American kids ate very odd things in the 19th century. Spicy sauces and vinegary pickles. Shellfish and organ meats. Beets, rutabagas, collards. They even loved coffee. In historical documents of all kinds, from medical treatises to diaries to school records, Americans described children as curious omnivores who appreciated bold flavors and interesting textures. A group of children in 1830s Boston spent their pocket money on raw oysters, doused them with vinegar and pepper and “ate them with rapture.” A girl in 1870s New York adored a salad made of tiny crabs that she ate by the spoonful, shell and all. It was normal for a child to cheer when she saw turnips growing in the garden or for another to call cabbage his “delight.”
The more I researched, the clearer it became that American children’s experiences with food in the past were full of pleasure. This was unrelated to socioeconomic status — children at every income level happily ate a diversity of foods. But today, appreciation of sharp and varied flavors can be hard to find among American kids. Parenting message boards are filled with questions about getting reluctant children to eat vegetables, and kids’ menus across the country offer dishes aimed at narrow palates.
Many adults assume that prolonged pickiness is a hard-wired stage and that kids naturally dislike many foods. But mass childhood pickiness is a modern phenomenon created largely by junk food companies that marketed products like sugary cereals as food specifically for children, convincing Americans that kids need different, easily likable foods. This fostered a culture of pickiness that is harming children’s health and depriving them of a range of pleasures and flavors that would have been available to them in the past — all while adding heaps of unnecessary anxiety to dinner tables across the country.
If prolonged childhood pickiness were evolutionarily protective, we’d expect to see it showing up regularly in different places and periods. But widespread pickiness didn’t exist until the 20th century. Before then, kids sometimes disliked individual foods, just as some adults did. But people in earlier eras didn’t think that pickiness was related to age.
All this changed as food companies like General Foods and Nestlé poured money into designing products in laboratories to target humans’ biological instincts and make their foods very hard to refuse. By the mid-20th century, thousands of seductively sweet, salty and crunchy factory foods crowded grocery shelves, and many of them were marketed aggressively to children — from Goldfish crackers to SpaghettiOs. “Child-pleasing” emerged as a marketing slogan, and brands promised in advertising campaigns that even the fussiest eaters would find their food irresistibly delicious. One 1960 Kraft advertisement featured an otherwise “picky” girl who “never turns up that button nose at mild, golden Velveeta!”
Junk food companies also started pushing portable, calorie-dense snacks. By the 1960s, Hostess was selling “snack cakes” like Twinkies, Kellogg’s was advertising Pop-Tarts as an “eat anytime” food, and eye-poppingly sweet cereals were showing up at snack time as well as breakfast. Many children were nibbling and drinking milk or Kool-Aid right up until the start of meals and showing much less interest in the food on the table because they were already full. In contrast, 19th-century children didn’t snack much and were more likely to have roaring appetites at mealtime. If you’ve ever gone grocery shopping on an empty stomach and come home with questionable items that just looked so good, you understand how powerfully hunger sharpens interest in food.
As marketers glorified personalized eating, family eating habits fractured. Before the mid-20th century, most family meals centered on communal food. But as kitchens filled with shelf-stable products, many Americans stopped sharing food in the same way. One 1950s mother noted that she ate whole-wheat bread, her husband ate rye bread, and her children ate white bread. And why not? By then, all those varieties could be found cheap and presliced at the supermarket. Cooking had also transformed. As more food was processed in factories, meal preparation could mean warming up or even just assembling. It suddenly became feasible to “cook” separate meals for different family members.
It might be tempting to buy marketers’ claims that once children got personalized food, they finally got to eat what they actually liked. But exploding choice fostered comparison and discontent. Within just a few decades, all sorts of foods that kids used to love — from briny shellfish to bitter marmalade — came to be unthinkable as kids’ foods. Preferences were increasingly understood in relation to aversions, and the beating heart of modern children’s food became displeasure.
Parents today hear grim warnings about the dangers of fighting pickiness. We’ve been told that urging kids to eat any particular dish can cause lasting aversions and dysfunctional relationships with food. At the same time, many parents quietly anguish over children’s highly processed diets, rising obesity rates and the stresses that stalk picky eaters in daily life. There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance, and it’s contributing to immense frustration, anxiety and undeserved guilt around mealtimes.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Before the days of Froot Loops and Lunchables, generations of American children learned to relish foods of all textures, flavors and colors, while obesity and eating disorders were both rare. The children of the past show us a happier, healthier and more delicious path forward. Parents can warmly encourage children to eat family foods and avoid offering alternatives. They can also counter corporate marketing with their own enthusiastic messages about the foods they love to eat, whether it’s a crunchy salad or slippery green olives.
Mass childhood pickiness isn’t parents’ fault. It’s the product of historical forces, and it’s made life harder for everyone. But we have more power than we know. Children are still capable of learning to love the foods enjoyed by their elders; we just need to regain the confidence to lovingly help them do so.
Helen Zoe Veit is an associate professor of history at Michigan State University and the author of the forthcoming book “Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History.”
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