Picky Eaters: A Modern American Phenomenon

When my middle son was two years old, my husband and I counted up, just for fun, all the foods this opinionated boy was willing to eat at the time. We topped out at 25—although that required counting sliced apples, applesauce, and apple juice as separate items. Rounding out the list: yogurt, plain waffles, grapes, other fruits, cherry tomatoes, plain rice, hot dogs, and dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets. Once, during the Covid shutdown, my local grocery store freezer was all out of dino-shaped nuggets, so I got the oval-shaped ones instead. It was a very sad night at the Williams house. 

No question about it: this guy has been the pickiest eater of all my children. But he is not an anomaly for modern America. Other friends have many similar stories of their children’s distinctive food preferences. Some children are just picky, the wisdom goes, even in the pediatrician handouts we’ve received at each year’s well-check appointment. And if you read children’s menus in restaurants, you may come away with the idea of children as a distinctive species of aliens, who subsist exclusively on chicken fingers, French fries, macaroni and cheese, and (for connoisseurs with a more sophisticated palate) grilled cheese sandwiches.

But the idea of children as picky eaters is relatively new to history—and it is particular to modern America, argues food historian Helen Zoe Veit in her new and fascinating history of children’s eating, Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History.

Veit explains that once upon a time—as recently as the nineteenth century, really—American children were “little omnivores,” delighting in every vegetable imaginable, and consuming a wide variety of animal products, organ meats, and all sorts of pickled foods (e.g., pickled eggs and pickled watermelon rinds) with gusto. Citing authors like Mark Twain, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, she notes childhood diets that included the joyful consumption of squirrels, sheep brains, beef heart and liver and tongue, raw oysters, turnips and parsnips, a long list of varieties of fish, succotash, and a long list of other foods, some of which we might not recognize on sight, as they are rarely available in a supermarket. In a nutshell, nineteenth-century American children ate extraordinarily diverse diets, because they simply ate what their parents were eating. Restaurant children’s menus, incidentally, were simply half-portions of the same foods as on the adult menus.

The problem is, though, that children in the nineteenth century also died in droves from diseases that have now largely been eliminated through vaccination—diphtheria and measles, for starters. Physicians, though, were convinced that some of these deaths, at least, could have been prevented through diet. And so, they blamed mothers for feeding their children a diet that was excessively diverse for the more delicate constitutions of the young. And so, the pseudo-science of children’s nutrition was born, with its recommendations of bland foods, especially for sick children. 

The book goes on to note that in the first half of the twentieth century, several additional factors colluded to change children’s eating. The new recommendation that children drink a lot of whole milk daily meant that some children had less stomach space for foods. Also, increasingly more children were living more sedentary lives in cities rather than an active existence on farms—and this meant that they did not need as many calories, plus they weren’t coming to the table quite as ravenous as kids who had worked or played all afternoon on a farm. This meant that for the first time in American history, children could be turning down food instead of scarfing down anything they were offered. Also, for the first time in American history, some kids were overweight.

At the same time, researchers like Clara Davis and Dr. Spock (“America’s pediatrician") began extensive experimentation, transforming the process of feeding children into a science. Davis argued, based on extensive experimentation, that just like any animals in the wild, children instinctively know what foods they need to thrive, so we should just offer them a wide variety of foods and trust their choices. Dr. Spock agreed—and he blamed any possible pickiness in children’s eating on their mothers’ neuroses (he really liked Freud, you see). 

Ironically, while children in the mid-1950s were still more likely than not to eat exactly as their parents, shortly after that, Vein reports, 

Mass pickiness exploded in the wake of advice not to guide children’s eating, and Americans’ stress and self-doubt about children’s eating exploded, too. And that’s the most devastating irony of all. Mid-century psychologists thought their advice would result in healthy children and relaxed parents. Instead, it led to more pickiness, worse health, and higher anxiety than anyone at the time had thought possible.

After that, children’s pickiness became a great selling gimmick for companies, and children’s food as we know it—processed, unhealthy, yet marketed as the best thing for kids—was born. 

Veit is an excellent historian—her book is built on extensive archival research. But she is also a mother, so she has had natural reasons to think about how to feed her own kids. And so, she concludes her book with some helpful tips for families. First, she recommends that parents have more confidence in feeding their children, instead of being too easily sold on the junk foods heavily marketed as the best thing for kids. Parents should offer different foods to their kids, without assuming that kids are picky. Second and relatedly, she would like us to recover a delight in family meals by going back to the nineteenth-century model: the entire family eating together, enjoying the same meals. And so, she encourages parents not to offer separate dinner options, should a child turn down what is on the table. 

This is good advice, and workable for most families. But I realized as I was reading Veit’s book, my family could never precisely follow this model, because children’s pickiness is not the only factor limiting our menu. My husband has Celiac (an autoimmune condition that makes it impossible to consume gluten). Furthermore, he was born without the ability to digest any meats. These limitations rule out not just a few foods but entire food groups, making it impossible to structure family menus only on items he can eat. On the other hand, as we all know, it is a lot of work on any cook to try and make multiple meals each night. Cooking one meal for the family is already enough work. 

Our family’s solution? While we practically always eat home-cooked meals and eat together as much as possible, I cook dishes in large batches. This means I am not cooking every single night, yet there are always leftovers available to meet varied needs. At the moment, our fridge is host to a massive bowl of quinoa and roasted vegetable salad. Next to it is a similarly large bowl of gluten-free Mediterranean macaroni salad with a variety of vegetables, fresh and roasted, topped with feta. I will bake salmon some nights, which the kids and I will eat over rice or salad, and my husband will eat either over rice or with other leftovers. It is okay if the entire family does not eat the exact same dinner. We can still enjoy eating dinner together, seated around the same table, joyfully catching up at the end of a long day.

Finally, I have an encouraging tale for parents worried about their own homegrown picky eaters. The week after my picky middle son turned 10, he tried a new food of his own volition. Then another, and another. In the 10 months since, it's become a family joke: now that you're 10, you'll eat anything. 

Nadya Williams is a homeschooling mother, Books Editor for Mere Orthodoxy, and the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church, and Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic.

*Photo credit: Shutterstock