First Bite: How We Learn to Eat (16 page)
But the way to protect them in such an environment is not to keep them in a bubble where all the foods are nutritionally perfect. What children need is to develop the skills to navigate the environment for themselves. The problem with this purist version of children’s food, just as much as the unhealthy kid food, is: What happens when they grow up? All “children’s food” comes with an assumption that one day you will stop being a child and eat something else.
People from those parts of the world that have still not completely given in to the Western diet speak of how strange they find the concept of “children’s food” altogether. Baby food is one thing. Contrary to what people often say, babies in India are not weaned onto highly spiced foods. During the first year, they might be fed various bland mushes of well-boiled vegetables, with added ghee to boost the calories, or overcooked milky cereals.
Suji kheer
is thought a good food for babies. It is semolina cooked with sugar and milk—in other words, not dissimilar to rice pudding. After children are one or so, however, they move on to roughly the same variety of foods that the rest of the family is eating, in both texture
and taste, though extra efforts are made to give them enough protein. In India, children’s food is just food. Depending on what family you have the luck to be born into, it might be good food or bad food; it might be enough or not enough. The crucial difference with this setup is that the food of childhood is not something you ever have to outgrow. In the West, we think we will outgrow it. But the truth is we often don’t.
During World War II, the American anthropologist Margaret
Mead was executive secretary of the National Research Council’s Committee on Food Habits. One of the questions Mead was asked to look into was the puzzle of how people could be made to change their food habits. The background was the worry about how Americans might be encouraged to accept the deprivation of wartime food shortages, particularly of meat. Mead saw that people did actually very often change their food behaviors. The pitfall was that when a diet felt constricting, people were liable to swing in the opposite direction as soon as they were free to do so. She gave the example of childhood. Families brought children up to eat less meat, drink more milk, and eat more vegetables than their parents:
Generation after generation, children are reared with the recognition that the customary diet contains foods, some more and some less approved, and they are exhorted to make the choice of foods which are “good for you” as a matter of moral choice. At the same time, there is implicit in the forms of persuasion and reward, an expectation that most children as they grow older, especially male children as they become men, will insist on making wilful choices in favour of foods which are not good for them.
As Mead recognized, the concept of nursery food was based on a double standard. If it was true that there was one stage of life when it was vital not to ingest anything unwholesome, it might follow that at a later stage, these unwholesome things might suddenly be allowed or even encouraged. The most blatant example is alcohol. In many families, it was a rite of passage for fathers to get their sons drunk. By the same token, once
you were a man, you could safely eat steak and shun green vegetables without anyone telling you off. If anything, it only added to your manliness. It showed that you were no mummy’s boy.
For girls, too, the rules of food changed on the cusp of adulthood. Food writer Elizabeth David recalled the wonderful moment when she was free to leave the nursery and take tea downstairs in the drawing room with the grown-ups. Suddenly there were elegant sweet cakes and delicious small sandwiches that actually tasted of something. She would never again be made to drink milk or eat rice pudding. It was relatively easy to outgrow “nursery food,” because there was never any expectation that you would like it.
What’s less obvious is what happens when people outgrow the unhealthy and highly flavored “kid food” of the postwar years. Or whether they do outgrow it. Have you noticed that when someone wants to express that something tastes extra specially wonderful, they will often invoke childhood? Ice cream sundaes are described as “so good you’ll think you were a kid again,” which signals not just that the whipped cream is rich and the chocolate sauce is darkly luscious, but that you are allowed to eat it without the burden of adult guilt. At David Chang’s Momofuku restaurants in New York and Toronto, they sell a dessert called “cereal milk” that is meant to taste like the milk left behind after a bowl of cornflakes. And it does: malty, milky, and sweet. You can opt to have it plain, or frozen as ice cream.
In theory, we should all reach a level of maturity where we put our childish tastes behind us. We swap our candy habit for a coffee one. Salad becomes a part of our lives and we grow to appreciate bitter flavors: espresso, chicory, Campari and soda. Desserts are laced with spirits (tiramisu) or flavored with challenging ingredients such as cardamom, as if to render them childproof. Many fashionable dinner-party dishes involve an ostentatious adoption of once-hated ingredients: chicken-liver crostini, caramelized Brussels sprouts, fennel gratin. This is how it goes for a lucky minority, anyway.
But judging from what we know of the world’s diet over the past few decades, it is clear that large numbers of adults as well as children have now become habituated to eating a version of “kid food” over a whole
lifetime: sweet, salty, undemanding to chew and swallow, and heavily processed. The kind of menus you typically see at casual chain restaurants suggests that when adults go out to eat, they want childish comfort: sweet-salty ribs, breadcrumbed chicken, cheesy pasta.
Professor Barry Popkin, at the University of North Carolina’s School of Public Health in Chapel Hill, has gathered data on dietary change across the world over the past few decades. Popkin found that “globally, our diet is becoming increasingly energy-dense and sweeter. At the same time, higher-fiber foods are being replaced by processed versions. There is enormous variability in eating patterns globally, but the broad themes seem to be retained in most countries.” This suggests that “kid food” has given us tastes that are enduringly narrow, increasingly homogenized, and very unhealthy. “Kid food” has a more permanent hold on our tastes than “nursery food” not because such foods as frosted cereals and cheese strings are objectively any more delicious than rice pudding, but because they are offered without any “should” attached.
Over the past fifty years, global food tastes have progressively narrowed to what is referred to as an SFS palate: sugar/fat/salt. No matter what you order in a fast-food restaurant, from hamburgers to salad dressing to apple pie, the odds are it will be united by a common flavor: not sweet-sour, but sweet-salty, with an undertow of fat. This matters, because, as we have seen, flavor has a remarkable ability to imprint itself on our memories, and therefore, to drive our future food choices. Repeated exposures to SFS foods early in life teaches us that this is how all food should taste. This homogenized sweet-saltiness is now ubiquitous in many supposedly adult treats, from pretzel croissants to salted caramel to pulled pork sandwiches.
The legacy of “nursery food” was to create adults who, for the most part, were only too eager to leave the constraints of the rice pudding years behind them and graduate to something more delicious. The legacy of being reared on “kid food” may be a state of arrested development when it comes to food. In 2002, a team of researchers devised a five-year study looking at seventy families to determine whether tastes for certain foods remained constant between the ages of around three and eight. Sure enough, in almost every case, the children studied continued to like the same foods during that stretch. The truly startling finding, however,
was the extent to which the eight-year-olds’ tastes matched those of their mothers. Admittedly, the mothers had learned to stop disliking some of the foods that traumatized eight-year-olds: these grown-ups were braver about raw onions, for example, and green peas. But the most passionately “liked” foods of the mothers were exactly the same “kid foods” that the eight-year-olds preferred, and the list looks like a recipe for nutritional disaster. Nearly all of them, adult or child, were most fond of popcorn, soft white rolls, French fries, chocolate chip cookies, ground beef, hamburgers, doughnuts, processed cheese, pancakes, syrup, muffins, pizza, and white sugar. The only food on the list that was obviously healthy was raw apple, liked by sixty-nine children and seventy mothers.
When parents as well as children are eating “kid food,” perhaps it’s time to call it something else. “Kid food” started off as something separate and different from normal food. Now it is close to being the new normal for all age groups. The danger is that when adults have childish tastes, it becomes very difficult for anyone to break the cycle and learn the pleasures of real food.
In recent years,
something called “birthday cake” ice cream has started popping up. It is a lurid multicolored confection with sprinkles, clots of frosting, and chunks of cake running through it. The idea is that it tastes like the lovingly iced cake your mother made for you when you were six and it was your birthday and you gave your friends slices of cake to take home, damply wrapped in party napkins. Except that you are not six anymore, and it isn’t your birthday.
This feels emblematic of how our eating has gone wrong (see also cookie dough ice cream). Birthday cake ice cream is designed to tap into special memories of blowing out your candles and eating a once-a-year treat with your family. But if you can eat it in a cone any day of the year, on a whim, the whole point is lost. The existence of birthday cake ice cream suggests that we can no longer distinguish celebration foods from everyday ones. We are also not too sure whether we are children or adults.
With children’s lives full of so many other sweet treats, birthday cake should have lost some of its emotional weight. If anything, though, the stakes are now higher. Birthday cake has morphed into a pure symbol of parental love. Nicola Humble, the author of
Cake
, says, “I swear each year that I will not go overboard on my son’s birthday cake, and each year the construction is more complicated, more ambitious, more absurd”: a treasure chest, a planet with marzipan aliens, a pyramid cake containing a secret tomb.
Birthday cake is one of those childhood foods we find it hardest to let go of. “Don’t they carry one back to all one’s parties?” says the heroine of Katherine Mansfield’s story “The Garden Party,”
looking at a plate of cream puffs. Many a diet is broken because it feels so cruel to reject a colleague’s request to share a slice of cake on his or her birthday. You don’t want to be the mean kid at the party who spoiled the games.
It’s not birthday cake in itself that is the problem. It’s the surrounding culture of food, where sweet treats are ever present, consumed without ceremony. In France, according to parenting author Pamela Druckerman, homemade yogurt cake is used as a lesson in delayed gratification. The child helps make the cake in the morning and has to wait until the afternoon to eat it. It’s a useful exercise—for adults, too. Healthy eating should not preclude the odd cake. But it’s good to be able to wait: if not for a whole year, at least for an hour or two.
His outstanding memory about his early life was his
mother’s urging him to eat, always with a stern invocation:
“
Ess, ess, ich sterbe weg
” (Eat, eat or I will die).
Hilde Bruch
, 1974 (of a middle-aged doctor in
New York City who had suffered a heart attack
but could not bring himself to lose weight)
A
fter my parents split up, my father often took me to the
station to catch the train back to my mother’s house. Although we had usually just eaten lunch, he would offer to buy me a magazine and “one more thing” to eat before we said good-bye. I could choose anything. I started to see that whatever I asked for during those anxious moments at the station would be granted, even a whole box of shiny Maltesers, chocolate-coated malted milk balls, the sort of indulgence that in earlier days of family life would only have been purchased on rare trips to the cinema or theater, and carefully shared out among the four of us. Now, the rules of food had changed. On the train home, as I pored over my copy of
Marie Claire
, the roof of my mouth became sore from sucking the crunchy honeycomb out of each chocolate sphere, with no one telling me to stop.
At first, I saw these transactions at the train station mainly in terms of my own appetite and the happy carb rush I was seeking.
“Mmm, fattening!” in the words of Homer Simpson. Later, it got more complicated. Around the age of sixteen, I became self-conscious about my increasing weight. When the moment came for my father to offer me “one more thing,” a voice in my head would tell me to say I wasn’t hungry, or to ask for a Diet Coke. But I hardly ever managed it. The prize of the treats was too great. It wasn’t just the taste. It was the feeling of merit; if you are being rewarded with food by a grown-up, you must have done something good. For years afterward, whenever I found myself traveling by train, my automatic reaction was to buy myself some indulgence or other.
It was only much later, as a parent myself, and rather too eager to dole out platefuls of cookies and milk whenever my children had friends around, that I realized the person my father was rewarding was primarily himself. He agonized about the divorce. To cast himself in the role of the bringer of treats, the generous provider, could make the good-byes less painful for him, as well as for me. To give a child the things she loves to eat bestows a heroic glow. It feels almost as wonderful as eating. Seeing a child fed reassures you that you have done your duty as a parent, like a mother bird ferrying worms to the nest. During the years following the divorce, my sister was for the most part refusing offers of food, treats or otherwise. The only child remaining to be plied with goodies was me, and I was happy to oblige, beak open.
Much of what we learn about eating comes from the way our
parents feed us. As a child, you assume that the grown-ups know what they are doing. But they are mostly just figuring things out as best they can, meal by meal, drawing on the convictions and prejudices they inherited from their own upbringing. Some parents use food as a pacifier, to keep the little ones quiet. Some withhold treats for bad behavior. Others fret about foods that are too rich or too strange for tiny stomachs, and pass on a generalized anxiety about eating. Trends in food change from decade to decade, yet our default patterns of eating are largely a response to an older generation’s own complicated attitudes toward food. Almost all parents want the best for their children, but they are frequently too hung up on the indignities of the past to see the real problems in front of them or to separate a child’s
needs from their own urges. A parent who was forced to eat vegetables in an atmosphere of repression may take joy in seeing children enjoy anarchic TV dinners of whatever they please. Likewise, any parent who remembers hunger will have a special stake in seeing a child eat. Feeding, like eating, is a learned behavior, and the methods that most parents absorb for doing it are based on the values of former times when a child needed to be protected from scarcity rather than plenty. Urging a child to take one more bite is no longer the way to keep them safe.
Not all children are overfed. When a child is neglected, one of the surest signs is underfeeding. As many as 5 to 10 percent of all children in the United States aged two through five show poor growth related to scant feeding, rather than to some organic cause (such as celiac disease). The medical term is “failure to thrive,” meaning that an infant is not getting enough food to grow and develop properly. The single greatest risk factor for failure to thrive across the world is poverty. In cases stemming from poverty, the poor feeding is unavoidable, or at least unintentional. But there can be other reasons for the condition as well. Feeding is a complex interplay between parent and child, and sometimes failure to thrive is caused in part by avoidant eating behavior in the child, which in turn makes the parent more anxious about feeding. And in some cases, failure to thrive is a sign that other things have gone deeply wrong in the child’s care. One study suggests that up to 80 percent of mothers whose babies failed to thrive due to nonorganic causes had experienced a history of abuse in their own past. The fact that a child is not getting enough to eat is often a sign of a home where there is alcohol or drug abuse or domestic violence. In the worst cases, a parent may intentionally withhold food from a child. This is such a chilling thought that it’s no wonder we sometimes act as if feeding were the same as love.
Feeding children is an immense responsibility. To take on the burden of someone else’s nourishment until they are old enough to do it for themselves is an expensive, thankless, and often unwelcome task. In times of scarce resources, having another mouth to feed can entail sacrifices and adjustments from everyone else in the household. (The scandal of baby formula being marketed in the developing world is not just that bottle-feeding is dangerous when water is unclean. It is that it costs families so much. In Bangladesh, a factory worker might spend as much as a third of his or her income to buy formula for a baby.)
When food becomes affordable and plentiful, the emotions associated with feeding children start to look rather different. Okay, it’s still not fun having bowls of spaghetti upended, and no chef has to endure the crushing ego blow of having a lovingly cooked casserole spat out as “too lumpy.” Standing at the toddler swings in the park, parents are constantly swapping gripes about feeding. We bemoan the tedium of carrying “healthy” snacks around until a bag becomes a mess of rice-cake debris and squashed dried apricots. It maddens us when a child picks at his lunch, then claims to be hungry half an hour later. And the meals never stop coming. “Didn’t I already do this yesterday?” you think when another breakfast has to be produced, so soon after the last one.
In all this companionable griping, however, you hardly ever hear anyone whisper the secret truth that feeding children—especially giving them treats, where the question of likes and dislikes does not weigh so heavily—can be pretty fun. It feels like parental affection in its purest form. Some of us get our kicks at the school gates doling out hugs and
pain au chocolat
. It’s a thrill to see eyes light up on the arrival of a birthday cake or to be the one buying when you visit an ice-cream stand on a hot day. After you’ve spent a decade or more fantasizing about the cotton candy of childhood—that warm fluffy halo of sweetness—it feels exhilarating to have a reason to buy it again. When something is easy, we say it’s like “taking candy from a baby.” Actually, the fingers cling on pretty tightly, I’ve found. The truly easy thing is giving the baby candy in the first place.
Feeding can be a cheap thrill, something so enjoyable that even children themselves aspire to do it, acting it out for fun. No less than eating, feeding can be a compulsion. To see small creatures gobbling up treats is very rewarding. The pleasure of keeping pets, for example, is largely about bringing home the food the animal likes and watching it vanish, whether it’s goldfish flakes sprinkled in a tank or hamster muesli scoffed up and stored in cheek pouches. We often assume that the urge to push food into another mouth is part of a deep maternal (or paternal) instinct and that the act of feeding others is a form of dutiful sacrifice: you are
putting someone else’s needs before your own. And often it is so. But we still need to account for the fact that feeding is seen as an enjoyable activity by some of the least maternal and self-sacrificing people you could meet. I am talking about video game players.
In 1980, Pac-Man launched in arcades in both Japan and the
United States, and was an instant hit, changing the whole video game industry. It took its name from the Japanese phrase
paku-paku
, referring to the sound a mouth makes when it opens and shuts. If you play the game for long enough, cherries, strawberries, oranges, apples, and grapes appear on the screen. When Pac-Man eats these fruits, they work as a “power-up,” which means that for a while afterward, he scores more points for every dot he consumes. Pac-Man is not eating food in any normal human sense. Nevertheless, the game’s basic appeal, which has been replicated by many other games since, is the hypnotic pleasure of seeing a small creature consuming rewards.
Among video game designers, there is a common language of treats. Whether you are playing the game in Mexico City or Moscow, there are items that are instantly recognizable as good things to feed the characters onscreen. It might be a hamburger or a hotdog crisscrossed with ketchup, but most likely it’s something sweet: a rectangle of chocolate, an ice cream sundae, a glazed doughnut. “One thing that everyone knows in every culture in the world is that sweet things are awesome,” says Luis Gigliotti one autumn morning sitting in a coffee shop. Gigliotti is a creative director in the games industry with twenty years of experience designing games for pretty much every platform—from consoles to online games to mobile tablets. I first met him in this same coffee shop when I overheard him having an intense conversation about how “cool” it would be to see a dog eating peanut butter. Gigliotti, who wears earrings and an LA Dodgers baseball cap and has heavily tattooed arms, goes by the name of “Lu” or sometimes “Dumpsta.” He has worked on games from Grand Theft Auto and Devil May Cry (a “hack-n-slash” fantasy) to smaller free-to-play “addictable” games with cute characters and speedy payoffs.
Gigliotti sees gaming potential everywhere. When he looks at a pastry, he sees a symbol of happiness. “Why are these displayed on the counter?” he asks, gesticulating at an assortment of sticky buns and croissants. “They are trying to make us hungry.” Over the years, Gigliotti has developed a clear understanding of what players will accept as treats “foodwise.” Color is important, for example. “Pink’s nothing but good,” he says (whether the player is male or female); red and even blue are appealing, too, but not usually green, because we associate it with sickness. This is one reason—albeit not the only one—that you won’t often see leafy greens used as a treat in computer games. It is simply not as rewarding for us to see characters eating green spinach as it is when they eat pink cake. Dark brown roasted things, on the other hand, work very well. “A brown turkey or the side of a beautifully roasted chicken steaming up with all the fixings. It’s synonymous with a feast.” But the quickest way to signify “treat” is to go for something sweet.
Feeding a computer character with treats is—evidently—not the same as feeding a real child. Often, you are so strongly identified with the hero, it is as if you are eating the treat yourself. But while neither the food nor the character is real, some of the payoff is the same. You want to see the treat vanish and the happy face appear, and when this happens, you feel great about yourself. The key thing with any game, says Gigliotti, is to create a connection with the main character and their world. The feelings are real, even if the images are not. “Once you’ve created empathy, then all the normal things that give you joy or grief will now apply to what happens to that character onscreen.”
When I met Gigliotti, he was working on a new game about a character called Shark Baby. She is an endearing little girl with pigtails, but when she sees something she likes, her eyes flip back and she turns into a shark and devours everything in her path, edible or not. It’s the player’s job to try to placate Shark Baby with treats so that she doesn’t wreak too much havoc, to herself or others, on her adventures. In one scene, Shark Baby is trying to cross a dangerous ravine. Her friend, a make-believe tiger, has a magical sack containing “yummy cakes,” which will help her get across to safety. It is our role to take the cake from the sack and use it to guide her over the ravine. By giving her cake, we make ourselves
heroic. The emotion we will feel when we do this, suggests Gigliotti, is very similar to the feeling of supporting a charity or helping a stranger.
In his own life, Gigliotti does not subsist on pink cake, nor is he friends with make-believe tigers. He and his wife have a toddler whom they feed “organic everything.” His wife disapproves, he says, of those parents who buy their kids fast food every day. But when designing games, he taps into a different value system. Gigliotti was born in Argentina to an Italian mother, a very good cook. Money was often tight and meat was a rare luxury. They only moved to the United States when he was nine. Once they built their new American life, his mother couldn’t understand when her son brought home vegetarian friends. Meat was the thing you aspired to, so why would you willfully reject it when it was there in front of you?
When he dreams up his games, Luis Gigliotti thinks like his thrifty Italian Argentine mother, for whom overfeeding was not the kind of problem you could ever imagine having. The reason we want to feed characters with sweet things in games, he tells me, is that they are “not an everyday thing. Why is dessert at the end of a meal? It’s a reward. Sugar is a luxury item. If you are poor, you don’t eat sweets. If you can afford sweets, you are living the good life.” He smiles his wide white California smile and we look again at the piles of treats on the coffee shop counter, which both of us can afford, but neither of us is eating.