But these discussions in 1912 and 1913 were still remarkable. It wasn’t just a matter of rice pudding. Here was a high-level conversation about whether children’s food should be likable or merely wholesome. For most of the children who had come before, it had been neither. One journalist who attended the 1912 conference, from the
Evening News
, was left “flabbergasted” by all the discussions of exactly what schoolchildren should eat. In his own schooldays he was told “to eat anything he could jolly well get and be jolly thankful for it.”
There are three basic ways of thinking about children’s food.
Each of them can teach attitudes to eating that come back to bite you in later life. The first—which I’ll call “family food”—is that, past the milk drinking of babyhood, children’s food is no different from any other food: everyone in the house, adults or children, grabs what they can get from the common pot. This teaches children to eat fast and seize their chances when food is available. Family food is the way that children have traditionally eaten—and still do, in most cultures around the world. The second—which we might call “nursery food”—says that children’s food should be separate from adult food, but that grown-ups should carefully select the foods with a view to what they believe is wholesome, rather than catering to a child’s tastes. This teaches children that swallowing what they do not like is a form of good behavior. The third—which I’ll call “kid food”—says that children should be fed exactly what they like, no matter how sugary or fake. This teaches children to satisfy their every whim, and that it’s normal to eat bread-crumbed and heavily processed items at every meal.
The ideal form of children’s food would take elements from each of these. The best children’s food would be as likable as “kid food” yet as wholesome as “nursery food.” And, like “family food,” it would also not stray too far from the diet of grown-ups. The signs are that children eat best when their diets have the same variety of tastes as adult food. But this only works when the family food itself consists of good varied fare: if your parents eat nothing but junk, you might be better off eating a separate nursery diet after all. The best children’s food is the result of adults controlling the nutrition, but children controlling what they put in their mouths. Assuming the food on the table is all reasonably nutritious, children should be encouraged to explore the tastes that they like. Which might or might not include rice pudding.
In most places, for most of history, children’s food has not existed as a separate category, after the age of weaning. If you look at early child-care manuals from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, you find that the anxieties are mainly about what a mother should eat to produce healthy breast milk, rather than any special foods for babies. In 1662, the herbalist Nicholas Culpeper wrote of “how to produce milk with a
pleasing scent and colour without any sharpness or ‘ill taste.’” A nursing woman, in Culpeper’s view, should have plenty of salads and radishes, and moderate amounts of wine, and should abstain from fried onions, spiced meat, and anger, all of which could make a baby fall sick. But Culpeper said nothing about what a child should eat once he graduated from milk to solid food.
This silence on the question of children’s food reflects the fact that protracted breastfeeding was the norm. Aside from a few starchy foods—gruel or sops of bread or overcooked rice in broth—the question of what to feed toddlers was settled by milk. Bone analysis of some of the Medici children buried in the Basilica di San Lorenzo in Florence has confirmed that they were milk-fed for nearly two years. By this age, children were ready to eat what the rest of the family ate—with a few exceptions.
Historically, most of the rules about children’s food were negative ones. Many societies have had taboos about substances that children must avoid, most often meat. No meat until second dentition—the age of six or seven—was a rule of thumb in some parts of Britain in the eighteenth century. Among the Mayans of Guatemala, there was a belief that all animal foods—whether eggs, milk, or meat—were bad for young children, a belief that often resulted in them becoming stunted from lack of protein. For the Chaga tribe of Tanzania, the meat taboo was more specific. Children were warned not to eat the tongue of the animal, lest it make them quarrelsome, or the head, which could make them stubborn.
Aside from these prohibitions, however, children’s food was not generally treated as a special category. Once they had passed the age of weaning, children ate the same foods as adults but less of them, and of worse quality. Children’s food could be summed up by the word “scraps.” In the hierarchy of a working family, children were lower down in the allocation of nutrients—particularly protein—than their father, though they might rank above their mother, depending on how selfless a person she was. There was a harsh logic to this. Without the man’s ability to work at heavy manual labor and earn money, no one else would eat.
You can tell a lot about the power dynamic of a family from whether the most highly prized tidbits are reserved for the parents or the children. In today’s families, preschoolers may be lavished with special
meals of organic blueberries and tender chicken fillet while, a few hours later, the exhausted parents make do with something on toast. In former times, by contrast, it was children who put up with oddments, after the parents had taken their portion. In his memoir of growing up in slavery on a plantation in Virginia, Booker T. Washington recalled that in his family, children’s meals were ad hoc. “It was a piece of bread here and a scrap of meat there. It was a cup of milk at one time and some potatoes at another. Sometimes a portion of our family would eat out of the skillet or pot, while someone else would eat from a tin plate held on the knees.”
Life under slavery was not typical. But the haphazard nature of children’s food held true for free laborers, too. Mothers gave their children as much food as they could, but only once the man’s needs had been taken care of. The British working classes spoke of “relishes,” which were the man’s prerogative. “Relish” in this sense did not mean pickles or condiments, like Gentleman’s Relish, the strong anchovy paste marketed to the rich since 1828. The man’s “relish” was what we might consider to be the main course, namely, the protein part of the meal: bacon, faggots (a kind of meatball), salted or fried fish, shrimp, beefsteak, or an egg. When these foods were available, they went automatically to the father, both to give flavor to the dullness of his bread-and-potato diet and to give him the strength to work. Neither children nor women could expect to have “relishes,” unless the father thought to give them a taste. When Dr. Ralph Crowley examined the physical condition of children in Bradford schools in 1907, he found that they were suffering not so much from general lack of food as from “protein starvation.”
When children were trusted with money to buy a midday meal for themselves, they did not necessarily fare much better. Despite being starved for protein, they sought out more cheap carbohydrates. In London, they tended to buy fried snacks on street corners. In New York, at the turn of the century, the progressive John Spargo (author of
The Bitter Cry of Children
) observed a group of children in a schoolyard going to a delicatessen to spend their lunchtime pennies. Out of fourteen children (eight boys and six girls), seven bought pickles and bread, four bought just pickles, two bought bologna sausage and rye bread, and one bought pick
led fish and bread. In 1910, a public health campaigner, Louise Stevens Bryant, watched New York schoolchildren buying lunches from stores and pushcarts near the school: “The lunches bought in this way were as follows: a tiny frankfurter and roll, costing one cent; a Swiss cheese sandwich, costing two cents; two small bananas and two long licorice ‘shoestrings’ costing two cents; two frosted cup cakes, costing three cents.” Bryant sent the foods off to a nutrition laboratory to be analyzed. The frankfurter was heavily dyed with cerise pink. It offered a meager 5 grams of protein. The “lunch” of bananas and licorice gave a mere 0.6 grams of protein.
All too often, when served family style, children’s food failed in the basic task of feeding, which is to nourish. In the 1910s, social reformer Maud Pember Reeves conducted a four-year investigation into the living conditions of “respectable” working-class families in Lambeth in London living on “round about a pound a week.” These were married men, working in such jobs as fish fryers or plumber’s mates, not the poorest people in the district. But money was so tight that any protein coming into the house was tightly policed: “Meat is bought for the men,” noted Reeves. One of the families she visited was headed by a cart driver and his wife who had four children under the age of five. Their usual breakfast was a loaf of bread among the six of them, with an ounce of butter, some tea, and “kippers extra for Mr X.” Over the course of the week, these children had little to eat except for bread, tea, potatoes, gravy, and greens. There was almost “no variety.” The occasional appearance of a tomato, when tomatoes were cheap, was a noteworthy event.
The way children eat has always depended a great deal on class and money. Reeves noted that in the households of “well-to-do” people there were two kinds of diets: one for adults and one for children. In the middle-class nursery, children were given the bland, creamy concoctions that were deemed so good for them. In households where the weekly food budget was about 10 shillings (£40.62 in modern money, based on purchasing power), the whole family had to eat a single diet, dictated by the needs of the man. Milk was hardly ever purchased, because it was so expensive. It cost the same in Lambeth as in Mayfair. So no rice pudding. “Nursery food is unknown for the children of the poor, who get only the remains of adult food,” wrote Reeves.
In all the working-class households Reeves visited, the main food for children was bread. “It is cheap; they like it; it comes into the house ready cooked; it is always at hand, and needs no plate and spoon,” Reeves observed. “Spread with a scraping of butter, jam or margarine, according to the length of purse of the mother, they never tire of it as long as they are in their ordinary state of health. They receive it into their hands and can please themselves as to where and how they eat it. It makes the sole article in the menu for two meals in the day.”
The food of poor children in the countryside was not necessarily any better. A doctor who lived in the West Country noted that the poorer families there lived on bread and butter, potatoes, “indigestible” pasties, and stale tea.
These patterns of feeding children the same food as everyone else in the household were not necessarily thoughtless. Given the high rates of infant mortality, many families believed—rightly or wrongly—that home was the only place where children were safe. The “family food” that the children ate may not have been very nutritious, but sitting around the same table, eating the same dishes, gave the family a sense of solidarity. According to Oxford historian Siân Pooley, who has studied working-class families in three separate regions of Britain in the nineteenth century, many parents of the era feared that their children could be harmed by food consumed outside the home, particularly fruit. “Death by fruit” appears frequently in the local court records listing infant deaths. This was partly because it was easier to blame a child’s death on a factor away from home than to contemplate the horrible possibility that it could have been caused by anything the parents themselves had done. But the belief in “death by fruit” went deeper than this. For a long time, one thing that everyone, rich and poor, could agree on about children’s food was that raw fruit was a dangerous substance for the young.
The fruit phobia probably had its roots in the intensely seasonal nature of fruit. After months of deprivation when no fresh fruit was available, some people, especially children, gorged on it straight from the tree during the summer glut, making themselves sick. In an era when there was scant knowledge of epidemiology, raw fruit seemed like one of the few clear and visible causes of child sickness, something concrete that could
explain why so many died in infancy. The fruit phobia also tied in to ancient ideas about the balance of the humors through diet. In Renaissance times, fruit was seen as “corruptible” and borderline poisonous, especially the sweetest and most tempting varieties, such as peaches, sweet grapes, and melons. A seventeenth-century book of prayers and songs for mothers and children warns a child not “to eat much”
Of Plums, Peares, Nuts and such
Be they never so Ripe
Lest they thy bellie gripe
Breed in thee ill bloud, cause Collique
Peaches make one melancholique.
Then there was the question of pips. Well into the twentieth century, books on feeding children make much of the need to strain the seeds out of any fruit dishes given to children. Cooked fruit was deemed safer than raw, but safer still was fruit both cooked and deprived of as much fiber as possible. The “pulp or seeds” of raspberries or strawberries might “cause serious disturbance” to the child, warned one authority.
Fears that children would harm themselves by eating fruit may sometimes have been justified. The fruit that these children were eating was not a sterile bowl of cut-up melon or a carefully washed apple. Often, children picked fruit from the tree before it was ripe; a basketful of green, unripe apricots can certainly cause a nasty stomachache. Other children might have become ill from picking dirty or contaminated fruit from the ground.
Yet the parental fear of fruit—like all fears about food—was not wholly rational. The main reason to be suspicious of fruit as a food for children was that it was just so delicious. It was the candy of its day, something children chose for themselves, away from grown-up control. It was widely noted that children had a special passion for fruit: its tender pulp, its juicy sweetness. Memoirs of childhood often describe berry picking, returning on a late summer evening inky fingered and replete. Gathering wild fruits—blackberries, bilberries, blueberries—has always been one of the ways that children could supplement their diets behind
adults’ backs. Their small size and nimble fingers make children especially good at berrying from low-lying bushes. Families would sometimes use children as berry-pickers to bring in a little extra cash, though they could not always be relied upon not to eat half on the way home. In his boyhood, the writer Henry David Thoreau used to be sent out to pick black huckleberries for a pudding. He marveled at the liberty of this wild crop: “wholesome, bountiful and free.” Grown-ups, however, were not always so happy to contemplate children taking pleasure into their own hands in the kingdom of fruit. Anything so appealing to young palates could surely not be trusted.