

Bea told us about a study about babies fed vanilla-flavored infant formula in Germany.

So for many years, babies that were fed on formula basically would be, you know, grow up with this happy positive association of vanillin.

And they did a test with grown-ups and the ones who had been formula fed found that when they tasted ketchup that was flavoured with vanilla, they thought it was really yummy.

Whereas the grown-ups who'd been breastfed just thought that vanilla ketchup tasted weird.

So the fact that an entire generation had their first experiences of food being super sweet, super salty, super processed, that cannot have been good.

I think the real drawback of it is that the food that we learn to eat with is largely the food that we then gravitate towards for a whole lifetime.

So what I'm seeing is that many adults are now eating some version of kid food their whole lives.

But hope is not lost.

We do have good news for you.

Kids can change their food likes and dislikes, and we grown-ups can change too.

We're going to tell you all about a pretty powerful technique pioneered in the US and the UK that helps you do exactly that.

But hold on a minute.

We've talked about what foods should come first, but what about when?

What age should you start a baby on solids?

Amy told us that in the 19th century, babies often didn't start on their beef tea until six months or beyond.

But when commercial baby food was invented, that started to change.

If you think about it, there's only a small window of time that a baby needs baby food.

And that is a bummer if you want to sell a lot of baby food.

So what do you do?

You create advertising to try to make that window of baby food eating a little longer.

And that is indeed what happens very, very quickly in the 1930s.

Pictures of tiny babies, texts that tells mothers that tiny babies love baby food and will be strong and healthy if they eat this baby food.

And this whole idea of like, I want my baby to be the strongest and the smartest, that anxiety that comes up, especially after World War II and the Cold War,

really create a pressure to feed babies baby food at earlier and earlier ages.

It wasn't just smart advertising to moms.

The baby food companies placed advertisements in scientific journals.

They sent representatives into doctors' offices.

They convinced pediatricians that starting babies on these new products was a great idea.

And so you have the average age of introducing baby food drop really dramatically in the space of one or two generations.

The early 1920s, the average age is six to seven months when you would first give a baby baby food.

By the 1950s, that has dropped to six weeks, four to six weeks.

So that is one month after birth.

And many doctors are prescribing baby food 24 hours after birth, which is pretty amazing.

Dear lord, one day old babies?

That is insane.

We just want to pause a second to let you take that in.

So the 1950s and 60s is really the triumph of baby food.

It is a product that crosses class lines, ethnic lines.

Everyone uses it.

95% of American babies are fed jarred baby food.

And there's another thing that's feeding into this movement.

Not as many women are breastfeeding.

And that has to do with some of this idea of the sexualization of the breast, which of course has gone on much earlier.

And breasts have always been sexualized,

but they take on this new aura of sexuality in the World War II, post-World War II era.

Think of the pin-up girls and the invention of the bikini and Marilyn Monroe.

Breasts are big, so to speak.

That affects breastfeeding levels because now these are mammary glands second and sexual objects first.

And then another thing that's going on is the United States is a superpower.

And so you look in the issues of national geographic at the time, and you have people from underdeveloped countries, Africa, and you have women, pictures of women with their breasts exposed.

And so the message there is that we are civilized.

We don't need to use these primitive methods like breasts.

That's something that these other countries do.

We don't do that.

Our breasts are perky, our baby food is smooth.

Who needs an A-bomb when you have that combo?

Take that, Stalin.

But by the 1970s, the tide starts to turn, both more in favor of breastfeeding and also against jars of processed baby food.

Some mothers sort of withdraw from the consumer society and make their own, begin to make their own baby food.

This starts out as a radical practice.

This is seen as very dangerous, and women are called communists who are making their own baby food somehow that's un-American but it pretty quickly becomes a mainstream practice.

My mom was one of those crazy lefty homemade baby food 1970s moms.

Your father and I made candles.

You made macrame.

He did macrame.

We made candles.

I figured food, chore, whatever.

This was a really interesting thing.

As we were making this episode, we figured we should call our own moms and see what we were fed on as babies, which ended up being sort of shocking.

Not so much for me, actually.

But before we get back to our moms, here are some voices from our listeners.

Well, maybe they're not quite listeners yet.

I like bagels.

And what do you hope we have for dinner tonight?

Um, noodles and broccoli and cauliflower and um cheese and that's it.

What's your favorite vegetable?

I like carrots and those sorts of things.

What is your name?

Axel.

How old are you?

Treat.

What do you like to eat?

Noodles.

And broccoli.

And

that's Dasha.

You don't like to eat cake?

Yeah.

Blue beans.

Yeah.

Do you like grapes?

Grapes.

Yeah.

Do you like rice krispies?

Rice krispies.

Do you like mushrooms?

Yeah.

Do you like Brussels sprouts?

I don't like brussel sprouts.

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I realized I had no idea what I was fed as a baby, but when I called my mom, I was pretty confident she would have done the whole homemade baby food thing.

I mean, she makes her own pasta and pastry from scratch.

She even sewed all my dresses.

I never read a single book about bringing up children, as you're probably aware, but the pediatrician did suggest that I started slowly with pureed foods, vegetables first, and then gradually going forward to

fruit and meat.

I didn't make anything myself at that stage, not until he went on to slightly more solid food.

So all the purees were from a jar?

A jar, yes.

My mom and dad were not making macrame or candles either.

I was kind of surprised to learn that I did actually start off eating some store-bought jars, but then my mom read the ingredients.

She wasn't a fan of all the sugar and the preservatives.

I did do baby stuff for a while, like the bottles, you know, jars of stuff.

And then I decided that's stupid, so I got a happy baby food grinder.

My mom fed me foods she liked.

Broccoli, fish, lamb, whatever.

I didn't care.

I had lamb for you.

I had made this lamb thing, and I had it in a little container, and you sat on the chair, and I fed you lamb stuff.

And you wonder why I love lamb so much, lamb and garlic.

Yum.

So my mom started me on food at six months, and that actually fits with the World Health Organization recommendation today.

They say that parents should breastfeed exclusively until six months.

Many people do introduce food a little bit earlier.

Kids often start reaching for it before six months.

And in fact, according to Bea, the latest science shows that starting a little earlier is not a bad thing.

Scientists talk of a flavour window between four and seven months when humans are more receptive to new flavours than they'll ever be at any subsequent stage.

But above and beyond that, once you've accepted a flavour at that stage, the odds are it will bank a happy memory, which will then mean you'll respond to it more favourably when you encounter it at a later age.

But if you only breastfeed till six months, you're actually missing out on a big chunk of that flavour window.

And it's not that a four-month-old baby necessarily has any nutritional need for additional vegetable purees, but there have been studies done showing that if you can introduce a smorgasbord of different vegetables at that stage, rapidly rotating, in contrast to the current advice where people will say, start a baby off on bland, sweet flavours like sweet potato and move very slowly because you've got to be a bit anxious and wait and check if they really like it.

No, you don't wait and check if they like it, you give it to them and then they will like it.

Nobody's telling moms to stop breastfeeding or even that babies need solid food earlier.

But B is saying that according to the research, giving tiny tastes of lots of different foods at around four to seven months might help babies get accustomed to those flavors and they're more likely to enjoy them later.

Because after seven months, that flavor window starts to slowly close.

Kids swing back in the other direction until by around 18 months they're saying no to everything.

Well, there's a natural stage in human development which

most children, maybe not all, goes through to a greater or lesser extent called neophobia.

It's exactly the time when you're starting to introduce new food.

So the reason why people would have been neophobic around that time, if you imagine a hunter-gatherer society, that would be when you might be encountering food that wasn't directly given to you by your parents for the first time.

So that is something that you should have been regarding with suspicion.

Whereas now, it's still food being offered by parents who are desperately wanting you to branch out and try these new flavours, and a lot of children are very resistant.

You won't be surprised to learn that mealtimes can turn into war zones.

I mean, it's stressful for the parent because you've cooked this meal and you're exhausted, and you've probably been rushing home from some other activity, or you've just gotten back from preschool, and everyone's a bit frazzled, and it's a miracle just to have food on the table.

And at that point, the emotions are running high, and you just want it to be eaten.

And the child senses that.

And everyone tenses up.

It is really stressful.

For parents, there's this feeling that they need to feed their kids, that nourishing their babies with food is a key part of their job description.

My friend Rachel told me that she knows she'll feel guilty if her kids don't eat.

I have this, you know, slight neuroses about like my kids going hungry.

Right?

Like, obviously, my children are, my children are not actually going to go hungry.

Like, even if they don't eat a lot of dinner one night, they're going to be fine, but they're still on some like visceral level for me.

There's like, oh no, like if they don't eat anything, they're going to be hungry.

And so, you know, at the end of the day, I'm going to probably end up giving them something that I know that they'll eat.

Parents try everything to get their kids to eat.

They lie.

Bea admitted to this.

She told her daughter that her doll's favorite food was green beans.

And I just felt ridiculous saying this.

I thought, no way is this going to work.

And after she'd seen him supposedly eating in inverted commas, the green beans, a couple of times, she was begging for them.

And I was just amazed.

I thought, really?

That trick works?

Apparently so.

Hiding vegetables in something else is another popular technique that your friend Rachel admitted to.

Yes,

I get vegetables into their bodies, but again, it's mostly from hiding them.

And again, this is a bizarre thing.

We make muffins that have pureed broccoli, zucchini, carrot,

banana, and apple in them.

And Jonah thinks it's the most normal thing in the world to throw broccoli in the blender when you're making muffins.

Like, how else would you make muffins in his world?

But yet will not eat broccoli if given broccoli.

I totally get what Rachel's doing, and I support her.

She wants her kids to be healthy, and she's hoping they'll get used to some of those flavors, too.

Bea appreciates the logic behind it, too, but she's not sure it's such a great idea.

When we give a kid a cake that has hidden zucchini or beets in it, mostly what we're doing is reinforcing their love of cake.

Sorry, Rachel, but I know you're not alone here.

Right, none of these behaviors makes you a bad parent.

But let's see, what what else do parents do to try to get their kids to try new foods?

There's lies, there's vegetable smuggling, and of course there's bribery.

A bite of your broccoli and then you can have some ice cream.

Bribery does work.

There's a recent study by three guys, an economist, a psychologist, and a health researcher.

They gave elementary school kids who took a serving of fruit or veg a token to buy books or toys.

And it worked.

The kids ate more produce.

And they carried on eating more fruit and vegetables even after the study was over and the tokens were no longer being given out.

But note one important thing.

The researchers did not bribe the children with dessert.

Bribery isn't a good idea if it's a sweet because in psychology this is the overjustification effect.

If you say eat some broccoli and you can have a chocolate, well it makes you like the broccoli less and the chocolate more.

Bea pointed out another study showing that rewards do work done by a British scientist called Lucy Cook.

She uses stickers.

She says if you can use a non-food reward, this is a great idea idea because the child who has dared to put something new and adventurous and unfamiliar and suspicious in their mouths genuinely does feel proud of themselves.

So bribery and lies are better than smuggling, it turns out.

The least when it comes to feeding kids.

But all of this persuading kids to eat things they don't want to eat, it's kind of a nightmare.

And then, I don't know, maybe it's not really necessary.

Some of us have this idea that when it comes down to it, kids actually do innately know what's best for their bodies.

Like, they may hate something, so fine, maybe it's not crucial.

Or, you know, eventually they'll eat the right mixture of foods to get what they need.

This idea that kids know what is best for their own bodies, it's actually a pretty recent concept.

B traces it back to Dr.

Spock, who wrote the book on childcare in the mid-20th century.

And in the book, he describes an experiment done in the 1920s by a woman named Clara Davis.

She was a pediatrician in Chicago.

It would never be allowed today, it would be completely unethical.

She took a series of children.

Some of them were orphans, and some of them had single mothers who consented for them to be taken into this experimental orphanage in a hospital.

None of them had tasted any solid food at the point that she took them under her care.

And each day at mealtime, instead of being offered food by a parent and pushed to eat this or that, they were free to select from a range of different natural whole foods.

It might be milk, yogurt, raw beef, carrots, salt, oranges, and from these foods they could just reach and take whatever they wanted.

No judgment was cast.

And what she found was that under these circumstances the children were in each in their individual idiosyncratic way able to form a perfectly healthy diet for themselves.

When they arrived, some of them were in a pretty poor state of health.

One of them had rickets.

A lot of them had colds.

They cured themselves of these conditions.

So the way her experiment often gets read is, well, children will be just fine if we leave them to select their diet for themselves.

So that seems to prove it, right?

Left to their own devices, kids will naturally feed themselves the right foods to be healthy.

Nope.

Actually, the experiments do not prove that at all because it was completely rigged.

As Clara Davis was the first to point out, there was a trick to the way the experiment was set up.

No child in real life, certainly in modern life, actually learns to eat like that.

Dr.

Spock didn't explain that part of the experiment.

Clara didn't have any processed foods, none of the super sweet treats that kids naturally love, so parents were left with this totally mistaken idea that kids would figure out how to feed themselves.

Clara designed the experiment to take place in a very controlled food environment.

An environment matters when it comes to food choice.

Everything from what your siblings eat or don't eat to TV advertising affects what kids choose.

They're not just listening to their bodies.

Or at least they stop listening to their bodies around the age of three.

We've known this since the 1930s, even before Dr.

Spock.

It came out of research done by a German psychologist named Carl Dunker.

He fled Nazi Germany and ended up doing research at a preschool in Camden Town in London.

So he found this amazing thing that

with very young children at the nursery, for those younger than 27 months, there was this wonderful, what he called, social indifference, where it didn't matter what others were doing around them.

They just had this...

natural relish and appetite where they ate the foods that appealed to them and in the quantities that they wanted, and then they would stop.

Whereas over the age of three, suddenly the influence of others would kick in.

And this has been replicated in recent times in cultures as different as China and the United States.

Once the age of social indifference was over, which is a term I love, by the way.

I sometimes feel like I never outgrew that.

Anyway, once these Camden Town kids reached the age of three, Carl was able to see just how much their food choices influenced each other.

And he allowed them to select food in the company of children who were a little bit older than they were.

And he found just to a remarkable extent the older child would choose first and then the younger child would just almost always choose identically to what the first child had picked.

It's so funny according to my mum this is exactly what happened to me.

I think you developed

dislikes when you went to school in England, so at the age of about six or seven,

and you had quite a lot of little friends, possibly with older siblings, who definitely knew what they liked to dislike.

That's what I put it down to, anyway.

I ate everything as a kid, and then I went to school, and suddenly there were a whole load of foods I didn't like: lemon curd, ketchup, even fish.

And B's not just talking about influence at school, our siblings can also have a huge impact on what we're willing to eat.

My aunt told me this funny story.

She says, My dad hated peanut butter.

So when they were getting along, she also hated peanut butter.

But when they were fighting, she just loved it.

And beyond even the people around you, there's the entire food environment.

One study last year showed that the more fast food commercials a kid sees, the more fast food they eat.

And advertising food to children is a multi-bajillion dollar business.

So we have a problem here.

Kids are innately in love with sugar.

They have good evolutionary reasons for saying no to trying new food.

new foods.

They're being influenced by their friends and siblings.

They're being influenced by junk food advertising on on TV.

And then you have parents trying desperately to get their kids to eat vegetables.

And all too often, they're failing.

And like we said, mealtimes can become a battleground.

So the thing that works, that has been shown to work, that everyone knows works, is exposure.

Exposing a kid to a new food multiple times, 10 times or more, that does work.

It's just not very easy to do.

I have to say, I don't know if I have the patience for 10 times.

And I hadn't even heard 10, I had heard 7.

I definitely keep trying.

Like I keep I keep putting vegetables on my two-year-old's high chair tray even though I know that the likelihood of him eating them is very very slim like maybe one day he will.

One day he did out of the blue eat like several pieces of beet because they were there.

This works.

The research shows it takes about 8 to 15 times which is boring and depressing.

Who wants to prepare food that's being thrown away?

But there is one other problem and it's a financial one.

If you don't have a lot of money you're not going to want to waste expensive vegetables by sticking them in front of a kid who never eats them.

Harvard sociologist Caitlin Daniel found that low-income parents in the Boston area bought food they knew their kids would like, and that wasn't vegetables.

Higher-income families didn't mind knowing they might have to throw the veggies out.

And that is a totally rational economic response.

But B told us about a different method, one that manages to expose kids to new foods without all the waste.

It's called Tiny Tastes, and it's been pioneered by a couple of different scientists.

Lucy Cook, the sticker researcher in London, and Keith Williams, who works with kids with severely disordered eating at his clinic at Penn State.

Over the past 10 years, they've figured out that if you can get a child to taste a morsel of the new food that is as small as a pea or even a grain of rice, it hugely reduces the pressure on the child and it means that it's not a horrible, unpleasant experience putting it in your mouth.

And I've tried it with my own youngest child, who's by far the fussiest eater in the family.

And you find that, yes, there might be a bit of conversation around

am I actually going to put this in my mouth?

But if you say you only have to lick it, you don't even have to swallow it, the odds are that the child will do that.

And if you do it again the next day and the day after that, what we found was that by about day four or five, he'd be saying, I can't really taste this.

Can you make it a bit bigger?

Because I really want to sort of see what it tastes like.

And it never actually took as long as 14 days for us.

Using this tiny taste method, Bea has converted her son to eggplant, cabbage, raw red pepper, all kinds of things he hated before.

And this is not just anecdotal.

Lucy Cook has co-authored papers showing it works on children in Portugal, Greece, the UK, pretty much without fail.

Bea talked us through how it works in practice.

The kids can choose which food they want to work on.

That helps them feel a little more in control.

And then at some point during the day, not during mealtime because that's already stressful, at some point you take a couple of minutes and they put a pea-sized bit in their mouth.

Once a day, every day for up to two weeks.

It's magical.

It really does work.

It's such a pragmatic, simple thing.

It sounds too simple to be true.

And yet it's just a little technique which the best thing about it has been every other feeding technique I've tried.

It feels as if it's us and them.

You feel as if you're coercing your child into something.

Whereas this feels like a collaboration.

My son, my youngest one, will now talk about, well, I don't like this, but maybe if I did tiny tastes on that, I could teach myself, you know, there are still plenty of things he's working on.

He's not so keen on eggs, unless it's an omelette and he can't see any separate white and yolk.

But sometimes we'll say, well, maybe we should do tiny tastes for eggs one day.

And it hasn't quite yet come, but just planting the thought in a person's head that they have this mechanism that means throughout life, if you ever wanted to expand your palate, you could do so and you're the one in charge.

That's a really powerful thing.

There's another newer method she's also excited about, and this one happens at mealtime.

So for some parents, it's easier to squeeze in.

It's called plate A, plate B.

And how it works is you put tiny pieces of three or four foods that your kid hates on plate A, and then a normal size portion of foods that they like on plate B.

For the whole of the meal, the child just takes one bite from plate A, one bite from plate B, one bite from plate A, one bite from plate B.

This way they're guaranteed a nice taste after the nasty taste and they feel in control.

So let's say that plate A has got a tiny bit of Brussels sprout, a tiny bit of red pepper and a tiny bit of sweet corn.

They might be really scared of the Brussels sprout, but they'd never actually have to choose that.

But the mere act of choosing one of the plate foods makes them like it more.

This has been pioneered in clinics by Keith Williams, treating children who have these profound difficulties.

He's worked with toddlers who were down to, one of whom was down to, I think, just hot dogs and grilled cheese sandwiches, and were not getting enough nutrition to be able to survive to the point where these children will then be fed by tube, which is horrible.

And through quite short-term interventions, he was able to build their repertoire up to the point that they were eating more than 50 different foods.

That's life-changing.

So there you go.

This is how to expand your child's palate the pain-free way once they get to that stage where they're saying no to everything.

But what about feeding younger kids and this idea that we've been trained by all those Gerber jars to like salty, sugary mush?

What about that?

Is the takeaway that baby food is bad?

First of all, baby food has changed dramatically since those early days.

In the 1970s and 80s, the companies fought back against radical home cooks like my mom, but they did take out a lot of the sugar and the preservatives.

And now today, there's plenty of baby food with kale and quinoa and salmon.

Baby food is reflecting what we're eating now.

But today there's a new backlash.

Because after all, baby food is kind of an invented category and maybe we don't need it.

The latest trend is something called baby-lead weaning, where you just cut up some solid food and let the kid beat itself.

Amy says that can work really well for most kids, but she does still see the value of mush as a bridge from liquid to solid.

I remember with my son,

I think before he was,

I gave him solid food, I wanted to see what would happen if I gave him a Cheerio.

So I put it, he was like five months old, I gave him a Cheerio, I just put it on his tongue and the reaction was so interesting.

He was like, what is this thing in my mouth?

It's not food.

It's something else.

He like couldn't,

he couldn't process it.

I could see like he couldn't process it as a food, he just wasn't ready.

So the idea of a semi-solid substance like baby food makes sense to me.

But there, you know, definitely there are those who are saying we don't even need this as a category.

And maybe we don't.

But baby food does have its uses.

First of all, if the family is eating a normal American diet, the baby might actually be better off eating from those jars.

Because baby food jars are full of a wide variety of fruits and vegetables that many American families aren't buying for themselves, beets and mango and kale and squash.

And if you take babies off commercial baby food earlier, if you're not a family that's very vigilant and eats a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, then the scope, the landscape of vegetables and fruits a baby eats is going to narrow dramatically.

And indeed, that's what the studies are showing.

And so by nine months of age, the number one vegetable

is french fries.

I don't even think I can comment on that.

In baby food's favor, there's also the convenience convenience factor.

Many families have two working parents.

Like my friends Penny and Mark.

As you could probably guess, as a very busy working mum, my children did indeed

both have

bought baby food.

We were particular fans of the one that you just squirt into your mouth and you don't even need cuttlery to inhale it.

That was the level of laziness we had.

And really, using jars or pouches of baby food is not going to ruin your tiny precious angel's life.

I mean, I turned out fine.

As did I, more or less.

But maybe we're just stressing out about this too much.

Eventually kids will grow up and they'll figure out that they like vegetables, right?

I think there's this naive view that it doesn't really matter what children eat because at a certain age they'll develop a deep voice, mature political opinions and a love of coffee and bitter greens.

And maybe for some people it is like that.

I mean, if you go away from home to college and you meet new people, then maybe maybe some of this social influence can kick in and you see other people eating in a more grown-up way and you change your own diet accordingly, or maybe you fall in love, maybe you travel.

There are lots of reasons people can change later on.

But there isn't a natural mechanism of change.

There's no automatic thing that happens.

You know, it's funny.

The stories you guys sent in sort of confirm that.

It often took something extraordinary, travel or love or embarrassment as a grown-up to get you to change.

Take Rodrigo Perez Ortega, a listener based in Mexico City.

So, everyone in my family loves food, every kind of food, but for some strange reason, I was a very picky eater as a child.

Rodrigo would not eat shrimp, or crab, or octopus, or any kind of seafood as a kid.

He just refused.

And then, as a teenager?

So,

my first travel alone was to Italy, to Milano, and I stayed there with a family.

And then, one night they made a pasta with fettuccine with shrimp.

You know, I swallowed my pride and just gave it a go.

I tried it and it was yummy.

I had this travel experience too.

I hated raw tomatoes as a kid, but I was living with a family in Switzerland when I was 15 and I ate an entire raw tomato just to be polite.

It did take me a little while longer to love them.

I wouldn't eat any seafood or fish either until my future husband, who at the time was a fellow grad student that I had a crush on, asked me if I wanted to get sushi.

And of course, you said yes.

I didn't want to look lame in front of him, and of course, it was delicious.

And now, if I had the cash, I would live on sushi.

Lots of you sent us stories about hating tomatoes as kids, or Brussels sprouts, or even eggs, and you managed to change when you got older.

Frequently, you finally had the chance to try much tastier versions.

I mean, boiled Brussels sprouts are gross.

For those of you who haven't realized, roasting them is the game changer.

But it's nice to know that change is possible at any age without travel or romance needing to be involved.

That's a really important message for fussy kids, yeah, but also for their parents.

I mean, if you look at the standard American diet, which is being adopted all over the world, this is actually important.

The USDA has a crazy statistic.

Only one in five of us even eats a single vegetable a day.

It may be because we don't think we like them, but that's something we can change.

Parents I've spoken to get really excited because we're often at our wits' end.

I know I have been, you know, that tea-time moment of the day isn't always the happiest.

And just to know that there are techniques out there that could help, I think people get very excited about that.

But on the question of their own tastes, we adults are far more set in our ways than children are.

Parents might be open to the idea of changing the way their child eats, but they're not open to the idea of changing the way they themselves eat.

And I have this in our own family.

My husband will not eat porridge or oatmeal.

And I think it's one of the most delicious things in the world.

The children and I have it for breakfast.

And I keep saying to him, you, I could do tiny tastes on you.

And he's like, I'm not putting that anywhere near my mouth.

No, no, no.

It's so common to believe that we just can't change our tastes.

And while it may not make a big difference whether or not Bea's husband likes oatmeal, for some people, this is really important.

They are adults with the eating habits of toddlers, and it's actually a serious problem.

So try tiny tastes.

That's what we should have done with you and cilantro, Cynthia.

The research shows shows that it should work at any age.

You know, even outside cilantro, I'm not a fan of absolutely every food.

And to be honest, in general, I'm fine with that.

But it's great to know that if I do want to change and learn to like something new, I can.

Everyone is entitled to have certain things that they hate, just and certain passions that they love.

I mean, that makes life interesting.

It's when your passions hold you back from being able to eat a good, varied diet.

And I think it's partly that many healthcare providers themselves aren't aware fully how malleable our tastes are.

I think we all have this view of our tastes kind of following us around like a comforting shadow and that there isn't much we can do until suddenly we might surprise ourselves.

Thanks this episode to everyone who sent us emails and voice messages with all your likes and dislikes and those of your kids as well.

Even if we didn't use your story, we loved hearing from you.

We'd also like to thank our guests this week.

Bea Wilson is author of the book First Bite, How We Learn to Eat.

Amy Bentley is author of the book Inventing Baby Food, Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet.

Both are well worth a read.

And thanks also to food historian Annie Gray, you can find links to her work on our website at gastropod.com.

Thanks to our moms who gamely answered our questions about our childhood and who, with our dads, fed us for all those years.

And let us know if you tried tiny tastes on your own or with your kids and what happens.

Finally, and one day we shouldn't leave this to the end, but hey, if you're still listening, there are a couple of things we'd love for you to do one go to gastropod.com and make a gift of any size to support the show two tell your friends and followers to listen to us and one more actually three leave us a review on itunes to help us find new listeners till next time

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