First Bite: How We Learn to Eat (18 page)

Fourier remembered that when eating with his schoolteacher, he was often required to eat turnips, which he loathed. One time he tried to throw his turnip away, only to be discovered by the teacher and forced to eat it, now covered in dust.

At home, likewise, Fourier was often forced by his father to finish food that he did not like. On one occasion, his father compelled him to eat leeks until he was violently sick. The memory left scars. Later, as an adult, Fourier worked as a traveling salesman, in his spare time writing books of social theory. The foundation of his philosophy was that no one should ever be forced to do anything that went against his inclinations. He dreamed up a utopia—Harmony—in which bread, instead of being the staple food, would be replaced with a mixture of fruit and sugar, more to children’s tastes. For him, forcing someone to eat food they could not stand was a form of child abuse.

Fourier’s older sister Lubine remembered things slightly differently. Charles was the baby of the family—he had four older sisters—and, as Lubine told it, he was his father’s favorite. Lubine recalled that their father’s strictness, when it came to whether Charles finished up his food, was a sign of particular fondness. She observed that her brother was “very delicate about his food.” Her papa’s aim in getting him used to “cleaning his plate” was the thought that “no one knows the situation in which he may find himself placed in life.” He bullied Charles to eat in the hope of toughening him up for a cruel world, since he “loved him as one loves an only son.” According to Lubine, as soon as he saw his beloved child vomit, he regretted his actions and promised to let the boy “do as he chose in the matter of food.” But for young Charles it was too late. He would never forget his father’s cruelty, and he would never be able to eat leeks.

How many parents and children have been locked in such battles over the years? It starts with a delicate child who is reluctant to eat. This makes the parent anxious that the child is not getting enough good, nutritious food—in this case, turnips and leeks. They try to force matters, which only increases the child’s reluctance, turning suspicion of the healthy food into an active loathing. Whether the food is eaten or not eaten, no one wins in the end.

It does seem a crazy way for parents to behave, but throughout history it has often been driven by a genuine fear of scarcity. For anyone lucky enough to know only postwar plenty, it is hard to reconstruct just how great was the horror of waste to earlier generations. The sight of nutritious food being pushed to the side of a plate is never enjoyable, but in
a time of world war, or economic depression, it began to seem to some like a selfishness akin to crime. In 1940,
The Times
published an editorial calling for it to be made “an offence” to waste food. My granny was born in 1908, and whenever we ate a baked potato in her house she used to recite this rhyme (half sternly, half in jest):

Dearly Beloved Brethren

Is it Not a Sin

To Eat a Baked Potato

And Throw Away the Skin?

Skins Feed Pigs

Pigs Feed We

Dearly Beloved Brethren

One, Two, Three.

Luckily, I thought the skin of a baked potato was the best part, particularly if there was a raft of butter to spread into the crispy crevices. Plus, I was the kind of child who never needed to be coerced to finish. But maybe I’d have enjoyed the skin even more without being told it was sinful not to eat it.

The clean plate—and coercing children to eat against their will generally—is one of a range of traditional feeding techniques founded on a fear that food shortages are just around the corner. These techniques were impatient ones devised by parents who did not have time to sit around fussing about likes and dislikes (though, ironically, a determination to wait with a child until she cleans her plate can make a meal go on all day). In rural Nigeria, it is still the norm for mothers to hand-feed children on diluted, fermented maize called
eko
. Mothers give the eko from hand to mouth because it is quicker than a spoon, no small matter when the mother works eight hours a day as a market trader. If children resist being hand-fed, mothers resort to force-feeding. Observers have watched as the mother covers the child’s nose with a cupped hand so that they cannot breathe, forcing them to swallow the maize porridge.

The assumption underlying such techniques is that a parent knows better than the child what his stomach needs. The psychologist Leann
Birch has identified a series of “traditional feeding practices” all based on protecting children from scarcity. These include:

Feeding children frequently

Offering large portions

Offering food as a first response to crying

Coercing children to eat when food is available

When food is short, such strategies may be a way to protect a
growing child. But when obesity is more of a threat than famine, they lose their logic.

Birch has led many experiments whose results suggest that these traditional feeding methods are actively damaging in the modern world, resulting “in overeating and accelerated weight gain” as well as bad feelings around mealtimes. Feeding children too often can make them forget what their own hunger feels like. Large portions lead to overeating. And giving food to calm a distressed child teaches the child that unhappiness is a reason to eat. This last one explains a lot. If your mother interpreted all your cries as a cry for food—rather than for play or sleep or a fresh nappy—then it stands to reason you would feel inclined to treat yourself the same way as a grown-up, silencing your sadness with sugar.

As for coercing children to eat up, it teaches many things, and none of them are very helpful. If you are disgusted by the thing you are being forced to eat, it makes you fear the food on your plate and the person giving it to you. A study of 140 college students found that their strongest food aversion very often went back to an incident of “forced consumption.” Even if you are not disgusted, force-feeding trains you to obey the plate and not your own appetite. You learn to measure when to stop eating not by what your body is telling you, but by external forces.

It wasn’t as if people—at least child-rearing experts—were ever unaware that force-feeding was a bad idea. Manuals on feeding infants and children repeatedly warn against pushing food on a child who does not want it. In 1923, the pediatrician L. Emmet Holt insisted that “children should not be continually urged to eat if they are disinclined to do so at their regular hours of feeding or if the appetite is habitually poor, and
under no circumstances should a child be forced to eat.” Holt argued that the result of force-feeding was that the child “has less and less desire for food and may even have attacks of vomiting.” Likewise, an article on feeding from a nursing journal in 1944 noted that forcing food, and “too great concern on the part of the adult” about a child’s food intake, could “hinder a child’s progress” in eating.

But force-feeding can be a tempting strategy, nevertheless. I know, because, to my great shame, I did it to one of my children. L. Emmet Holt is right when he says that it begins “in despair” because the child’s appetite “is not keen.” Or at least, this was the case for me. My third child was born with a cleft palate, making it harder for him to swallow. When he was tiny, each feed could last an hour or more, at the end of which, much of the milk often gushed back up his nose and was lost. Before he had the operation to repair his palate at six months, I fed him through a combination of breastfeeding and expressed milk, which I gave him from bottles with special nipples. Even though it felt as if the whole day was dominated by feeding and expressing, he stopped gaining enough weight. The cleft nurses were worried. When I look back now at photos of him at the age of three or four months, I am startled by how skinny he looks, a little pale skull with wide, trusting eyes.

Once he switched to a mix of formula and breast milk, he did gain weight. Following the nurse’s advice, we spoon fed him on purees for two months before the operation. He took to them easily. It seemed to be a relief to him to be eating something thicker than milk. He loved carrots, mashed banana, all sorts of gunk. The operation at six months went fine and now he could swallow like anyone else, thanks to the embroidery of stitches on his palate. The nurses said he could go home as soon as he was eating enough. He learned to eat porridge and broccoli and beef stew and many sorts of dal. He was fine.

It was me that was the problem. Looking back, I see that I never lost the early anxiety about his feeding. At the age of eighteen months, he developed the classic balkiness about food that most toddlers go through. It got worse when we all traveled abroad for ten weeks for my husband’s work. Our toddler was fussier than his older siblings had ever been. Foods he had once adored he now spat out. At the same time, he became fixated on sweet
foods, begging for sugary
fromage frais
and gingerbread men. He called these “Run Runs” because of the story “The Gingerbread Man”: run, run, as fast as you can. Maybe he envied the way the gingerbread man could escape. In his own case, it wasn’t being eaten that he wanted to run away from, but being fed. Instead of sitting back and riding things out—as all the baby books advise, not to mention my common sense—I started to force matters.

At first, I would make him take “just one bite,” ramming in the tiniest spoonful of something that I “knew” he liked, saying “Mmmmm” in a pantomime voice. To start with, this worked. After the first taste of spaghetti bolognese or whatever, he remembered it was okay and carried on eating by himself. But increasingly, I found that he was still wildly shaking his head after the first taste. The thought of him skipping a meal was horrible. Maybe he needed another taste, I thought, forcing my spoon between his little clenched teeth. “Remember! You like carrots!” But he didn’t remember.

“I thought you were an awful mother,” said someone at a lunch party who had seen me ramming food into his mouth one day. The more I did it—hardly surprising—the more limited his repertoire of foods became. He even began to reject cake. It made me demented to think how little protein he was consuming, and how much sugar. At one stage, he would only consent to eat bananas, gingerbread men, muffins, dry cereal, and yogurt. These were the only things I wasn’t pressing him to eat, and therefore, the only ones he could safely enjoy. It makes me shudder now to think how offensive it must feel to have a large, powerful person bearing down, cramming a hard spoon between your teeth. “By far the worst aspect of weaning in my view,” Germaine Greer observed in a lecture from 1989, “is coming to terms with cold steel.” Pretending that the spoon is a train or an airplane only makes it worse: Would you like your mouth to be used as a runway? Grown-ups who have been asked to recall what being force-fed was like report emotions such as anger, humiliation, and betrayal. Force-feeding is a crime of passion, driven by a parent’s desire to see a child eat; as with other crimes of passion, the perpetrator has lost sight of the loved one’s autonomy.

Forcers of food always feel they are justified at some level (I know I did). In 2001, a group of students were asked by psychologists to look
back on times in their childhood when they were forced to eat food. More than two-thirds of the students had been forced to eat at least once. In almost every case, the students said that the authority figure’s “stated purpose was to benefit the child.” The most common reasons were to avoid wastefulness, to make a child get more variety into their diet, and to ensure the child ate healthy food (“We worry about your health when you don’t eat”). In a handful of cases, the reason given was tradition. No fewer than five of the students—who attended Southern Methodist University, near Dallas—had been forced to eat black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day, which is a good-luck ritual in that part of the world. One of the students had been called “un-American” for not wanting to consume a hotdog on the Fourth of July. The most frequently forced substances were vegetables (49.5 percent) and red meat (15.9 percent).

In our case, we broke the force-feeding habit. I backed off, and my son slowly broadened his horizons. A few months on, he rediscovered carrots, when I steamed some and brought them along on a stroller ride, presenting them as a surprise offering that he could try if he liked, rather than a meal pressed upon him. I stood well back, as if lighting fireworks, and he freely took some in his hand.

You, I am sure, would never behave in such a stupid and cruel way to a child. But there are other, subtler ways of coercing a child to eat that are far more normal. Interviews with mothers of preschoolers in 2011 found that 86 percent used “verbal encouragement,” and 54 percent used “physical encouragement,” to get their children to eat. Verbal encouragement might mean saying something like, “You can’t leave the table until you’ve finished.” Physical encouragement could be reverting to spoon-feeding a child who no longer needs it, or putting food on a fork for the child. Another study found that many parents believed that pressuring and cajoling a child to eat was a positive strategy to use at mealtimes. And indeed, it does seem perfectly reasonable. Anyone can see there’s a big difference between threatening to cane a child if they don’t finish a plate of leeks and pushing them to take three more bites.

Research suggests, however, that even quite mild verbal coercion changes how a child views food. Leann Birch and colleagues set up an experiment over an eleven-week period that involved offering soup to
preschool children in Pennsylvania. Sometimes the children were pressured to eat the soup and sometimes they were not. Two soups were chosen for the experiment: butternut squash and corn. Half of the children were pressured to eat only the squash soup and the other half were pressured to eat the corn soup. In the pressure situation, a grown-up calmly reminded the children four times—once every minute—to “finish your soup.” The no-pressure situation was exactly the same, except that the grown-up made no reminder to finish. Researchers measured the amount of soup the children ate, plus any comments they made. The effect of the pressure varied from child to child. A minority relished the challenge, saying things like, “Wow. Yellow soup! I think I can drink yellow soup!” and proudly showing the researchers their empty cups. But the vast majority of comments (157 of them) during the pressure situation were negative. Children said things like, “Yuck, it’s yellow soup again,” or, “I told you already I don’t like it.” When they were told to finish their soup, one child said, “You always say that to us and I don’t want it. It’s so annoying.”