The most striking passages in Picky, a forthcoming book by the historian Helen Zoe Veit, describe the way famous 19th-century American figures ate as children. I found myself gripped with envy as I read—not because the foods were particularly appetizing, but because I would kill for my kid to eat like that.
To wit: As a girl, Edith Wharton adored oyster sauce, turtle, stewed celery, cooked tomatoes, and lima beans in cream. Mark Twain fondly remembered eating succotash, string beans, squirrels, and rabbits on his uncle’s farm. And during her childhood, Veit writes, Elizabeth Cady Stanton “happily ate vegetables, hickory nuts, and cold jellied brain.”
If these don’t sound like typical “kid foods,” that’s because they aren’t, and weren’t. “Kid food,” as a category, is a recent invention. According to Veit, American kids weren’t picky until the early 20th century. (Indeed, the word picky came into widespread usage around then.) Before that, Veit writes, children in the United States ate “spicy relishes, vinegary pickles, wild plants, and a huge variety of animal species and organ meats. They slurped up raw oysters and looked forward to their daily coffee.” Fennel seeds and tomatoes were considered treats.
According to Veit, the idea that kids are naturally neophobic, or wary of new tastes, is a myth. Eating like a child, Veit explains, was once understood to mean being overly excited and undiscriminating about food, not being picky. In the 1860s, a doctor wrote that children generally ate “anything and everything.”
Veit’s book recounts how kids went from eating jellied brain to consuming, like my toddler, little but macaroni and cheese. A big part of the story, as she tells it, is that American kids used to be hungrier at mealtimes—which meant that they were more eager to eat anything. Before the 20th century, many children did hours of chores both before and after school, so they worked up a good appetite. (Maybe Twain was hungry for those string beans because he spent so much time hunting wild turkeys and clubbing pigeons to death.) Few kids snacked between meals, because processed foods weren’t widely available. In addition, parents tended to be confident that children could learn to like most adult foods. If a child didn’t like a given meal, they generally wouldn’t be offered an alternative, because, due to a lack of refrigeration, no other food was on hand. But after a series of societal changes in the 20th century, Veit writes, “the children were less hungry. The food was less delicious.” And pickiness was born.