WHEN YOUR 4-YEAR-OLD REFUSES everything on his plate, a history book is probably not the first thing you reach for. But Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History, by Michigan State historian and consultant for HBO’s The Gilded Age Helen Zoe Veit, offers a history lesson that parents might not know they need. The fussy-eater child has been so thoroughly baked into our cultural imagination that it’s easy to assume children have always been pernickety about their food, that negotiating with a child over dinner is as timeless as sleepless nights and dirty diapers. Maybe George Washington may not have been raised on string cheese and pizza rolls, but surely American parents have always had to wrestle with children and their supposedly hardwired preference for sweet and savory. But Veit not only dispels that assumption, but convincingly demonstrates that picky eating is a recent—and quite American—invention.
Veit shows that from the colonial period into the Gilded Age, children ate a wide range of foods. “Well into the twentieth century,” she writes, “most human cultures didn’t have something called ‘children’s food’ and something else called ‘adult food.’ Almost everyone on Earth—including Americans—used to take it for granted that young children could learn to enjoy the same foods as everyone else.”
Drawing on memoirs, slave narratives, children’s cookbooks, medical treatises, and periodicals like Prairie Farmer, she reconstructs just how diverse (and adventurous, by our standards) American children’s diets could be. For example, a Massachusetts boy in the 1810s relished clams and described the eels he caught with friends as “superb.” Edith Wharton, raised amid Gilded Age abundance in Manhattan, delighted in a “salad made entirely of tiny little crabs she ate by the spoonful, shell and all.” Black Elk, growing up on the Great Plains in the early 1870s, savored raw deer liver as a delicacy. Children across the country happily consumed turnips, codfish cakes, corned beef, and even jellied pork brain and bison tongue, as well as plenty of vegetables and a whole lot of hot coffee.
Upon reading such examples from early America, one might assume this dietary diversity and willingness to eat broadly stemmed simply from necessity. While that was somewhat true for the extremely poor and for enslaved communities, as Veit makes clear, Americans across the socioeconomic spectrum ate widely and enthusiastically. Some of this openness was rooted in the basic reality of hearty appetites, as children in the nineteenth century worked alongside their parents in kitchens, factories, and fields, doing physically demanding labor that left them hungry. But children also simply ate what adults ate and followed their parents’ lead.