Observing the eating habits of small children provides clues to their developing appreciation of food.
FOOD-MINDED PARENTS ARE FOREVER COMPLAINING that their children like only starches (pasta, rice, potatoes), the blandest cheeses, and tasteless meats (especially the white meat of chicken). Why do we begin our eating lives liking such dull foods? How can children be set straight about food before it’s too late? It used to be that psychologists and sociologists were likeliest to wonder about the biological motivations that cause parents to despair for their offspring. Today it is the sensory biochemists who have taken the lead in exploring the dietary preferences of children and how these change.
An important experiment that only now is yielding its first results began in 1982 and finished in 1999 at the Gaffarell Nursery of the Dijon Hospital in France. The children, aged two to three years, were allowed to decide what they would eat for lunch, with several constraints. The menu contained eight items: bread, two starters, meat (or a meat-based dish) or fish as a main course, two vegetables or starches, and two cheeses. Sweets were not offered as part of the meal because of the children’s presumed attraction to sugar; they were reserved for snacks instead. The children could have extra helpings but not more than three of the same food during the same meal. Their minders accommodated and recorded the choices freely made by the twenty-five children enrolled in the nursery each year. All eight dishes were placed on the table, and the children were free to serve themselves as they pleased or to eat nothing at all. In all 420 children were monitored, each for an average of 110 meals.
The results are being scrutinized by Sophie Nicklaus and Sylvie Issanchou at the Laboratoire de Recherches sur les Arômes at the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique station in Dijon, in collaboration with Vincent Boggio of the medical school at the University of Dijon. They are interested in a number of questions. What foods did the children eat? Did they show a general aversion to certain dishes? How are different choices between dishes to be interpreted? How are variations in choice to be explained: by individual preferences? Sifting through the data, the researchers found evidence in favor of certain familiar assumptions as well as a number of unanticipated outcomes.
A Taste for the Tasteless
First, as parents have long maintained, children do indeed prefer starches and meats on the whole. The cheeses they select are almost invariably ones with minimal taste and a soft texture. Rare are the amateurs de roquefort at the age of two or three—gourmets in short pants one day perhaps, but not in diapers. It may be a sign of the times that bread was the starch least often selected, behind pasta, rice, and fried potatoes. The most popular dishes were French fries, small sausages of the kind known in France and elsewhere in Europe as chipolatas, quiches, pasta, breaded fish, rice, mashed potatoes, ham, and beefsteak. No surprise, any of this—only a quantified confirmation of what has long been observed.
On the other hand, the choice of meats and vegetables did hold surprises for the researchers. The children made little distinction between them, choosing roast pork, turkey, leg of lamb, and organ meats almost indiscriminately. But when it came to vegetables, which were chosen less often than meats, preferences were quite clear, depending on the type of vegetable and the type of culinary preparation. Spinach, which is so widely thought to be disliked by children, was selected more often and consumed in greater quantities than any other vegetable—as long as it was napped with a white sauce. Endives, cabbage (raw or cooked), tomatoes, and green beans appealed to few of the young diners, however. It appears that foods with a hard and fibrous texture (which makes them hard to chew) are more likely to be refused, as are those with a pronounced bitter flavor.
How are we to account for all this? It occurred to the sensory biochemists in Dijon to try to relate the selection of foods to their nutritional content. What they discovered was that the higher the caloric value of a food, the more often it is chosen (with the exception of cheeses). Is this proof that innate dispositions are still strong in young children? We know that infants who are fed salt, sweet, sour, or bitter liquids react visibly with disgust in the case of the last two flavors but show pleasure when they encounter a sweet taste. In this they resemble fruit-eating monkeys, who associate sweetness with the presence of sugars (whose molecules have a high energy value) and bitter with vegetables that contain toxic alkaloids. Gradually children come to learn, through conditioning and culture, to diversify their diet. Conditioning causes children to associate satiety, for example, with the consumption of high-calorie nonsweet dishes (fatty foods in particular); culture accounts for the fact that some children, even when quite young, learn to relish dishes with a powerful taste, contrary to what purely biological explanations would predict.
All Equal, All Different
None of the factors analyzed so far explains the highly variable choice of foods with a strong taste—neither sex, nor maternal feeding, nor the child’s birth order, nor his or her body mass index (a measure of fatty mass obtained by dividing weight by the square of the child’s height).
Because the dietary preferences of young children have been little studied until now, it is not surprising that these first studies have left many observations unexplained. Moreover, it will be a long time before we are able to correlate the choices of the children studied with their preferences as adults. But patience is the price we must pay if we are to identify the mechanisms of dietary learning in childhood and to clarify the role of early exposure to different foods in the formation of later preferences—long thought to be important but so far undemonstrated. The food industry takes an obvious interest in the results of these studies, for it will be able to offer products of longer-lasting appeal only if the dynamics of the dietary preferences of young children are understood.