The way we reward children with food is based on folk memories
of a food supply that has not existed in the West for decades, when white sugar was so rare it seemed to sparkle like snow. Our impulse to make children happy with food is a loving one—sweets for my sweet—and because the motive is generous, it can be hard to spot that what we are doing no longer makes much sense. In Laura Ingalls Wilder’s
Little House on the Prairie
, a family friend, Mr. Edwards, risks his life to cross a stormy creek to bring Christmas candy to Laura and her sister Mary. These girls only taste candy once a year, and when they see the sticks of striped peppermint candy, and little heart-shaped cakes “made of pure white flour, and sweetened with white sugar,” they are overwhelmed with joy. “Think
of having a cup and a cake and a stick of candy.” Laura cannot resist taking one lick of the peppermint candy. “But Mary was not so greedy.” A treat cannot possibly have the same meaning in an era when white-flour cakes are everywhere and candy canes are sold by the dozen for less than the price of a loaf of bread. Modern children have so many forms of sweetness offered to them that, in my experience, a common reaction to a candy cane at Christmas is not joy, but mild resentment that the sugar rush is tainted by the minty flavor of toothpaste. The problem now for many parents is not the fear that there will be no Christmas candy, but that when the Christmas candy arrives in the house, the children still won’t have finished up the last batch, from Halloween. And yet the loving spirit of Mr. Edwards endures.
We still believe we would do “anything” to give children their treats, even though we probably do not need to swim through stormy creeks to obtain them. There continue to be families where the grown-ups sacrifice their own pleasures to see the children fed. In China, many children are looked after by their grandparents while the parents go out to work. In the cities, the percentage of children being looked after by grandparents may be as high as 50 to 70 percent. For the sake of their families, the grandparents have given up the leisure they might have expected in old age. Without their selfless child care, many households could not function, and the Chinese economy would grind to a halt. There is a Chinese idiom, “
Han yi nong sun
” (to play with grandchildren with candies in mouth), that conjures a blissful grandparenthood in which the grandparent relaxes with a sweet while watching a grandchild play. In reality, it is more likely the grandchild eating the sweet, while their elderly relatives toil. A 2009 study from urban Xiamen, a large city on the southeast coast, found that, after a lifetime of work, those in the older generation were often now working harder than ever: doing laundry, supervising homework, ferrying grandchildren to and from school.
The grandparents are generally the ones responsible for buying and cooking the food. When it comes to their own consumption, the norm is frugality. One Xiamen grandfather told researchers he eats cheap preserved vegetables to save the money for his nine-year-old grandson’s education. Grandparents are far less parsimonious, however, when it comes
to feeding the grandchildren, and the one-child policy means that all of the treats in the household go to a single mouth. In 2003–2004, a team of public health experts from Sweden and China interviewed the parents and grandparents of children attending four kindergartens in two different districts of Beijing. The grandchildren tended to have the same food preferences as their grandparents, whether for saltiness or sugar, wheat noodles or rice. The quantities they ate were also determined by the grandparents, who expressed “love and caring” through food. What this meant in many cases was that they drastically overfed the children.
This overfeeding was not accidental; there was a rationale behind it. All of the Beijing grandparents interviewed had vivid memories of food shortage and hunger. As we have seen, such memories will inevitably color a person’s long-term relationship with eating. One grandmother said, “Happiness in life is to eat what you want, to eat the amount you want, and to eat whenever you want to.” Another grandmother spoke of the exquisite pleasure of watching a child eat. “My granddaughter has always had a very good appetite. She always opens her mouth whenever I feed her. I enjoy feeding her so much.” There was a sense in these families that a child’s desire for food must be satisfied at all costs, that it was worth paying a lot of money to buy enough meat to make a child “strong.” Some brought along snacks every afternoon when they picked up the beloved child from kindergarten. Others used food as a reward for achievements. A prize in a piano competition was, for a grandmother, a reason to buy “a lot of chips.”
More than half of the children studied—who had an average age of four and a half—were obese. Several of the grandparents expressed the view that it was good to be a heavy child because a fat child will grow up to be strong and tall. This belief was based on their memories of hungrier times, and in previous generations, they would not have been wrong to think about fat in this way. Across the world, puppy fat has been seen—and in some places still is seen—as a kind of insurance policy against malnutrition in a growing child. The French had a proverb: “
Pour avoir assez, il faut avoir trop
” (to have enough, you must have too much). In 1912, a British doctor argued that overfeeding a child was far less of a danger than underfeeding, even if it risked “a certain amount of excess.” Any
plumpness would soon be shed during the next growth spurt, for “while it is only too easy to overfeed the adult, superabundant nourishment is almost impossible in those still growing.”
This was sound reasoning at the time. Those most likely to have survived famine were those who were fattest to begin with. Between 108
bc
and
ad
1911, there were over 1,800 major famines in China. Then Mao brought fresh waves of hunger. The Beijing grandparents had survived the hungers of the 1960s, and perhaps they remembered being fat children themselves. It is hard for anyone to stay alive in a famine, harder still for a child. “Children seem literally born to die,” said one observer of the Irish Catholics in Boston in the 1840s, who escaped famine at home only to be met with new shortages in America. Unless parents built up a child’s reserves of adipose tissue when food was plentiful after a harvest, the child would struggle to make it through the “hungry gap” when stores ran low in the spring. In a bad year in modern-day Gambia during the “hungry season,” adults may lose ten or twelve pounds, or 50 percent of their body fat; a child who lost that much would probably die, unless he or she had a little extra padding to begin with. Given that periods of feast and famine were the norm for our ancestors, those of us who came after seem to have inherited what biochemist C. Nicholas Hales and epidemiologist David J.P. Barker christened “thrifty genes,” good at conserving fat. We are all descended from survivors, and survivors were the chubby ones.
“At least it means that I treat the child well . . . if the child is fat,” said one Chinese grandmother. Another grandmother felt “sorry” for her own thin granddaughter. This mismatch between a child’s weight and what a grandparent sees is not unique to China. The view that a plump child is a healthy child is common among the older generation in many ethnic communities. Baldeesh Rai is a dietician working to persuade South Asian families in Britain to adopt healthier diets. As in China, she finds that the cooking for the whole family is often done by the mother-in-law. When Rai gently suggests that a child is overweight, she often encounters resistance from the extended family, for whom it is a good thing—no matter what science or medicine may say—when young ones have adorably chubby cheeks, ripe for pinching.
Among the Beijing families, many parents expressed frustration at not being able to influence how the grandparents were feeding the child. But since they were out at work all day, there was little they could do. One mother told her son not to eat candy, only to be told, “Okay, I will have it when you leave.” A father begged his mother not to feed his daughter so much, but was told that she knew how to feed children because she had brought up three of them. In the most extreme scenario, one of the mothers said that she and her husband had decided to move out from her parents-in-law’s house. “This is the only way I can avoid my mother-in-law’s overfeeding my child.”
A generation ago, it was rare to be overweight in China. Not anymore. The country’s dizzying economic growth over the past three decades has been matched with a rapid growth in the weight of its citizens. As of 2010, official statistics indicated that there were 100 million obese people in China, more than five times as many as in 2002. As a percentage of the overall population, obesity is still much less prevalent there than in the West. In 2010, only 4.1 percent of men in China had a BMI over 30 kg/m
2
, the number defining obesity, compared with 30.3 percent in Greece and 44.2 percent in the United States. Yet the worry, as journalist Paul French and statistician Matthew Crabbe explored in their 2010 book
Fat China
, is that rates of obesity are growing much faster than anywhere else in the world, particularly in the cities. Because of China’s size, the country now contains a fifth of all the obese people on the planet. “Famine to gluttony in two generations is quite an achievement,” as French and Crabbe put it.
In some ways, China’s obesity crisis looks like a speeded-up version of that of the West, a consequence of the modern food industry, changing diets, and sedentary lifestyles (the bicycle has made way for the car, and a competitive education system leaves many children with no time to exercise). Traditional Chinese cuisine—with its peerless balance of flavors and textures—always seemed like a good way to eat, whether for pleasure or health. But in the past thirty years, new foods have arrived, and with them, new tastes. Rising incomes for city-dwellers and the opening up of markets mean that the Chinese can buy food in both quantities and varieties that would have seemed alien to previous
generations. China has developed a penchant for many novel things: fried chicken, supermarkets, beer, frozen foods, burgers, French fries, cook-in sauces, TV dinners, sugary sodas, breakfast cereals, jam, and pizza. Perhaps most surprising has been the success of the big coffee franchises in persuading a nation of tea drinkers (calories in black tea: negligible) to swap to milky coffee (calories in a grande mocha with whipped cream: nearly four hundred).
Given the influx of these strange new items, it would be easy to blame China’s new weight problem on a move away from a traditional diet. “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,” is one of Michael Pollan’s rules for healthy eating. A Chinese child eating blueberry muffins and drinking a milkshake has definitely broken this rule. But we shouldn’t be too quick to attribute China’s weight problem to modernity. While many of the foods may be new, the attitudes toward feeding are the old peasant ones: if you find yourself in a state of plenty, the right thing to do is to gorge, to set yourself up for the lean times. Among the urban grandparents studied by a group of researchers from the National Center for Women’s and Children’s Health in Beijing, certain thoughts about feeding were universal: children should ignore whether they were full or not and leave nothing behind in the bowl; waste was anathema; and good behavior merited treats. In some ways, China’s obesity is a symptom of the fact that attitudes toward eating have not changed fast enough to adjust to a new situation. Your great-grandmother would not have known how to feed children in these times, because she never encountered such abundance. Like the rest of us, she would have had to muddle through and—with luck—adapt. The Chinese situation is a more extreme version of what is happening all over the world in places where the new food supply is colliding with an outdated body of knowledge about feeding.
All of these feeding practices come from a desire to protect the children and see them flourish. These grandparents, survivors of hunger, want their descendants to enjoy the things they never had. Yet the researchers who interviewed them concluded that the grandparents’ generous patterns of feeding were pushing their beloved grandchildren to gain weight. These obese preschoolers were not suffering from any lack
of affection. They were not neglected. If anything, they were loved too single-mindedly.
What the Chinese case tells us is that we urgently need to invent new models of generosity. We need to find a way for a small portion to feel as much like love as a large one. The longing to protect our children through food—which is one of the most potent forms of affection—now requires new manifestations. “Comfort me with apples” says the Song of Solomon. It is such a magnificent feeling, to feed someone with love, no wonder we place great faith in it. This love plays out in all kinds of ways. In an ideal scenario, you love a child by giving him carefully chosen foods that are good for him. It makes you feel cozy, knowing that your child has a thermos of homemade soup on a cold day, particularly if you experience guilt that you won’t get home from work in time to make a hot dinner. But expressing parental love through food does not always work so well. A parent’s enjoyment in feeding feels so right, we think it will lead us inexorably to a child’s true needs, when often it takes us somewhere else.
Through the ages, children have been traumatized by the
injunction to leave a clean plate. For some, it becomes a miserable battle of wills: a child sits for hours in front of a congealing plate of food as a parent or teacher urges the child to eat the hated meal. This is a setup that can never end well for either party, especially when the child undergoes genuine revulsion for the food forced upon him.
The philosopher Charles Fourier grew up in provincial France in the late eighteenth century. He was a delicate boy with very strong likes and dislikes, and his childhood memories were dominated by the “tyranny” of schoolteachers and parents in matters of taste. “How many canings did I not receive for refusing to eat turnips and cabbage, barley, vermicelli, and other moral medicine that caused me to vomit, not to mention my feelings of disgust,” he lamented.