First Bite: How We Learn to Eat. Bee Wilson

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СКАЧАТЬ of pure salt. On trying something new, Davis observed that their faces showed first surprise, then indifference, pleasure or dislike.

      However bizarre and unbalanced the children’s likes and dislikes look to our eyes, they served them well. In a 1928 article writing up her findings, Dr Davis included a ‘before’ and ‘after’ photo of one of the children, Abraham G. At eight months, on arriving in her care, he looks a little pale. At twenty months, after a year on the diet, he is cherubic and plump.

      When they arrived at the hospital the infants were generally in poor health. Four were seriously underweight; five had rickets. Yet within a few months, all the children were pink-cheeked and optimally nourished. One of the rickets sufferers was offered cod liver oil, which he took the occasional glug of; but the other four managed to get enough vitamin D and calcium to cure their rickets through diet alone. When they suffered colds, they appeared to self-medicate, eating vast amounts of carrots, beets and raw beef. Even though they were given no guidance on what their bodies needed, their ratio of calories averaged at protein 17 per cent, fat 35 per cent and carbohydrate 48 per cent, very much in line with contemporary nutritional science.

      Dr Davis created an unprecedented body of information on childish appetites (though it was never fully analysed and, after her death in 1959, all the boxes of raw data were discarded). When Davis took up a new job, the original set-up in Cleveland was moved to Chicago, where she established what amounted to ‘an eating-experiment orphanage’. In all, she logged around 36,000 meals as well as recording changes in height and weight, blood and urine, bowel movements and bone density.¹⁵ It is unlikely any scientist will ever get such detailed data again, given the dubious ethics of keeping children locked up in an experimental nursery for so long. The babies stayed on the diet for a minimum of six months and a maximum of four and a half years, during which time they were always at the hospital.

      No friends visited and those who were not orphans had little or no contact with their parents. While in the hospital nursery, their lives were subordinated to the needs of the experiment. Such an arrangement would never be allowed now, though Davis evidently cared for the children very much, in her way. She adopted two of them, as a single mother: Abraham G (the plump cherub) and Donald, the passionate orange eater. Many years later, after Donald was dead, his widow recalled that he and Abraham had always been ‘easy to cook for’ and ‘happy to try all kinds of foods’; they remained omnivores all their lives.¹⁶

      It was such an extraordinary, audacious, borderline-crazy project that Davis attempted: to get to the heart of where children’s food passions come from. It’s just a shame that her experiment proved so easy to misread. Time and again, Davis’s orphanage has been held up as evidence that appetite is mostly genetic and, as a consequence, that the foods children like or dislike are a sure guide to what their bodies need.¹⁷ Davis’s food orphanage has been taken as proof that in their natural state, likes and dislikes are genetic and highly individual, like fingerprints: our tastes are a matter of nature, not nurture. What this interpretation fails to take account of is that the biggest thing Dr Davis did was to radically restructure the food environment of the children.

      There was a ‘trick’ to the way the experiment was set up, as Clara Davis was the first to point out. The real secret was in her choice of the thirty-four foods, which were all unprocessed whole foods. With such foods preselected for them, it didn’t matter which ones the children were drawn to on any given day, because, assuming they took food from several of the bowls at each meal, they could not help but eat a diet of an excellent standard of nutrition. Davis said that her choice of food was designed to mimic the conditions of ‘primitive peoples’, though the heaping bowlfuls were surely more plentiful than any hunter-gatherer regime. The experiment proved that when your only food choices are good ones, preferences become unimportant. The ‘fifteen patterns of taste’ resulted in a single healthy whole-food diet, because of the set-up. None of the children was totally omnivorous, but nor were their likes and dislikes a problem, as they so often are in normal family life. There was no option to like unhealthy food and dislike healthy food.

      Davis herself concluded that her experiment showed that the selection of food for young children should be left ‘in the hands of their elders where everyone has always known it belongs’. Instead of the ‘wisdom of the body’ Davis spoke of the ‘glaring fallibility of appetite’. It was obvious to her that there was no ‘instinct’ pointing blindly to the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ in food. The two most popular foods overall in her study were also the sweetest: milk and fruit. Had she offered the children a free choice of ‘sugar and white flour’, those staples of a 1930s diet, it is unlikely they would have ended up in such fine fettle. Self-selection, she concluded, would have little or no value if the children were selecting from ‘inferior foods’.

      The real test, Davis recognized, would be to offer newly weaned infants a choice between natural foods and processed food. This was to have been her next experiment, but the Depression dashed this prospect, as her funding ran out at the crucial moment. Davis never got the chance to test the effects on appetite of the ‘pastries, preserves, gravies, white bread, sugar and canned food’ that had in her lifetime become so popular. Davis’s experiment left a powerful legacy that took no account of the trick at the heart of it. Doctors, particularly in America, interpreted her experiment to mean that children’s appetites are inbuilt and benign, without paying attention to the way in which Davis had changed the food environment in which the babies ate. Her work was seized on as proof that our individual appetites are messages encoded with exactly the nutrients that our particular body needs. If we need protein, we will crave chicken. If we have rickets, we will naturally gorge on vitamin D until we are cured. All we have to do to eat well is listen to our cravings. Mother Nature knows best. Davis herself gave licence to such a view, commenting that the children’s successful ‘juggling and balancing’ of more than thirty essential nutrients suggested ‘the existence of some innate, automatic mechanism … of which appetite is a part’.¹⁸

      Influenced by Davis, the dominant view on appetite among paediatricians became ‘the wisdom of the body’, which went along with the vogue for ‘child-centred’ learning. In 2005 Benjamin Scheindlin MD, a paediatrician, noted that Davis’s work contributed to a widespread change in attitudes in paediatric medicine from the 1930s onwards.¹⁹ Where a previous generation lamented the pickiness of children’s changeable tastes, now doctors positively welcomed childish vagaries of appetite. Dr Spock, author of the bestselling Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946, devoted ten pages to the Davis experiment. A mother, in Spock’s opinion ‘can trust an unspoiled child’s appetite to choose a wholesome diet if she serves him a reasonable variety and balance’.²⁰ It didn’t matter if a child developed a temporary dislike of a vegetable, because their cravings would naturally give them everything they needed in the way of nutrition.

      Many experts in child-rearing still think like this, operating on the assumption that children are born with special appetites for exactly the nutrients they most need and that it will all balance out, if only they are given free rein to eat what they like. A book on solving children’s eating problems that went through several reprints in the 1980s and 1990s argued that the implications of Davis’s work were that children should be given total control over food selection: let them eat cornflakes!²¹ As recently as 2007, a popular website about feeding children discussed Davis and concluded that there was ‘a strong biological plausibility … that children will instinctively choose a balanced diet’.²²

      The ‘wisdom of the body’ is an alluring thought (like maternal instinct and other biological myths). Eating would be such a simple business, if only we had little memos inside our bodies telling us what we needed to eat at each precise moment (your vitamin C levels are dropping – quick, eat a kiwifruit!). If only we liked just the stuff that was good for us and disliked anything superfluous or bad. We can certainly learn to get better at reading our body’s cues for food, but this tends to come with age and experience, as you notice little things like how pasta for lunch makes you sleepy or that a handful of nuts СКАЧАТЬ