Picky Eating

Other than carrots and the occasional lettuce, I essentially didn’t discover vegetables until college. Whenever offered a vegetable by my parents, my typical reaction was to say, “That looks scary.”

My mom and dad had very different approaches to dealing with my picky eating. My dad, having grown up a picky eater himself, understood my plight. “She’ll grow out of it,” he always assured my mom. “In her twenties, she’ll start liking things.” My dad, then, felt no need to make me eat vegetables. He never tried to force them on me, and whenever I encountered a new one, I always turned to him and asked him if I would like it. He would say “yes” or “no” based on his experience of the vegetable as a child, and that usually determined whether or not I tried the it. This rule prevailed for other types of terrifying foods (pasta salads, anything spicy, and anything unidentifiable).

My mom, on the other hand, wanted me to try everything. How would I know if I liked something if I had never tried it? Often, we compromised by having me smell the food. If it smelled bad, I didn’t have to eat it. But if the smell was neutral or good, it was time to taste. I sometimes lied about the vegetable smelling bad, but sometimes I did try a nibble, only to make a horrible face and push the food away. My mom never quit trying, though. I tried tomatoes every summer (I still don’t like them), and she once coerced me into trying crab (I threw up).

Now, at 20, I have added to my vegetable list. I eat carrots, lettuce, spinach, green beans, corn, mushrooms, peas, onions, kale, and peppers just to name a few. Really, all of this happened in about the last year. Why, all of the sudden, the change?

What my dad always told me was that my taste buds would change when I got older. Kids just don’t like vegetables, he would say. So, according to his theory, my taste buds have just matured. I’m not really sure that I buy that, though. Yes, chicken nuggets and macaroni and apples all probably taste better than mushrooms to a kid, but I think a lot of the difference between child and adult food habits are the cultural stories that we tell about eating. If all that we hear culturally is that kids will only eat grilled cheese and cereal, then we will assume that that’s the type of food we need to buy for our children in order to get them to eat. Perhaps we won’t even try that hard to get them to eat vegetables because we think it’s hopeless. In my case, I hadn’t even tried most vegetables by the time I left for college. Who is to say that I wouldn’t have liked them if I had tried them? Instead, I just believed that I would magically like food when I got to my twenties, so when I went to college, I figured that it was time to start trying food, and I discovered that vegetables were great when prepared correctly.

Part of the story that we tell about eating habits has to do with how food is presented on the government’s MyPlate. The very separate categories of vegetable, fruit, grain, protein, and dairy do not have to be so isolated, but that is how we, as a society, often present food. When vegetables were served to me, they were often just vegetables. But what if I had been given vegetarian lasagna with peppers and spinach and onions and mushrooms in it and it had been presented just as lasagna, not as a “vegetable”? It might have seemed a little less scary, and my mother could have shown me that, in the right setting, I could like vegetables. Then, I might have been willing to try vegetables on their own. Furthermore, our culture often clumps fruits and vegetables together when making dietary suggestions, and I ate plenty of fruit as a child. In terms of health, I thought that eating more fruit would make up for my lack of vegetables.

In terms of Bronfenbrenner’s model, my eating habits were clearly influenced by my parents. My attitude as a child was that I didn’t have to like vegetables until I was an adult, an idea fed to me by my father. My dad, in turn, got that idea from his parents and the culture and media around him. (Kids so notoriously had vegetables that we had to create Popeye to sell spinach). Had I gone to a school in which most children ate vegetables at lunch, I might have been embarrassed by my eating habits, but the culture I lived in presented my pickiness as normal. As I grew older, though, my peers began to eat vegetables. I became more and more embarrassed by my pickiness, which I started to see as childish and abnormal, and it pushed me to try new foods.

With all of this assumed pickiness, parents have to develop tactics for getting their children to eat healthy food. In the two articles we read, parents had come up with several different techniques that had varying success. In general, forcing children to eat particular foods was ineffective in getting them to like a food, as noted by Bastell et al. Most of the time, children in these forced food situations reported that the experience actually limited their diet rather than expanding it. But parents in the Bourcier et al. article had more success when modeling healthy eating and stressing the importance of eating fruits and vegetables for performing well mentally and physically. When a child is immersed in a family culture of healthy eating, it becomes the norm and expectation. I think that to make this technique really effective, it is important that the child not even know that adults and children are supposed to eat differently. My parents, for example, ate really well and modeled good food habits, but because my father was so open about the fact that children and adults could eat differently, I felt no need to try vegetables. Instead, I perfectly mimicked my dad's food trajectory by having a picky childhood and beginning to try vegetables in my twenties.

My best friend, on the other hand, had a mother who modeled healthy eating behavior and never let on that there are “child foods” and “adult foods.” From an extremely young age, mother and daughter at the same meals, and no alternatives were ever presented. So, without any knowledge of the cultural expectation that children should have their own menu, this friend of mine ate just about everything that came her way. So, looking back at Bronfenbrenner’s model, my friend’s attitude toward food and her eating habits were influenced by her mom and her home environment. And her mom may have made this parenting decision because of the environment that she worked in – she was a professor in a cultural anthropology department, an environment that may have shown her that, in different cultures, child eating habits don’t match those in the United States and that children across the world eat just what adults eat.

Questions:

In the Bourcier et al. article, it was noted that many parents recognized that forcing a child to eat something was fairly ineffective, yet over half of the participants in the Bastell et al. article reported a forced food experience. What do you think accounts for this discrepancy?

While parents may choose to present food in a way that goes against cultural scripts, most children attend schools where they will witness food habits typical of the larger culture and, thus, learn those cultural stories about eating. Do you think parents or the school environment will have a bigger impact on attitudes toward eating? Why?