First Bite: How We Learn to Eat (12 page)
Mark Bittman, the
New York Times
food writer, asked why it was so hard for us to stop eating food, like hotdogs, “that we know is not only evidently bad for us in the long run but also makes us feel queasy immediately afterward and doesn’t even taste good.” His answer was that for him, hotdogs—especially those from Nathan’s on Coney Island—had deep memory connections that could not be matched by any of the foods he had learned to love subsequently in adulthood. Hotdogs for him were about childhood and longing and being with his sister at the fun fair on a hot summer’s day. If Bittman wanted to stop eating them, it wasn’t enough to understand rationally that they were unhealthy, or that the meat in them came from the least salubrious parts of unhappy animals. The emotional connection somehow had to be severed.
What makes junk food so dangerous is not that it is unhealthy—though it is. It’s that it is entwined in our minds with so many other memories that are good and true and pure. Memory has always been an important part of how we learn to eat, but never before have so many of us been stamped with reinforcing food memories that mostly come not from a cuisine but from a series of cartons and packets. When we hear someone suggesting that we stop eating our favorite brand of ice cream or potato chips or sliced white bread, we feel a knee-jerk hostility. It’s hard to let go of these foods and find a better way of eating without a sense of loss. The thing you are losing is your own childhood.
There is a rising
phenomenon of something called “continuous milk intake” in the second year of life. Mothers arrive at feeding clinics complaining that their toddlers won’t eat anything. It often turns out that they are drinking a liter or more of whole cow’s milk a day. This is an extreme manifestation of a more general phenomenon. The flavor of sweet milk is perhaps the most firmly imprinted of all food memories in Western culture. Milk and cookies, chocolate milk, a mug of warm milk at bedtime: thus we were comforted, and reassured that we were still children.
Because breast milk is the first thing babies drink, it is an article of faith for many parents that dairy is the perfect food for older children, too (though anyone with lactose intolerance would disagree). Some coffee shops now offer milky “babyccinos”: cappuccino without the coffee, designed for toddlers. Better a child should drink milk—with its calcium, vitamins, and protein—than ruin their teeth with sugary fizzy drinks. But our early trust in the goodness of milk has unintended consequences.
It often doesn’t occur to the parents dosing their one-year-olds with limitless milk that there’s anything wrong with it, because we all “know” that milk does a child good. But in these vast quantities, the milk leaves children anemic (because calcium in the cow’s milk blocks the absorption of iron) and badly constipated, not to mention at risk for obesity from the excess calories. The constipation and the fact that the milk is so filling leave the children with little appetite for proper meals. As a result, they fail to try new foods, and before long, the sweet, bland taste of milk is almost all they want, because it’s all they’ve ever known.
The problem is not new. In the early twentieth century, doctors complained that children were being given so much milk it was making them “bilious” and overweight. One doctor, Thomas Dutton, complained that such children were like “drunkards” whose “thirst for milk is never quenched.” The difference was that at this time, milk was expensive, and the problem of continuous milk drinking was limited to the “well-to-do.” Now, industrialized agriculture has made milk so cheap that almost anyone can afford to be a milk drunkard. Even children who are not given excess milk to drink may be weaned onto sugary commercial yogurts, which also build strong memories of the goodness of milk sugar.
Statistics on global ice-cream consumption (as of 2013, the world ate more than 14 billion liters of it, and rising) suggest that plenty of adults as well as children engage in the near-continuous intake of sweet dairy. And when we speak of drinking coffee, what many of us now mean by that is a “milk-based coffee drink” such as cappuccino, latte, or flat white. A squirt of flavored syrup takes it closer still to the milk we remember from our toddler days.
Snack Paks! Before play. Snack Paks! In the park.
Snack Paks! To share.
From a box of Barnum’s Animal Crackers,
quoted in Elliott (2008)
R
ice pudding is a childhood food that causes some to
shudder and others to shiver with pleasure. It is either a milky bowl of comfort or punishment disguised as dessert. For my husband, one of the benefits of being a grown-up is that he has been liberated from any duty to eat either porridge or rice pudding. When asked to explain the roots of his dismay, the word “claggy” will feature. If I point out that the texture is just like risotto—which he loves—he responds that no one made him eat risotto for school dinners. It doesn’t matter whether the pudding is baked in the oven until a nutmeggy skin forms, or stirred on the stovetop with vanilla pods and lemon zest (my preferred way). The sight and smell make him want to flee. When the children and I eat it, delicious spoonfuls topped with cream and muscovado sugar, he has been known to leave the room.
If we learn to eat mainly as children, then the food on which we hone our eating skills is children’s food. Yet the education offered by this curious category of cuisine tends to reinforce in various ways the deep-seated belief that healthy food can never be likable. Over the centuries, the grown-ups who have devised children’s food have seldom paid much
attention to the fact that its composition matters not just in the short term but because it forms how the children will eat in adult life. Modern meals marketed at children send the message that if you are a kid, you cannot be expected to find enjoyment in anything so boring as real, whole food. The kids’ foods in supermarkets, laced with sugar and adorned with happy cartoons, teach children that what they eat must be a form of entertainment, portable packages of fun. In earlier times, parents and providers did not attempt to make children’s food enjoyable, never mind fun; there was a quasi-religious virtue in being the sort of child who could suffer flavorless food. As the cookery writer Ruth Lowinsky observed in 1931, “when we were children, it was considered good for our souls as well as our bodies to be continually fed on any food we disliked.”
As we’ve seen, the main way that anyone learns to like new foods is through repeated exposure. But the example of rice pudding—and of nursery food in general—adds a new condition to this rule. If a food is repeatedly tasted under conditions of coercion or stress, the exposure may have the effect of reinforcing rather than reversing an aversion. For those of a certain age, the problem with rice pudding is that it is what children were
meant
to eat. Growing up, you could not avoid it. “Cold mutton and rice pudding” is the menu most dreaded by the Bastable children in E. Nesbitt’s
The Treasure Seekers
(1899), dreaded because it was inevitable. In the poorer American schools in the early twentieth century, rice pudding was treated as a staple, to be served in many forms. Sometimes it came with bread on the side like soup; in Cincinnati, children were given it in a cone, like ice cream. Milk puddings of every kind—tapioca, sago, semolina, ground rice, whole rice—appeared with such regularity on school dinner menus that the children gloomily eating them might well have imagined that no grown-up ever stopped to think whether it was right to treat a child in this way.
They might have been surprised to learn that for two years in a row at London’s Guildhall, in 1912 and 1913, before World War I took minds elsewhere, some of the top educators in Britain earnestly debated rice pudding’s role as food for children. When they spoke of rice pudding, what these educators were really getting at was the broader problem of chil
dren’s diets. This is why it is worth returning to this moment in history to illuminate some of our own confusion about how to feed children.
The 1912–1913 debates happened at the end of half a century of intense discussions around the world about children’s diets that were prompted by growing unease about child hunger. The dominant view at the time was that children—like animals—needed to be filled up with whatever wholesome fodder their elders chose for them, rather than being given free choice. Teachers, doctors, and social campaigners, who reported that poor children’s problems with food went beyond starvation, began to challenge this dogma. Dr. Hall, who worked with slum children in the city of Leeds in the north of England, found that many of them had no clue how to chew food: “They put it into their mouths,” said Dr. Hall, “and down it went like a letter going in a letter box.” There were reports of children who could not hold a spoon, of two-year-olds who were addicted to pickles and strong cups of tea. What these children needed, suggested Dr. Hall and many others, was food that could serve as an education in how to eat.
The period from the mid-nineteenth century to World War I was a rare moment when improving children’s food became a matter of serious politics, thanks to the spread of free and compulsory education. From the 1860s onward, a school food movement had sprung up to address the problem of large numbers of children arriving at school too hungry to study. How could the authorities force children to attend school during mealtimes without taking some responsibility for feeding them? By 1912, school food had been reformed in Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Britain. Paris led the way with the Cantines Scolaires, dining rooms that continue in the city to this day offering good cheap meals to students. At the original French Cantines Scolaires, in 1867, the poorest children could produce a meal ticket and be given a hearty lunch such as roast veal and macaroni cheese, or meat broth followed by boiled beef and lentils.
In Britain, the options were far less varied. A new system of school lunches came in with the Provision of Meals Act of 1906, but the mainstay was the “Eternal Rice Pudding,” as the
Daily Mail
called it. In 1912, a Manchester grammar school’s dessert menu ran as follows:
Monday: stewed fruit and custard, rice pudding
Tuesday: rice pudding and jam
Wednesday: rice pudding, tapioca pudding with jam
Thursday: rice pudding and stewed fruit
Friday: rice pudding and jam
Rice pudding—which in Edwardian terms was a health food—had much to recommend it as a food for children. It was filling. It was cheap. It was rich in both milk and “farinaceous” matter, which the best experts in nutrition agreed was wholesome fare for the young.
But did children like it? The 1912–1913 rice-pudding debates were part of two conferences on the future of school food in Britain that urgently considered the question of how children’s health could be improved. This was more than a decade after the Boer War had revealed that many young British men were too undernourished to fight. The stated aim of the conferences was “rearing an imperial race.” Despite their supposedly nutritious school meals, many British children remained in a shockingly poor physical condition, with widespread tooth decay, stunting, and gastric malaise. In some schools, teachers reported that children actually lost weight after the new meals were introduced, because they refused to try them, preferring the stodge they knew.
This was where rice pudding came into the conversation. Delegates stood up and debated the case for and against milk puddings. What they were really debating was whether food should be designed to cater to children’s tastes. At this time, the prevailing view, inherited from the Victorians, was that children must eat food that was good for them, even if it didn’t taste good.
Especially
if it didn’t taste good: to eat bland rations without complaining showed that a child had moral fiber. But at the Guildhall in 1912, some made a new and radical proposition: What if the best food for children was whatever they enjoyed eating best?
Several prominent teachers argued that it was time to abolish rice pudding from schools. They did not dispute that rice pudding was healthy, but saw it as a test case for the question of whether children’s own tastes should be considered when choosing their food. Their answer—a slightly daring one for post-Edwardian times—was yes.
W. A. Nicholls, the head teacher of a slum school in Portsmouth, argued that it was a “specialized sort of cruelty” to force a child to eat rice pudding (it did not occur to him that a child might eat it of their own free will). He confessed that he himself detested rice pudding and never ate it. George Rainey, who ran a children’s canteen in London, said that when he served rice pudding to forty poor boys, much went uneaten. In his view, children “appreciate something which requires masticating,” and “have an aversion to food which is neither liquid nor solid, such as thick soup or rice pudding.” At the opposite end of the class spectrum, Dr. Clement Dukes of Rugby School agreed. “Children crave for sweets,” Dukes remarked, “and so do I.” Instead of wholesome but insipid milk-based desserts, they should be allowed such treats as jam pudding.
A different view was offered on rice pudding by the delegates who had come to the conference from Bradford, an industrial center in the north of England. At this time, under the guidance of a visionary medical officer named Ralph Crowley, Bradford was the greatest pioneer of good school food in the country. Before school meals were brought in, the city had suffered some of the worst child malnutrition in England. Dr. Crowley oversaw a team of doctors who examined all of the 60,000 schoolchildren in Bradford. He declared that “at least” 6,000, 10 percent, were malnourished. The new meals established in 1906, said Crowley, needed to address the children’s “protein starvation” rather than a general lack of food. The Fabian politician Margaret McMillan, who worked with Crowley, said that the great aim of the Bradford meals was to avoid “stupid feeding.”
Crowley insisted that the lunches must be varied, appealing, and, above all, educative: the meals should teach children hygiene (clean hands and faces!); how to sit and eat calmly, without “undue noise or bustle”; and, most importantly, how to acquire new tastes, instead of relying on the diet of canned food and coffee they were used to. Each day, the children of Bradford were given a two-course meal, rotating on a three-week cycle, with plenty of protein, fat, and vegetables and not too much sugar. Crowley was a deeply humane man. When people spoke of the difficulties of feeding children, he replied that there was “only one
point” that mattered, that “the child must not suffer.” Under Crowley’s supervision, the dinner tables in Bradford schools were laid with cloths with a vase of flowers or a plant in the center of each one. Every effort was made to tempt the children to try new dishes. Including rice pudding. Unlike Nicholls, the delegates from Bradford did not consider it a cruelty to serve rice pudding to children.
The difference was that the Bradford envoys were the only ones who seemed to have grasped that children’s food ought to be devised with a view to a person’s future development. They started from the assumption that when the quality of food provided was good enough, children could learn new and more beneficial tastes. A colleague of Crowley’s, Marion E. Cuff, who devised the Bradford menus, stood up to defend rice pudding to the assembled company at the Guildhall. “She noted,” said one report, that “while it might not be a favourite in London, in Bradford ‘it is the pudding that the children like better than any other.’”
As Miss Cuff spoke, it became clear that rice pudding in Bradford schools was something far more delicious than the dessert served under the same name in London. The kitchen equipment used to make the school meals in Bradford was said to be the finest at any school in the world, with porcelain baths for washing vegetables and special steam-jacketed boilers. In Bradford, rice pudding was cooked at a very slow heat for three hours with plenty of milk and nutmeg until rich and creamy. The London rice pudding, by contrast, was “an economical affair,” the conference heard: waterlogged and cooked without much care.
Another big difference between rice pudding in Bradford and in London was the way it was served. Just as in London, the Bradford children often rejected milk puddings when they first tasted them. But Crowley and Cuff did not take this initial rejection as a sign that rice pudding was a food that children would never like. They understood that some of the poor children arriving at school were used to eating nothing but bread at home, and therefore needed gentle encouragement to accustom them to rice pudding. In Bradford, milk puddings were presented in as great a variety as possible—rice, sago, ground rice, and others. No child was forced to try any of them, but after a little encouragement, said Miss Cuff, “they get to like them all.” New foods were offered in small helpings and with
individual attention to reluctant eaters. Each table had a “monitress”: an older girl dressed in an apron, who was painstakingly trained to help the younger children eat, but without rushing them. The aim was to get the children to the point where they actively relished the “tissue building” foods that would help them grow.
This suggests real wisdom about children’s food. The Bradford school food pioneers saw that children’s food did not have to be something healthy that children did not like (such as old-fashioned watery rice pudding), or something unhealthy that children did like (such as jam pudding). With good cooking and a patient but persistent approach at mealtimes, it could be food that was both good for the children and enjoyable. Crowley recognized that his task was the long-term formation of healthy food habits, rather than just filling up “small savages” with whatever they were used to eating.
This crucial insight has not endured. Even more than adult food, children’s food has tended to treat pleasure and health as enemies. Either you are “eating up” your greens for the sake of obedience and health, or you are being indulged with “naughty” treats. If you internalize these lessons as a child, the odds are, you may never fully shrug them off.
In the end, the rice-pudding debates went nowhere. World War I diverted attention away from the finer points of children’s taste. For decades afterward, British schoolchildren continued to be served milk puddings of varying quality, with little expectation that they would enjoy them. Chef Rowley Leigh, born in 1950, ate milk pudding “at least twice a week” throughout childhood, whether “at home or at school,” and recalled that while “greedy little chaps like me would lick their lips, others would recoil.” So nothing much had changed.