We’ve all seen it or experienced it firsthand. The kid who only eats chicken nuggets or mac and cheese. The kid who screams if they see a single fleck of green on their plate. Special kids’ menus with butter noodles or a plain hot dog. It’s the stereotypical American child’s diet. It’s beige, it’s simple, and it’s seriously lacking.
That normality is exactly what historian Helen Zoe Veit is arguing against in her new book Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History. According to the book’s publisher, Veit traces how American children went from “joyful omnivores” to famously picky eaters over the last couple of centuries.
The first useful correction here is that kids weren’t always built this way. Veit’s research argues that well into the 20th century, American children ate many of the same foods adults did, including bitter greens, pickles, shellfish, and organ meats. On WBUR’s Here & Now, Veit said American kids in the 19th century ate “all kinds of different foods,” and associated today’s pickiness with processed food and the industry built around it.
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Part of the change came from bad ideas disguised as child welfare. As the New York Post summarized from Veit’s book, reformers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries pushed the belief that rich or highly seasoned foods were dangerous for children. Veit writes that these claims were “deeply pseudoscientific.” From there, middle-class parents started restricting children’s diets in the name of safety, even though better child health had far more to do with refrigeration, hygiene, and vaccines than a life sentence of bland food.
Then came the 20th-century American superweapon, abundance. Veit argues that postwar food culture gave children unprecedented power at the table. Processed foods built for young palates became their own category, supermarkets put kids in a prime position to see and demand branded food, and convenience culture made it easier for families to produce separate meals for separate people. Veit also points to snacking as a major problem, saying children need a “pleasant pre-meal hunger,” which is a polite way of saying kids who graze all day have very little reason to embrace dinner.
There’s also a parenting philosophy problem sitting underneath all this. Veit argues that mid-century experts such as Dr. Spock taught parents to back off at the table and treat food refusal as part of a child’s individuality. In her telling, that advice never had much scientific basis, but it lodged itself firmly in American family life.
American kids didn’t become picky by accident. Adults built the food culture, the rules, and the workarounds, then acted shocked when children fell right in line.
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