Since the 1950s, children’s food has gone from being something nourishing but pleasureless to something whose primary aim is to pander to childish tastes. Marmalade and spinach are still not considered ideal foods for children, but unlike Dr. Pritchard in 1909, we do not fear they will do terrible things to their insides. We simply lack the imagination to think that a child might actually enjoy the ferrous taste of spinach or the bitter peel of oranges. The “kid food” of modern times is designed to please; and so, given the reinforcing power of positive exposure, it does please. “Kid food” is based on the presumption that children have a natural palate for simple carbohydrates, fat, sugar, and not much else. As we’ve seen, there is no truth to the idea that children have an innate drive that will automatically make them like hamburgers more than grilled fish or muffins more than fresh berries. But if you eat enough “kid food” meals as a child, the presumption of limited tastes may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“Kids’ menus are all about fun food,” said a report on
children’s food in US chain restaurants in 2001. In other words, “Don’t expect any spinach or broccoli.” A journalist in the hospitality business trawled a database of kids’ menus for the top 500 American chains. As you’d expect, French fries were a common occurrence. Just
how
common is more surprising. Of the nearly 2,000 menu options at these restaurants,
710 were fries. They were on menus more than twice as often as any other single item, paired with anything from hotdogs to spaghetti. If you were a child in 2001 and your parents suggested a meal out, you could be pretty sure you would be able to order fries.
For your main course, they’d probably let you have something else deep-fried: over half of the “entrées” sampled were fried, and the rest were usually burgers or pasta. Commonest were breaded and deep-fried pieces of chicken, dolled up in various guises to make them more “kid-friendly”: “strips, tenders, bites, nuggets, chunks—even antlers.” Desserts tended to be ice cream, often with added confectionary. The Ragazzi’s chain served “Dirt for Dessert: chocolate pudding with chocolate chips, whipped cream, and a gummy worm” (only 99 cents—a bargain!).
Restaurant meals—as a special outing—may not be typical of what a child eats the rest of the time. After all, who doesn’t like to be sitting somewhere away from home, eating something hot, crispy, and fried once in a while? I often order tempura or crispy fried squid when eating out, though I hardly ever make them for myself in my own kitchen. For many children, however, the fries—and the ice cream and gummy worms—of a typical chain restaurant meal were of a piece with the food of daily life. The top three school lunches in Britain in 2000 were pizza, burgers, and chips—that is, the British version of French fries. “What does he like to eat?” I asked the mother of one of my son’s friends when we arranged a playdate sometime around 2005. “Oh, you know, normal kid food,” was her reply. This turned out to mean chicken nuggets, oven chips (that is, more fries), plain pasta, and ketchup. No vegetables.
The entire thrust of postwar commercial children’s food was to make it seem “normal” for a child never to eat anything nutritious. Parents who grew up eating rice pudding were not going to do the same to their own offspring. Children’s food products were designed to be as fun and stimulating as toys. Even potatoes had smiley faces.
There have always been children’s foods that play around with shape and color. In the past, however, they tended to fall into the category of an occasional treat: a slippery black rope of licorice shoestrings, a packet of fizzy Lovehearts. During the postwar years, however, the big players in the food industry started to see that they could lavish their visual
creativity on children’s products that were—supposedly—to be eaten as actual meals. Much of the food supply now resembles candy, both in nutritional content and form.
Samira Kawash, the author of
Candy: A Century of Panic and Pleasure
(2013), observes that parents have become confused on the subject of sweets. There is a hysteria now in many circles about children eating actual sweets, things like jelly beans that are mostly sugar and coloring. There is a “nebulous feeling that candy may be dangerous, perhaps even deadly,” says Kawash. We know that letting our children eat too much candy makes us a bad parent, hence the pointless ritual at Halloween when parents allow their children to go from house to house accumulating a big haul of treats, only to confiscate them at the end of the night, because they don’t want their children to get cavities. Yet despite their anxiety about candy, parents will happily feed their children highly sweetened sports bars, fruit snacks, and cereals that are candy in all but name. Why is a bowl of frosted cereal loops with added rainbow marshmallows allowed to count as “breakfast” and not “candy”?
Now, foods marketed for children come in a cornucopia of shapes. Like medieval gingerbread, chicken nuggets have assumed many forms: dinosaurs, giraffes, spaceships, elephants, numbers, and Buzz Lightyear. The old 1960s standby of Alphabetti Spaghetti has been joined by canned pasta shaped like the Teletubbies, Barbie, or Spiderman. And oh, the cereals! The sugar-coated, cocoa-laced spheres and flakes and pops in happy pop-art packages. A market report on children’s food boasted that “developments in extrusion technology” were making an “increasing range of shapes and textures possible” for children’s cereal. Likewise, by the mid-1990s, traditional potato chips were losing market share to “extruded” snack products that could be given more “child appeal” by being shaped like teddy bears or ghosts.
While the form of “kid food” is more varied than ever, however, the content is far less so. Foods marketed specifically at children tend to be higher than average in salt, sugar, and fat. If you want to find an extra-sugary breakfast cereal, pick one aimed at children. As of 2000, several kids’ cereals for sale were more than 50 percent refined sugar by weight. A 2013 study of 577 food ads aimed at children found that nearly
three-quarters of them were promoting foods of “low nutritional quality,” despite the fact that more than half of them also included some kind of health message.
Something strange was going on here. Marketeers spoke of a new trend for “entertaining and amusing a child with food.” Children have always liked to play with food. Maybe you used to pull a croissant apart and pretend the ends were devil’s horns, or took a bunch of cherries and hung them from your ears like earrings, or used tangerine peel to give yourself vampire teeth. Another fun game was using ketchup to dye mashed potato different shades of red, swirling it in with the tines of a fork. I’d add to this the pleasure of eating French beans by opening them up one by one, discovering the specks inside, like green pearls.
The difference with the new kids’ foods marketed from the 1990s onward was that whereas in the past, playing with food felt a little bit subversive, now the games had already been decided for the children by the manufacturers. You were
meant
to play, and the rules had been set up in advance. New children’s foods were twistable, stringable, or dunkable. There were cheese strings that invited the child to dismember a strip of processed cheese into finer and finer threads, and “dunking” products that included both biscuits and cheese sauce in the pack. Such products were created not with consideration for what the child’s body needed, but after extensive market research into what children wanted. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that children are not going to tell focus groups that they want more broccoli and rice pudding. Consumer panels showed that children craved products that were just “for them.” They wanted bright cartoonish colors, smooth textures, sweet tastes. They wanted foods that—unlike the old family food—did not need to be shared with anyone else. Manufacturers responded with products such as dessert in a tube, which could be torn open and squirted straight into the mouth, or yogurt with sprinkles tucked into the lid. Then there were “Lunchables” (launched by Kraft in 1988), efficiently contained meals in plastic trays that treated children as if they were passengers on a cramped long-haul flight, far from the nearest supply of fresh produce. In 2002, a typical Lunchable consisted of three separate compartments featuring minuscule hotdogs (“no need to heat”), three tiny white rolls, some cheese-food
slices (“a good source of calcium”), and a sachet of ketchup. This was supposedly a complete and balanced lunch for a child, and one that required no adult assistance to eat.
What children really wanted was to be treated as older than they were. A market researcher who worked with an average of 4,000 children every year found that their single greatest wish was for “control.” The more a product could answer their aspirations to be treated as more grown-up than they were, the greater its chances of success. This wish for autonomy over the food supply partly explains the success of breakfast cereal as a children’s food. “Even the simple act of pouring out a bowl of cereal and adding milk gives the child control,” the market researcher noted. Likewise, ketchup became a beloved children’s food partly because it is one of the few elements in a meal a child can add themselves.
As of the mid-1990s, 77 percent of French four- to seven-year-olds had the power to choose which breakfast cereal the household bought, and 58 percent could choose their own yogurts. And this is France, where—or so we imagine—parents still have a tighter grip on family cuisine. But how can wholesome nursery food compete with hundreds of new and heavily advertised concoctions calculated to appeal to a child’s sense of novelty? The labels have plenty of messages designed to assuage any sense of parental guilt. There are pediatrician-approved sweet biscuits and dentist-recommended sugar-free fruit drinks, not to mention the endless “calcium” declarations on sugary yogurts and processed cheeses, which can make you feel you are actually neglecting your child’s health by failing to buy them lurid orange cheese-like slices.
The sense that children need their own special foods that are uniquely appealing and altogether different from a mainstream human diet—like pet food—starts early, with commercial baby food. It is easy for anxious new parents to get the sense that they are doing the right thing by turning to packets and jars to feed their growing babies, rather than mashing up home-cooked foods for them. A survey of 5,000 British mothers found that only 35 percent had offered the baby anything they had prepared themselves on the previous day. Eighty-two percent had offered food from jars, which, despite the various nutritional claims on the labels, is likely to be far less nutritious than home-cooked purees. An analysis of
“fortified weaning food” showed that it was less rich in vitamins and minerals than the old nursery-food staple of sieved potato with an egg yolk stirred in. When choosing what to feed a preverbal baby, parents cannot pretend that they are being controlled by “pester power.” But they may still have a sense of being pestered by the dream babies on the baby-food boxes, who look so pink-cheeked and contented to be eating their apple and strawberry dessert.
Parents tell focus groups that one of the reasons they give in to “pester power” is cost. Even when a child is not actually there with you, sitting in the supermarket trolley, grabbing things and going red in the face with anger if you do not buy the Thomas the Tank Engine
fromage frais
now, now, NOW, there is the worry that if you don’t buy foods with child appeal, you will make expensive mistakes that go uneaten in the cupboard. A US research company, Langbourne Rust, followed mothers as they went grocery shopping and found that even children as young as one year old could influence what was bought. Parents would deny their child’s request for specific foods only one in three times. This finding tallies with the experience of Dr. Keith Williams, director of the Penn State Hershey Medical Center’s Feeding Program. “While it should be the case that ‘children eat what their parents serve,’” says Williams, “our clinical experience tells us that ‘parents serve what their children eat.’”
It is by no means true that all parents now feed their children on “kid food.” The past decade has seen a modest backlash against the unhealthiest children’s menus. Even McDonald’s now serves organic carrot sticks on its kids’ menus. A 2009 survey unearthed growing numbers of vegetables—not all of them fries—on US kids’ menus. Thanks to the efforts of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, in 2005, school meals in Britain were reformed again, with “Turkey Twizzlers” and similar forms of shaped processed meats eliminated from the menu. In the United States, First Lady Michelle Obama promoted healthier diets for children through her “Let’s Move” program. In both Britain and the United States, the introduction of healthier school meals was controversial; many of the new fruits and vegetables went from “tray to trash” untouched, as one article put it, as children who knew only “kid food” rejected unfamiliar dishes. Some took this rejection as a sign that children are naturally inclined to prefer
“kid food” to wholesome home-cooked meals. The real lesson, however, is that for dietary reform to be effective, it must go hand in hand with changes in the way that individuals learn to eat. A child will only benefit from a healthy balanced lunch when he has developed a taste for healthy balanced food.
The effort of avoiding all the junk marketed under the umbrella of children’s food, coupled with the epidemic of childhood food allergies, diabetes, and other health effects, has driven some affluent parents to become a little unhinged. There are households now where children’s food is policed more fiercely than it was by L. Emmet Holt in the early twentieth century: where kale is given as a snack and sugar is an absolute “no-no,” and anything containing white flour is treated as only slightly less suspect than hard drugs. The English journalist Zoe Williams describes “wholemeal parents” who refer to raisins as “baby-crack, to underline their impossibly delicious, contraband nature.” In alarming times, food can seem like a way to keep your child safe from danger, and admittedly, there are good grounds for thinking that children
are
at risk from the current food environment.