First Bite: How We Learn to Eat (20 page)
The radical thinking behind Baby Led Weaning is that in developmental terms, we actually learn deliberate swallowing only after we have learned to chew. Babies, says Rapley, do not have the ability to move food to the back of their throats until after they have acquired the ability to chew. Rapley’s innovation was to let babies learn chewing first. Many of the first meals of a BLW-fed baby will provoke gagging and spitting, but Rapley does not view this as a bad thing. When a parsnip is regurgitated,
it is not cause for despair, but a sign that a baby is exploring different flavors and textures. As for the fear that BLW will lead to choking, Rapley claims this is not so, suggesting that there is good reason to think that babies “are at less risk of choking when they control what goes into their mouths.”
In the decade since it was launched, BLW has found rapturous followers among middle-class mothers, who say it has taken the stress and worry out of feeding. I’ve spoken to people who say it makes mealtimes a more equal interaction between parent and child, who sit side by side as companions at the table. But, as with the breastfeeding–versus–bottle-feeding debates, the BLW discussions on parenting websites can quickly descend into rancor on both sides, with the more dogmatic advocates of BLW suggesting that spoon-feeding in any form is akin to retarding a child’s development.
What’s most striking about the BLW literature is how it takes away the parent’s traditional role as feeder. No longer are parents to view themselves as beneficent providers of treats, like the mother bird passing worms to the nest. Parents, says Rapley, must resist the temptation to “help” a baby who is struggling to get food into his or her mouth. Nor should parents decide when it is time for a baby to stop drinking milk, or how many feeds to give. Rapley recommends continuing to breastfeed alongside the solid meals of finger food, because a breastfed baby is “always in control” of feeding, and will take more or less milk depending on how thirsty he is. “There is no need for [a baby’s] mother to make these decisions for him,” says Rapley. The parent must not hurry the child or chivvy him. And put down your knife. “There is no need to cut food into mouth-sized pieces.” Other than buying and cooking the food—which could be almost anything, but not fast food, ready meals, or choking hazards like nuts—the parent’s main role is to watch.
The evidence so far on BLW is not all positive. On the plus side, the mothers using BLW are required to behave in ways that are less restrictive and pressuring than those using traditional spoon-feeding. Babies fed in this way are more likely to eat the same foods as the rest of the family, which is a bonus, assuming that the family eats healthily. But in one small study of American mothers using BLW, it was found that
the grown-ups—
and by implication the babies—were eating excessive amounts of sugar and salt and inadequate amounts of micronutrients, especially folate.
There are also concerns as to whether all babies are developmentally ready for grabbing chunks of food at six months. Professor Charlotte Wright, a pediatrician from Glasgow, found that, of a sample of six hundred families, only 40 percent of babies were in fact ready to self-feed at six months. By eight months, 90 percent were ready to reach out spontaneously for food. This indicated to Wright that it was “unrealistic” to expect children to rely exclusively on self-feeding when they started on their first tastes of solids. Another problem with BLW is that, as we saw in Chapter 1, when a child waits until six months to start solids, they miss out on much of the crucial flavor window between four and seven months, when they would have been more receptive to acquiring new tastes.
BLW cannot be the one true way to feed a child, because nothing ever is. But it does suggest that babies need far less help with feeding than parents generally think, especially when so much of that “help” turns out to be counterproductive. Our current food environment requires children to learn very different skills from those taught by the traditional feeding methods. It can take years of reconditioning to see that it is not in our interests to take “one more bite” or clean our plates when we are already full, to realize that the people who taught us to eat were themselves not necessarily masters of the art of feeding. I know a grown man, the youngest of four, whose mother was still feeding him from baby jars when he started school. He is now middle-aged and still has nursery-food tendencies. Sooner or later, and preferably sooner, we all have to liberate ourselves from the parental spoon.
The artist Rich Gold
once said that the lunchbox could be thought of as a “‘portable shrine of home’ that is carried into the hostile environment of school.” It is a strong protective enclosure, adorned with beloved cartoon characters such as Spiderman or Hello Kitty and filled with food that makes you feel your parents are close by.
We probably place too much faith in the feeling of security that comes from carrying a lunchbox. The problem with lunchboxes is the problem with the way we feed children in general. Parents trust that anything they place in this magical box will be good for the child, because it comes with their love. A report on school meals in the United Kingdom in 2013 noted that just 1 percent of packed lunches sent from home fulfilled the nutritional requirements applied to the hot lunches served in the school canteen. Yet most parents, the report noted, still believe the packed lunch is healthier.
The contents of the average lunchbox offer a pretty strange education in what “lunch” is. A sample of 1,314 school lunches eaten at American elementary schools in 2014 revealed that packed lunches contained more sugar, more calories, more processed snacks, more sugary drinks, and less protein, fiber, and calcium than school lunches.
This poorly balanced selection is often eaten in unsociable isolation, except for the odd piece of bartering (“Your cereal bar for my chocolate?”). Parents may give their children packed lunches because they believe them to be too fussy to eat anything else, but
a 2009 poll suggested that children eating cafeteria food were far more open to trying new things than the lunchbox kids.
But this magical box still has potential. When it comes to adults feeding themselves, a lunchbox can become a tool for training yourself to eat better. The Japanese bento—pioneered using aluminium boxes in the early twentieth century—offers a structure ideally designed for eating a healthy lunch. Rectangular compartments are filled with varied flavors, artistically arranged: rice, vegetables, protein (tofu or fish, stir-fried chicken, some meatballs, or a Japanese omelet), and beautiful fruit. The boxes—which are used for lunch for everyone from toddlers to businessmen—give an easy handle on portion sizes, without any need to count calories. Makiko Itoh, author of
Just Bento
, used bento lunches to lose more than 30 pounds, because the box focused her attention on “variety and portion size.” If you only consume what is in your bento—300 milliliters for little kids, 600 for adults with modest appetites, and 900 for hearty eaters—it should be impossible to overeat.
And now the best food was cooked for poor Hansel,
but Gretel got nothing but crab-shells.
The Brothers Grimm, “Hansel and Gretel”
O
n our first family holiday abroad, a week in Brittany in
the north of France, my older sister discovered
moules marinières
. She would pick out the plump mussels one by one, noting how each one was slightly different, dipping her baguette into the rich winey juices. Two years her junior, I couldn’t allow myself to like the same thing as she did, so I chose winkles for my favorite food of the holiday. Never tried winkles? You are not missing much. They are sometimes described as “edible sea snails,” but this is to stretch the meaning of the word “edible.” Their small black shells make them a pretty addition to a French
plateau de fruits de mer,
but they have the texture of gristle and the flavor of salty tears. Every lunch of that holiday, I doggedly ate these cold chewy mollusks—each one as joyless as the last—loudly insisting they were far superior to her fragrant bowl of mussels.
Siblings have always marked out territory through food. Squabbling over who gets the best bits of a family dinner is the main way people first learn to compete over resources. Sharing out a pizza is a tough lesson in justice and how it needs to be blind: you cut and I choose. Eating with siblings provides an early warning in how everyone feels entitled to more. It isn’t just about getting the last chicken wing or the last cherry in the bowl; it’s about winning. You want to be the person wily enough to grab an extra pancake before anyone else does. My youngest, aged five, can be reduced to weeping by the discovery that his brother, ten years older and unattainably ahead of him in everything, has finished his favorite packet of cereal. The trembling look on his face says: “thwarted again.” He doesn’t mind half as much when the cereal is eaten up by his dad.
As time goes on, the sibling rivalry over food gets more complicated. Or it did for me and my sister. At first it was about who had the most: more licks of cake mixture, more scrapings from the edge of the dish of cheese soufflé. Later, the competition became stranger and more devious. I always knew she was clever, because teachers would tell me so when I joined their class two years later and proved less brilliant. But I only realized just how clever she was the day of the custard tart incident. We both adored custard tarts: the kind sold in every British bakery, sprinkled with a thick skin of nutmeg with crimped edges. The game here was to eat the tarts as slowly as possible. We started with the dry pastry around the edges and worked our way down to the delicious wobbly cream, and last of all, the soggy disk of pastry at the bottom, the trophy—like the nutty heart at the center of an artichoke. My sister usually won the race to finish last, because my greed would get the better of me. One day, we were each given our tarts, and I began to nibble slowly, as usual. My sister left the room, then came back and said she had finished her tart. Elated to have won at last, I quickly gobbled mine up in just a few mouthfuls. At which, she produced her pristine tart from the other room and ate it very slowly in front of me.
In the end, competing over the same things got so intense that we started to divide the world up into things that were mine and things that were hers. What she had, I wouldn’t have. She got a rabbit; I got a guinea pig. She did art; I did music. She read all the great children’s books, such as
Ballet Shoes
and
The Railway Children
; I was left with comics and Enid Blyton. She had mussels; I had winkles. She went vegetarian; I loved roast dinners. She nibbled lentils and nut cutlets; I ate our mother’s beef stew and parsley dumplings (here, in my opinion, I got the better deal; vegetarian food in the 1980s was not the flavor-packed feast it has now
become). For years she was famous in the family for how fast she could eat. One of her talents—when not eating custard tarts—was finishing everything on her plate before the last person had been served. I dawdled over my meals, savoring second helpings, and thirds. She had no interest in cooking, which created an opening for me to play around in the kitchen, making cheese straws and huge puffy brioches, which I would then try to persuade her to eat. Mostly, she declined.
With the teenage years, the games changed, and I would sometimes look back fondly on the old silly battles. It’s sad to look at a tray of warm scones that no one is fighting over. She started to miss meals—just breakfast at first, but later stretching into lunch and dinner, too, subsisting mainly on green apples. She’d say she wasn’t hungry and didn’t want to come down from her room, and our parents seemed to accept that. I would look at my mother’s worried expression and the empty placemat, and I would eat all the more. Sometimes she did join us, but only picked at what was on her plate. I was happy to finish whatever she left. The more she starved, the more I binged. It was like the rabbit and the guinea pig all over again. We were just playing our allotted roles, the only way we knew how.
The power siblings have over our eating habits is no small thing. Yet we hardly ever talk about these familial influences. Whether you develop the habit of eating breakfast or not may be less a matter of temperament than how many brothers or sisters you had as a teenager: data from one study suggest that the more older siblings an adolescent has, the lower the teen’s chances of breakfasting, regardless of family income. Having more children in the home makes for a more chaotic morning start, plus, as my youngest has discovered, older siblings have an annoying habit of hoovering up all the cereal.
Even those who grow up with no siblings may assume quasi-brother or -sister roles when they sit down to eat in groups. It’s like when someone says “Shall I be Mother?” as they pour tea from a teapot. In practice, what eating as brothers and sisters often means is that we expect people to receive different shares of what’s on the table, depending on gender. Across different cultures and countries, we grow up with entrenched—if not fully articulated—beliefs that boys and girls merit separate foods and differing
quantities of those foods. Often, these beliefs lead us to feed ourselves and our children in ways that are damaging to our health and theirs.
The influence of the companions who joined us around the childhood table continues long after you have stopped eating together. Decades later, you are in a sandwich shop, and your decision about whether to have tuna or turkey—or to walk out of the shop and not have a sandwich at all—is partly shaped by this person whose spoon and cup were laid out next to yours night after night. Young children—aged around two to eight—are, according to research, far more likely to resemble their siblings in their food preferences than they are to resemble their parents. This rings true. Parents tend to offer children the same foods, whereas they may save certain dishes for themselves, especially in families where children and parents eat in separate sittings. A brother and sister sitting eating meatloaf and frozen peas side by side are modeling to each other that this is a good thing to eat. Each bite that you see the other person take reinforces your liking. Or not: it is hard to sit calmly by and carry on eating if you share a table with someone who is grumbling that peas are “gross” and pinging them at you with a knife.
As siblings get older, their eating habits become more distinct. When 415 pairs of Dutch siblings aged thirteen to sixteen were followed for a year in 2002–2003, it was found that their eating behavior was only “moderately similar.” Much depended, as you’d expect, on the quality of the relationships. Brothers and sisters who were very close to each other—reporting having a lot of “fun” together—had more similar eating habits than those who were distant or hostile. The really startling finding was that in the cases where the siblings copied each other’s eating habits, it was the older ones who copied the younger rather than the other way round, especially with pairs of girls. This is the opposite of what you’d expect. Shouldn’t the older one set an example? Not in our topsy-turvy culture. The researchers put it down to the fact that the older ones, having gone through puberty, were not as thin. With their teenage curves, the older girls looked at their skinny-thighed sisters and subliminally concluded that eating like a little girl could reverse the effects of time. Most disturbingly, the older girls copied the younger ones when they engaged in “emotional eating,” eating in response to
stress, anger, or fear. We assume that thin people are the ones who have sussed out how to eat, even if they are only thin because they haven’t yet reached a certain age.
It is through our siblings that we first learn how unfair our genetic inheritance can be: that one person seems to be able to eat whatever they like without putting on weight, while another is forever struggling to consume less. Inequality among siblings goes all the way to the gut: we are born with different microbes inside us, and the microbes outnumber our cells ten to one. Some of them affect our chances of becoming obese in later life; others affect how well we digest dinner. What we eat is constantly changing the composition of our microbiota, and the nature of our microbiota determines how well we respond to the food we eat. This variation exists even among identical twins. Researchers in Malawi discovered that when a pair of twins with severe malnutrition and
kwashiorkor
—a protein deficiency—are given the same emergency aid rations, one twin may recover while the other doesn’t, the reason being different microbes in the gut. Scientists took fecal samples from some of these “discordant” twins and transplanted them into mice. The mice with the healthy twin’s microbiota easily flourished even on a low-calorie diet; the mice with the kwashiorkor-sufferer’s microbes lost alarming amounts of weight.
So siblings are not born equal, but the inequality is often entrenched by the differing treatment we receive at the table from our parents. Mealtimes are a vehicle for favoritism (or perceived favoritism, since most parents believe themselves to be scrupulously impartial): Who gets served first? Who gets the florets of broccoli and who gets the stalks? Who is expected to put up with the slice of burned toast because they “won’t mind”? Who gets the special drinking glass? Whose turn is it to clear the dishes? These parental decisions often feel unfair to at least one, if not all, of the children involved. In some contexts, for some children, they are positively toxic.
Food favoritism is especially stark when it is done because you were born the “wrong” sex. The idea that boys deserve bigger or better portions than girls plays out in many ways, some subtle and some not so subtle. In its most extreme forms, this sex bias in feeding has damaging consequences that last well beyond childhood.
If you must be born in rural India, especially the south, don’t
be born a girl. An Indian girl under the age of five is 75 percent more likely to die than an Indian boy: “the worst gender differential in child mortality for any country in the world,” reported
The Times of India
in 2012. It’s not just the death rate among girls and boys that is the problem: the gender imbalance starts before birth, with sex-selective abortions in India causing differences from the start. As a result of both factors, in 2001 there were 107.2 males for every 100 females across the population; a hundred years earlier, there were 103 males for every 100 females. The situation—which extends to many other parts of Asia—has been described as “gendercide.”
So a girl who is born and who survives is fortunate, and yet she still faces hardships. Life is often worse for surviving girls than it is for boys. In many of the very poorest families, girls are given less of everything: less food, less medicine, less clothing. They are not seen as having the same economic and social usefulness as boys, and therefore parents invest less in them, down to the rice on their plate: not in every family, certainly, but enough that it can be measured statistically. As long ago as 1901, an Indian census taker observed this nutritional neglect of girls, noting: “She is less warmly clad. . . . [S]he is probably not so well fed as a boy would be and, when ill, her parents are not likely to make the same strenuous efforts to ensure her recovery.”
Not all girls are equally deprived. If you must be born a girl in rural India, take care to have older brothers and not sisters. In 2003, the Indian economist Rohini Pande set out to quantify the effects that siblings had on how badly girls were fed. She measured this by looking at the numbers who were “severely stunted,” in other words, with a height more than three standard deviations below what would be expected for the age. This is a pretty good marker of a child who is suffering long-term nutritional neglect.
Pande looked at data from 14,715 rural children aged six to forty-seven months. Most of the mothers were illiterate, and very few of them earned any money to supplement the father’s income. A third of the children lived in households that owned no consumer goods at all. These are families who have very little indeed, and they must make brutal choices about the small
amount of food the household has on any given day. In these Indian villages, no one, not even the favored children, has what we would consider “enough.” Half of these children lived in villages with no all-weather road.
Just how hungry the children are in these families depends on how many siblings they have and what sex they are. Overall, 6 percent more girls than boys were severely stunted, which accords with the picture of “gendercide.” But Pande found that some girls had better chances of being adequately fed than others. Girls who had several older brothers actually had a lower chance of severe stunting than a boy with two or more older brothers. The worst-off girls were those with multiple older sisters. The existence of these other girls took away any novelty value they might have had, leaving them with the least food of anyone in the family. A girl with two or more older sisters had a 38 percent chance of being severely stunted, reflecting how little her parents valued her existence. Boys, on the other hand, benefited from being the only male among sisters. Pande found that such a boy had the lowest odds of stunting and the highest odds of being immunized against disease of any children: as the only boy among girls, he was extra special—and extra worthy of food.