Read Online First Bite: How We Learn to Eat by Bee Wilson - Free Book Online Page B

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 favorite 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 aahed 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 she 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.
    Most children get over the worst of their fear of new foods 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 flavors that can look suspiciously like showing off. My oldest child, the one who doesn’t like chocolate, is like this. His favorite 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 flavored 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 cornflakes boy was seen—outside of 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 only felt safe when eating reheated frozen Yorkshire puddings, the main thing her mother, an alcoholic, cooked for her. Even now, the sight of vegetables nauseated her. This woman wasn’t stupid. She had not failed to comprehend that vegetables are healthy. She got it; but the roots of her behavior lay elsewhere, deep in the past.
    Apart from the health implications of eating such a limited diet, it is socially awkward. Any meal in an unfamiliar setting is fraught with potential embarrassment. I spoke to another neophobic woman who said that whenever friends suggested a meal out, she had to call ahead to the restaurant to confirm that they could cook her a plain hamburger with absolutely no fixings. She ate no vegetables, though she was training herself slowly to like some fruits. When I asked why she disliked vegetables so much she laughed ruefully and said, “I think when I was about three, my mum got fed up with me being so fussy, so she decided to let me just have the things I liked.” Which meant processed meats, chips, and not much else.
    The belief that tastes are a facet of personality—or genes—has dangerous consequences. If you think that children are born with certain inbuilt likes and dislikes—as fixed as eye color—you may make no attempt to change them, because what’s the point? In a 2013 journal article called “Why Don’t They Like It? And Can I Do Anything