First Bite: How We Learn to Eat (7 page)

The usefulness of “Tiny Tastes” is that it provides a non-stressful way to enact the multiple exposures that we seem to need to develop new tastes. In our house, it changed the whole conversation around mealtimes, from one of stress and anxiety to something—mostly—more positive and mellow. Because he chose the vegetable himself, my child seemed to feel less trapped. Plus, he really likes stickers. Lucy Cooke said that before she and her colleagues started using stickers in their experiments, there would always be a few children who would refuse to take part; with stickers, participation went up to 100 percent. Cooke’s research overturns the
previous orthodoxy that offering rewards for eating would make children like the food even less. Her hunch is that rewards only work, first, when they are not themselves food, and second, when children feel they have genuinely worked for them. If you reward children for eating healthy foods that they already like, it confuses them. But it takes a real effort for a child who dislikes raw red pepper to put that first morsel into his mouth; hence, he feels he deserves the sticker.

This approach to creating new, better likes sounds almost too good—too simple—to be true. For one thing, it only addresses vegetables, which is a good place to start, but there’s a lot more to a healthy diet than just greens. For many children, it is the protein foods—eggs, meat, fish—that are the hardest to love. “Tiny Tastes” also presumes that a child will willingly cooperate, once stickers are proposed. What about the hard-core food refuseniks? Some people have very definite dislikes with their roots in complex conditions, which surely can’t be wished away with a sticker.

When children have learning difficulties or other disabilities,
one of the many daily tasks they often tussle with is eating. Children who are slow to speak also tend to be slow to master the skills of eating, because there is a strong relationship between the muscle control needed for language and that for chewing and swallowing. Eating can also become a problematic business for those whose condition involves rigid behaviors and routines. Those on the autistic spectrum are far more likely than other children to have a wide range of problems with food. It’s been estimated that 75 percent of children diagnosed with autism have severe feeding difficulties. They may demand exclusively “yellow” food (chips, corn, biscuits, popcorn, fried chicken), or refuse to eat a meal unless none of the components are touching. Above all, autistic children are likely to have a very narrow range of foods that they find acceptable.

Jim,
a
age three and a half, was an autistic boy with serious eating problems by the time he arrived at the Penn State Hershey Medical Center. He ate only two foods, toasted cheese sandwiches and hotdogs,
supplemented with frequent glasses of milk. In addition, Jim tended to be disruptive at mealtimes: he had tantrums, cried, acted out, and refused food from even his limited repertoire.

But Jim was doing well compared to Kim, a five-year-old autistic girl referred to the same clinic. For a while, Kim, too, had eaten a limited diet of hotdogs, peanut butter, bacon, chocolate, eggs, and toast. She, too, would cry, tantrum, and throw food at mealtimes. After an illness, though, she stopped eating altogether, and for six months she had been completely dependent on feeding through a gastrostomy tube.

Most parents would feel overwhelmed at the thought of feeding these children and somehow broadening their horizons. I know I would. Food refusal is demoralizing at the best of times; all the more so when you are dealing with the other challenges of caring for an autistic child. If a child dislikes most foods to the point that they provoke tears and rage, it is very hard to bring yourself to do anything other than sigh and make another toasted cheese sandwich.

Jim and Kim sound like two hopeless cases. But they weren’t. Within two weeks of intensive treatment at the center, Jim’s repertoire of foods had increased from three to sixty-five. Kim, meanwhile, would now eat forty-nine different foods and no longer needed the feeding tube. This huge increase in “likes” (and decrease in “dislikes”) was achieved not through any magic, but simply through a more systematic and intensive version of Lucy Cooke’s “Tiny Tastes” system.

Therapists at the clinic engaged the children in many repeated taste sessions to expose them to pea-sized amounts of novel foods in the course of each day. Unlike with “Tiny Tastes,” the therapists added in an “escape prevention” element: the child was told “when you take your bite, you can go and play,” and was not allowed to leave the room until the bite was taken. If a child screamed or cried, this was ignored, but a child who ate the pea-sized bite was praised. There were also “probe meals” at which larger quantities of the new foods were offered—three tablespoons of three different foods—with a ten-minute time limit and no requirement to eat the food.

The results of this experiment have been astonishing. To go from being fed by a tube to being able to eat forty-nine different foods is life changing for the whole family. A three-month follow-up showed that
Jim and Kim had not lost the majority of their new likes at home. They had not slipped into the old unhappy mealtimes of before. Food was no longer a trauma to them. Both sets of parents were continuing to offer the children taste sessions outside of mealtimes. Jim’s range of foods was now fifty-three. This large repertoire was all the more impressive considering that Jim’s parents had decided to become vegetarian since the start of the intervention, the sort of change that autistic children often find unsettling. Kim’s range of foods was still forty-seven. In place of a tube, she was now enjoying many different flavors and textures, without tears or rage. Autism goes along with restricted social interaction. Yet Kim’s new likes placed her back in the social world of the family dinner table.

Similar work is being done by therapists at specialist feeding clinics across the world, although Keith Williams, head of the Feeding Program at the Penn State Hershey Medical Center, says that these methods are by no means standard practice. Too many feeding therapists still treat limited eaters such as Jim and Kim by offering them whole platefuls of disliked food and hoping they will suddenly decide to eat it. But when these interventions succeed, they show the huge potential there is for changing our likes and dislikes for the better through a change to our eating environment. No one is doomed to like nothing but cheese sandwiches and hotdogs. If it’s possible to train a severely autistic three-year-old to love fifty-three different nutritious foods, there’s hope for us all.

The trouble is, though, that most of our food environment influences us in an opposite direction. Every day, children are exposed to messages—whether on giant billboards and TV ads or from looking in friends’ lunchboxes—telling them they should like the very foods that will do them the most harm.

Psychologist Karl Duncker’s 1930s experiments on children’s
likes and dislikes are not as well-known as Clara Davis’s feeding orphanage. But they offer just as great an insight into how our tastes are formed, almost in spite of ourselves, by forces of which we are only dimly aware. While Davis was interested in what tastes looked like
stripped of the normal social influences, Duncker wanted to pinpoint how those influences actually worked.

In 1936, Duncker (born in Leipzig in 1903) was a promising young Gestalt psychologist exiled from Nazi Germany—where his parents were prominent communists—to Britain, where he continued his work. One of his great philosophical interests was pleasure and what causes it. His definition of the pleasure of anticipation was a child who “has been told that he is soon to have a piece of candy . . . glowing all over with happiness.” In one of his papers, Duncker asked why eating a fine juicy beefsteak could cause such delight. He decided that it wasn’t just that it took away the pain of hunger; it was the sensory enjoyment of biting into the steak, and the feeling it gave that “life is grand.”

Upon arrival in Britain, Duncker set himself the task of investigating the role of social suggestion in forming food preferences. Given that likes and dislikes varied to an “astounding degree” among different cultures, he realized that there must be a process of social influence at work. His mission was to unravel the psychological processes by which likes were formed.

Duncker’s experiments involved children from Somers Town nursery school in London NW1, which was then a poor district of the city. The first experiment was a simple one. Boys and girls aged between two and five were asked to make a food selection from carrots, bananas, nuts, apples, bread, and grapes. What Duncker found was that children were far more likely to select the same foods as one another if they made their choices in the presence of other children than if they were alone. For children younger than twenty-seven months, there was a wonderful “social indifference”: “When they had fixed their minds upon the food, nothing else seemed to exist.” Above that age, however, there was a marked tendency to copy the likes of other children, especially if the child who selected first was just a little older. There was one pair of girls where one was an extroverted five and the other a shy four. Before choosing her food, “B would always send some furtive glances over to A as if for reassurance.”

We’ve all seen this kind of peer influence at work. If you offer a snack to a group of young girls, they will often tie themselves in knots second-guessing what the others will go for before making their own minds up.
You don’t want to be a lone wolf eating popcorn when everyone else has opted for toast. Duncker’s findings about social suggestion when eating have since been confirmed by at least sixty-nine separate experiments. This is a very robust phenomenon. Depending on the influence of those who share our meals, we may eat faster or slower; we choose different foods; we manage larger or smaller portions.

Duncker’s second experiment was more dramatic. He took two substances. One was a white chocolate powder flavored with lemon—a very luxurious commodity in 1930s Britain and “decidedly pleasant.” The other was valerian sugar colored brown, valerian being an herbal root traditionally used as a sedative: it has a very bitter and medicinal flavor that Duncker called “rather unpleasant.” He then asked the nursery teacher to read the children a story about a hero, Micky, a little field mouse, who hates one food—“hemlock”—and loves another—“maple sugar.” When Micky discovers maple sugar in a tree, he realizes he has never “tasted such good stuff before.” But the hemlock bark is “sour and disgusting.”

After the story, the children were then asked to taste some actual “hemlock,” which was really the delicious white chocolate powder, and some “maple sugar,” which was really the unpleasant valerian sugar. The deception did not exactly work. Many of the children recognized that the “hemlock” was really chocolate. Yet when asked to choose which substance they preferred, 67 percent of them opted for the nasty-tasting “maple sugar,” because of the positive associations in the story (only 13 percent chose it in a control group with no story).

Can our likes and dislikes really be so easily influenced? Apparently so. Duncker’s experiment shows that a simple story is enough to make children forget—for a time—that they like chocolate. For Duncker himself, having witnessed Hitler’s rise to power, it was no surprise that human beings are suggestible in their “likes,” or that social forces can make them suppress their natural impulses. At the time Karl Duncker was doing his peaceful experiments with children and chocolate, his younger brother Wolfgang was living a precarious life in exile in Moscow; he was arrested during the Great Purges of 1938 and died in the Gulag. Duncker himself had lost his academic position in Berlin in 1935 for having once been
married to a Jewish woman. “If educated adults,” wrote Karl Duncker, “can be made to discard their ingrained preferences because the leader has contrary ones, why should children prove [harder to influence]—even in such a vital domain as food?”

Given his background, Duncker had a strong sense of how those with power manipulate the powerless. To him, a child being manipulated to change ingrained food likes was in a position similar to that of the population of Nazi Germany.

Duncker’s findings are deeply worrying. If just one story about a not-very-inspiring mouse hero could make children change their likes to such a degree, what are the effects of a daily barrage of advertising stories, in which godlike athletes are shown drinking sugary beverages, and the least nutritious cereals are those with the cutest characters on the box? “Don’t trust that tiger! He’s a bad tiger!” I used to tell my son as we walked down the cereal aisle.

What can any one of us do in the face of such social pressure? Duncker offered himself up as an example of how individuals could train themselves to have new likes, despite their social prejudices and circumstances, through a kind of “inner reorganization.” When he arrived in Cambridge from Germany, Duncker was appalled by the prevalence of something called “salad cream”: a sharp condiment beloved in the British Isles that has the texture of mayonnaise but the acrid taste of spirit vinegar. Like many mass-market foods, it has a devoted following among those reared on it, but to Duncker, who wasn’t prepared for the taste, salad cream came as quite a shock:

Suffice it to tell just one personal experience. When I first came to England, I was made to understand that raw green salad leaves could be made into “salad” with the aid of a bottled substance of yellowish color, called salad dressing. It looked like mayonnaise; I expected mayonnaise—and I dare say I was deeply disappointed. No, I did not like it. But as I did not like raw leaves either, I was therefore prompted to adopt the most favorable and adventurous attitude. I tried again, and I still remember the day when suddenly I discovered that this was not an unpleasant variant of mayonnaise but a kind of mustard which was not unpleasant
at all. Thus by accentuating the mustard potentiality and suppressing the non-mayonnaise aspect, I came to like it.

Like Lucy Cooke, Duncker knew that there is huge scope for changing our likes and dislikes: not all of them, for sure, but enough to make the difference between a good diet and a bad one. Whether you are a PROP taster or not, autistic or not, neophobic or not, fussy or not, a foreigner or not, genes are never the final reason for why you like the particular range of foods you do. When a boy likes nothing but cornflakes, it says less about him than it does about the world he lives in.