First Bite: How We Learn to Eat. Bee Wilson

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СКАЧАТЬ of Ottolenghi’s own sprouts with caramelized garlic and lemon peel, charred in a hot pan until sweetly blackened at the edges, maybe they would be the most popular of all the vegetables. Perhaps your parents were sprout haters and – without meaning to – turned you against them. Or perhaps they forced them on you too vehemently. I know someone – a PROP supertaster, as it happens – who says she can never enjoy Brussels sprouts – though she has no quarrel with broccoli – because of memories of Christmas Day, when she was compelled by her parents to cut each hated sprout into quarters, and swallow them unchewed, like bitter pills. Maybe you never actually tasted sprouts because you ‘knew’ you wouldn’t like them, because in our society the child who loves sprouts is considered a little odd. When the food writer Michele Humes arrived in the US from Hong Kong, it took her a while to get her head around the concept that ‘children weren’t supposed to like vegetables’.⁴⁶

      Likes and dislikes cannot be reduced to molecules and genes. This is bad news for the more sensationalist health pages, which thrive on headlines like ‘Revealed: the Obesity Gene’. For the rest of us, it is – potentially – excellent information. It means that our food habits are not final and fixed but adaptable and open, if only we will give ourselves half a chance. We did not come into the world disliking bitter greens; we were taught to dislike them by our environment. Taste may be identity but it is not destiny. The hope – and admittedly it’s a slim one at present for the children whose dislikes are vegetables and whose likes are all junk – is that while we are stuck with our genes, the environment is something that can change.

      The main way we learn to like foods is simply by trying them. The term ‘mere exposure’ was coined by Robert Zajonc in 1968.⁴⁷ Zajonc’s thesis was that affection is triggered by familiarity; and that disliking, conversely, is fear of the novel. Some of Zajonc’s early experiments involved showing subjects complex shapes for very short periods of time. When the subjects were later asked to choose their favourite shapes from a line-up, there was a marked preference for the shapes that they had already encountered. Zajonc has suggested that there are similar forces at work when we favour Brie over Camembert.⁴⁸ These cravings are a function of prior experience. One or other cheese may trigger a recognition in us that we cannot necessarily put into words. Zajonc later observed this phenomenon of ‘mere exposure’ at work across cultures and species.

      It’s a truism that we know what we like and we like what we know. If you ask young children which foods they most detest, they tend to be the ones they have never actually tasted, often vegetables. To an adult, this sounds crazy: you can’t know if you hate something until you have tasted it. ‘Go on – you might like it!’ I find myself urging, ineffectually, at the dinner table. But to a child, there is nothing paradoxical in saying, ‘I don’t like it – I never tried it!’⁴⁹ The foods that ranked highly on the ‘never tried’ list of a group of seventy American eight-year-olds included avocado (49/70 had never tried it), beetroot (48), prunes (43), collard greens (49), rye bread (43), lima beans (39), radish (38) and fried liver (55).⁵⁰

      The children’s book Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban is about precisely this dilemma. Frances – a young badger – does not want to eat anything except bread and jam. ‘How do you know what you’ll like if you won’t even try it?’ asks her father. Eventually, her parents give in to her demands for nothing but bread and jam. She is delighted. But over time, being excluded from what the rest of the family is eating makes her sad and she craves variety. One evening, Frances begs tearfully for some spaghetti and meatballs. Her parents express surprise, because they didn’t think she liked spaghetti. ‘How do you know what I’ll like if you won’t even try me?’ is her reply.

      If liking is a consequence of familiarity, it follows that children are bound to like a narrower range of foods at first than adults, because they haven’t tried as many. Problems arise when parents interpret this temporary wariness as something permanent. This is an easy mistake to make. The key period for acquiring preferences is toddlerdom: from one to three. But this coincides with a period in the child’s life when they are most maddeningly, wilfully reluctant to try anything new. All children suffer from neophobia to a greater or lesser extent – a fear of new foods, often novel vegetables but also very commonly protein foods such as fish and meat. This reaches a peak between two and six. It probably evolved as a safety mechanism to protect us from toxins as we foraged in the wild. Now, unfortunately, it leads children away from the very foods they need to learn to like – vegetables and protein – and towards the comforting embrace of cakes, white bread and doughnuts.

      As the name suggests, neophobia isn’t just a dislike of how something tastes: it is an active fear of tasting it. In many cases, neophobia can be broken down simply by feeding the food to the child numerous times – often as many as fifteen – until the child realizes they haven’t suffered any adverse consequences. See, the tomato didn’t kill you! See, it didn’t kill you again! Bit by bit dislike is lessened until one day it flips, almost comically, to enthusiasm. This has to be done over and over for each new ingredient. A child’s love of cantaloupe is no guarantee that they will like watermelon.

      The biggest problem with using ‘mere exposure’ on children is that you first have to persuade them to try the food. Exposing a child to broccoli multiple times is easier said than done. As any parent who has ever tried to feed a recalcitrant toddler will know, the best-intentioned strategies often backfire. ‘Eat your vegetables and you can have a sweet’ is a dangerous game to play because it makes the child dislike the vegetables even more. Psychologists call this the over-justification effect.⁵¹ When a reward is offered for performing an activity, that activity is valued less. The child ends up loving sweets more, because they have become a prize.

      Given that neophobia is a deep-seated fear that the unfamiliar food will cause you harm, it can help if the child witnesses someone else eating the food and surviving; preferably even enjoying it. I did not know that this was what I was doing, but after various futile attempts to get my daughter, then three, to eat something green other than cucumber, I hatched the idea of bringing her favourite doll to eat with us. This doll – a grubby-faced baby boy – sat at the table and proceeded to ‘eat’ green beans, as he oohed and ahhed with ecstasy (or rather, I did). It felt pretty lame, but one day my daughter begged to be given some of the baby doll’s green beans too and has loved them ever since. Another successful strategy is combining a scary new food with a familiar old one. Both children and adults are more likely to try something new when it is served with a familiar condiment – a blanket of ketchup, say, that renders the new food safe enough to try. But as the food psychologist John Prescott has written, no amount of ketchup will induce most children to try a plateful of spiders.⁵²

      Most children get over the worst of their fear of new food by the age of six or seven. Up to this age, it is considered a normal stage of child development. Having conquered neophobia, they may flip over to neophilia: an ostentatious delight in novel flavours that can look suspiciously like showing off. My oldest child, the one who doesn’t like chocolate, is like this. His favourite foods change with capricious haste; dishes may please him at first, then bore him. He abhors plainness, grumbling that I always cook the same things for supper (charming!) and taking a macho delight in strongly flavoured condiments. When he was eight, we went to Rome, just the two of us. At a famous offal restaurant, he selected from the menu a dish called ‘artichokes with lamb’s hearts and all the organs in the vicinity’. And ate it too, with gusto.

      For a significant minority, however, a terror of new food – or mixed-up food, or strange food or spicy food or food that just plain smells wrong – is never conquered. The numbers are high: it has been estimated that as many as a quarter of all adults are severely neophobic about what they eat. Fussiness in children is something we often joke about or laugh off. The cornflake boy was seen – outside his family, anyway – as a comic figure rather than a tragic one.

      But living as a neophobic adult is no joke. I’ve met grown men and women who quietly confessed that they could not bring themselves to eat any vegetables. One said she СКАЧАТЬ