First Bite: How We Learn to Eat. Bee Wilson

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СКАЧАТЬ on this or that side of the family – you got your fussiness from your grandfather! – as if you were destined from birth to eat a certain way. Sometimes it is uncanny how a suspicion of celery or a deep hunger for blackberries replicates from parent to child. When we notice these familial patterns, it confirms us in our view that food preferences must be inherited through our genes.

      When I’ve described the argument of this book to people I meet, sometimes they get a little angry. ‘I disagree that we learn how to eat,’ they say. ‘You’d never get me to like sultanas/squid/salami [delete as appropriate].’ Anyway, they say, ‘What about genes?’

      It’s fine by me if you don’t like sultanas. And I’m certainly not denying that there is a genetic component in our relationship with food. We are not born as blank slates. Some people have a heightened genetic sensitivity to certain flavours (notably bitterness) while others are blind to them.⁷ There are also genetic variations in individual appetite, the speed at which we eat and the extent to which people actually enjoy eating.⁸ We vary in how we chew, how we swallow and how we digest. Some people are born with conditions that make it much harder to eat, such as a delay to the oral-motor system. I had no idea quite how fraught the basic matter of getting food from plate to mouth could be until my third child was born with cleft palate and he and I both struggled at mealtimes. He is now five and new dishes occasionally still provoke tears (usually his). Our relationship with food and weight is additionally affected by epigenetics: our experience in the womb. The ‘thrifty phenotype’ hypothesis of biochemist C. Nicholas Hales and epidemiologist David Barker suggests that being undernourished in utero leaves people with a lifelong propensity for weight gain, an unfair fate to be handed so early.⁹

      The question remains to what extent we are capable of overriding this genetic and epigenetic inheritance and learning new tastes. This riddle can seem impossible to unravel, given that children do not learn to eat under laboratory conditions. As we take our first bites, our parents are supplying us simultaneously with both nature (genes) and nurture (environment conceived in its broadest sense, including everything from cuisine to family dynamics to religion to cutlery and table manners to the ethics of meat to views on whether it’s OK to eat food off the floor if it was only there for five seconds). The two are so intertwined, it’s hard to tell where one starts and the other stops.

      In one remarkable experiment, however, a group of children did learn to eat under lab conditions. In the 1920s and 1930s, Dr Clara Davis, a paediatrician from Chicago, spent six years trying to study what children’s appetites would look like if allowed to blossom in total freedom without any preconceived ideas of what tasted good.¹⁰ Davis’s results have often been taken as a clear indication that likes and dislikes are fundamentally inbuilt and natural though, as we’ll see, Davis herself drew a rather different conclusion.

      In 1926, at Mt Sinai Hospital in Cleveland, Dr Clara Marie Davis started the most influential experiment ever conducted into the question of human likes and dislikes. As a doctor, Davis saw many children with eating problems – mostly refusal to eat – whose appetites did not match their nutritional needs. She wondered what children’s appetites would look like, freed from the usual pressures of parents and doctors pushing them to eat nutritious foods such as hot cereal and milk, regardless of whether they liked them. Conventional medical wisdom at that time was that children’s particular likes should not be indulged, lest they became ‘faddy’. Dr Davis was not so sure that eating what you liked was automatically a bad thing.

      She borrowed a number of infants – some of them orphans from institutions and some the children of teenage mothers and widows – and placed them on a special ‘self-selection diet’ under her medical care. The children – aged from six to eleven months, who had never yet tasted solid food – were offered a selection of whole, natural foods and given free rein, day after day, to eat only what they wished. The full list of foods was:

      1 Water

      2 Sweet milk

      3 Sour (lactic) milk

      4 Sea salt

      5 Apples

      6 Bananas

      7 Orange juice

      8 Fresh pineapple

      9 Peaches

      10 Tomatoes

      11 Beets

      12 Carrots

      13 Peas

      14 Turnips

      15 Cauliflower

      16 Cabbage

      17 Spinach

      18 Potatoes

      19 Lettuce

      20 Oatmeal

      21 Wheat

      22 Corn meal

      23 Barley

      24 Ry-Krisp

      25 Beef

      26 Lamb

      27 Bone marrow

      28 Bone jelly

      29 Chicken

      30 Sweetbreads (offal from the pancreas)

      31 Brains

      32 Liver

      33 Kidneys

      34 Fish (haddock)11

      At each meal, the infants were offered a selection of around ten foods from this list, all of them mashed, ground up or finely minced. Some, such as bone marrow, beef, peas and carrots, were offered both in cooked and raw form. The selection was laid out in bowls, while nurses sat by, waiting to see what the children would choose. As Davis described it:

      The nurse’s orders were to sit quietly by, spoon in hand, and make no motion. When, and only when, the infant reached for or pointed to a dish might she take up a spoonful and, if he opened his mouth for it, put it in. She might not comment on what he took or did not take, point to or in any way attract his attention to any food, or refuse him any for which he reached. He might eat with his fingers or in any way he could without comment or correction of his manners.¹²

      Davis continued this experiment over a period of six years, starting with three babies and building up to fifteen. The results, which have been hotly discussed by doctors ever since, were dramatic. Without any preconceived notions about what foods were suitable for them, the babies showed enthusiasm for everything from bone marrow to turnips. They didn’t realize they weren’t supposed to like beets or offal. All of them tried all of the thirty-four foods, except for two who never attempted lettuce and one who shunned spinach.

      Within a few days, Davis noticed, ‘they began to reach eagerly for some and to neglect others, so that definite tastes grew under our eyes.’¹³ It soon became obvious to her that for the fifteen children, there were ‘fifteen different patterns of taste’. The children made some very odd selections which looked like a ‘dietician’s nightmare’ said Davis. They went on curious ‘food jags’. One day, they might gorge on liver or eat a meal of nothing but bananas, eggs and milk. A boy called Donald showed a rare passion for oranges, cramming in nearly two pounds of them one day.¹⁴ In the process of СКАЧАТЬ