What Happened to Picky Eaters in Olden Times?
Turns out picky eating existed long before chicken nuggets.
My brother was a severe picky eater, for his entire childhood. Every day, my parents would provide his safe foods for him—cereal for breakfast, often a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch, and either pizza or unseasoned baked chicken breast and steamed broccoli for dinner. I can still vividly recall my mother fashioning a mini baking sheet out of aluminum foil for his nightly bone-dry chicken, a defeated look on her face. And my first thought was, I will never let my kid do this to me.
But parenthood humbles you, and as it turned out, my brother wasn’t just a picky eater. He had a generalized feeding disorder that went beyond stubbornness. He would gag when pushed to try new foods. He had anxiety, gagging, texture sensitivities and found even some typical childhood foods repulsive (to this day, he loathes ice cream cake.) He would have gladly skipped a meal, or even multiple meals, if he found the food intolerably disgusting—and he found lots of foods disgusting. In a moment of weakness, my mom exclaimed at the dinner table, “You don’t like anything!” to which he, about four years old, incredulously responded, “I like fings. Like chips.” (He did not even get chips very often, and he would have made a more compelling case had he invoked the steamed broccoli.)
I later went on to have a child with the same basic issue, and much like my brother, his safe foods aren’t “chicken nuggets.” In fact, my child will not touch chicken nuggets, but loves to snack on extremely healthy (and extremely bitter) cacao nibs. He had another phase marked by an obsession with pistachios. For two years, he would eat up to five scrambled eggs every morning, before one day grimacing at the sight of them, never eating them again no matter how many times they were offered. His picky eating is not driven by a diet of processed sugar. When he started at a school that provided free lunch, I asked his teacher if I should pack him a separate lunch to accommodate his eating issues. She laughed and said, “If he’s hungry, he’ll eat! I’ve never had a picky eater in my class who wasn’t eating something new after a week with me!” I was excited that this woman might actually hold the key to his feeding issues, especially given that we had gotten nowhere with two feeding therapists already. After two weeks, the teacher was urging me to pack him “anything” he would eat in his lunch box, nutrition aside. Apparently, he was the first kid she had seen who would gladly not eat, even when hungry.
To this day, we serve him his few safe foods (which, thankfully, include some healthy things) while consistently offering new foods in a low-pressure setting. We’ve made some progress (he’s eating apples, dried fruits and more varieties of nuts, although, as Trump would say, “not with a lot of enthusiasm”) but most of the time, our goal is simply to make sure he’s eating. And we have the stamp of approval from his pediatrician, which makes us feel a bit better.
I’ve now experienced enough not to judge my parents for “catering” to my brother’s picky eating. It was obvious, in my brother’s case at least, that “you eat this or you starve” would have resulted in his starvation. Perhaps not starvation to death, but eating the bare minimum for survival and having inadequate energy and stunted growth.
But it got me wondering—what the hell happened to kids like this before the advent of “safe foods?” For most of human history, we didn’t have the capacity to procure preferred foods for children, whether that was a processed mango-flavored pouch or a bespoke nut and seed smoothie with Greek yogurt, as my son drinks. “You eat this or you starve” was quite literally our only option for most of human history. So I did some research to try and understand what happened to picky eaters in the days of yore—and I learned some pretty surprising things!
